Then Sylvia seemed to become aware of the position they were in. The deck, the distance, the fact that several cadets were definitely looking and something moved across her expression that went through flustered and arrived somewhere that was working very hard to be composed.

She pulled herself up and stood, clearing her throat once, her eyes finding a neutral point somewhere that wasn’t his face.

"Good," she said. "Then there’s no problem."

Lucas sat up slowly, still not entirely sure which part of the last ten seconds to process first.

"Good reaction, Sylvia," Gideon said from nearby with the specific seriousness that meant something had happened that was worth being serious about.

Around them the deck had shifted, cadets who had witnessed the moment were looking around nervously now, the vacation atmosphere evaporating fast.

"Just what was that?"

"Was that aimed at someone?"

Lucas followed Gideon’s eyeline and felt his breath stop.

An arrow was embedded in the wall of the cruise, deep enough that the metal around it had cracked and bent at the point of impact. It was thick, heavy, the kind that didn’t come from anything small.

He looked at where he had been standing.

The arrow had struck exactly there.

He understood what that meant without Sylvia saying it. If she had reacted a fraction of a second later, if she hadn’t already sensed something wrong, that arrow would have gone through his skull instead of the wall.

"Something’s wrong here," Nova said, and every trace of his earlier dramatic suffering was completely gone, replaced by a focus that appeared whenever things stopped being a joke.

Gideon crossed to the wall and pulled the arrow free carefully, turning it over in his hands, his eyes narrowing as he examined it.

"Yeah," he said quietly, his voice carrying the weight of someone arriving at an uncomfortable certainty. "I don’t think we’re safe right now."

The entire cruise shook.

The kind of shaking that isn’t a bump or a wave, the kind that comes from something massive connecting with the hull, the floor tilting for a long terrible second before it came back, throwing half the deck into chaos simultaneously.

Chairs scraped and slid. Something made of glass shattered somewhere nearby. Several cadets grabbed for railings or each other, and the screams that went up were immediate and overlapping.

Lucas caught the railing beside him with both hands. Sylvia steadied herself in one motion. Nova grabbed Gideon’s shoulder with both hands, which Gideon absorbed without comment.

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Celia’s eyes swept the deck, wide and searching.

"Did we crash?" Nova stared at the floor beneath him like it had personally betrayed him. "Please tell me we didn’t just actually crash."

Nobody got the chance to answer before the emergency siren split through the air across the entire ship repeating and red warning lights began pulsing overhead in slow urgent flashes.

Nova stared at the lights for a moment.

"So we did crash," he said, all the usual color gone from his voice.

The deck broke into noise. Cadets scrambling, talking over each other, some moving toward exits and some just looking around trying to find something that made sense of it.

Then a senior cadet stepped forward with enough force in his voice to cut through the noise. "Everyone calm down! Headmaster Beatrice is on this cruise, there’s no need to panic. The higher-ups will handle it. Stop losing your heads!"

It worked faster than it had any right to. The noise dropped, shoulders came down, and the specific relief of there being an adult in charge of the situation moved through the crowd visibly.

"Right, she’s here."

"If Headmaster Beatrice is handling it—"

"We’re probably overreacting anyway."

The tension had almost fully released when someone came running from the inner hallway of the cruise, breathing hard, and the look on his face was wrong in a very specific way.

"Headmaster Beatrice isn’t here."

The deck went silent.

"I checked the upper deck and the command area," the cadet continued, catching his breath. "She’s not anywhere on the cruise."

Nobody moved for a second.

"You’re joking," Nova said. His voice had the quality of someone using words as a delay while their brain caught up.

Celia looked around the deck, her expression shifting toward something more careful. "Then where did she go?"

Sylvia’s face had settled into the focused composure that appeared whenever she was moving from reaction into problem-solving. "Panicking won’t help us. If the Headmaster truly isn’t here, we handle the situation ourselves until she is." Her eyes moved toward the flooding entrance leading below deck.

Gideon folded his arms slowly, his gaze moving out across the dark ocean surrounding the ship on all sides. "I have a very bad feeling about this,"

Lucas didn’t say anything.

He was standing slightly apart from the group, and his thoughts were moving faster than the conversation around him.

’First the atmosphere changed, something in the air shifted and the dolphins disappeared before anything happened. Then the arrow came from nowhere, aimed at exactly where I was standing. Then the cruise gets hit hard enough to send everyone scrambling. And now Beatrice is gone, and nobody knows when she left or how.’

