[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/NISMglX.png[/img][/center][center][h2][color=#b9dde9]Laurey Karlin[/color][/h2][/center]If the nails of her right hand weren’t a ceramic plastymer, Laurey would have chewed them down to their beds. Hunched in the shadow of her (their) mech, glass synapses funneled electric dreams into her mind. The local feed was double hot. Videos and stills of the incident were circulating. Laurey watched, flitting between and knitting them together, as the ever growing list of transgressions and broken laws piled up. Terrorism was the general consesus. Laurey almost agreed.

Voices. 

She switched to the ship's external cameras and found a portal, through which faces she knew and faces she didn’t stepped. Feelings fizzed within Laurey. Relief, fear…  pride. She could feel the cold fingers of her cybernetics modulating them, keeping them “acceptable”. Yet it was still too much; not long ago Laurey was wanting to leave,[i] would[/i] have left these psycho kids to their fates, found her own way to contribute to The Cause. Now if any had died, even those she knew least, she would have mourned… that couldn’t be the sum of awkward passings in hallways, of muttered words and meal times. Had everything changed at Plenty?

Was she a criminal?

Was she still - 

An awful noise cut in. The world lurched sideways, crates groaning in their nets. Tools clattered down from the mech. Laurey peered out from behind a leg.

A jeep sat in the loading bay, shuddered as its engine was killed. Laurey’s insides fluttered again when she saw Avelyn. That boy… The brief moment of confusion was chased away as her augmentations regurgitated a name into her mind, and the memories of where she’d seen him. Joey. 

The two had come in pretty hot. 

A thousand questions spoke over each other in her head: are you okay were you followed is there anybody left out there where are we going are we going to be alright is it okay to stop hiding are you angry at me are you okay? 

Laurey slunk away and hurried up to the lobby.

She arrived in time to hear the roll call, and an awkward slip. Cute. Inevitable. Surprising it hadn’t happened sooner; hormones, trauma, confined spaces. Also: irrelevant. 

Then Laurey was volunteered for some snooping. The subject of all this suspicion was a feathery haired man with a beak of a nose. Laurey thought he looked like a crow. She nodded.

A momentary nausea passed over her at the news that Phi had left. She had forgotten about her up until her name was mentioned (were there others she’d forgotten?). The girl could be captive, or she could have done the wise thing and ditched. Or she could have turned coat. Laurey made a mental note to check the telemetry, Phi’s room (did she have one?), and ask Nat more about it once they weren’t in deep shit.

Deep shit. Why had things gone so wrong? It was enough to make her entirely forget the chunk of time missing from her memory. She felt pressure building inside her temples.

“Can Klein -” the word had a familiar taste to her mouth, like home. She paused, then snapped, “Can Klein not wait?” Her breathing was erratic, her thoughts, “Sorry. News and speculation about us,” she rapped her omni tool against her head, hard enough to bring a hollow thudding, “won’t take them long to watch security footage and find you guys. Us. Or lockdown the port. Surely? I see two options: either we confess or get the hell out of Dodge.”

Her eyes searched the others. Nat, Ashton, Jude. Avelyn, Nero. There was almost a plea in them: [i]something, anything. Rebuttal, agreement. Just action. [/i]