The Anatomy of Drowning (ONC 2022 Longlist)

10. R.M.S Etruria, 1893

There were moments when Vera walked the ship that she forgot herself.

When each corridor had looked and felt like the inside of another ship. When corridors, lined with metal and not wood, had been her constant comfort. And it was the rooms, like the ones on the bridge, that blurred the lines the best. The hallway didn't exactly fit into the pieces in her memory but even twisted up, glimpsed of the past didn't look or behave they way they should sometimes on the Etruria.

Not when the metal railings felt the same under her hands or the voices, overlapping one another, said similar things to a bridge on a different ship. Orders to steady and check watch, keep sharp eyes even in the dark.

However clear her head had been before, it was full now.

She could hear the tick of it through the walls, echo'd back to her from the aft staircase, in the spaces between the throb of her pulse in her head.  It didn't matter how far into the ship Vera went or how many doors she closed between her and them, she could still hear it.

It pressed in around her. A gentle touch to the space between her eyebrows, a finger resting lightly against her skin. And just underneath it, the longing to give up. There was too much ground to cover. The ship was too large and this was only a small part of –

No. No, she couldn't believe that, not here, not now.

She'd chosen the bridge over the crew cabins, seven decks below her feet, because the odds had been better. The choice had been easy. An officer for an officer. She'd picked.

And there had been a wrong answer.

She didn't know yet if she'd chosen the wrong one.

The noise of the navigation bridge drew out her thoughts, amplified her panicked, too fast, breathing. The first half of the officers deck had been empty. Not of passengers but of him. There had been no sign of anyone that didn't belong, but Vera didn't leave marks either. Nothing that couldn't be explained away by anyone looking for her.

It was that thought that had Vera leaving bread crumbs behind.

A glass in the middle of the hallway. A flotation device on an arm chair. She'd thought about opening doors but the officers were constant streams of in and out, and she didn't think an open door would tell her anything, if he had been leaving her breadcrumbs.

She'd thought about leaving her socks on the steps down here to B Deck. The pink set would certainly not belong to the Etruria but Vera had taken a single step away on bare feet when she changed her mind.

It was a small, insignificant line of defence for the water she knew was coming. The thin material would offer no protection and yet, the thought of being bare foot in water so cold it burned, made her chest tighten.

Vera focused her gaze back into the room. Inside the bridge, wide windows look out into where the ocean would be if there had been light left. The Boat Deck is illuminated, the passengers under a blanket of it, but beyond that, there's nothing. The room inside is small and practical. Darkened banks of control equipment, line the wall of windows. The entire room is made of wood and behind it, the wheelhouse where two officers are at their stations.

Neither look up as Vera stepped through them. There and then gone. She was left with empty and with the ache in her body that tingled and spread where the rest of the arm passed through her. She grit her teeth against the sting and stepped into the second half of the officer's quarters.

The bridge, the the officers's cabins that lined it, was one long hallway made up of two squared off hallways. One that branched to the left, the other two the right. Vera had cleared exactly half. Again and again, she'd come up empty. Cabin after cabin, and all the other rooms connected to them.