Regrettably, with the vault activated and there no longer being any Outcasts to speak of, it meant that Sara had to move on from Kadara. Well. So long as the Initiative and the powers that be still valued her as a Pathfinder, she supposed.

Had Sara felt like being honest (and she didn't really,) she would have admitted to excitement over the change of pace. Reyes had become inundated with new responsibilities that pulled him away for hours on end, and that in turn left her with far too much time to work her nose out of joint. He'd even respected her knee jerk declaration that they cool it until she figured out where her head was at, so without the haze of constant sex to lubricate the days, Sara was faced with a put-upon camaraderie that dotted her long stretches of solitary, introspective hell.

She radioed Avitus and never looked back.

They were supposed to meet at Kralla's and Sara even managed to be punctual. She hustled through the door while still toying with what could be considered an appropriate greeting, only to be relieved that the bar's deafening music drowned out her obscenities.

Avitus was not there. Yet inexplicably in his place, sat one Lieutenant Cora Harper.

Although not startled, Cora did appear vaguely as uncomfortable as Sara felt. Her former second was predictably rigid as she pretended to lounge on her chair. In lieu of pacing, Cora's foot would intermittently tap restlessly, until she noticed and forced it back into casualness. Sara continued her stride toward the table, because she presumably would have a planet's worth of Collective on her side should events flip belly up.

"Avitus Rix. What big eyes you have!" Sara drawled.

That stirred Cora from any nervousness she may have felt. "Ryder. Can we talk without making a scene? Please?"

"What big ears you have!" Sara continued, flipping her chair around and straddling it.

"So, no, then-"

"And your teeth-!"

"All right, I get it!" Cora bellowed. "I'm going to eat you!"

Her outburst interrupted the typical din of the bar and Sara snorted as she glanced around at the other patrons. "Well. Not without buying me a drink first, I hope."

"This was a mistake." Cora was already pushing her chair out and standing up. "I shouldn't have come."

"Uh huh." Perhaps the wrong response was to grin, but Sara couldn't help herself. "Then why did you? You took my ship. You took my crew. You got everything you wanted. What else could you possibly need?"

"You, you stupid, childish little shit! I need you!" Cora pounded the table hard enough with her fists that it rattled Sara's teeth from where her chin rested on the back of her chair. Cora glared at the bar patrons, daring them to intervene, before she lowered her voice. "It's true. Now, are you ready to put on your big girl pants and talk like a grown up?"

"I'd settle for clean pants, big girl or not," Sara muttered with a shrug.

That earned her a long suffering groan.

"I radioed Avitus," Sara reminded her. "How'd you end up here instead?"

Cora shook her head. "You know Avitus is busy," she said. "He's not just overseeing the active pods on Natanus. He's waking entire family groups at a time to relocate to Eos and Elaaden. He's going through a lot of records very quickly to decide who wakes up and he doesn't have the time to deal with any outside drama."

"And a Pathfinder mutiny is outside drama," Sara replied.

"You really don't need to say it like that..."

"I think I do."

Cora's mouth thinned for the briefest moment before she dropped back into her chair with a sigh. "Listen, I don't know how or why, but the fact of the matter is that since you left, things have completely fallen to pieces."

Sara craned her neck at the other woman. "Uh huh."

"Sara, please."

They stared at each other for a long moment in silence. It occurred then to Sara that perhaps that was all Cora came to Kadara to say. Like perhaps that would be enough to sway Sara. Perhaps that simplicity was the root of Cora Harper's problems.

"I've been a little busy down here," Sara said finally. "Activated a vault, upped the planet's viability. Helped stabilize whatever passes as government here, so our outpost won't get eaten alive."

Cora's nose turned up, dismayed. "I heard about were responsible for uprooting Sloane Kelly?"

"I helped." Sara shrugged. "What exactly has completely fallen to pieces since I've been gone?"

If she had more questions, Cora shook them off. "Everything," she said. "You were right about Liam."

"SAM, file that away as an eidetic core memory-"

"Will you stop it?"

"Please." Sara waved a hand. "Do continue."

"His heart's in the right place," Cora said. "But his head is just..."

"Up his ass," Sara concluded.

"Yeah." The lieutenant grimaced. "His brilliant idea to rescue his unapproved contact was to pose as cargo inside 'abandoned' crates in space and wait for scavengers."

Sara whistled. "I don't even need to have SAM run down why that's such a stupid plan, it's so glaringly obvious. You're not dead though, so congratulations."

"Because I nixed it," Cora said. "We would have been lucky if only our suits ran out of oxygen out there. It was a reckless risk of lives and resources."