He turned it over, looking at the shape of it from different angles.

’Too many things happened too fast’ 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

His fist closed slowly at his side without him deciding to close it.

’This doesn’t feel like an accident. Just why is everything turning into a mess all of a sudd—’

He stopped.

Something had arrived at the back of his mind, the particular feeling of a piece clicking into a place it had been waiting for.

Beatrice’s exact words.

’We will begin the second round at a certain location. All cadets, board the cruise immediately.’

Lucas went very still.

She had said they will begin the second round at a certain location.

She had not said the cruise was a break. She had not said the second round would begin after they arrived somewhere. She had not said anything about rest or downtime or enjoying themselves.

Every single cadet, himself included, had simply assumed those things because there were loungers and dolphins and cadets eating snacks, and none of them had questioned the assumption for a second.

But she hadn’t said any of it.

Which meant —

Lucas lifted his head slowly, the full shape of it arriving all at once.

’The second round started the moment we stepped onto this cruise.’

He opened his mouth.

"Hey, I think the second round already—"

The cruise exploded with sound.

A deafening crack tore through the hull, massive and deep, the kind of sound that means something structural has failed. The floor split apart along the center of the deck in a jagged line that spread faster than anyone could move away from it, and the whole ship tilted so violently and so suddenly that dozens of cadets lost their footing at exactly the same moment.

Tables launched sideways. Chairs became projectiles. The screaming was immediate and everywhere.

"GRAB SOMETHING!" Gideon shouted, throwing himself at the nearest railing and catching it with both hands just before the angle became impossible.

Lucas caught the edge of a metal support, his fingers locking around it hard. Celia crashed into the side of a broken table beside him, barely managing to get her balance back. Around them cadets were scrambling in every direction, grabbing whatever they could find as the ship continued its terrible tilt.

Then Lucas heard Sylvia’s foot slip.

He looked and his stomach dropped, she was sliding toward the broken railing at the ship’s edge, the tilted deck offering nothing to catch herself on, the gap between her and the ocean getting smaller with every second.

"SYLVIA—"

The shout came from three mouths at exactly the same time. Lucas, Celia, Gideon.

And then from a fourth.

"I’LL SAVE HER!"

Nova’s eyes had gone wide with the specific look he got when he had committed to a decision before finishing the thought behind it. And then — he jumped. Didn’t run or grab something and work toward her.

He launched himself horizontally across the tilted deck like a person who had seen this exact moment in a dream and was finally living it, both arms stretched forward, wind hitting his face, the full heroic energy of someone answering a calling.

"I’M COMINGGGG—!"

At the edge of the ship, Sylvia’s hand caught the broken railing.

She pulled herself to a stop in one clean motion, feet finding the edge, body stabilized, the whole thing handled in the time it took to blink.

Nova was still in the air.

He flew past her.

Right past her.

He had time to turn his head and look at her, already safe, already holding the railing and looking back at him with an expression that had moved through surprise and arrived somewhere closer to resigned.

"...Heh?" He looked at her. She looked at him.

Then he looked down.

The deck had ended.

Below him was the ocean, dark and wide and not interested in his feelings about the situation.

"...Oh no," Nova said.

Very quietly. Very sincerely.

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH—"

The scream traveled the full distance down and the splash that followed it was considerable.

One full second of silence passed over Sylvia’s group.

Then Celia’s composure broke completely.

"THAT ABSOLUTE IDIOT!" she screamed, gripping the railing with one hand while pointing at the ocean with the other like she was filing a formal complaint. "WHAT WAS HE EVEN THINKING?"

The ship made a sound that ended the conversation.

The middle section of the cruise split apart with a crack that went through the deck and the hull and the air simultaneously, the whole structure giving up at once, and the tilt that had been gradual became instant and vertical.

"BRACE YOURSELVES—" Sylvia’s voice cut across the chaos.

The floor disappeared.

Lucas lost his feet first, the deck going vertical beneath him with no warning and nothing to hold. Gideon reached for him and slipped too. Celia hit a broken edge of something on the way down and bounced off it. Sylvia held a metal bar for exactly the moment it took for the bar to snap, and then she was falling with the rest of them.

The ocean came up to meet all of them at once, and the broken remains of the cruise came down around them, and the second round which had apparently been happening this whole time had fully, completely, irrevocably begun.