The Oceanus sailed the following days with its same untouched elegance. The sun shone over the deck, occasional seagulls accompanied the progress, and the passengers seemed to have completely forgotten the dull vibration that interrupted the waltz. If anyone asked, the staff replied with the same learned phrase: "A slight friction, nothing out of the ordinary."
Dinners resumed with wine and live music. Couples lounged in the sun on the deck chairs, and children ran through the lower-level corridors with no one reprimanding them. Everything seemed perfectly normal.
But it wasn't.
Samuel noticed the first sign on the third day. During breakfast, the dining room floor vibrated with a brief pulse, like a distant echo. No one else seemed to notice, but he felt the cup tremble lightly on its saucer.
Then, that night, he heard a hollow sound beneath the floor of his cabin. It was rhythmic, metallic. Like something slowly striking one of the ship's internal structures. Dull, spaced knocks—not strong enough to raise alarm, but clear enough to unsettle him.
The next day, he ran into one of the engineers outside the engine room. The man was sweating, sleeves rolled up, inspecting a valve in a hallway where there was usually no activity.
"Everything alright?" Samuel asked, unable to hide his curiosity.
"Yeah, sure," the man answered without fully meeting his gaze. "Just routine maintenance."
He said it without conviction. Like someone repeating an agreed-upon version, not the truth.
That same afternoon, Samuel went down one deck. Pretending to be lost, he wandered. A few meters past the service dining room, the air smelled different. Not foul, but heavier, with a faint hint of dampness and rust. He stopped near an unattended hatch. It wasn't locked.
From there, he barely heard the murmur of technical voices.
"…the secondary valve won't hold if the pressure keeps dropping."
"Did they check it?"
"Yes. And there are leaks, small ones. Very small. But real."
"This won't reach the captain."
Samuel slipped away silently.
That night, he couldn't sleep. He alternated between bed and chair, his briefcase by his feet. Inside, the knife, flashlight, and notebook. He jotted down things: times, places, symptoms. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but every detail he wrote carefully, as if he could later reconstruct the thread of what was about to happen.
The last note was simple:
"The ship keeps sounding different. Like it's creaking from the inside."
The next morning, in the ship's library, he leafed through an old navigation book he found on the highest shelf. He wasn't an expert, but he understood enough to know that friction with an underwater mountain doesn't always sink a ship instantly. Sometimes, it just leaves a wound that bleeds slowly.
When he returned to the main deck, he found a woman with a worried expression talking to a stewardess.
"My husband says it smells strange in our bathroom. Like... like the water isn't clean."
"Probably some sulfur. Nothing to worry about," the young woman replied, with her best professional smile.
Samuel kept walking without interrupting. But he was already sure: the Oceanus' wound wasn't just metallic. It was one of silence too.
No one said it out loud, but something was wrong. Very wrong. And while everyone smiled, bathed, and laughed on deck, the ship continued its course toward a destination that, for now, seemed as perfect as it was fragile.