Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dossier: SA2066-03-EUUK-001796

Name: Greggory Clarke

Species: Human

Gender: Male

DOB: May 15, 2148 (38)

Birthplace: London, Great Britain, Earth

Rank: 2nd Lieutenant. Discharged 2179. Honorable with disability.

Information: Enlisted with Systems Alliance in 2166. Academy graduate 2170 and commissioned. Deployed for service in Skyllian Verge. Wounded 2178 in assault on Torfan. Medical records indicate development of panic disorder following medical recovery. Discharge requested and granted on basis of disability. Current affiliation with London Resistance Force.

He cringed as he watched the wall of another flat crumble and fall, spilling bricks and furniture into the street.

Clarke could hear the techno-buzz vibrating through the floor, that low-frequency rumble that hummed around the reaperspawn. He exhaled slowly, ignoring the knot building in his throat as he lifted his fingers, stretching them one by one as he reset them on the handle of his rifle. His index finger settled back on the stiff trigger as he peered down the short scope of the Vindicator.

“Targets are in the clear. I have a window, on your order.” The short, punchy words crackled in the comm in his ear. He closed his right eye and opened his left, glancing up to the roof across the plaza. He couldn’t see the Salarian in his perch, but he knew the muzzle of the long-gun was just barely hanging over the parapet. He shut his left eye again and reopened the right.

Clarke shifted his gun, lining up the crosshair in the center of the bulbous head, the glowing, blue-white eyes and maw of the cannibal shuffling down the avenue. He closed his mouth, holding the clump of stress in place somewhere between swallowing and vomit as he looked over the once-Batarian features.

Once, he had eyed down a similar target with his rifle and had justified to himself that it was monstrous enough to pull the trigger.

“Prepare to fire on my count,” Clarke whispered into his comm. “Three. Two. Mark.”

The Vindicator gently kicked in his hand, that familiar bounce as it spit three rounds down into the street. He watched the sparks and blood fly as the cannibal crumpled to the pavement. A second, booming shot echoed through the deserted streets as the sniper’s shot pierced through another.

The street erupted with gunfire, rounds criss-crossing from all four directions, the hopeless reapers caught in the crossfire. The gun swung in his hands, the high-pitched sound of three rounds passing the barrel all crammed into one deadly chitter. Blue biotic explosions burnt like dark flames, the illumination of colorful sparks and static following each open as the squad shredded their enemies.

When the last of the spawn fell, Clarke slowly lowered his rifle and placed it on the floor of the blasted-out living room, sitting back and exhaling. He wasn’t sure if he had been holding his breath for the length of the firefight, but his fingers trembled as he rolled them in and out of fists to try to force them to stop shaking.

“Clarke, are you OK?” Dess’s soft voice broke through on the private channel, a note of concern tucked in between the sounds of her heavy breathing. “I don’t see you.”

He swallowed, forcing the lump down. As it felt like the dry wad scraped its way down, he coughed, the sour and bitter taste of bile spilling across his tongue. He spat and touched the button to respond.

“I’m fine,” he lied. “Thank you. I’ll be down at the rendezvous in a second.”

He scooped up his rifle, carefully stepping over the remains of furniture, shattered picture frames of a young family and the dirt and wet that had blown in through the broken windows and headed for the stairwell back down to street level.

To the streets of London, his home.

“It’s a good thing us Krogan can go weeks without eating a good meal,” Grog said, tossing the empty tuna tin into the growing pile of garbage in the center of the corner bedroom. “Because this stuff isn’t getting the job done.”

He pounded his fist against his abdomen -- how many stomachs did Krogan have, anyway? -- and groaned again. Scavenging for rations had become a chore, even with the city nearly abandoned. There were empty homes and shops everywhere, but between the destruction, roving patrols of reaperspawn and weeks-long power outages, finding something to eat at all had increasingly become a challenge.

“I don’t know, little brother,” the Salarian said as he sipped the salty water out of the edge of his can. Clarke had told Bug time and time again he was supposed to dump it before eating. Bug preferred not to waste it. “Reminds me of my younger days, hunting minnows by hand in some of the shallow pools on Sur’Kesh. Much saltier, but still, just like home.”

The Salarian’s eyes closed, a small smile creeping across his lips as he tipped the tin back again slightly as if he were sipping a midday tea in a cafe as if the world weren’t burning all around them.

“I guess it’s not too bad if you’re used to sucking up swamp water and eating grubs and worms and flies, big bro,” Grog grumbled. “Let’s talk when you’re four times as big. I’m a man! I need a real meal!”

“Maybe if you laid off the ‘real meals,’ you wouldn’t be four times as big,” Tarkus quipped as his hands slowly moved off his stomach as if it were inflating like a balloon. “And at least you can pick up something and eat it without having to figure out if it’s going to burn a hole in your gut.”

Tarkus picked up a can of the tuna and scanned it with his omni-tool for effect, not quieting the audible buzz that indicated it wasn’t safe for Turian consumption. He followed that up with the can of baked beans, which buzzed too. He lifted the half-empty bag of hot dog buns and scanned those, which didn’t set off any immediate alarms.

“Joy,” he said unenthusiastically as he crammed a smashed clump of bread into his mouth.

Tarkus only had a few cans of his own rations left, but he was trying to conserve them as long as possible. They hadn’t crossed paths with any Turian platoons recently, not this far north in the city, anyway. Most of the forward force that had arrived on the planet were sitting alongside the Alliance brass south of the Thames.

“You both whine too much.” The quiet observation was followed by the crinkling of plastic as a hand dove back into a box of crackers, slowly pulling out a handful and slipping them silently into his mouth.

Vorn sat on an overturned waste bin, back turned to the rest of the group, a few feet from the corner where he could look out the windows on both the north and east walls of the bedroom. His body was turned slightly to the left, slightly favoring the north side as the Batarian divided his four eyes on watch. His pistol sat resting in his lap as he otherwise quietly munched.

“What I would do for a big, burnt varren haunch,” Grog fantasized, holding both his hands to the side of his face as if he were tearing into it. “Crispy and charred on the outside. Still red and bloody on the inside. Chew that thing down to the bone. Chug about a gallon of burner. Then find some pretty little thing and get this quad off!”

“That’s disturbing,” Tarkus said as he scanned a once-frozen microwave burrito that caused his scanner to buzz and blink red before tossing the foil-wrapped thing back onto the floor. Clarke wasn’t sure that convenience store burrito wouldn’t burn a hole in his gut if he ate it.

“How about it Dess? I swear I’ll be gentle,” Grog offered, eyeing up the blue-skinned woman.

She smiled politely as she took a sip from a can of lime-flavored seltzer water she had found in the dented fridge in the kitchen. It was warm, but unopened. She said she liked tart things. “No thank you, Grog.”

“Come on,” Grog pleaded. “I think you’re the only woman left on the planet.”

She was the only woman they had seen for a week or two, at least, Clarke thought. They certainly hadn’t seen many Asari at all. There were a few teams of commandos who had come in to scout out the city before the rest of the Citadel allies arrived. Word was Shepard would be coming before the end of the month. If that was the case, the Reapers didn’t seem too concerned about it.

“I’m sure some of the reapers we’ve been killing were female at some point,” Clarke chimed in. “But you’ve got to work on your courtship, Grog. A little subtlety, a little tenderness.”

He glanced over at Dessia and gave her a little wink. She grinned, covering it up as she brought the prepackaged peanut butter and jelly sandwich to her mouth and took a bite. He looked back over to Grog. “See?”

Grog shook his head. “It must be the hair. It’s the hair, isn’t it?”

Clarke ran a hand across the soft curls of his blonde and brown beard and glanced sideways at Dess again making a kissy face. She feigned fanning herself as she chuckled while chewing.

“Yes, Grog. It’s the hair,” she said between bites.

“I knew it!” the Krogan said slapping his knee.

“Batarians have fine, thin facial hair too,” Bug offered.

Vorn didn’t indicate that he heard, although he almost certainly did. He was always listening and watching. His hand dipped down into his box of crackers and returned at the same pace toward his mouth.

“I know,” Dess teased. “But I think Vorn is a little out of my league. He’s too much of a bad boy for me to handle, right Vorn?”

The Batarian raised his left fist up to his side to signal his agreement.

“Where to next?” Bug asked, pinching a bit of the shredded tuna between his thin fingers and pushing it into his cheek like chewing tobacco.

Didn’t really matter, Clarke supposed. The entire city was a mess. The entire planet was a mess. They couldn’t move too far in any direction without running afoul of reapers prowling the streets. The assimilated monsters shambled down about every lane of the city at one time or another. Thankfully none of the big ones, the giant, miles-tall, squid-looking ones had landed recently.

The last time that happened, one of those beams had sheared three blocks of buildings into rubble in just a few seconds. The Resistance had flanked the reapers, penned them into a open-air park and been cutting them down mercilessly. Then that thing had landed and burnt the whole place down. If Clarke hadn’t kicked down the door to an underground pub and dove in, the whole building might have come down on top of him as the roof and walls fell into the street.

That was more or less the end of the organized London Resistance Force. In one heavy-handed blow, a single black demon descending from the sky had shattered what little shreds of hope they were all hanging onto to restore some semblance of freedom and safety in London.

The resistance fighters scattered. If they stayed separated, they couldn’t all be decimated at the same time.

They could just be decimated more slowly, with less fanfare.

The local comms were nearly silent now, both because everyone was afraid to stay plugged into the system too long and because there just weren’t many people left to use it. And there never seemed to be a shortage of new reapers on the streets.

“Well since Grog is being a big baby about food,” Clarke said as he punched up his map off his wrist tool. Grog narrowed his eyes at that.

“There’s a meat packing warehouse in this industrial area near the reservoir. Probably spoiled, but we might find some deep frozen or cured meat so he can gorge himself.” Clarke turned to his Turian companion. “Sorry, Tark, that stuff will probably kill you.”

“No, don’t worry. It’s fine. I’m really enjoying this flavorful, ‘hot dog bun,’” he said sarcastically as he read the label off the plastic bag.

“A lot of those warehouses do have some old-style solar panels on them, though,” Clarke said as he shut down his map. He and everyone else was paranoid that the reapers were so deep in the system that every search, every message every location ping was being monitored. “We might be able to scavenge something useful and you can rig us up some power.”

Tarkus took the last of the hot dog buns out of the bag and tossed the plastic into the garbage pile. “I did always spend more time in the shop than in the kitchen back on Palaven,” he said and crammed the last of the buns into his mouth.

“If we can get a reliable power source, I can see if some friends can make a supply drop,” Bug said. He was never really specific about who his “friends” were, but he always talked about them as if they were just hanging out waiting for a phone call.

“And we’re probably less likely to run afoul of more reapers if we’re close some water,” Dess said. “Although it didn’t sound like the water did much to help Thessia.” Her eyes dropped with a sudden sadness at her own mention as she took another nibble of her sandwich.

“Does that sound good to you, Vorn?” Clarke asked. The Batarian didn’t answer. Clarke clapped. “OK, Vorn is on board too.”

Clarke reached into his pocket and pulled out the bag of M&Ms candies, giving the brown pouch a shake and glancing around the room. He ripped a corner off and poured a few into his hand, popping one into his mouth. He offered it forward and Dess stuck out her palm as he dropped a few in.

Bug shook it off. Grog nodded and Clarke tossed one into his giant, open mouth. Tarkus pulled out his scanner, but Clarke pressed two candies into his hand without letting him. Vorn didn’t turn around.

“You know, they made these specifically for soldiers way back when,” Clarke said, as he tossed another piece into the side of his mouth. “Regular folks couldn’t get their hands on them. A treat just for fighters spilling their blood all over the world, back when us humans only killed each other. Back in the day London was getting the shit bomb out of it daily.”

That was ancient history nowadays. His ancestors had lived somewhere in Britain during the war. No one could remember whether or not some generations-old Clarke fought back then. It wasn’t a military family. He had been the first, a kid sitting and looking up at the sky and thinking about human spacecraft zipping from relay to relay out there, visiting worlds that had only just been discovered.

He was born that year, the year that humanity first discovered mass effect technology. They were just babes floating around the infinite. Like babes, they hadn’t been ready for any of it.

He hadn’t been ready for any of it.

He followed the movement of the solitary husk down the sidewalk, letting it pass by as he took his finger off the trigger.

One husk wasn’t worth giving away their position, especially with Grog sleeping. It took a half hour to wake him up to the point where was worth something. The Krogan was a grump if he didn’t get his beauty rest.

Clarke should have been sleeping too, but he found it harder and harder to rest. The pops of ordnance in the distance, the hum of what few aircraft were still flying and the isolated sounds of breaking glass and crumbling buildings all kept him up. Bug never seemed to sleep and he was on the roof with his rifle watching over them all night.

Yet sitting just inside the broken window and peering out into the dark and empty buildings was somehow more relaxing than trying to curl up on a dusty, musty mattress. Seeing the distant flash of fighting, watching the occasional husk or cannibal shamble by with the bright blue lights shining from within, those were now the horrid normal of nightlife in London.

It had been a conflicting feeling to look at at the city in dark, even before the Reapers. London was old. The wealthiest parts of the city were marvelous to behold, alive with centuries of history and updated with the most modern, advanced flair. But the older parts of the city had been crumbling long before the Reapers. He had seen a lot of that side of the city, from his pitifully dank one-room apartment to walking the streets daily because he had little else to do. He once tried to pick up jobs when he could, but it became apparent that the only thing he was useful for after discharge was sitting around collecting paltry disability checks.

He had parlayed his college degree from the academy into some office work at an insurance group. He had gone on a few sales pitches, but the boss said he came off as distant and nervous in front of customers. They moved him into a cubicle processing claims paperwork where he could work by himself most days, but he couldn’t keep up with their quotas as the stress of deadlines grated on him. He resigned the position to save them the trouble of firing him.

He had been working in a warehouse in the industrial sector for a few weeks, until one of his coworkers popped off about his shaky hands. He had snapped and shown that guy how steady his hands could be as he put his fist through a couple of that guy’s teeth. The local magistrate was a vet, too, and cut him some slack by letting him off on a pretrial diversion as long as he stayed out of trouble.

He picked up some on-and-off work as a substitute teacher at a local secondary school. That was fine until he got caught in the middle of a crowd during passing period and began seizing up, barely making it to the stall in the men’s room to try to breathe before he suffocated in the wave of young, screaming kids.

