They spent the night in Aurora's office -- She'd provided pillows and blankets, but beyond that they'd had to make do with the carpet since Jarett had stretched out on the couch as soon as everyone else had stood up.
Nick was woken up by the rising sun, suddenly aware that he'd never actually seen one in person before -- his apartment had been far from the top of his building, and even farther from the top of the building across from his. He sat up, peeling the shirt from his skin, stiff with sweat and dirt. His hands weren't much cleaner, and his eyes felt like they were burried.
He pinched the blanket between his fingers, softer than the hotel linens from the other night. He rubbed his face into it, feeling the grit and grease despite the fine threads as days worth of sweat and dirt smeared into it. He let out a breath as he pulled away, blinking as he opened his eyes fully for the first time that morning.
One of the black clad figures who'd taken them from the APC the night before stood near the door on the far side of the room, to the right of a black interface-desk in front of Nick. He cast the blanket aside, sitting cross-legged as he turned to face the windows. He leaned his forehead against them, as if to stick his head into the sunrise.
He heard Leru shift behind him, going through a similar process of waking up but finishing with ten push-ups. She stood to his right at the window, staring at the reflective obelisk bisecting the rising star in the distance. "The days here are almost exactly one standard."
Nick looked up at her. "How can you tell?"
She shrugged. "I can't be exactly sure, but I'm used to living on a schedule. Despite this planet's small size, that schedule hasn't really changed."
"Hm." Nick turned back to the window, watching the sunlight spread over hundreds of featureless, grey buildings. The windows had all been tinted to match the texture of the building's structure, leaving the whole thing a desaturated lump in the golden desert. "Why would they put so much work into something so… austere?"
Leru smirked. "You must know every comonese word to describe loneliness."
Nick smiled and shrugged, staring out the window.
She followed his gaze, "The decor is all interfaced. They did the same thing with the newer buildings in my home-city; it's more expensive than a standard building, but you save on the cost of the storefronts since they can change with their inventory. And of course," she added, "the things you can do with interface animations far exceed the capabilities of practical construction."
"And no one too poor will even know your store exists." Nick wasn't sure what his face looked like, only that the expression was well worn into the muscles -- too unhappy to smile, too tired to frown, and too stressed to relax, leaving the muscles half clenched in every direction. "We never understood why grey-sectors were so popular, why they kept building more and more of these ugly tumors in our city." He shook his head and chuckled. "We just assumed they were cheap, and sold as trendy. Turns out they were paying extra to manufacture exclusivity."
Leru stared silently out the window with him until the office door opened a few minutes later. Aurora entered behind another black-clad individual, both carrying synthwood baskets full of linens. They placed the baskets on the desk, one piled high with rolls of steaming, white towels while the other contained crisply folded shirts and pants.
"I'm sorry we aren't able to offer better accommodations." Aurora plucked a towel off the top of the basket and wiped sweat off her brow. "The entire city is interfaced, the only place I can be sure you won't be found is here -- or the sewers, but I assumed this would be preferable."
Jarret rolled over to face the back of the couch, whose materials rumbled loudly as they rubbed together. He buried his face into the cushions, hands between his knees.
Nick turned back to the window as he realized that, at some point durning the night, Jarett had removed his flight suit, and was now brandishing his slightly-hairy ass at the room.
"Showers aren't an option either," Aurora continued, turning to the rest of the room. "This is the best I can do in that regard." She gestured to the hot towels. "But I can offer clean clothes."
"Can you offer a way off this planet?" Nick walked over to the basket of towels and began running one over his head, behind his ears -- he felt like his skin was suffocating beneath the unwashed days. The towels smelled of nothing but filtered water, yet seemed to relax and invigorate the muscles beneath the skin. "Or maybe, you know, clear my name of the terrorist attack you framed me for?"
"Not… yet." Aurora frowned. "The port is controlled by my father -- even if I gave you a ship and helped you take off, you'd barely make it to the nullcasters before being brought back."
Nick dropped the soiled towel on the desk. "So we kill Dawn, then you begin digging us out from the shit you've buried us under?"
She smiled weakly. "That's the idea."
"You don't know." Leru stepped up to the desk, mouth bent halfway up the side of her face. "You have no plan."
