First Light

I can't sleep. Three days on Nexus and my body still hasn't adjusted to the rhythm of a world that doesn't have one. No sunrise. No sunset. Just the slow shift from purple to deeper purple and back, the brown dwarf hanging in the sky like a bruise that never heals.

I slip out of the alcove. Soll and Diego are both sleeping — Diego flat on his back, one arm over his eyes, the way he's slept since the day I met him. Soll curled in the corner, filaments dim and steady.

I move through the mid-levels alone. The corridors are quieter at these hours but never empty — Nexus doesn't sleep, not fully. Some species are diurnal, some nocturnal, some don't have a cycle at all. I pass a pair of Driftkin drifting through a corridor in their pressurized containers, their semi-transparent bodies trailing misty tendrils. They hum as they pass me — a low, atonal sound that I've started to recognize as a greeting.

I hum back. It feels absurd. Everything feels absurd.

Gate Ring 7 is quiet. The outer rings always are — these are the minor connections, the rarely-used corridors, the gates to worlds that most of Nexus has forgotten about. Some of the archways here are dark, have been dark for centuries. Others shimmer faintly, connecting to places no one visits.

Our gate — the Earth gate — shimmers steady and bright in the third position from the end. It looks the same as it did when we fell through it. Blue-white light that has no source and casts no shadows.

I stand in front of it and let myself want.