She crouched, covering her mouth with her sleeve, and descended.
The stairwell reeked of ammonia; she pulled up her shirt over her nose and mouth to reduce any contaminants. Hereyes burned, but with so much wind and water, the distance to whatever chemicals they were mixing allowed her to breathe. The steps were slick. Somewhere deeper, machinery still groaned under pressure, the sound of a wounded heart refusing to stop beating.
She followed the sound.
“Blake?” she whispered again, voice barely audible.
For a long moment, nothing. Then—faint, muffled—something that wasn’t machinery. A rhythmic pounding. Two beats. Pause. Two beats.
Her heart lurched.
She quickened her pace, slipping once, catching herself on a pipe. “Hold on,” she whispered, not sure if she was talking to him or someone else or herself.
The passage narrowed, forcing her to squeeze sideways between twisted panels. The air grew hotter the farther she went, the smoke thicker, bitter with melted plastic.
She turned a corner—and stopped dead.
The floor had collapsed ahead. A gaping hole yawned where the walkway should’ve been, the deck below visible through the jagged tear. Firelight glowed from somewhere under the wreckage, flickering up the steel.
And there—on the far side of the breach—something moved.
A shape slumped against the bulkhead, head bowed, one arm dragging along the wall. Even through the smoke, she knew that silhouette.
“Blake,” she breathed.
He lifted his head weakly, disoriented. His face caught the light—blood smeared across his temple, eyes unfocused but alive.
Relief hit her so hard her knees wobbled.
“I’m here,” she whispered, stepping forward before realizing the truth: there was no way across. The gap stretched six, maybeseven feet wide. The metal edges gleamed wet, razor-sharp. Below, seawater churned, rising fast.
Blake turned his head, confusion twisting his features as he spotted her. “Viv?” His voice was hoarse, half-swallowed by the moans of the ship.
“Don’t move! The deck’s unstable,” she called out.
He tried anyway, bracing one hand on the wall. The metal groaned beneath him.
Vivian’s pulse thundered. She scanned the edges—no bridge, no railing, nothing stable enough to cross. Behind her, the fire crackled, a low, hungry growl.
She spotted a coil of cable, grabbed it, secured it, looped it around her waist?—
And the deck exploded.
The blast wasn’t fire this time but pressure—something collapsing beneath the surface. A shockwave of sound and wind slammed into her, hurling her backward. She hit the wall, air torn from her lungs, vision shattering into white, then black.
When the roar faded, half the walkway was gone.
Smoke rolled through the breach, swallowing everything.
“Blake!”
Her scream ripped out of her—raw, untrained, nothing like the controlled agent she was meant to be. She scrambled to the edge, fingers digging into twisted metal as if she could claw the world back into place.
No silhouette. No movement. No answering cough. Just the groan of dying steel and the surge of water devouring the space where he had been.
A cold, tearing panic punched through her chest. She’d let herself hope. She’d seen him alive—reaching for her. And now the world had swallowed him without mercy.
“No,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “No. I’m not losing you.”