Aurora looked into the space between them. "Half true," she sighed. "I know how to get you into the citadel. I'm cut-off from entering it myself, so I'm afraid that's where my knowledge ends."
Nick pushed out his lower lip. "Did daddy send you to your room?"
Aurora stood, statue still, staring into that same space between Nick and Leru. "You didn't think Perseverance, a fully functional ship too old for spare parts yet interface compatible, just happened to be sent to your sector of the scrap yard, did you?" She moved like a doll, empty behind her eyes as her mouth formed words beneath a tight, too-small smile. "Father didn't even notice anything was strange until you escaped -- no one's done that before, you see. No functioning technology makes it to the workforce for starters, there's an entire department assigned to sorting and breaking any scrap that might be repurposed. As soon as Dawn began searching for the culprit, Aurora submitted herself to experimentation -- it was the only way to make sure Dawn didn't just..."
Nick's face knotted. "What do you mean, 'experimentation?'"
Aurora's mouth opened slightly, hanging as if the puppeteer had left her to hang. "Aurora is not…" her mouth moved, body still hanging limp on invisible strings, being held upright by the mere presence of strings alone. Finally, she stood up straight, inhaling deeply and letting it out slow. "I am here," she said, looking Nick in the eye. "I- the Aurora you knew, is here. But I am not alone, and this is not our only body -- nor is it only Aurora's body." She turned, lifting her hair to reveal a dark shape protruding from a square, metal frame in the back of her neck. The edges pressing against her skin were far enough apart to cover an entire vertebrate. As the light of the sun glistened off the dark shape, Nick recognized the opaque, dark purple material it was made of. "Do you know what RDI's main venture is?" She asked as she turned back to them.
"Yeah, world domination." Nick tilted his head. "You are going to explain what that datachit in your neck is, right?"
Aurora smiled. "More or less. My father doesn't own multiple cities just to eat well and spend each standard on a different planet, though."
Leru snorted, "You can't own a city -- there isn't a settlement in the galaxy that isn't democratic."
Aurora continued to smile through unfocussed eyes. "All Radiant Dawn Intergalactic ventures serve to fund our research into the soul, with the specific goal of containing it outside of the body, and eventually placing it in a manufactured one. In short, immortality."
"So that thing in your neck…" Leru folded her arms.
Aurora raised a hand. "Not quite. The research we were assisting was in its very early stages. The idea had been to have a constant connection to a central storage device -- basically, a server farm for the soul. If at any point the soul left the body, it would travel to the storage device until it could be placed into a new body, rather than dissipating as the soul usually does.
"The storage container acted like a vacuum, and with nothing in place to prevent the pressure from evening itself out, we were pulled from our own bodies." Their voice grew quiet, "like falling into a pit in the back of your mind. We were aware of what happened to us when our bodies weren't sedated, but even when our bodies were unconscious we were aware of each other -- and the distance between us and our physical selves." Two black clad figures stepped up to her sides, turning their backs to Nick and Leru and lifting their helmets just far enough to reveal the same device in their own necks.
Leru's arms fell to her sides. "You're a… a hive-mind."
Aurora's eyes refocused as she faced Leru. "We prefer the term 'soul-collective'. The experiment was more or less canceled, it's resources diverted elsewhere," the figures next to her turned back around.
"Did they put you back in your bodies first?" Nick's expression was flat as he waited for the expected answer.
"That was the final part of the experiment: If the larger space collapsed, would we return to our bodies, or disperse and leave behind corpses? The answer was a little of the first, and a little of the unexpected.
Being a soul is like being a liquid, or gas, in that your… self, is constantly seeking to spread equally between the edges of its container. It was very… dark, very cold, but there was an inherent warmth when we shared space with each other. When they collapsed the space we were held in, we… many parts of the liquid of our souls, now existed in the same physical space- not that they had become tangible, but they relate directly to where the soul is, in tangible space."
"I don't…" Nick's mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.
"You may still call us Aurora." They smiled at him. "This is the face we choose, and we find the name somewhat fitting, but the woman you knew…" the woman's eyes rounded without widening. Though he couldn't explain how, Nick recognized the look. "I'm here, but I'm not just me. I owe so much of myself to the others that I can't be here to personally make things right between us. Just know that I'm sorry..." Their eyes grew distant again. "And we share a common enemy."