It was the same story that replayed over and over and over. How many different jobs did he had in the seven years since he had been back? It had been sixteen, no, seventeen months since he last tried to work. Before the Reapers. Before everything went to shit here. Before he decided what was the point in fleeing? Before he decided that he might as well do the only thing he remembered how to do, point a rifle and pull the trigger.

“You’re awake?”

Clarke turned his head to see Dess standing in the doorway, her hands pressed against both sides of the doorframe as if she were holding herself from falling in. She was out of her combat suit, instead wearing a long men’s T-shirt that draped past her hips. Somewhere, obscured underneath there, he guessed she was wearing those neon pink mesh hot pants she had scavenged out of a teenage girl’s bedroom five days back.

Her liquid blue skin seemed to fit just right in the dim blue light of night, contrasted with the narrow, lighter purple streaks that ran down the length of her crests like camouflage.

“Yeah,” he said, pointing off to the east. “There’s a battle going on out there tonight. They’ve been at it for about an hour.”

All he could see was the flashes of light in the distance and hear the quiet echo of guns firing. He couldn’t tell how far off, but someone out there was engaged with reapers. If it was an ambush, it had gone poorly, because they were still exchanging fire. Reapers didn’t retreat, so whoever it was had chosen to stand their ground.

Dess tiptoed across the floor, the balls of her bare feet stepping carefully around broken glass, her legs crossing carefully one in front of the other. She looked almost as if she floated, as if walking across a wire or carefully balancing on the surface of water. “You’ll be tired,” she said as she reached the bench before the window, slipping up onto the other side across from him and pulling her knees up close to her chest.

“I know,” he said as he peeked back down the street, watching the shambling husk turn the corner down a side street and out of view. He lowered the rifle, laying it gently on the hardwood floor and getting it out of his hands.

Dess wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked forward a little bit, smiling. “It’s nice of you to go looking for food for Grog,” she said.

“We’ll need him at his best, if Shepard is coming home,” Clarke said.

“You know that’s not why we’re going,” Dess said.

“Yeah,” he agreed as he rubbed his fingers across his chin and through his beard. An Alliance gunship buzzed overhead, heading in the direction of the fighting to the east. Whoever it was, they had some powerful friends in downtown.

“It really is the hair, isn’t it?” he said with a teasing look.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Dess said. “It gives you a very human look. The stereotypical man in an Asari romance novel. Young. Masculine. Brash and passionate. The kind who sweeps a young maiden right into his arms and carries her away to bed.”

Clarke snorted at the idea. “You older women… preying on us naive youngsters.”

“I’m only 130,” she said, crooking her head to side.

“By 130, our women are as wrinkly and saggy as Grog’s quad scrote,” he reminded her.

She made a sour face at that, as if she had stuck half a lemon into her mouth. It made him wish he had one of those lemon ice cups he always used to get when he’d catch American baseball games. Smooth and tart and chilly.

“That’s gross,” Dess noted.

He chuckled at the notion. They were going searching for meat for Grog because he wanted meat. And he deserved a good ham or turkey or whatever he could get his hands on. Since connecting with them a month ago, the Krogan had gotten them out of more jams than Clarke cared to admit.

Grog and Bug were like brothers. Vorn wasn’t much for chatting, but the way he flew around the battlefield and worked a rifle was like watching the orchestra flawlessly playing classical music. Tarkus had been here since Turian reinforcements started arriving and was part of the LRF company that got disintegrated when the beams started flying.

But Dess, Dess had been here to see London before. She had seen the real London, his London, not this shattered heart of a city.

She had been part of the staff at the embassy. He remembered first spotting her trying to figure out the underground map, tracing her finger across all the colored lines and looking confused. He had offered to help point her in the right direction. He pretended he was going to the same place, although he had just been planning to sit on a bench and people watch for half the day just to get out of the unseasonably summer heat.

They chatted. He convinced her to join him for a drink. She accepted. They chatted more. She asked what he did. He said he was a soldier. She asked what that was like. He explained he was a soldier. She apologized. He brushed it off. She seemed to enjoy herself. He thought she was adorably wide-eyed as a newcomer to Earth. She asked if he would like to meet her again, perhaps for lunch? He accepted.

They saw a lot of each other like that. Then the invasion happened on an afternoon while they were out sipping coffee. And Dess said she needed to get back to the embassy. He convinced her that was a mistake. She trusted him. The embassy, they later found out, was reduced to little more than glowing chunks of burning stone.

And she had seem him when he was broken, even before London crumbled.

“I hope the rumors about Shepard coming back are true,” Clarke said. “Get this thing done one way or another. Take the pressure off.”

Dess smiled and tilted her head to the other side. “You know they, me, we, all are fine following you around for however long it takes. Our fearless leader.”

He snorted at that notion, too. “Leading isn’t my thing any more. You know that.”

She leaned forward and waved her hand to try to lightly smack him, missing by several inches. “You know you’re great. This is your home. You can’t be anything but great, Gregg.”

The landing craft had bounced hard as it touched down on the surface of Torfan. They were greeted by gunfire as the doors slid open and they quickly piled out. One of the privates got caught in the neck and never even made it out of the ship.

The HUD in his visor glowed a dull green as it compensated for the dark, red boxes blinking as they marked the targets, Batarians popping up from behind cover or retreating into the caves. His eyes caught the shifting bars on the edges of his helmet, watching the shields and vital signs of the men of his platoon fluctuate up and down.

Sgt. Okebe, the hulking, booming leader of Raven Squad fell before they even made it inside the caves. The guns on both sides never stopped firing as the Alliance teams forced their way underground, dropping the Batarian resistance at every turn. By the time they secured their first objective, a third of the platoon had fallen.

The orders were clear. Move forward, no matter what. Medical support would bring up the rear, but if a man fell, you were to move on without him. They moved down the narrowly cut corridors of the cave system, Clarke looking down as he stepped over bodies, both Batarian and human as he pressed forward.

When the wounded Batarians threw down their weapons and surrendered, they answered by putting rounds in their heads.

By the time they made it to the last objective, by the time all of the Alliance teams converged on the final chamber, the Batarians realized there would be no quarter. Backed into a corner, nowhere to go and nowhere to run, the gunfire only stopped when the last Batarian fell slumped to the floor and there was no one left to return fire. When it finally stopped after several solid minutes of deafening noise, his ears were ringing badly enough that he could hardly hear the check-ins coming across his radio.

Only then did Clarke have time to stop, breathe, and take the time to squeeze half a tube of medi-gel into the burning wound gushing from just above his right knee. He took off his helmet and set it on the ground, so that he didn’t have to look at the horrifyingly dim HUD for a moment longer.

Of his forty-two man platoon, there were only seven left.

Clarke glanced out of the window as blue lights caught his eye again. Three cannibals were lumbering down the road and he reached down toward his rifle on the floor. His fingers curled and stopped before reaching the handle.

He closed his eyes, gripping his fingers tightly on his right hand, the tension in his knuckles burning. He lifted his left hand off his hip, squeezing his fingers in and out as he could feel the rising thump of his heart in his chest. His teeth ground together, his throat tightening as he forced himself to pull the air in through his nose.

“Clarke?”

