“Exonia is a dying world,” Klaren explained. Slowly, she began to shed her heavy red armor, unbuckling it piece by piece to reveal her small frame beneath. “I came here long ago, with one other, in hopes of becoming that savior. I wanted the glory for myself, and yet, when I came to Mirabel, I fell in love. This is a world of purest light, so different from the vast Exonian darkness I had always known.” She lifted her hands, which were scarred and yet somehow delicate. “In this world, you have bodies. You have freedom. The Exonians are not so blessed.”

“You don’t have...bodies?” Dex asked, wide-eyed. There were plenty of races in Mirabel, but nothing quite so unique as that.

“No,” Klaren said. “Instead, we have abilities, gifted from the Godstars themselves. A few of us, called the Yielded, were once the strongest of our kind. We were given bodies, ones that took centuries to create, so that we could make the journey to Mirabel and find a way for our people to someday join us here. There’s a small doorway in the Void, a tiny tear that allows us entrance, but our elders feared that if all the Exonian people tried to come through at once, the Mirabellians would see us as an invading force, and respond accordingly.”

“So you came over,” Andi said. She still didn’t fully trust the woman, but if there was any truth to her tale, they needed to know everything Klaren could tell them. “To be that person? To open the Void?”

Klaren nodded. Her little droid scuttled across her shoulder, concealed for a moment by the smoke from the fire. “We were supposed to come over as a group, the Yielded and I. But I have never been one to place my trust in any other.” She swallowed hard. “I killed them all, in one fell swoop. I should not have done it. But there is no changing the past. They live among the Godstars now.”

A dangerous woman, no doubt. And yet she was spilling the truths of her past as if she truly regretted them.

Klaren continued. “I arrived, with only my adviser, in hopes of using my compulsion to sway the system leaders of Mirabel, to persuade them to allow the Exonians peaceful migration into this galaxy.”

“But you’re supposedly working against your children?” Dex scoffed. “You said you need to stop them from finishing what you started, but if that was your life goal, if you started this in the first place... What changed? And how can we be sure you aren’t simply trying to help them now by destroying the Underground—the only people who are standing up against the Solis siblings?”

Klaren’s face folded into a frown. “The tale is a long one, full of pain and regret.”

“We all have pain,” Andi said with a growl. “Why the hell should we care about yours?”