It's late enough that the research labs should be empty.

The main doors to the Science buildings was always open, a fire prevention method that Vera knew the students took advantage of when the libraries closed, but tonight it meant that Vera didn't have to speak to anyone.

The impatient drum of rain on the windows followed Vera through the building, past labs and closets and bathroom. Her steps were light, but Vera they might as well have been signal fires. The echo of herself in the hallway took up each empty space and turned the silence back around and into Vera's chest.

The pressure of it was not akin to the ache in her back. The ache was a reminder that she was alive. The pressure was a reminder of why.

The Schwab Building looked that same, a building of red brick and aged features, older than most of the dedicated labs around campus, it stood tall and unaffected by time, or rain, or internal tragedy.

It looked the same and would continue to look the same until someone pushed and poked at it's foundation – then it would crumble like a deck of cards. But in the middle of the night, in the rain that was simply bad weather, the Institute was being washed of leaves and grim. Unaffected, in a way Vera couldn't be.

The wheelchair in the lobby was proof enough of that.

The rickety piece of equipment was hastily swept of dust and was left, as it always was, next to her visitors badge. There is she needed it. Vera had only accepted the offer once after one of her MRI's. She'd been so overwhelmed in the machine that she'd puked and sank against the wall after the test was finished.

They hadn't let her walk after that.

But there was no one here now, so she'd taken the badge, looped it over her head and left the chair where it was. Occasionally, Vera leaned her palm onto the wall to brace herself but each time was only a moment, two at the most and she'd remember where she was and straightened against the deep ache in her body.

They had told her that she had drowned. That her brain had gone without oxygen and that there would be remnants of it for the rest of her life. Some things had come back. Slowly or all at once, but there were things that lingered.

Phantoms that haunted her every breath.

Vera stepped into the junction where the building split into three.

Several departments used the Schwab as their main labs: chemistry was left, engineering was right and triangulated in the centre – the last remaining evidence of the original Schwab Annex, home to the mind that connected the department, was research. The main core of the building, a control room with the campuses first, but not only, supercomputer.

The Schwab was a hive mind responsible for research – to research. A movement of science driving a force behind expeditions like Vera's.

They'd met each other here. They'd laughed in the hallways and worked together in the labs. They – Vera cut her eyes to the glass around her, watching in the dark that was slowly turning to day outside the windows she could barley see through the glass squares in metal doors.

She was alone, awake and alone.

Vera kept her eyes on the floor. She knew there were thirty-six tiles between the lab she's looking for and the stairway she'd just walked out of. Muscle memory and time spent sitting in these halls, years of having her nose in a book or impatiently waiting for the grades to be posted after an exam meant she'd spent most of her time, just there on the floor. Curled into herself and buzzing with anticipation.

Dreams she'd had that were no longer apart of the dreams that followed her now.

Vera pulled the swipe-card from her pocket trying to ignore the press of building around her, but her hands were shaking. The uneven tremor forced her to slow, to press both hands on the reader and push the plastic down through the slot.

A moment later and the door clicked, unlocked.

Vera opened the door with a twist of her hand and slipped inside the room where she knew she'd find Reed. Without the chaos of exam season or pre-expedition prep-checks the space expanded. The grip she'd kept on the dossier at her elbow slipped slightly, she hadn't been home in so long she'd forgotten what it had felt like to be here.

Anchor yourself. The voice didn't make it past a whisper and Vera let it slip through her thoughts until it was nothing more than added static to a room already full of it.

The research department didn't have rooms with windows but the screens and radios more than made up for it – chalkboards, all slightly taller than Vera, were stacked and crowded with equations and problems. Some partially covered by the ladders on a track. Vera was one of two people in the room but rows of desks sat with active equipment.

Dials of all colours flashed and blinked.

Vera pulled the dossier from her elbow, flipped it onto the side that wasn't so damp anymore, and settled it gentle onto the closest desk. Control Tower One, is written on the marquee above the cluster of desks.

Another said: Radio Transmission and under the another stood Reed, a maze of grid maps before him, expanding well beyond his broad frame and up a wall with pins scattered in clusters. Without turning, Reed waved a hand and beckoned her closer, no doubt seeing it was her in the shining reflection the laminated grid gave off.

"I wasn't expecting you until morning." He said without turning.

"It is morning," Vera countered. The words she spoke nothing more than a rush of sound that mixed strangely with the static around them. The radios were constant voices and the machines all buzzed and there was so much noise that she felt herself be righted.

There was only silence in Arthurs house, outside in the street with loud car horns the noise wasn't enough – wasn't this.

Vera stepped up behind him. Her coat still tucked into her body, damp at the shoulders and under the nap of her neck where her hair hadn't dried from when she'd woken in the leaking sea. At his shoulder Vera conceded, "technically morning."

"Technically," he echo'd, in his New England accent, "that makes you late, then."

Vera looked over at him. Dressed in layers of sweaters pulled up at the elbows, he looks, for a moment, like Arthur. They had the same black hair, the same sharp jaw, but the sparkle of life in Reeds eyes could never be seen again in Arthurs.

Brothers. They had been brothers and looking at him always haunted Vera. As if he were a ghost in a waking dream, come back to remind her of how disappointed he was with her. But she was here to help him now.

At the very least she could grant them peace in death. Lay them to rest in a place that wasn't a watery tomb. Somewhere safe. Somewhere warm. Home. They deserved to come home.

Vera wrapped an arm around her middle. Ten toes, all twenty-six bones in her right foot, she whispered to herself.

