“Aurora?”

Empty, like a void. The ticking of a wall clock bounces from bare wall to bare wall.

Dom meanders his way through the front door, noticing the mattress still sitting on the parlor floor where they last left it. The bed was made, of course. Threadbare blanket tucked and folded neatly. Thin pillow fluffed and center as best he could get it. Even though Dad's teachings were something he'd rather forget than cherish, old habits do die hard.

Isla followed him in. 

Arizona Bay felt like a ghost town.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

“Maybe check upstairs?”

“Right.”

He wanders up the wooden staircase carefully, only to find the large oak door at the landing to be cracked open.

With a gulp, he pushes his way in. He's not sure what to expect. Maybe goon 1 and goon 2 paid a visit after they had left. But there was no broken lock or doorframe, and no sign of the forced entry otherwise. Dom musters up the courage to pass through the threshold and is taken aback by the state of this room. Inside, nothing’s broken or out of place. It's just... tiny. The old books. The scant window. The bathroom that barely qualified as such. 

This was the cramped little jail cell that Aurora called her home.

Which he knew nothing about... until now.

“Is she up there?” Isla calls out.

“No. The door was wide open.”

“Odd.”

As he's taking it all in, he notices something resting in the center of the floor. He almost stepped on that damn thing.

Dom picks it up and checks it over. It’s an old iPod, about the size of a brick and the weight of one, too. This must've been back when the gigabyte was first invented. In the kid’s mind this thing belonged in a museum.

Even the earbuds were corded... gross... and the cord was left wrapped around the antique.

Ick.

After unraveling the wired headphones, he notices an engraving on the back of the iPod itself:



“What the hell?”

“What the hell what?”

Isla checked the doorway and made sure it was safe to come in before entering. The look in her eyes says everything that you need to know about her reaction. The room was so small she at first doubted the two of them could fit in it side by side. 

Dom turned carefully and showed her the Steve Jobs era iPod.

“This.”

“Do you think it's Auroras?”

“Dunno who else it might be. But I found it literally sitting in the middle of the floor.”

“Like maybe she dropped it or something?”

“Maybe.”

Dom walks over to her dusty old desk with school-like marble notebooks sprawled across it. Inside the pages he finds beautiful sketches of all kinds of subjects. Ranging from girly do-dads to tattoo stuff and even a few pages that are magnificent renderings of Lucy Johnson, who looks a lot like a younger version of Lucy Wylde.

The last page has a scribble doodle that looks worse than what a child could do. It has a large black ‘X’ over the entire page. Even the X is wavy and troubled in its own way.

The book ends abruptly after that.

Isla moves in to take a look herself. She places iPod down on the desk, and to their surprise, the screen lights up. If they see is correct, there’s a song already selected, one that's sitting on pause from the beginning: