Page 80 of The Girl Out of Time
“Take a moment and relax, yes?” The officer next to Kinsley said.
Will only nodded. The officers waited as if to make sure he wasn’t going to have another outburst, then headed back to the wheelhouse, murmuring about paranoid passengers on the way.
He was left alone, but instead of heading back to the cabin, Will took the stairs down to the promenade deck. Rubbernecking—he’d only heard it applied to tourists, but Emily ascribed it to accident onlookers as well, when she once vented about being stuck in traffic—the irresistible, morbid curiosity to look at a horrible thing that’s happened.
And he knew one was about to happen.
With a bated breath, he waited. The night was calm, peaceful—but also pitch black. Along the sky, thousands, millions of stars spread, concentrated along the silvery belt of the Milky Way. He’d never seen this many stars, not even when he was little and he sneaked out into the vineyards way past his bedtime so he could look up and dream about the things he wanted to do and be. But no moon shone, and it made the ocean a big, black void, indistinguishable from the horizon. It seemed incredible, unbelievable, that their doom could be right out there.
In fact, as Will stood on the deck and the ship gently swayed forward and stars passed over his head and nothing stirred—not on deck, not out there—he believed, for a moment, that Emily had simply made a mistake.They were fine. Everything would be fine. Perhaps the officers listened to him and adjusted the ship’s direction. Perhaps the iceberg was slightly off. They would’ve seen it by now.
It would’ve happened by now.
He closed his eyes and breathed, not minding the cold biting his cheeks. Surely, it was over. They were safe.
And then a bell rang in the distance. Not down the ship—up, in the crow’s nest. The faint ringing of the telephone came from the deck above him, leading to a commotion on the bridge.
The ship started turning left, hard.
His heartbeat picked up, jumping into his throat, as he ran to the railing and bent over, straining his eyes to discern anything on the horizon. A straight, blurry stripe where the stars dipped into the ocean—and in the middle of it, a wiggle, as if the artist painting the horizon had his hand shake and ruined the perfect line. As the ship moved ahead—slowing down, but turning still—the wiggle grew larger, biting into the starry sky, until it turned into a dark mass, obscuring the right side of the ocean.
The iceberg rose ahead of them, fast traveling toward the starboard side. But they were turning. They were going to pass it. They had to.
Will closed his eyes.Turn. Turn. Turn.And he waited. A second, five, ten, not daring to look, as if not looking would make the iceberg pass easier. He hadn’t frozen time, but it felt all the same, the seconds dragging on, echoing in the silence.
Silence.
And then a low moan of steel being ripped asunder.
Titanichad struck the iceberg.
Chapter 20
The strangest thing was that there was no panic.
The ship scraped along the side of the iceberg and left it behind, a stranger in the night, come and gone. Silence rose once more, heavy and threatening, as Will moved across the promenade to the starboard side. Chunks of ice had been scraped off the iceberg, now lying on the well deck below. The ship still looked fine; she trudged on, but her speed was slowly leaving her, and rapid steps coming from the bridge gave the only hint that everything was not as it should be.
Will stood on the promenade for a minute or two more, disbelief fighting against logic. He’d imagined bells and whistles going off, people running all across the promenade, wondering what had happened—but instead, it was calm.
It may not be as bad as it looked. Perhaps theyhadaverted complete disaster after all. Perhaps he had succeeded in something, made that tiniest nudge that shifted their destiny…
Or perhaps not. In the end, he felt it—in the slowing of the ship, in the eerie silence, in the trembling in his bones. They were not fine.
He had to get his family.
He slipped back inside and walked to his cabin, quietly, as if afraid of alarming the others. Sylvia wasn’t back yet; most likely besieged in the reception, the lounge, or somewhere else by the other ladies who liked to push their chatting past the closing hours of the public spaces. Maybe it was better that way. He couldn’t change the trajectory of this voyage, but he could give her fifteen more minutes of peace. Fifteen minutes less of worrying.
He sat on the sofa and called Emily.
“Gramps.” Her face contorted with worry as she answered the call. “How are you? What time is it?”
“We just struck the iceberg,” he said. “It’s close to midnight. I tried.” His shoulders sagged, weary from the ordeal of the past few hours. “I went to the wireless room to get a message through so theCalifornianwould come to our aid, but it was too late. Then I tried to warn them on the bridge. It didn’t help.”
“Okay.” Emily rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It was a valiant effort.”
“But a pointless one.”
“It’s the thought that counts. But don’t you worry.” Her voice shook, undermining her words. “I studied everything. I know that ship from top to bottom, and I know every minute of your next two hours.”
