Vera sat, alone in the dark, until the office started too close in around her.

Her words to Reed echoed through her head, a terrible, reverberated symmetry to them that continued to bite at her thoughts. I have to know. I have to know.

I have to.

She pulled the coffee cup closer, tucked it into her chest, and settled herself further into the large chair. It tethered her to the room. Settled her breathing. Her hands that still shook, now from nerves and less from the shock of having slipped between waking in a dream and waking against a wooden desk top.

Vera pushed her fingers into her eyes. It was a mistake to mention anything to Reed. The postscript could have stayed a secret and she could have explained away the need for the computer beyond just the ability to insert the disc. Easy lies to cover harder ones.

But the truth had sounded so small in her mouth. The confession slipped out from between her teeth and then it wasn't her own truth anymore. It belonged to both of them now, but only Vera was left with the burden of opening Schroeder's box.

It could be nothing.

It could be everything.

Vera pulled her hands from her eyes and unfolded herself from the chair. The cold cup of coffee forgotten at the edge of her fingers. She tapped the computer awake and watched it click open. The screen ready and on it a prompt: Open Transcript.

"Transcript?" She read aloud, "from what?"

She hesitated for only a moment before pushing her finger into the left mouse key.

The computer unfolded, blinking open a new window in the process of downloading the file. A bar of black slipped across the screen completing i't sun through in increments of twenty.

When it reached one-hundred the bar froze and the window dissolved into a full screen window filled with black and white text, spaced in single lines. Sentences flowed into simple three word commands all aligned to the left and neatly organized by speaker, command and radio interference or structure.

Vera reads through the first few lines trying to understand the context. The transcript wasn't whole and there were pieces missing, beginnings that ran into middles that began other things. But none of it was redacted, the endless jumble of words were plain for her to see and read, if she could understand it.

During the Etruria Expedition there wasn't cause for her to relay more than the ordinary to the crew to her team. Those reports had been mostly verbal and never anywhere near a radio. The ship was too large. There were too many people and it would have gotten crossed somewhere and the work she'd been doing wasn't all that important in the grand scheme of a ship in the ocean surrounded by icecaps.

A few more lines of back and forth communication went by before Vera stopped and leaned her body into the desk. In the light distorted by the lamp and the overflow of light from the room beyond the office, Vera's face paled. On the monitor, in four neat lines of communication that looked to have taken place forty minutes after twenty-three hundred hours. Midnight.

> We have debris. It looks to be covered in sand, moving around the obstruction.

> Copy. Standing by.

> Um, someone might want to get John. He'll want to see this... Intelligible... Found something.

> OSN 390, Please repeat. We lost your communication.

"Command. We have a shipwreck," Vera breathes, her voice a little frayed at the edges. There's a break in the transcript after that. Silence over the radio.

> Copy.

> Command. Do we have permission to set off course?

> Yes. Is there a ship, OSN 390?

> Negative. Dropping weights. Stand by... Command. There's a ... We found a ... Intelligible... They looks like eyes.

Vera recoiled. She pulled herself from the monitor, overturning the mouse in her attempt to get up and out of the chair. The cold cup of coffee tethered and fell, liquid slide across and over the desk. It isn't even register. The room was already tilting, and there wasn't enough air getting into her lungs. Eyes. It looks like eyes. She opened her mouth to let out a breath, but all that came out was a rasp that clawed it's way up her throat.

There were no other words past that line. Another piece removed from a puzzle so she wouldn't – couldn't complete the picture.

Vera took an involuntary step back as she tried to put as much space between the information still pouring across the monitor. She felt a tremor of residual panic pass through her. Already off kilter it spun into exhaustion and twisted. You're floating away, whispered Sydney, like a soft caress at her ear. You left us alone, in the dark but we can still see you, Vera. Vera. Vera.

"Vera?"

Like an elastic band pulled taunt, she snapped back into the glass office. Back pressed against the wall, she was standing in a puddle of coffee and Reed was kneeling in it. She didn't say anything for several minutes, dazed by the panic attack. She needed it to slip from under her skin before she opened her mouth or she was sure something like a scream was all she'd be able to manage.

The last time a panic attack crept up on her she'd been alone. But her first had been in the hospital a few days after she'd woken up, in a room that smelled the way clean tastes, and the needle in her arm had been the things to tip her over. Now, she adjusted her back and slide to the floor. Her limbs like jello.

Reed followed her down. Somewhere along the way he'd closed the office door again and settled the blind over it. His face was a shock of concern. His features too big, too wide. He'd leaned down until his face was level with hers, not close or too far, just in the space where she could see him and just him. "What happened?"

The New England drawl taut with tension and a little too loud. Radio static filled her ears and it echoed around in her head. The adrenaline waining.

"Reed," She swallowed. Re-setting.

"I overreacted earlier." He seemed to accept her hesitation, as he eased the conversation away from her onto him. "I wasn't expecting – I was caught off guard but that wasn't a reason to say anything I did. You have me, Vera. Throw something at me the next time I try something so self-righteous."

