Page 17 of A Perfect Disaster

I don’t want to smile. I really do try my hardest to maintain the regulation poker face, but the corner of my mouth suffers a rebellious twitch for a fraction of a second. She catches it on the fly, of course. Her eyes light up with such obvious triumph that I feel like ordering a complete inventory of the ship’s three thousand life jackets just to bring her down a peg.

“Don’t get used to it, Maika,” I warn her in a low voice.

“Never. I’m a woman of strict morals,” she replies with an innocence she doesn’t even believe herself.

“Since when?” Gonzalo mutters from the background.

Maika puts her hand to her chest.

“Gonzalo, you’re hurting my feelings. You have so little faith in my professional growth.”

For the first time since this steel giant became our battlefield, the tension doesn’t feel like a rope about to snap. Though it’s still there, vibrating in the hot air.

I give the final guard orders and break formation. As the rest disperse toward the crew mess halls, Maika lingers for a second, staying by my side while I feign absolute concentration on my tablet screen.

“Good work,” she says, lowering her voice to a frequency that seems designed just for my ears.

Looking up is a mistake.

“The drill was… acceptable,” I reply.

Her smile widens, revealing a dimple that throws my heartbeat off balance.

“That, in Officer Müller’s cryptic language, means: ‘Thanks, Maika, you’re a fucking genius.’”

“I don’t speak that dialect,” I declare.

“Not yet,” she whispers.

And without another word, she turns away before I can say a thing, leaving me standing still, watching her walk across the sunlit deck until she passes through the doors.

“You’re screwed, Helen. Screwed and without a lifeboat.”

· · ·

Hours later, taking advantage of the shift change and the absolute solitude of the Security Control Room, I lock myself in to review the camera recordings. I don’t log it in the logbook, of course.

On the screens, the deck unfolds from four different angles. I search for every sequence where the entertainment crew might have made a mistake. But what I find are very practical solutions executed in record time.

I lean back, tapping my lower lip with my index finger. Eleven seconds may seem like a trifle to any civilian who buys a cruise ticket to sip margaritas by the pool. For a safety officer, eleven seconds is the difference between a clear corridor and a human stampede, between a smooth evacuation and a tragedy. And, to my utter misfortune, Maika’s intuition foresaw it before all my procedure manuals did.

I rest my arms on the table, exhausted.

“This doesn’t change anything,” I tell myself in the dim light of the room.

I work on the preliminary report for another hour. I draft the modifications to the Emergency Plan and introduce the concept of “dynamic support points under direct security supervision.” I’m very careful not to write “Proposal by the Entertainment Coordinator,” of course.

I look like an idiot trying to hide the sun with one finger.

Working with Maika is no longer the ungovernable chaos I remember from years ago. She’s irritating, defiant, and tests my patience, yes, but she’s also making things very easy for me. And, suddenly, the past hits me: before she shattered my expectations and disappointed me, Maika fascinated me. And discovering that that fascination remains intact is what truly terrifies me.

Because resentment is a clean, structured emotion. It has an origin, a designated file, and an expiration date that you control. But attraction, on the other hand, is a shipwreck with no survivors and no logbook.

And I can’t afford a shipwreck on my impeccable record of service.

6

Maika