Emilie lays the borrowed clothes on Matilde Doehner’s bed. She cannot wear them. She cannot go with the family to Mexico. She cannot leave Max. Emilie has known this all along, somewhere deep down. But she is afraid of what it means to love again. This surrendering of her heart and the vulnerability it requires of her is so much harder the second time around. It was easy when she was young and innocent, when she had never been broken. Now she knows what it is to suffer loss. Now she knows what it means to have her heart ripped from her soul. To be dislocated.
And this time she chooses, knowing that it could happen again. Emilie chooses Max. What is faith if not this? Matilde will be disappointed, of course. But she is a woman. And she will understand.
Having made her decision, Emilie is at peace. She reaches for the door and something shifts. She sees her own trembling but she isn’t afraid. She isn’t shaking. This quiver comes not from within but from without. Everything trembles. The walls. The floor. Her own body. She feels it in the air and in the balls of her feet. It rises up and through her.
She feels herself lifted. Thrown. Catapulted backward into the hard edge of the berth. Emilie hears her head hit with a crack so loud her teeth throb. She feels the flair of pain at her scalp, along her hairline. She feels it acutely, and then she’s slipping into darkness. Then there is silence. There is nothing.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner sets the last plate in the cabinet above the banquette and steps back with a triumphant grin. But this feeling is gone before he has taken a step toward the door. Werner Franz is rendered a child quickly and completely when he hears the explosion. He is frightened by what he hopes—in the single moment he has left for hope—is a crack of thunder.
And then the air surrounding Werner splinters. It isn’t just the floor or the walls or some shudder within the structure like yesterday morning on the catwalk. It sounds as though the Hindenburg is tearing itself apart at the seams. The cupboard doors fly open and all the dishes that Werner so carefully washed and dried and put away only moments ago come sliding out and crash to the floor, where they shatter into wicked little pieces. He stands there, mute and dumb and bewildered, even as the floor tilts away behind him. To Werner, the explosion sounds like breaking glass. It will sound like that for as long as he has the capacity to remember it.
He is broken out of this stupor when the Hindenburg drops again sharply aft and he falls onto his haunches. Werner is aware of the broken china sliding across the floor toward him. He is aware of the raging, popping, explosive sounds that come from all directions now. And the screams—some distant and some in the next room—but the only thing the cabin boy can focus on is the door. It never occurs to him that he could go out the window. His only thought is of getting through the door. So he crawls and scrambles across the linoleum, grabbing onto table legs for balance and support. Once he has regained his balance, Werner throws himself toward the door, then down the corridor until he’s through the security threshold and into the ship’s cavity. The walkway is empty and, in the time it takes him to blink once, he understands why. A colossal, roiling fireball is rushing toward him, consuming everything in its wake.
THE JOURNALIST
The floor drops out from underneath them. First Leonhard and then Gertrud is hurled against the far wall. She can hear a woman scream in a cabin on the other side, a hard thump, and then nothing. The air rushes from Leonhard’s lungs, and his rib cage heaves with a thin whistling sound. Gertrud is pinned to the wall by one of his arms as chairs, dishes, and fellow passengers tumble toward them. She can feel her husband thrashing beside her, trying to cover her body with his own. To protect her.
“Leonhard,” she breathes his name and nods toward the window where blooming clouds of flame have filled the sky. “It’s on fire.”
THE NAVIGATOR
Max does not see the fire at first. He notices the glow of it lighting the ground and the clouds and the eyes of the men who stare out the window beside him. But he takes no more than one breath before he sees it in the air around him as well. Everywhere. The sky is lit with it. And then all is chaos. Max knows that the other officers are screaming, cursing, and shouting orders, but he can do nothing but stand beside the window in awe.
The sky is liquid gold.
The sky is death.
He might have stayed there, gazing into his own doom, but the stern drops suddenly, pulling him backward. Max throws out his hands to catch himself on the rear wall of the navigation room as the ship tilts upward, until he is pressed flat against the wall, supported by his hands, as though lying on the floor.