"So, let me get this straight." Sara tried and failed at a neutral expression. "After you mutiny and try to lock me up for shutting Liam down, you decide to inevitably shut Liam down?"

"I said you were right!" Cora's arms crossed tightly across her chest. "I still think he had a point about needing to take some risks, but maybe any of the risks taken should have been..."

"Calculated and not decided arbitrarily by a failed cop?" Sara suggested.

"You are not making this any easier!"

"Yup."

Cora took an extended period of time to just scowl as she gathered her thoughts. "I was frustrated," she said finally. "I had trained for years and when it finally came time, the position I had earned was doled out on account of nepotism. That this person was completely out of her depth and content to leave me with all the organization and work while she went off galavanting was just salt rubbed into the wound. Why shouldn't I formally take charge when I already practically was? Why shouldn't I oversee to make sure huge decisions about outposts and drive cores weren't made on a whim?"

"I wasn't deciding things on a whim," Sara's protest sounded paltry and whiny in the face of what was obviously weeks of built up resentment.

Cora just shot her a look. "When I was thirteen, I could bend a steel girder with my mind. Impressive, until you consider I grew up on a freighter and that's a dangerous ability to have out in space untrained. My parents contacted the Alliance recruiters real quick. Parents sent me away to the Alliance, the Alliance sent me away to the asari- and you saw exactly what the asari thought of me. The only place I fit was with your father, so I took what I thought was mine, but I was wrong about that, too."

Sara frowned. "Is this an apology?"

"When Liam couldn't get what he wanted from you, he moved on to me," Cora explained. "And when that didn't work, he tried to usurp by claiming we should take a more democratic approach. On a ship! No one went for it and by that point, everyone was a bit soured over power struggles and upheavals in the chain of command." She sighed and shrugged, leaving her shoulders slumped. "Jaal said it was obvious we didn't care about the angara or kett and were too mired in our own business. He left to go spend time with his family on Havarl. I think the only reason Drack and Vetra are still onboard is because they have family on the Nexus. I'd ask, but they're not talking to me."

It was a weird sort of vindication. On one hand, Sara wanted to whoop for joy, do a little dance and thumb her nose. On the other hand, that kind of behavior was what gave birth to this predicament in the first place. If she was to return to the Tempest with a downtrodden Cora and a crew- that if not entirely approving of Sara's removal, had at the very least allowed for it- perhaps she would be wise to hold back on any I told you so's. "Wow," was all she managed to murmur as she looked to Cora on how to proceed.

"It's... upsetting to be in a position where you think you know what's best only for no one to listen," Cora said. As her head drooped, her bangs fell over her face. "I'm hoping that if you'll return, you'll be able to convince Jaal that the angara were right to ally themselves with us. Even if that means I'm... no longer welcome."

That stopped Sara. "You're willing to step down and have all of your privileges revoked?"

"This is bigger than us. There's still an ark of twenty thousand people missing in space somewhere." Cora snorted to herself. "Besides, plenty of people seem to be doing just fine as exiles, right?"

"Well, that's just stupid." Sara took a moment to smile inwardly as Cora flinched. "Why would I want to take on the responsibilities of running a ship on top of what I'm already doing, when you've been doing it for so long without incident? If I'm tracking Ark Paarchero and looking for Meridian, I can't be bothered with fuel logs and how many rations of protein bars we have left."

"Excuse me?" Cora spluttered.

"Understand I do what I do and I do it well," Sara said, gripping her hands together to stop them from shaking and betraying her confidence. "But in order for me to do so, I need someone overseeing the little things that make a ship run smoothly. You were right. None of that makes sense to me, so I neglected it."

Cora's eyes narrowed as she looked up. "You don't want to exile me?"

"With how many people we've already lost?" Sara replied. "What a waste of resources."

Her former second still seemed hesitant. "So Liam..?"

"Oh no. He's gone the second we touch ground on Eos."

Cora visibly relaxed, then, her shoulders slacking and her smile growing sheepish. "That makes sense, I suppose."

"Thank you." Sara released her hands before they squeezed the life out of each other. She waved to the bartender for drinks and Umi ignored her. "I know we're never going to be best friends, but I hope we can figure out how to work together. With fewer mutinies, if nothing else."

"You know, maybe the old man was right about you," Cora murmured.

"You think?" Sara felt the corners of her mouth twitch.

Cora nodded. "I never liked your father, either," she said. "But I admired and respected him. Enough to follow him to a completely new galaxy."

"Yeah?" That was probably the fairest assessment of Alec Ryder that Sara had ever heard.

"Yeah," Cora told her. "I should be able to trust you enough to make it to Meridian, regardless of how annoying you can be."

"I can live with that," Sara said.