She could tell Reed. Tell him that she'd been having dreams. Episodes. That sometimes followed her from sleep but she didn't want her guilt haunting him anymore than he was being haunted already. It left a gap between them that was wide enough for her to fall through.

It had been his expedition, his research, that lead to Vera's team being out there. Reed's was the first familiar face she'd seen in that helicopter when she's gained that brief reprieve of warmth from the rescue team.

So Vera offered something else, "That's quite a view."

"The latest images from the satellite. Here," Reed said, taking Vera by the shoulders and walking her back four paces.

Reed always spoke like that, statements in place of questions. But Vera knew that it was an opening, an outstretched hand yet to be taken. "You're mapping the migration patterns."

"Yes," he said, "based on your research. Just satellite, we don't want to scare them off course. They have their calves are with them, this time."

The grid of the ocean spanned wide before her, the cluster of pins was three whales each and they were moving, deeper into the Atlantic.

Vera closed her eyes, vision swimming.

Based on her research. The thought swells a little in her chest.

Reeds grip tightened on her shoulders, like she'd been swaying on her feet and when Vera opened her eyes, his hand was pointed at the edge of her vision where a blue marker sat far beyond the grid into the plaster wall. Their hypothesized destination.

"On course. Like you predicted." He said. His smile was barley more than a quick of his lips, so faint that only years of familiarity allowed her to see it for what it was. Green eyes bright and sharp, that strange intensity he'd worn around her, slipped back onto his face. Maybe it's guilt or pity. So few people looked at her without a hint of either in their eyes.

The pager tucked into Reeds belt beeped. Two quick chimes. His free hand grabbed the pager, all talk of whales forgotten for him as he read the message. Vera watched him, noticed the eye roll and smiled disjointed herself. "I have to attend to this, an undergraduate –," he didn't explain, only waved his hand around in the air in exasperation.

"Go. I'll be fine on my own."

That garnered a look that was almost entity Arthur. Thick brows pulled together in an almost frown, an almost scowl. "Are one of these for me?" Vera turned her back to the maps and waved a hand at a nearby computer, it buzzed at attention but the screen was blank.

"If you're sure, the one in my office is set up for you."

"I'm sure." Was all she said.

And then she was alone. Alone and able to lean into the nearest chair, a plastic uncomfortable thing that would hurt her back more than waking on the floor had, but Vera didn't care in that moment. Her eyes had gone back to that cluster of pins and than up to the lone blue one hovering well above her head, above the room.

Above where she knew another map, in another room, had a pin for her.

Vera drifted closer to the wall, placing her hand flat on the grid, fingers finding the nearest whale pin, then another, than another. In the haze of recovery, Reed had feed her information on the pods. Small things to keep her mind busy.

Each time she sat in that MRI machine, each time they mapped her brain, each time she'd come back here, he'd fed her something and even lost and adrift in her own head she'd managed to find them, map the data and locate a new migration pattern.

If Vera could find the whales, she could find her team.

Vera tucked the dossier into her chest, and stepped into the back corner office that was Dr. Reeds. A consolation from the department from years ago. They had toasted to it with a bottle of something cheap that he'd kept in the side table. The corner was lit only by the computer screen and the small table lamp that hummed louder the close she got it.

She set the dossier on the desk and pulled the chair out. She took a deep breath through gritted teeth and leaned her body into the leather. It groaned like it could read her thoughts.

The computer was on and beeping, breathing like the processes was waiting in anticipation for what she'd type into the key but it wasn't the search engine that Vera wanted, it was the reader. She pulled the dossier across the metal and spread papers already littered across Reeds desk. She pulled the latch and thumbed through the official documentation of the Etruria Expedition, to find the floppy disc.

She'd gone through all of paperwork, every statement, every interview. Her own statement was northing more than spewed guilt and pain, barley more than mumbled nonsense for all the good it had done her to give it. The engineer reports, diagrams of the ships haul and quarters. Grid maps of the ocean floor, in rows of twenty-five meters, all of it useless.

All of it amounted to nothing but rejections and pity ridden statements from departments declining her requests to use their equipment except one.

The disk fell from where she'd tucked it. It slipped through the pages of her journal and into her lap where she'd curled herself into the chair. Vera set the journal back into the dossier, gently as to not tear it.

She'd kept a journal those first few months. Before her dreams became more than that. Before she realized what her life was now. She'd kept it, continued to write in it, for the memories she'd lost if she hadn't written them down.

There was always those on the crew that were superstitious, as sailers tended to be but Jay was the believer.

"A believer of dreams," he'd whisper around tables, with bright eyes and a storytellers lit to his voice.

"A believer of monsters," Sydney would bite back. But she would wear her smile tucked away like a secret. That Sydney wasn't the one that haunted Vera now.

Vera left the journal tucked away and settled the weight of the disk in her hand. See for yourself could mean anything and Vera wanted to know. The boxy screen was lit up and waiting, the cursor blinked impatiently. So Vera pressed the floppy disk into the slot and pushed it in.

The screen blinks with static.

The screen went black and the load started bit by bit. Line by line. Methodical and orderly. The screen continued systematically loading. She leaned back, watching the loading information, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair she'd curled her body into.

Arms tucked under herself on the best where she rests her forehead on her elbows. The metronome beat and constant static of people talking in low tones through the radios around the room was a familiar blanket that lulled Vera into the sleeplessness she was trying to run from.

As the disk loaded, Vera leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.