“Very…selfless,” murmured Fitzwilliam, “but even after your crew and age exclusions, thirty-one passengers are still under eighteen. You will still have to select seven of them. Will you be able to throw them overboard, the children, the innocents?”

“But I save the rest, right?”

“It’s not for me to say,” said Fitzwilliam quietly. “I am not the captain.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, my heart thumping and a cold panic roiling inside me. I had to do terrible things in order to save others, and I’m not sure I could even do it—and thus imperil everyone’s life. I stopped for a moment and thought. The dilemmas had been getting progressively worse since I arrived. Perhaps this place—wherever it was—was quirkily responsive to my decisions. I decided to try something.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to kill anyone simply because an abstract ethical situation demands it. We’re going to sail on as we are and trust to providence that we meet another ship. If we don’t, then we may die, but we will have at least done the right thing by one another.”

There was a distant rumble of thunder in the distance, and the boat heeled over. I wondered what would be next.

“Begging your pardon, Captain, but I bring bad news.” It was a steward whom I hadn’t seen before.

“And…?”

“We have a gentleman in the wardroom who claims there is a bomb on board the ship—and it’s set to go off in ten minutes.”

I allowed myself a wry smile. The rapidly changing scenarios seemed to have a clumsy intelligence to them. It was possible this was something in the oral tradition, but I couldn’t be sure. If this small world were somehow sentient, though, it could be beaten. To vanquish it, I needed to find its weakness, and it had just supplied one: impatience. It didn’t want a long, drawn-out starvation for the passengers; it wanted me to commit a hands-on murder for the greater good—and soon.

“Show me.”

I followed the steward down into the wardroom, where a man was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He looked sallow and had fine, wispy blond hair and small eyes that stared intently at me as I walked in. A burly sailor named McTavish, who was tattoo and Scotsman in a three-to-four ratio, was standing guard over him. There was no one else in the room—there didn’t need to be. It was a hypothetical situation.

“Your name, sir?”

“Jebediah Salford. And I have hidden a bomb—”

“I heard. And naturally you won’t tell me where it is?”

“Naturally.”

“This bomb,” I went on, “will sink the ship, potentially leading to many deaths?”

“Indeed, I hope so,” replied Jebediah cheerily.

“Your own included?”

“I fear no death.”