Dess’s voice seemed quiet and distant behind the sound of the air she struggled to pull into his lungs. He could feel the arteries in his neck pumping, feel the blood coursing through every vein his body. He knew he was sitting, but he felt as if he were swaying or the bench underneath him was moving like liquid. He tugged at the collar of his shirt, the sudden rush of sweat percolating up through his skin.

“Clarke? Is it happening?”

His left hand fingers jerked rapidly in and out of a fist, the fabric of his shirt caught in between them as it crinkled in his hand and tugged tightly at his shoulders. His mouth was filling with spit. His throat was closed. His heart was racing, his pulse shooting well over a hundred beats as he began to tremble.

The cannibals on the street were no danger. Everything else was quiet. The flashes of light in the distance were far, far, away. Bug was on the roof. Everyone was here. They were all safe. There was nothing wrong.

Still, he couldn’t swallow the growing swell of panic inside of him.

Clarke opened his eyes. Dess was now sitting up, just a few inches away from him. Her mouth hung just slightly open, her face laced with a look of pity, like watching an animal with a broken leg trying to drag its way back into the woods. He hated that he made her look like at him like that.

He forced his neck to move, quickly, jerkily nodding his head up and down.

Dess leaned forward, holding her face before his, looking deeply into his eyes as she had done dozens of times before. He tried not to blink, even as he began to shake, even as his heart thumped and he could hear the blood rushing through his temples, even as he struggled to get any air through his nose.

“I’m here for you, Gregg,” Dess said as she closed her eyes. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Just focus on my words and try to relax. Open your thoughts to me.”

Her fingertips came up, running through the hair of his beard until they brushed lightly against his cheek. He knew what was coming next. His lifeline, her grace, the only thing that could bring him down and calm his nerves. The anxiety and fear overran him, his fingers burned as he tried to force himself to unclench his fist. His throat swelled shut and he shook as the last bits of air were cut off from his lungs.

She would steal all the blackness right out of his own mind, give him her sanity and take his madness inside of her. She could do it because she was strong and he was weak. And she did it because she was nothing but goodness and he was nothing but rot.

She would make herself lesser so that he would not be consumed into nothing.

“It’ll be over soon,” she said as she wrapped her fingers around the back of his ear. Dess took a breath and when she opened her eyes, the silver irises had been swallowed by the unending depth of her dark, dilated pupils.

“Embrace eternity.”

Chapter Text

A brief news excerpt from Palaven, dated 2184
For the eighth year in a row, the lightweight bot competition was won by Palaven-native Tarkus Raetia. Raetia’s bot, “Little Cutter IX,” cleared the tournament field with little resistance, despite its limited array of weaponry including a short-range cutting laser, electrical burst rod and twin, spinning saws.

This year’s competition was as good as ever, said Raetia, a senior researcher with the Turian Engineering Corps. He was prepared for many of his opponents, whom he had scouted extensively in qualifying matches. Little Cutter IX was a new bot that he had not entered in previous competitions and the tiny, maneuverable machine was designed to specifically counter his anticipated opponents.

“My hope was to win these battles before ever lowering my machine into the arena, and all that scouting really paid off,” Raetia said. “Win or lose, I just love seeing everyone who comes out for Robo Royale each year. It’s an honor to take home the trophy again.”

There was a lot of metal around him here, and metal felt like home.

Nevermind that the metal here in this battle-blasted industrial zone of London was twisted and scorched and bent and useless. Metal was metal, and metal was the heart, organs and skin of Palaven. True, the Reapers sheared through all the metal as if it were paper, but they sheared through it a lot slower than they had through Earth or any of the other planets that had fallen before the Turian homeworld. Even now, he heard from time to time that his people were still fighting them back home.

Turian pride would see to it that if they were going to go extinct, they’d all do it with guns pasted in their hands. You only see a Turian’s back when he’s dead.

Tarkus ducked under the half ajar overhead garage door, flipping on the small flashlight mounted at his right shoulder. Half of the roof had caved in on top of this warehouse. Just as well, because it looked like some sort of plumbing warehouse, filled with useless pipes, fittings and fasteners. They didn’t need running water. Well, they did need running water, but they needed it much less than they needed many other things.

He looked up toward the ceiling, tracing the conduit that snaked across the uncollapsed parts and following it down the walls. He stepped carefully over a crate that had spilled white plastic fittings all over the concrete shop floor and looked at the electrical box on the wall.

“AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”

The yellow warning sign was slightly askew, the top bolt having fallen out, allowing the metal plaque to rotate to the side.

“That’s cute,” Tarkus said to himself as he lifted the latch and swung open the box, looking at the breakers and the sloppy wiring that was inside. He grimaced to see the shoddy workmanship. All human engineering was pretty amateur, but this looked like something his son had put together when he was a still a little squirt.

The kid never did have a knack for building stuff, but put a rifle in his hand and he could rip things apart with the best of them. He hadn’t heard from his boy in forever. Communications were spotty at best and the 79th Flotilla was never in one place too long anyway. That, and Chellus rarely bothered to take the time to send a message home to his mother and father to let them know he wasn’t dead even during more peaceable times.

He tried to nudge Chellus toward a more stable officer’s track with a safer assignment. Or maybe moving into local training command where he could live off-base and maybe think about settling down. Tarkus had taken the initiative to poke around a find a few leads to send to his son, but the boy’s short message of response over the net was more snippy than appreciative.

Maybe they Reapers had caught up with the 79th, finally. He doubted it, though. The big, albeit technologically brilliant Reapers, were too clunky and slow to keep up with quick-striking fleet.

The wires in the panel still appeared to be in good shape, despite their tangles. He pulled his pair of snips from his belt and began clipping the good ones, pruning the ends and yanking the wire to get as much as he could out of them. As he snipped them, he coiled the wire into neat little bundles and wrapped a tie around the center of each, sliding them into his pack.

He’d have to have Clarke show him a couple of these old solar panels he was talking about. They’d need to get up on the roof, but so far he hadn’t seen too many roofs to scavenge. If Clarke’s expectations were that they might find this part of the city intact, it seemed he was misinformed. Hope had been sinking lower and lower as they walked down the narrow residential streets, seeing the leveled homes and twisted vehicles thrown everywhere. Whatever had happened here, it had been particularly more nasty than other places they had been.

Still, there was metal here. And metal was metal and could be used. Metal felt like home.

This area wasn’t bad as that plaza when the Reaper landed. If Clarke hadn’t shoved him down the stairs into the tavern as the building came down, they’d probably both be dead.

Clarke wasn’t the most organized. And he certainly wasn’t much of a planner. But the human was a hell of a fighter and had sharp sense under pressure.

They didn’t pick a fight they couldn’t win and they didn’t stick around in a fight that was turning against them. Tarkus could appreciate that. The man knew his limitations. A man should know and accept his limitations.

Tarkus never could.

He slipped the fifth bundle of wire into his pack and slid the snips back onto his belt. He’d better be getting back before the others came looking for him.

Clarke had said something about a shopping mall nearby. Maybe there they’d have a tech shop where he could find some fresh circuit boards filled with all the tasty components he’d need to build something useful. Or something not useful.

If he could create something, anything, maybe it would lift the funk of destruction hanging like gloom around them.

Tarkus wasn’t sure if, mechanically, Krogan were capable of weeping, but if they were, Grog was about as close as one could expect.

