It took them a little time to track down Mraawn, but eventually they located him as a salvager based on Gooli. "There's something inherently creepy about this," Ed remarked as they picked their way through the junk yards.

"About what?" Rila asked. "Gooli?"

"It's like lots of high tech shipwrecks all in one place," Ed continued. "There's something not right about a hollowed out ship."

"It's just technology, metal, plastic, circuit boards…" Waarlm corrected as he dug into a nearby pile. "Though what they hope to salvage from this I'm not sure…"

"Anything they can," Rila explained. "Sometimes it's just the materials, occasionally a savvy engineer will coax some life out of something to get a bit more money."

Waarlm made a purring sound as he thought about that, considering the manifold he'd picked up. "Perhaps I have become too accustomed to having spares."

"Seriously, am I the only one who senses the bad vibe to this place?"

Rila ignored Ed, for all his jokes, teasing observations and deliberate demeanour she knew that he had enough knowledge of these places to be useful in both negotiations and firefights. But she did wish he would stay quiet a little more often. Ali had got the jetran used to the wry quips and jokes, but at least their captain also had a good sense of knowing when the silence didn't need filling. Usually.

"Well, well, well, looks like we've got us some strangers," a voice called from a nearby shack. Nearly hidden by the bank of junk it was propping up, but there was a small clearing where a couple of different thoroughfares met next to it.

"What's it to you?" Rila asked, stopping to face the yertan but not approaching closer.

"We don't often get you USEP types out here, then suddenly we get four all in a month? Seems like trouble's coming our way."

Rila didn't need to turn to see Ed looking surprised at being made. They hadn't come down in their uniforms, but even so she wasn't surprised someone could place them so easily within the organisation. Even in civilian gear they stuck out like beacons. "Who was the other?"

"Some young tech whiz, arrived here with nothing but the clothes on her back - and we could see the USEP uniform under her old coat. Bet and salvaged her way to a ship to get back off-world. If you were looking for her you've already missed her."

"We weren't, but sounds like you've nothing to worry about if she's already gone," Rila clicked her tongue again as she stamped down the urge to ask any follow up questions. Best to let them thing they didn't care who that might be. "We'll be gone real quick after we've talked to someone."

"Who?"

"Mraawn, know him?"

"Of him," the yertan said. "He usually digs through a patch two heaps over that way."

"Thanks," Rila said before tossing a piece of junk she'd picked up a while back. "For your time."

"Not a bad find, miss, you looking for a job?"

"No thanks." She didn't even turn around to reply but just led Ed and Waarlm away from him and as many prying ears as she could.

Waarlm had a scanner in his hand the moment they were out of sight, modified so he could slide his hand through a strap to keep it secure in his grip, and was tapping away until he confirmed that there weren't any life-signs near enough to overhear them. "You heard that, right?" Ed asked. "That's the skipper if ever we heard about her."

"Probably, but she's long gone by now," Rila reminded him.

"What if she left us something?" Waarlm asked.

"Like a trail of breadcrumbs?" Ed asked.

Waarlm and Rila shared a look before the jetran clicked her tongue as if to dismiss the idiom. "She wanted to keep us out of it, but it's possible… But what would she leave that would allow us to track her without giving her away to anyone else."

Waarlm purred again before he looked back at the scanner and pressed some more buttons. "He said that she still had her uniform top?" Rila's tentacles bobbed in affirmation as both she and Ed waited for Waarlm to finish chasing his thought. "It's faint, but I think I can detect vestiges of USEP tech."

"Near enough to check out?" Rila asked, and Waarlm confirmed it was. "Okay, go, Ed and I will try and find Mraawn and meet back up with you."

Waarlm slid the scanner off his hand and reattached it to his belt. "I'll try and catch up with you before you're finished. After all you brought me because you thought it'd help when talking to him." With that he dropped into a quadruped stance and leapt off towards where he'd seen the blip on his scanner.

Meanwhile she and Ed carefully made their way between the heaps of junk, cutting over smaller hills and making use of the semi-worn footpaths between some of the larger stacks. For the most part the scrapheaps looked relatively stable, until they passed the occasionally unnaturally balanced piles.

"Look out!" Rila shouted as one of the stacks nearby started creaking as it leant a bit too far over. Both she and Ed dived out of the way of it's almost slow motion fall as gravity slowly overwhelmed the expertise of the person who'd stacked it - interlocking pieces giving it a stability it shouldn't have had.

The ground shook under their feet and the dust clouds swirled as high as their knees before everything started to settle again. "You okay?" Ed yelled from the other side of the rubble.

"Yeah," Rila replied. "You?"

"I need a drink after this, but yeah, fine."

"See if you can find a way around, I'll keep going."

"Rila -"

"I know!" Rila assured him. She'd rather have back up too, but if that wasn't an accident, she didn't really want to stick around and wait for another attempt.

If Ed had any further objections, he didn't vocalise them. Rila could sense his frustration, but she wasn't sure if that was due to the stack of junk that had just toppled towards them, or at her specifically. She could sense him move away to look for another route through the maze of salvage. She turned away from the blockage behind her and continued on the same path she had initially planned on, one hand resting loosely on the energy pistol at her hip.