It's his attempt at a distraction, she knows. After the MRI, he'd been too observant, too keen and Vera had caught him in his own mind once or twice in return. Arthur hadn't been the steadier one between the two, Reed had that mantel. It was only when thee was one left that she saw the cracks in it. Saw how much Reed leaned when he spoke as if his brother would be right there beside him. A nod of encouragement or a wave of a hand as an offered agreement.

Over Reeds shoulder, Vera could see the spilled coffee and the sensor from the underside of the mouse as it rocked back and forth on the desk. The room closed at the edges, black spots spread across her vision. They look like eyes. She blinked hard and pulled her gaze from the mess and the room and settled on Reed again.

And for a second – just a second – she found herself staring at a ghost. Blue eyes, pressed into worried lines, grey tipped hair, a neatly trimmed beard on a round face that slacked and emptied, void of life.

But it wasn't Arthur. It was just an echo.

"Hey, still with me?" Said Reed.

"Yeah. It's just been a long night." She waved her hand at the computer, and watched the coffee drip from her fingers, and down onto her pants. The screen on the monitor had been bumped when the mouse clicked, and something new was across the transcript. It was a window of tiny square boxes with dates and numbers on top. Indexed photographs. "I was combing through them and it set me off. I'm okay."

She was speaking to fast. The way people do when they have too little breath to get a thought out. The first three were stills taken inside a submarine. It looked like a condensed version of the room beyond the glass walls. Less space to move around but enough technology to make it usable and just barely wide enough so people weren't seated on each other. It was familiar and ordinary. Vera took a breath.

"Let me clean the coffee and put your office back together."

"There's paper towels in the cabinet." Said Reed, mechanically. Vera stopped listening and walked around the spill to the cabinet in the corner. A metal box with handles that whined when someone looked at it but inside was paper towels and she pressed them to the floor to absorb the spill.

Reed lowered himself into the desk chair, pressed his back against the leather, and flipped the mouse over. He righted the cup and tipped it into the garbage can next to him.

"I can finished, Reed." said Vera, reading his face. He'd gone absent and focused.

"Did," Reed started. He swallowed hard and kept his posture half turned towards her. Though he didn't move from his spot. "Was there... anything?"

"No." It was one things to mention a possibility of something, it was another to mention that they found a body. Pieces of a ship. She'd have to print the file is she hoped to read them, something she couldn't do with Reed here. "Really, let me –"

But Reed had brought his hand up and tapped the next key. The pictures on the screen changed with it.

The monitor blinked and changed views.

The next set of photographs weren't of the submarine but taken through one of the scopes, the camera fashioned to the front of it. Three neat sets of pictures all displaying various angles of the same thing: debris. Pieces of a ship that had broken or torn in a decent too fast for normal pressure to adjust. The edges look rough and sharp and stretched. As if the metal didn't want to let go.

In a trance, Reed kept clicking next.

And the debris kept getting larger.

Full pieces and parts of a main deck, furniture and loose equipment covered in sand. Bottles of wine and straps of black smudges that looked like luggage. Picked part and left there. An anchor, rusted and blown out by the lights thrown onto it from the submarine. The further Reed clicks the more intact the debris becomes.

Until it's a power turbine, a wing propeller, the side of a ship.

"Oh my god," Reed sputters but his finger continues to click and for a second, Vera wishes the machine would eat the disc and the entire thing would shut off. They look like eyes, echoed in her head. Please don't be there, please don't let it be in there.

But the folder ends with two pictures, innocent and almost harmless.

One is a faded and grainy still of a window, square and rusted. A bunk room window from below deck. There's pieces of a ship all around it but the picture is too close to see if anything around it is recognizable.

The other isn't a picture of a wreck at all.

It's a clear and open photograph, taken on a camera, held by a person no where near the middle of the ocean. Each face is smiling and bright and the camera flash had burned so bad, a few of the crew had jokes about it, teasing the dockworker who'd taken it. They had never taken a full crew shot before but this time, Jay had mentioned wanting something special. A keep sake. A memory.

Vera's face smiled back at her. Arthur, Sydney, Jay, the captain and the entire crew. The photograph on the screen is a picture of a picture and the flash cuts some faces out of the shot from over exposure but she didn't need the clear photograph to member that moment. A warm hand on her shoulder. The chilled beer in one of her own hands, tucked into a cozy.

The Etruria Expedition crew a week before the accident.

Reed went to hit the next key but nothing happened. That was the last one and he hovered the mouse of the picture, double clicking to zoom in. Vera reached out a hand and braced herself on the wall. She shuddered out a breath and it had nothing to do with the familiar ghosts that smiled up at her.

It was the unfamiliar one that caught her attention.

Under Reeds cursor, almost out of frame from the flash of that second camera is the a man standing in uniform. Face pulled wide and teeth showing, pride clear across his face. He looked excited. There was no trace of the broken and drowning stranger from her dream, just a man, on a ship, bound for discovery.