The metal roof on the warehouse of the meat packers had completely collapsed. The metal was scorched. Grog was trying to lift up some of the fallen-down panels to peek inside. But even he had to be able to smell the putrid stink of rotten meat. The fume of that human food would probably give Tarkus a stomach ache just from smelling it.

“There’s no way you’re getting in there,” Tarkus said as he eyed the heap of scrap. Structurally, it was a total loss. “Even if you manage to pull that piece out, the walls are just going to cave in on top of it.”

Grog, not to be deterred, pulled the sheet metal back and tossed it aside. As promised, the rest of the metal creaked, the wreckage shifted and then with a creaking lean, the west wall began to slip and fell. A puff of dust and a wall of that rotten stink pushed out from underneath the pile.

The Krogan softly kicked a piece of broken metal back toward the fallen building and turned around, giving up.

“Hey Clarke, what’s that word you humans use? You know, the one you guys shout when something bad happens. When someone kicks you square in the quad?” Grog asked.

“I think you want ‘fuck,’” Clarke suggested.

“Yes! That’s the one,” Grog said with an appreciative nod. He turned back around toward the fallen building and squatted slightly. “FUCK!”

His bellowing roar did nothing to convince the building to be less destroyed. But it did echo across this otherwise quiet part of the city. No doubt they’d have reapers on top of them in a few minutes. His Krogan brain probably didn’t think of that. Or maybe it did. Grog seemed to like fighting.

Tarkus calmly pressed the buttons on his omni-tool as he tossed the core up into the air, watching as the drone system flickered online and it hovered up above their heads. He scowled at the power bar running in the yellow on the display. He’d need to find a new battery soon.

“Perimeter sweep, two-hundred meter radius. Tell me what’s out there.” Tarkus delivered the succinct orders to the drone and it floated away, heading out over the mangled rooftops of the buildings to fulfill its duty.

“Did you find anything useful at least?” Clarke asked him.

“A lot of junk, unfortunately,” Tarkus said. “Got some wires. Found a tube of omni-gel.  Other than that, not much worth taking.”

Clarke scratched the hair on his left cheek as he tucked his right hand into his left armpit. His mouth kind of hung open awkwardly as he glanced around the destroyed street. “Looks like this was a total waste of time then.”

“The stroll was pleasant,” Tarkus said as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Clarke, at least, chuckled at that and smiled. “So what kind of grade do we get on our buildings?”

“How do humans grade things?” he asked.

“Let’s say zero to one hundred. Zero is bad. One hundred good,” Clarke said.

“Maybe like a fifteen,” Tarkus said without a moment’s hesitation. “My wife could have pushed some of these buildings over. And she was petite by Turian standards.”

Unlike his son, he at least knew Ardi was dead. Before the Primarch pulled off the moon, he had received the transmission from the homeworld. There were a few brief details. They weren’t worth reading. He knew she went down fighting like any true Turian would.

He hadn’t been able to recall the last conversation they had. Maybe it was that one about replacing the stove? He had been off-world for a conference. He told her he would take it apart and try to fix it when he got home. She made sure to point out he had been saying that for at least two months. He got short with her and she hung up the call. That’s the way it had been for far longer than he cared to admit because he just couldn’t let things be.

His omni-tool blinked and he pulled up the alert, checking the video feed. The drone was bobbing up and down -- he would need to tweak its fields to steady it when he got some time -- and locked onto a small group of humans walking down the highway.

“Got some survivors,” Tarkus said as he zoomed in the feed. “No armor. Lightly armed. Not soldiers. They look young. At least compared to you, Clarke.”

The human sent a dismissive smile back his way at being prodded at the same time as he patted Grog on the shoulder and tried to console him about going hungry another day. The Krogan muttered something and nodded, then slapped Clarke hard enough on the shoulder that it made the human stumble.

Clarke caught his feet and rolled his shoulder back, shaking his head. “Probably some stupid teenagers,” he said. “Let’s go get them before they get themselves killed.”

Tarkus didn’t know what qualified as “stupid teenagers” on this planet, but the three they had intercepted on the bridge certainly seemed to fit the bill.

The girl complained even more than Grog and the two boys were even more arrogant than Chellus had been at that age. The difference was that Chellus could back up some his boasting. Those two had nearly soiled themselves when Vorn came up behind them with his rifle trained on them and demanded they surrender. He was sure the boys would remember the encounter differently if they lived long enough to tell someone else about it.

In comparison, the company of the dead husk on the counter that he was poking around in with his tools was both charming and welcome. The husk didn’t speak, at least. Although it did twitch hard once when he tapped a node with his screwdriver, so much so that Tarkus startled and put another round from his pistol into its brain just to make sure it was dead. Thankfully no one saw him jump. That would have been embarrassing.

The video game shop inside the Brent Cross Shopping Center was one of the less destroyed storefronts in the large mall. They had gunned down the husks just outside the shop and Clarke had agreed to give him an hour or two to poke around with the reaper tech while the others scavenged through the shops, many of which looked like they had been looted.

A little bit of tinkering would ease his wearied soul.

Tarkus glanced up at the promotional display for Arcturus Defense 3 - Betrayal again, shaking his head at the cardboard cutout of fictional Alliance hero Jack Charger exchanging pistol fire with an imposing black-clad Turian. The humans had made some liberal choices with their Turian antagonist General Annihilus. The ridiculous caricature wore uselessly exaggerated spiked armor, had snarly fangs badly in need of dental treatment and had some swirling black ball of biotic nonsense in his left hand. And of course, he had a long, wicked scar across one eye.

The game boasted “The most realistic gunplay on any console!” Tarkus had dabbled with Arcturus Defense 2 - Venegeance on the Citadel and found its mechanics to be clunky and babying. Apparently humans needed a hyper-masculine protagonist with oversized guns that did unrealistic amounts of damage in order to feel like they were capable of conquering the galaxy. The humans had been lucky the Council had stepped in during the First Contact War before the Hierarchy really got moving. Then the humans might have been playing some game like “Earth Defense” or “Extinction.”

Sadly, everyone was being forced to play a real-life versions of extinction.

Without Shepard, the Crucible and the galaxy-spanning alliances forming, the Turians stood little chance of surviving. The humans, by comparison, stood no chance.

“Find anything interesting?” Bug was folding up his long gun and tucking it behind his back as he stepped lightly into the shop.

“Everything about these reapers is interesting,” Tarkus said as he carefully touched the husk with the tip of his voltmeter. Although it was clearly dead, he was still picking up electrical readings from the components. This husk was smaller, might have been a human woman at one time, and the least damaged of the group of five they had killed while exploring this part of the mall. “I wish I could get my hands on a live one.”

Bug’s eyes kind of squeezed shut as he smiled again. “I don’t think anyone would like that,” he said, his words a quick, condensed chitter.

“I do have an unusual opportunity here,” he said as he picked up his pliers. “It looks like this processing node is still at least semi-active.”

He pushed the metal tips into the open chest cavity of the husk, turning his shoulder slightly so the light from his lamp illuminated underneath the chip. He offered the blunt probe with his other hand to Bug. “Take this and come over here. I need you to hold this part open while I extract this.”

