The sinking of Titanic has been told for more than a century-but rarely from the inside out. This book moves beyond legend to examine the lives shaped, tested, and lost beneath the decks: immigrant families traveling steerage, engineers and firemen who stayed at their posts, women navigating evacuation rules shaped by class, language, and access. Drawing on inquiry records, survivor testimony, and modern scholarship, it reveals how disaster did not strike evenly-and how survival was shaped by labor, hierarchy, and proximity to power. Rather than retelling the night as spectacle, this volume asks harder questions. Who bore the greatest risk? Whose work made survival possible? And why did the same fault lines-class, invisibility, unequal protection-persist even as the ship went down? This is not a story of a ship alone, but of a system under stress-and of the people who paid the price when it failed.