Vera felt the shift of cold around her like a draft.

It ebbed and flowed around her and where it touched it drew up the hairs on her arms. The softness of the bed was gone, the grip she had slipped and faltered. Only the pain in her fingers followed her. The fever and sick that had burned through her dissipated and thinned until it was a phantom caress at her temple. Barley there.

But the ache in her fingers felt good.

It settled something in Vera that had loosened in her spiral. The chaos of thought that would have continued to hollow her – cut the ties to something too vital and human: fear and guilt among them.

Vera stared down at her left hand, the fingers still curled like she could still hold onto the mattress under her fingers. She flexed them and turned her palm over to try and shake the feeling loose. The brush of material was absent but in it's place was a small line where the banister had pressed into her skin in a deep red fold line.

Not as deep as a bruise but a mark all the same.

It would fade in a better of minutes, the line on her palm. Somethings followed her here, some never made it through and now something followed her out. The bruise still there and far from faded.

That had been the first time anything had ever followed Vera out. Stay with me. I will. It was a change in a constant that had lasted for months. A steady and set loop. Something had disturbed that, caused the change. Which meant something wasn't the same and off balance – or she was going mad.

Which was worse?

Her head felt clear, focused. The last effects of the high fever dissipated and thinned taking with it the last of the grip she had on Sydneys bed. The safety she felt and needed gone with it. Safe. The though reverberated through her, she was alone in the foyer, something she checked for as she pulled herself up to standing. In all the places to be, on ship where none of the life could touch her, it was the safest place she could be.

Until the clock at her back, wound and notched, struck midnight.

Then the water would come for her and she would choke and sputter for breath alone in the dark. The loop repeated. Intact and unaffected. Just the burn of icy water dripping into her lungs, closing over her mouth. Across her eyes.

The light was always the last of the ship to go when the breach happened. Though, that too was a break in the constant. The light hadn't left Vera on the expedition vessel. It never banked or wavered, only she had, because she couldn't make it fast enough and when the light did die out it had been her fault. Her our body failing.

Your fault. Your fault, floating away, echoed Sydney in a mirror to her own thoughts.

Vera shuddered out a breath and stepped off the staircase. She leaned against the candelabra for support of leverage she wasn't sure.

It was beautiful.

But it was also unnerving. The light may be the last piece of the ship to dissolve around her when the water snuffed out the flames inside them, but each time Vera came back to the ship, where was no water to be seen. No damp carpets. No furniture thrown or displaced. The Etruria was a feat of engineering and it stayed that way.

The first time Vera had screamed at the passengers around her. She hadn't understood why they wouldn't help her, why they weren't doing anything about the rising level of sea water inside the ship. Now, Vera tipped her gaze up to look at the deck above where, that first night, she hadn't been able to outrun the water.

It had been – was, so cold it burned.

Vera kept her gaze turned up at the railing. She followed the line of spindles with her eyes before finding the exact one she'd been looking for. A corner piece, where a body had sagged the night before. Vera's mind spun and for just a moment she let it.

Let the confusion ebb into understanding before settling on something like fear.

Water came for Vera. She was connected to it in a way she hadn't understood until the pain medication had worn off and she was sober enough to ask questions, to retain the answer. The expedition rescue team had found her body, unconscious and unresponsive, tethered to the staircase that lead to crew questers. The structure had collapsed some and the pressure of the breach had loosened the railing enough that it collapsed around her and kept her just under the water level. She'd never made it down the hallway, the door still sealed when they reach her, breath leaking from her lungs.

Water came for Vera but it spilled out of him.

It leaked from his mouth, in tears around his eyes and it had started before he'd made it to the banister. The front of his shirt and pants already wet with it. There had been so much water that it puddled onto the floor under his feet.

He hadn't died the way she did, in a fight to win her last breath, he'd choked on it.

Like an elastic band pulled taunt, took an involuntary step back as she tried to put as much space between the deck above and the thoughts still pouring through her mind.

She hadn't given much thought to how the crew would have died aboard the expedition vessel. Maybe it was selfish, maybe she just didn't have the energy to look beyond herself, beyond the faces she recognized. Not thinking about them made things ... easier. It shouldn't have but Vera didn't have anymore space left to give.

And now, something had burrowed deep and made the space she needed to feel the pressure of, more than just guilt but, shame.

She didn't even know his name. All she had was a uniform.

Apart from her team, the crew that manned the Etruria Expedition, had all been dressed in their uniforms. Pressed blues and whites, grey for the two engines on board. He'd been eight people apart from her, and her red arctic jacket, wearing the blue long coat of an officer. But there had been several and each was warm, friendly, but the interaction between them wasn't more than that.

Of all the things she wished to go back and change, she was surprised when she realized this was one of them.

In a ship this size, she didn't even have a name to shout into the void. All she had was a face and a cause of death, and the possibility that he'd been somewhere with enough oxygen that he chocked on water and had the ability to spit it out.

Was that what killed him? And if it was, where had he been?

Vera only had vague details. Pieces of conversation and reports and rumours that didn't amount to much when she had to think about it from the perspective of an R.M.S. ship.

Vera had been on the stairs when the expedition vessel had started to tilt. She had been delayed by the shift change, needed Arthur to sign over the count from that day. Officers and crewmen had been stepping to and stepping away from their posts. It had been just before twenty-two hundred hours. Shift change. When the vessel lulled and dark made it impossible to see out any panes of glass.

It was a fifty-fifty shot in the dark. The bridge or the crew cabins.

Both R.M.S versions of bridge and officers cabins were side by side. One long hallway that lead out onto the promenade, but if he wasn't an officer in the mirrored version of the Etruria, the crew cabins were seven decks below her feet.

She had to pick. And there was a wrong answer.

She couldn't stay standing in the foyer forever, the clock at her back would make sure of that but it was more. A pressure between her temples that had been mounting the last few days, weeks, maybe months. Something was slipping. A culmination of trama? Possibly.

If she lost her grip then she'd never find her team.

She'd made a promise. Arthur was already disappointed in her she couldn't let him down further. She had to find them, bring them home. Home. They deserved to come home.

Overhead, the muffled sound of someone walking on the deck. Their footsteps diminished by the thick carpet and for a moment, Vera wondered if he'd found her instead. But the footsteps came with whispers that dissolve into a giggle, a sigh, and a rush of fabric. Just passengers.

Vera retreated back over the steps she'd taken down the staircase. Her sock covered feet didn't so much as echo on the veined marble as she trailed under the deck above to peer over the edge of the staircase. It wasn't dark on the deck below but felt like peering over a ledge. The cold seeped into her arches. She'd forgotten to put her shoes back on before she walked into the shared bedroom.

Vera wiggled her toes, pink socks moved with her.

Vera had died on the mainstarcase on the expedition vessel. It looked nothing like the grand and looming staircase spread out around her. But it had been biggest, the one most used to get through the ship without needing to go below the water line and treck through where they kept cargo. Here, on this ship, that meant the aft staircase.

She pulled her eyes from the ledge and turned her head to glance so a second at the stencilled B Deck sign at the edge of the steps down. It reflected Vera back against herself.

She looked bloodless and transparent.

The sick she'd felt before still lingered on her face in smudged under eyes and pale cheeks. The way she knows she looks back on Sydneys bed.

The knuckles on her left hand pulsed in time with her heartbeat where she has them curled over the railing. Steady and firm. Stay with me. If all Vera had was a uniform and an adjacent rank then that was enough. It would have to be enough.

Vera takes the first step down to the deck below.