The Salarian wrapped his fingers around the tool and pressed it down, holding back the shreds of metal and dead flesh to create a small gap in between the two ribs. “Just like that,” Tarkus whispered as he ducked down, carefully nudging the pliers underneath the still humming processor. These reapers were full of safeguards that would kill key components upon tampering, so he had to be careful. He picked up his snips with his free hand, cutting away some of the melted flesh around the corner so that the piece could start lifting away.

“Get your pistol out,” Tarkus said. “And when I say, pump a shot right into the heart over there. I think if I clip this while the rest of the system is experiencing a more critical shock, I can get it out without burning it up.”

“Copy that,” Bug said, slipping his sidearm out of the holster at his hip and pressing the barrel down to the twisted heart that was less flesh now than it was tangled metal and cords that snaked in and out of the breast like creeping vines.

“I’m ready,” Tarkus said, positioning his snips. “Let me know when you’re ready to hit it.”

“Firing on my mark,” the Salarian said, all business as always. “Three. Two. Mark.”

Tarkus’ face got splattered as the muffled round pumped into the husk’s chest, but he was too occupied making the two small cuts he needed. A pulse of static burst out of the severed ends of the circuit as he lifted away the undamaged core.

Tarkus lifted it out of the cavity, holding it up in front of him in the beam of light. He could feel that swell inside his chest, that mix of happiness, pride and accomplishment as he looked at the squarish piece of metal slightly smudged with blood. It would feel even better once he could figure out what he wanted to do with it.

“Yes. That will work for me,” Tarkus said as he palmed the item and slipped it carefully into a static-free bag.

He glanced down at the dead husk and shoved it onto the floor. It hit with an unceremonious thud. Done. Nothing more to be gained from that.

“Now if I can just get my hands on a few -- what does Clarke call them? Mo-biles? -- we might get somewhere,” he said triumphantly as he stepped over the dead husk on the floor. “Let’s head back. But first…”

He reached out and tipped over the cardboard cutout onto the floor, face down, so no one could see it.

“That’s better.”

“Did you hear how he made peace between the Quarians and the Geth? I mean, come on man, the fucking Geth?” the brown-haired male teenager said.

“Dude, I know, it takes some balls to do something like that,” said the blonde-haired male teen with the shaggy hair.

“Shepard is so fucking cool,” brown said. “I bet he gets so much pussy, wherever he wants, whenever he wants.”

“You know it,” blonde agreed. They punched fists together. “I mean, after you fucking disintegrate falling into a fucking planet and come back to life? Free V. Anytime. Anywhere. Chicks gotta be falling on their knees.”

The female teenager scowled and tried to pretend like she wasn’t listening.

Tarkus carefully tapped at his omni-tool, running through the diagnostics on the reaper processor he had tapped into. He would have to be quick, because he was tapping out these pathetic mobile batteries quickly with the intensive decryption program.

Clarke and Dess had found a mattress shop on the top floor of the mall, tucked into a somewhat defensible corner. The entryway into the anchor store had fully collapsed, so the only approach was down the wide corridor. Between large planters, stone benches and kiosks in the center walkway, there was plenty of cover packed in. And the shop had plenty of new, clean, comfortable mattresses. They wouldn’t get an opportunity to bed down like this for a while.

Still, Tarkus had taken time to set up both of his sentry guns, Spinny and Grinder, outside. Just in case. There was something he didn’t like about being backed into a corner. The auto guns would give them a fighting chance if someone tried to pen them in.

Although he would need to look at Grinder again. Despite taking the thing apart three times, the gun still made an awful grinding noise like something in the motor was catching every time the barrell spun up. If he fixed it, though, he’d have to give the gun a new name.

“Just grab the back and their head and…” the brown-haired one started thrusting his hips with one hand in front of his groin. His buddy laughed.

Tarkus looked over at Grog, who even looked unimpressed at the lewd display, despite doing something similar the day before. He looked up from the diagnostic readout scrolling by, having had enough.

“Hey!” he shouted, letting the flanging in his voice vibrate as he raised his volume. The two boys startled straight. “There’s a lady here. Show a little respect. And shut up, before I shut you up.”

If Ardi had seen that happening, she would have shouted at them until she fully emasculated both. If Chellus had been doing something like that, Tarkus would have hit him across the mouth. The humans should consider themselves lucky, either way, that they were just getting a quick, verbal scolding.

“OK,” the blonde one said.

“Yeah, sorry,” the brown added.

“That’s ‘Yes, sir,’” Tarkus admonished, just as hard and serious as he forced his black-streaked mandibles to push out a little from the sides of his mouth.

“Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!” The brown one rolled the other way and curled up on his mattress. The blonde one retreated to the other mattress and laid down, looking at the ceiling.

He kept his eyes trained on both, and when neither spoke for a few peaceful seconds, he returned his eyes to his screen. The decrypt had finished and the data was his for the taking. The Reapers were good, but not good enough to outsmart a little Turian ingenuity.

Tarkus laughed to himself as he cracked out a can of his dextro rations. They tasted like garbage, but garbage from home was better than garbage from Earth. And he deserved a little celebration.

He tapped the button to have his VI start searching for anything of note as he dug his small collapsible fork into his can of pinkish-brown meat paste that filled the canister. He got the first forkful to his mouth, taking in the glory of the garbage-tasting gunk and stopped it stuck halfway in his mouth. His tongue slid the mushy paste off the utensil and he quickly swallowed.

“Uhhh, Clarke,” he called out, turning his head back toward where their human leader was chatting with Dess on one of the larger beds. “Clarke, you better come look at this.”

Hovering in front of him in the soft orange holographic glow was Earth. And above it, the image of hundreds of Reapers and a narrow, dart-like structure that he recognized all too well.

“What is it Tark…” he started to say, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of the hologram, he stopped. “What the fuck is…”

“The Citadel,” Tarkus said, spinning the 3D image, looking at the unmistakable ring at the far end. The arms of the Citadel were all closed, tucked and sealed tightly together. But there was no doubt, the massive station was clearly above Earth.

“Why is the Citadel here? How is it here?” Clarke asked. “I didn’t even know the thing could move.”

“Don’t know,” Tarkus said, punching a short string of code into his tool. “Let’s ask the Reapers.”

He hit the button, sending the short ping out. He was connected through the husk’s core, so he hoped that it would look like an inquiry from the ground, from a friendly, and not from the hacker behind it pulling the strings.

Lines of code sprung up, data packets going out and coming in, his tool encrypting, decrypting and translating. His eyes tracked as it all flew by, before the fragments cleared and began clipping together. Then the translated response started becoming clear.

“It’s just arrived,” Tarkus said. “Today. Here.”

“But why?”

“No, Clarke,” he said ignoring the question. “It’s here. Literally here.” He changed the map, changing views to the overhead of London and the beam it showed transmitting between the orbital station and the city.

Clarke’s face was scrunched up as he looked at the images, trying to figure out what was going on. “I know where that is, it’s…” he stopped as the image began to crack up and collapse. “What’s happening?”

“I’m losing the connection,” Tarkus said as he began punching keys. The code was scrolling faster and faster. His encryption was being pushed. He could see a small amount of smoke beginning to rise from the husk core as it got hot and began to burn the fabric of the mattress below it. “Bad. That’s bad. Very bad.”

“What? What’s wrong?” Clarke asked as he looked at the sizzling husk core.

“They’re in ,” he said.

