STAR MAP, aurora burning | f. de seel

□ Chapter Two

The room smells odd.

It's a smell that comes from low-priced hotels on the underside of a city. Of stale smoked plants, lingering new plastic scent, and the smell of too much dirt tracked into the carpets that clearly haven't had a deep clean since they were put in.

Other than the funny smell, there's two beds and a holo display that takes up one whole wall. A small, grimy window sits on the far side of the room.

I've taken up keeping myself occupied by multitasking. I watch Aurora as she lies nearly motionless in one bed. I keep an ear out for the news reports on the channel we've switched to on the holo display. My hands are kept busy helping Finian trying to fix his suit.

"You look like an angel…"

With how quiet everyone is, Aurora's whisper makes me jump. I nearly drop the small wrench I'm using to realign the wrist supports in Finian's suit, gripping his hand as I whirl to face Aurora.

"What is an angel?" Kaliis returns, leaning over Aurora as he sits on the edge of her bed. He takes her hand, the other moving to tenderly brush a strand of hair from her face.

"It's a dirtchild with wings," Finian remarks crusily, looking up from the section of his suit he was working on.

Kaliis' brows raise, gaze glancing briefly up towards us. "Humans do not have wings."

"How would you know?" A grin splits across the Betraskan's face. "Ever seen one naked?"

Kaliis' eyebrows rise even further, the tips of his ears starting to blush.

I tap the wrench against Finian's knuckles, raising a skeptical brow. "Now by that logic you have, after you called me one on Sempiternity- and I have a hard time believing you've seen anyone naked," I tease.

He goes to pry his hand from mine, probably ready to press it in mock offense to his chest and chant his mantra of how I wound him. I simply grip it and draw it back, turning his arm over again to continue my work.

"Be nice, you two," Scarlett sounds bemused. "You alive over there, Auri? That was some kaboom."

Scarlett and Tyler wander over to Aurora's bedside, leaning in over her. Zila's on her feet before me, prying her uniglass from her breast pocket and shifts Kaliis out the way to scan Aurora's vitals.

I watch for a moment before giving the wrench one last tighten before sitting back slightly, admiring the handiwork. I hadn't done anything, but Finian's suit still amazed me.

"Where are we?" Aurora asks hoarsely.

"Hotel on the Emerald City underside," Tyler responds, ducking out of the way of Zila's scan that she runs over Aurora. "The low-rent and no-questions-asked kind. I booked it as a backup before the deal with the gremps, just in case things went really south."

"Which is weird," Scarlett muses, nudging her brother's shoulder. "Because I thought all your ideas were amazing. Lucky that you knew we'd need a fallback position."

"Almost like I studied tactics," Tyler retorts, nudging her back.

"You are well," Zila announces. "Brainwave activity is slightly elevated, but bio-readings are normalizing."

I snorted, eyes rolling slightly as I moved on to focusing on the knee of Finian's suit Zila had abandoned. My definition of weird was certainly becoming Aurora's normal.

"What happened?" Aurora asks, one hand moving to rub her temples.

"You lost consciousness," Kaliis replies.