Eventually she came upon a junction she could sense another presence at, and even though she only read surface emotions without additional effort, she also knew it wasn't Ed. There was always a familiar tinge to someone's emotional aura when it was someone she knew well. She rounded the corner as carefully and calmly as she could to try and avoid spooking the other person, only to dive into a roll to avoid the shot that came her way.

"Mraawn?" She shouted as she found a knee to see the isharate running away from her. "I only want to talk!" She added, but he didn't stop. She swore under her breath and took aim, hoping to at least be able to stun him. His reflexes were better than she'd anticipated and he dodged the shot only for it to bring another section of scrap down in the path. Rila pushed herself back to her feet and sprinted after him, vaulting over the obstacles she'd created.

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Rila had almost caught up with Mraawn - or the man she was assuming was Mraawn - when he skidded to a stop as Ed blocked his path at another intersection. He quickly turned to try and take a different path but Rila was there. He crouched before pouncing towards her, she fluidly ducked under him before slamming the heel of her palm into his soft belly. It disrupted the leap and he stumbled to the floor rather than landing neatly on his paws to run off. Before he had a chance to recover Rila was close enough to have a shot she wouldn't miss, but out of his reach.

As Ed joined them, Mraawn yielded, breathing heavily as he looked between them. "So, you've finally come to silence me, huh?" he asked, trying to sound confident a snarl to his words, but the twitching of his tail gave away his nervousness. In fact, now that she had a moment, Rila felt his aura was as equally disjointed, as if it were a jigsaw someone had put back together.

"Actually, I was hoping you'd be anything but silent," Rila replied calmly.

Mraawn looked at them more closely, and Rila figured he noticed that they didn't have any markings or logos that would proclaim which gang or outlaw group they were with. "Who are you?"

"USEP," Rila replied.

"What do they want with me?"

"They don't want anything, heck I don't think they know about you," Rila admitted. "We have some questions about your… removal from Peshtar."

Mraawn snarled at them again. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Try again," Rila suggested.

"Bite me," Mraawn snarled. "There are some things worse than death."

A roar sounded from behind them, and Rila didn't turn to see Waarlm bounding down a nearby knoll of junk. "Is that why your family believes you dead, Mraawn of Buurll by Rurwll?"

"Names I do not know, written on files I don't recognise," Mraawn replied, though the snarl was gone as Waarlm prowled towards him.

"You reject your family name?"

"A family I do not know!"

Waarlm snarled, but Rila placated him by saying, "he's telling the truth."

"How can that be?" He asked, but Rila was unable to offer an answer. "Who is your family then?"

"I don't know, lost that to whatever those people did to me."

"What people?" Ed asked.

"Huh, you think a group that erased my past would let me remember them?"

"Then what do you remember?" Rila asked.

Mraawn scrutinised the band of three USEP officers who had cornered him. "They're bad news, if you try and take them on, it'll only end badly for you."

Rila clicked her tongue. "Gotta try anyway," she said. "I don't suppose you remember anything we can use to try and find them?"

Mraawn purred for a moment before he said, "yeah. They experiment on minds, I think they're trying to build up their working knowledge of other species, whatever they did to me didn't stick as well as they planned. It took a while, but I started to remember the journey off-world when they were done with me, and other bad fragments."

"Enough to give us a location?" Ed asked.

"Yeah, I can get you near enough," Mraawn said. "But they've got security - very heavy security - and very important and rich backers. Even if you come out alive and in one piece, your reputation will be in tatters."

"My reputation doesn't hold up to scrutiny anyway," Rila replied with a soft and lilting voice.

"That just makes it easy for them," Mraawn corrected.

"Or means my skeletons are already out in the open," Rila figured. "Let us decide what risks we're willing to take."

~-x-~

Ali lurched awake as she felt something on her arm. "Whoa, you're okay, you just fell asleep in the mess," Ben warned as he sank into the seat next to her at the table she'd been asleep on.

Ali winced as she wiped her face and her hand came away sticky. "I have tomato in my hair, don't I?"

Ben laughed. "Only a little."

"Picture perfect, as always," Ali joked wryly, as she tried to clean up the mess she'd made with a napkin, or at least enough to stop her smearing pasta sauce over anything else. "What're you doing up anyway? I assumed Narla wasn't gonna let you guys out of her sight for a week."

"She's released most of us to rest in our own bunks, but we've gotta go back for regular check ups for the next week," he explained. "I take it your research is going well if you're face planting your dinner when surrounded by data-pads."

Ali surveyed the scene in front of her. He might have a point there. "I meant to eat then hit my bunk. Guess my subconscious had a different idea."

"Have you found anything?"

Ali shook her head with a resigned shrug. She and Mishri had spent all day with the data from her scanner and the stolen data module. "Not really," she admitted with a sigh. She beckoned at the data-pads. "We managed to build up some profiles on the mercs to run backgrounds on. Mishri's got an algorithm running trying to cross-reference the logs we've so far managed to decrypt from the data module I stole to various research articles against said logs, though I doubt it'll ping because this krekt is not legal."