His fingers flew across the keys, trying frantically to pull up extra walls. He wasn’t going to get another chance like this. He needed a data dump, to pull whatever he could off the core before it burnt up. But the system was rapidly degrading and someone, no, something, was hooked in on the other end. The download was transmitting rapidly, fifteen, twenty percent.

And then the screen blanked out.

And that low-frequency scream came across the system. That fear-inducing rumble. His tool seized up.

And where his interface was, now there was just the red holographic outline of a Reaper, it’s tentacles slithering and reaching out through the digital toward him, that bone-chilling vibration rattling through him.

I see you, Turian, the hologram seemed to say to him.

Tarkus pulled his pistol and shot it into the husk core, shattering it to pieces and blacking out the Reaper hologram before him. Still, the system on his omni-tool was a wreck. He heard the crackle of electric and the humming of machines as he lifted his head to look up at Spinny and Grinder, their joints pivoting and barrels spinning, before both guns seized in a fit of sparks and smoke. Both sagged in death.

“We need to get out of here, Clarke,” Tarkus said as he looked at the fried guns in the corridor. “Now.”

The wailing, high-pitched shriek of a banshee told him that it was already too late. The piercing scream perked up everyone’s head, all eyes fixed on the corridor, the only way in and the only way out of the mall now.

Tarkus knew he had a bad feeling about this place and now he knew why.

Vorn was already on the move, clicking a clip into the bottom of his rifle as he quickly marched past them toward the door. “I’ll try to keep that banshee occupied,” he said simply, as if it would be no big deal. He stepped out into the hall with blue fire wicking up around his body. As the shell wrapped around him, he lurched forward and was gone, the flash of light followed seconds later by the sonic crack and boom of his biotic departure.

“Can you get those guns back online?” Clarke asked.

Tarkus looked at the smoking sentries in the hall, standing like they had already been defeated.

“You better hope so,” he said, glancing down at his tool. The entire thing was still scrambled. No doubt the Reapers on the other end had trashed it. It wasn’t ready now, if it would ever be ready. He slipped it off his wrist and tossed it onto the smoldering mattress. “I need your tool.”

Clarke unclipped it from his wrist and handed it over without protest. Bug was already rushing out of the mattress store and setting up the tripod for his rifle on the thick stone and tile planter. A moment later he was already opening fire.

“They’re here!” Bug shouted from the hall, pumping a second and third shot down the long, narrow corridor.

“Shit,” Clarke swore as Dess pushed his rifle into his hands and she bolted out the door to join Bug. “We’ll do our best to cover you. Get the guns back online.”

“I’ll get it done or die trying,” Tarkus promised.

He was dodging fire the second he got out into the corridor as he spied multiple targets coming down the lane. The cannibals were spraying fire all over as husk after husk charged past the storefronts, their mechanical rotten arms flailing as gunfire tore them down before they could overrun the others.

Tarkus slid behind Grinder, snapping Clarke’s omnitool onto his wrist as he pulled the back panel open. He blew into the compartment, forcing the smoke out as he peered inside to survey the damage. His eyes flew over the components, noting spots of damage in the circuitry where it had been overloaded by the hacked burst from the Reaper. As his eyes glanced over it, his hands were working independently, checking the hinges on the gun and spinning the barrel to make sure it wasn’t jammed.

Nothing wrong mechanically. Some minor damage done to the electronics. Power shot. Likely a software issue. He slid the tube of omnigel out and began pressing the nozzle to the board, squeezing beads of gel out sloppily in his haste over the damaged areas and counting on it to do its thing to repair the busted up connections.

“Make connection, TurTech Sentry Gun Model 42A032B Mark II, model numbers 00152-14630 and 00152-18939. Authorization Tarkus Raetia, TEC Level 5, ID 5554555. PIN 9093.” He rattled off the voice commands to the tool as calmly, clearly and quickly he could with the background noise of gunfire, biotics and the crackle of tech attacks blaring just a few feet away.

He touched the plastic nozzle to the last spot of noticeable damage and ducked down, rushing across to the other side of the hall to attend to Spinny. The omni-tool buzzed and responded in a woman’s voice. “Model 00152-18939 connected. Unable to connect to 00152-14630.”

“Give me a second,” he said to the tool, but more to himself as he lifted the back plate on the other gun, seeing noticeable more scorching on the board than on the other and began applying the gel to the damaged spots.

“Watch the right flank!” Clarke shouted.

“I got it!” Dess shouted back and Tarkus could hear the crackle of her ripping a singularity open as he watched the small bit of smoke pull away from the gun toward the right side.

Grog was roaring, sounding almost like laughter after each blast out of his shotgun and the crackling of electric and buzz of husks falling. There was a rumble as a biotic combination burst on the right side of the hall, no doubt the Krogan playing off Dess’s singularity.

“Come on you pyjacks! Get out here and fight if you don’t want to die!” Tarkus lifted his eyes, seeing Grog yelling back at the teens cowering behind a mattress. The Krogan’s yelling only caused them to duck down and out of sight. Grog turned back to the fight. “Fucking cowards-” the burst of shotgun fire drowned out the rest of whatever he was yelling.

Tarkus smeared the last of the gel inside of the panel, tossing the tube over his shoulder and onto the floor. “Attempt reconnect with 00152-14630.”

He pulled his Carnifex and poked his head out from behind the sentry gun, tracing a husk rushing up the hall. The gun jumped in his hand as the powerful round struck the husk, stopping its advance a few meters ahead of Bug. The Salarian turned his gun, the shot from the long gun splattering the husk’s head off its shoulders.

“Model 00152-14630 connected. Guns offline. Critical protocol failure. Systems inoperable.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know,” Tarkus said as he brought up the keypad. There was no time to figure out what exactly was damaged. It would be quicker to just scrap the whole thing and start with something crude.

“Initiate quick format. Dump cache. Establish live connection.”

He could see the shimmer of blue light as the barrier stretched from wall to wall of the corridor, its shifting, liquid-like form deflecting incoming fire.

“Do you see Vorn?” Clarke called out.

“Negative,” was Bug’s quick response as his rifle boomed again.

“I won’t be able to keep this barrier up for long,” Dess already sounded desperate and tired, Tarkus thought.

“How’s it coming back there Tark?” Clarke called out to him.

His fingers were flying across the keys, scripting line after line of code, creating a rudimentary firing protocol. The targeting would be for shit and it wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between friend and foe, so he hopped that Vorn didn’t come right back into the middle of the crossfire. He could overcharge the motor and push the firing rate to max at a risk of overheating the thing, but he needed a lot of cover, right now.

“This is delicate work, Clarke,” he responded. “Can you keep it down up there? I’m trying to concentrate.”

“How much longer?” Clarke pressed over the chitter of his rifle.

“Two minutes!” Tarkus shouted back. He really needed more like four or five, but he doubted Clarke would want to hear that. The human would think he could hold the line for two minutes. He would try to hold it for two minutes.

He hoped none of the reapers would try to hit either of the guns with an overload. He didn’t have time to try to build in any protection against a tech charge. Full forward shields, no backup, no power spared for recharge. Full power diverted to firing systems. Dissipate extra heat through the chambers instead of through normal cooling ports. That would add a little extra pop toward the ordnance at the risk of melting the entire front of the gun into a useless blob of metal.

