Malan leaned back in his seat. Around them, the bar rode the balance nicely between busy and empty, with dozens of relaxed conversations creating an atmospheric buzz to the place without ever becoming overpowering, or feeling like others were too close to speak candidly. They’d managed to find a booth out of the way of the general flow of traffic, and soon enough even the presence of a Starbound had been mostly forgotten as people tried to enjoy their evening.

He tried to get a read on Elena, but she simply looked back at him almost impassively, taking a small sip of her drink. There was no judgement in her expression—at least, not any that Malan could make out—as she waited for a response to her question.

What had happened on the Jauda?

A little over twenty four hours ago, he’d have said he knew exactly what had happened. Twenty four hours had been all it had taken to shatter his entire perception of the event his entire life pivoted around, and now he barely had any idea what to think about it at all, let alone how to explain it to somebody else.

He’d not exactly had the time to think about it.

Still, whatever his feelings were, this whole shitshow had been orchestrated to target him. The Sparrow sabotaged, Beric dead and their entire mission dead in the water to get at him. He could hardly hold it against Elena for wanting answers. Even if all this wasn’t strictly his fault, it had happened because he was there—because she had given him a chance.

Malan took a bracing gulp of his drink, the bitter alcoholic tang sending a wave of warmth washing through him, and then began with a question.

“I take it you know who my parents were?”

Elena blinked, caught off-guard by the question, before nodding. “Well respected UGC scientist types. Specialisations in studying celestial anomalies. That was as far as my background checks on you went, barring a few calls to servicemen I know who did some security detail on some of their projects. All said they were decent people, for scientists. Competent. Respectful.”

“Their specialisations weren’t always centred on celestial anomalies. They shifted disciplines around the time I was born.”

“I assume,” Elena said, steepling her fingers. “That those two events were related?”

He smiled wanly. “I was born with the ability to see it—celestial energy, that is,” he said, finger tracing the pulsing patterns of white light that ran through everything around them. “I can see it, and interpret it, to an extent.”

“Interpret?” she asked, sharply.

“Yeah. I can see changes in the flows when certain things are about to happen. Hard shifts in weather, celestial events…Rifts forming. There’s a lot to see if you know how to look—sometimes it even feels as though the energy itself is trying to communicate, to tell you things.”

“There are a lot of…implications…to that kind of talk, Malan,” she said, voice low.

“It was the reason for the shift in discipline. It was part desire to help me navigate what I would go through as I grew up, and part compromise with the UGC.”

Her eyes narrowed. “They wanted to take you.”

“I almost can’t really blame them for it. The Starbound do what they do using celestial energy. Galactic travel relies on it. It underpins absolutely everything post-earth humanity has managed to build, and yet we know next to nothing about it. I was earmarked of Starbound testing pretty much since birth. Was groomed for it, even. My parents studied celestial energy for the UGC, whilst also working with me on what I could do and see, and reporting it.”

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“You were allowed to stay with you parents, for as long as they could produce results regarding your abilities or celestial energy itself.”

“Right,” he said with a nod. “It worked for us. I wanted to be Starbound. Wanted to help people. And I was excelling. At the same time, my ability to read celestial energy helped us to track down celestial anomalies at an unheard of rate, and analyse them far quicker. It was an excellent relationship for everyone—”

“Until the Jauda,” Elena finished for him, and he grimaced in response.

“Until the Jauda.”

This was where things got sticky. There were demons lurking in his memories here, and he wasn’t keen to disturb them again so soon after Talia’s words. Obligation held him still, but fear kept his mouth closed. His eyes did a scan of the bar, trying desperately to find something to distract from the conversation at hand, and found one.

Trying not to visibly react, he tried to signal Elena with his own eye movement, looking between her and the lone form of a still-uniformed Julian Standarr at the bar, backs to them and nursing a single drink.

Elena smirked. “He’s been here for a while, Mal. Almost certainly keeping an eye on us, but is too far away to be eavesdropping.” She pulled a small scanner from her pocket. “I also did a sweep for bugs before you got here—habit, more than anything, but I’m glad I did.”

“Should we…?”

She shook her head. “No point. He knows we know. There are ways he could listen in, I suppose, but if we were to find out you're well within your right to start digging openly, which I'm guessing he's trying to avoid. Far more likely he's simply making sure we're not digging where they don't want us to. May as well finish our conversation. You were explaining the Jauda to me.”

He nodded, shifting on his seat uncomfortably. Even if it was unlikely, the thought of Standarr listening in made his skin crawl. “The Jauda is obviously where it all went wrong. You’ll have seen from the news at the time the gist of the story.”

“Research station caught in the formation of a rift. A handful of survivors found by the UGC when they arrived. Terrible tragedy.”

“Right. What they don’t say out loud is that we were there investigating a celestial anomaly. A tear in space that led to somewhere…else.”

Elena frowned. “The Abyss?”

“That was just the thing,” Malan replied, his inner scientist taking over. “It wasn’t that. Nor was is to any place in this galaxy at all. It was a whole new place—perhaps even a whole new reality. None of our instruments could make head nor tail of it, neither could we retrieve any object we sent through. I’d not long finished a study period in a nearby system when my parents called me to come and help with their investigation.”

“Was there something unusual about the celestial energy there?” she asked, and he responded with a scoff.

“I’ll say. The only thing I’ve ever seen like it was Tanwen—my, ah, ship. It flowed…differently. Behaved strangely.”

“How so?”

He frowned. “It reacted to me, for starters. We tested that extensively until there was no doubt. The flows would become agitated. Overactive. I would get feelings from it at different times, some warning, some almost beckoning.”

“That sounds like something to not be fucking with, especially with a 17 year old on the team.”

He could only shrug. “The expectation for results from the UGC was always in the forefront of their minds, I think. If I were a little more reckless, I think things would have been different. Stricter. But it frightened me a little as it was. I would only go close with others there, and even then it was only to make notes and drawings of the flows.”

“I’m guessing that changed, then?”

“You could say that. The night of the attack, it went haywire. The flows of energy were like a storm that only I could see, and worse, it called me stronger than it ever had—like having a air raid siren in my head. I couldn’t think straight. There were only a few of us in the lab at the time. Rhiad, a senior lab tech, and a few of the security guys. The tear was becoming unstable, and I was the only one who could see it.”

He paused, but Elena stayed silent, simply watching from behind dark eyes that gave nothing away. Malan was glad for that. He couldn’t have handled judgement, but somehow pity or sympathy would have been worse.

“I—I tried to fix it. Until Talia said the whole thing had been planned, I thought that was what had caused the whole thing. I tried to reach for the flows—to use the celestial energy in me to calm or even restrain the energy around the tear. It didn’t work, obviously. The energy from the tear recoiled away from whatever I did, and that damned noise only got louder and louder, until the energy was so intense it was affecting the room. Rattling the doors and screens—even the security officer’s sidearm shook in its case.

“We were ready to run when everything stopped. No movement. No sound. Just emptiness. Then, out of nowhere, the tear was bleeding crimson and violet, and they started to crawl their way through.”