"I'd hope not," he muttered, picking up a tablet and curiously glancing at the screen.

"After your debriefs confirmed the use of telepathy in the interrogations and experiments I started a new one to collate a bunch of kentarian arrests and trials on similar things. I wanted to add security resignation matters, but that's all classified. I'm not expecting much of a hit on any of that, Kentar does a lot to keep these abilities under wraps."

"That's really it?"

Ali made an annoyed noise before beckoning to the final tablet. "Other than a reference to tuktutav, yeah, that's it."

"What's tuktukab..?" He trailed off as if he knew he'd mispronounced it so she would help him out.

"Tuk-tut-av," she repeated more slowly. "And, honestly? I've absolutely no idea. It reads as if it's a group or person, but it doesn't follow any kentarian naming conventions I'm familiar with, and I can't find a group of a similar name."

"Does tuktutav have any meaning in kentarian? Or any language?"

"Couldn't find it in the translator databases, and it's not any slang I'm familiar with," she explained. "At this point I'm convinced it's a corrupted data string that I'm putting entirely too much weight onto because I have nothing else."

"Hey," Ben intervened to prevent her starting a new ramble as he put the tablet down again. "When was the last time you actually stopped working?"

"I've slept," Ali replied defensively.

"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Ben said firmly. Ali sighed as she sagged back into her chair. "Ali, talk to me."

Ali wiped at her face. "I guess… everything's just felt so out of control since… well, since that first bomb went off on Earth," she figured as she avoided his gaze. She didn't know why, it wasn't like he wouldn't be able to tell what she was thinking or feeling regardless. It just felt safer that way. "Picking away at the data at least gives me something to focus on," she added. Then shook her head and looked at him again. "It doesn't matter, you and the others are the priority -"

"And Narla's got it well in hand," Ben interrupted again, only this time reaching a hand out to cup her cheek so she couldn't look away. Ali stiffened at first, worried that one wrong reaction would break everything, before closing her eyes and leaning into it.

"I thought you were dead," she finally confessed in a whisper, opening her eyes again to find his. "It wasn't until I went to Narla about my headaches that we were able to figure out it was you."

Ben leant forward so he could rest his forehead against hers. "I'm sorry for using the tetnar that way, I know I shouldn't-"

She didn't let him finish his sentence, interrupting him with a tilt of her head so she could kiss him. He shifted to wrap his free arm loosely around her. "Never apologise for that," she scolded when she pulled away again. "There's a theory that's one of the reasons it evolved in the first place."

"Still, I didn't mean to hurt you," he explained, his thumb wiping away a tear she hadn't even realised had escaped.

"I know," Ali assured him. "We didn't really have time for me to try and explain how to use it," she added with a wry, slightly amused smirk. It disappeared almost as quickly because she bit her lip as she had a thought. "I… If you really want to know, I can let you in to how it all felt…" She swallowed to remove the lump in her throat. His eyes searched hers for a moment, before nodding.

Ali shifted slightly in her chair before relaxing the mental walls she had, finding the now familiar feeling of their tetnar and allowing her emotions to reach him. The fear when the bomb at Yerta had gone off, the relief that some of her friends had survived only to be intertwined with guilt for being happy about that whilst some people had died. The grief that she thought she'd lost him, the desire to forget it all as she was dealing with debriefs that morphed into rage as they targeted her. Then finally the hope when she knew they were still alive.

By the time she had finished sharing the rollercoaster of emotions, he had pulled her into a proper hug. "That's… a lot," he whispered into her hair.

"No less than what's expected, surely?" Ali teased, despite everything. "Besides, what's more important is your recovery - and Claire's and everyone else's - you don't need me burdening you right now."

"It's not a burden," Ben corrected. "I want to be there for you, just as you want to be there for me."

"I wasn't -"

"No, you weren't, I was," Ben reminded her firmly, pulling away to look her in the eye again. "For the most part we were sedated, and the times I wasn't I was mad as all hell. I know I need to process everything that happened, especially given that I don't know all of it yet, but that doesn't mean I can't support you too."

Ali sighed. "I suppose you're right, but it makes me feel selfish."

Ben's lips almost twitched into a smile at that and Ali realised he understood that feeling well. "I know, but you're no good to any of us if you've burnt yourself out."

"Not even if I've taken the bad guys out with me?"

"Not sure it's worth it," he retorted, and Ali giggled. "Besides, you need to teach me how to use this tetnar properly."

"Sure, but it'll involve a lot of trial and error practice."

"I can cope with that," Ben promised. Then he cast a glance over the table she'd commandeered, Ali stayed where she was, oddly content, but watching curiously as he tilted some of them to better read. After a moment of perusing them he started dimming the screens. "Right, you need to sleep."

"Are you offering to take me to bed, commander?" Ali giggled.

"No, when we get to that I want you fully awake," he retorted, pressing a kiss to her forehead. Ali couldn't help but hum her agreement before moving to take over tidying up her mess.