“I can’t… hold on…” Dess’s voice was laced with exhaustion as the blue light of the barrier collapsed and fell.

A few errant shots whizzed past his left shoulder as the barrier collapsed before him. A third ricocheted off the side of the gun, a loud ping as the shot bounced off wide and shattered the glass of the mattress store. The teenager girl within screamed as the glass broke.

“Where are my guns, Tark!” Clarke shouted.

“They’re coming!” He shouted it back. Field of fire, 45 degrees left, 45 degrees right, 30 degrees up, 10 degrees down. Bypass and skip firing on any chambers where obstructions or damage are detected. Emergency shutdown if 75 percent of chambers are unable to fire.

“Marauder. Right side, fifty meters,” Bug said coolly across the comm. “I don’t have an angle on him.”

“Moving!” Clarke shouted back. Tarkus could see him roll from cover to cover out of the corner of his eye, the human lifting his gun back up and planting shots down field.

“My shield is down!” Dess said over the din of her submachine gun chittering.

“Husks breaking through on the left!” Grog shouted. A blast of shotgun fire. Tarkus could feel the pulse of Grog’s tech armor bursting. “One coming your way, Tark!”

The charging husk had its arms over its head, screeching as it shambled toward his position. Tarkus lifted the Carnifex from his side and fired two rounds into the husk, watching as it crumbled to the ground, where he put another two rounds into its back to make sure it stayed down and slipped the pistol back into its holster.

“Tark!” Clarke’s voice was strained.

“Thirty seconds!”

“We can give you ten!”

Good enough. It would have to suffice. He punched the button to upload, watching the bar quickly shoot across the display as the rough program uploaded into the guns. He looked out from behind the cover, seeing dozens of cannibals and husks baring down on them, the glowing of marauders, once-Turian, once his people, at the far back of the lines supporting them.

“Program uploaded. Guns online,” the voice from the tool relayed as the turrets lifted on their hinge and turned toward the field, but as he expected to hear the hum-whirr of the guns spinning up, instead he heard nothing. “Warning. Insufficient power. Firing protocol halted.”

The reapers were nearly on top of them now. More fire sprayed around him, striking the back wall behind them. Clarke ducked down as a shot nearly took off his head. Sparks were flying off Grog’s armor as round after round plunked into his shield, the blue field fading and collapsing. He kept shooting, even as the shots began to strike his armor.

His own shield lit as it stopped a shot, the crackle of blue static washing momentarily across his field of vision.

This was his fault. He had gotten them into this mess with his tinkering. Was it really worth peeking in on the Reapers, just for that minute, just because he could? Was it better than creeping around this dead city, skittering from building to building in the shadows and trying to keep just out reach?

The enemy was here now. They brought the fight. They wanted the fight. A Turian never turned down a good fight, not even when the odds were out of his favor. Palaven had gone down in flames but gone down battling every last second of it. Ardi had gone down fighting. Chellus was out there fighting.

He had never turned down a fight, with either of them, or anyone.

Maybe that’s why both were half the galaxy away and he was here instead. Maybe that’s why TEC was working around the clock on the Crucible and he was here instead. Maybe that’s why he had decided to follow Clarke around instead of returning back to Turian command.

He had promised Clarke that he’d get those guns firing. There was only one way left to get that done.

No one would say that Tarkus Raetia wasn’t a true-blooded, proud Turian.

He stood out of cover, lifting his Carnifex and picking his targets, firing down the field as he stepped to the exposed middle between Spinny and Grinder. He didn’t blink as the shield stopped shot after shot, the barrier stressing under the load. Close enough to get both guns, he hoped.

“Get down!” he shouted to his squadmates.

As his pistol clicked empty, he let it fall from his fingers and hit the button on the wrist tool.

The jolt of energy discharged, the electric field crossing both of the guns.

Tarkus grimaced as he heard the grinding noise in the right gun as the turret spun up, soon drowned out by the beautiful high-speed music of the guns spraying death down the narrow corridor of the mall.

Clarke pressed his body hard into the edge of the planter to avoid any shrapnel bouncing around as the turrets mercilessly shredded the reapers. He couldn’t hear a thing as the auto guns roared and could barely see anything beyond the bright flash of light and smoke coming off the rapidly spinning barrels of the turrets.

He glanced left to Dess, who was huddled up behind a bench, breathing heavy but unhurt. Bug was crouched down, white-hot fire spraying just above his head but calmly sitting with his rifle across his lap, waiting for his next opportunity. Grog to his right was brushing blood off his shoulder where a shot had strafed him.

The auto guns stopped firing, the one on the right spinning down and stopping. The one of the left looked like it was on fire as flames were crackling out of the housing on the back. Bug already had his gun back up on its perch, glancing down the field.

The Salarian peered down the scope and then lifted the gun. “We’re clear.”

“We need to get out of here before they regroup,” Clarke said. “Hug the right wall. Down the escalator and out. I’ll contact Vorn.”

“Copy,” Bug said.

“Got it, Clarke. I’ll clear a path,” Grog said and lumbered over his cover, chugging away.

“I’ll get the kids,” Dess said as she skirted past him toward the storefront.

Clarke pushed himself to his feet, looking at the burning auto gun now fully engulfed in flames. No doubt Tarkus would pissed about losing such a valuable piece of tech.

“Good work, Tark,” he said, only then spotting the Turian slumped on the ground, a pool of dark blue liquid pooling around his head. “Tark!”

He crouched down, lifting the Turian’s body and immediately noticing the dead, dull, black eyes in his head. A single shot had pierced his right cheek, a neat, blue, bloody hole just beneath his eye. His body was heavy and limp.

The omni-tool at his wrist was still on, the orange interface blinking silently. Clarke slowly lowered Tarkus back to the ground, lifting his left arm and looking at the list of commands that had fired to get the guns working. He unclipped the tool from the Turian’s wrist, clipping it back around his own as he read.

Initiating upload…
Uploading…
Upload complete.
Initiating protocol “Work Or We’re Dead”
Error: Insufficient power
Command: Transfer power from personal shield
WARNING: Shield utilization detected. Disabling of shield may result in personal injury or death.
Confirmation required. Discharge shield? Y/N: Y
Preparing for discharge...
Discharging…
Discharge complete.
|

The still body of Tarkus Raetia on the floor was an indistinct shadow behind the rhythmic blinking of the cursor waiting for the next command, the electronic heartbeat he had used to give his machines life.

To give the rest of them life.

Chapter Text

Systems Alliance Prison Record
Offender ID: 2081-1289HS-0003945

Name: Vorn Deagh
Gender: Male
Species: Batarian
Age: 54

Location: ESCAPE -- WARRANT ISSUED

Date of sentence: 09/23/2181
Description: Drug Trafficking w/ red sand enhancement
Term in Years/Months/Day: 25 / 00 / 00
Jurisdiction of Conviction: Earth/European Circuit/United Kingdom District/London Magistrate
Estimated Release Date: 07/05/2204

It is pity he feels as the last shots from his rifle pierce the dead blue flesh and the banshee melts in a burst of blue and black fire.

Who was she before and what kind of life did she lead?

The white tendril of smoke follows like a tail as the spent thermal clip spins toward the ground, bouncing with a ping as it strikes the tile floor. It twists, the red-hot metal cooling in a moment’s time until it lies dead and dormant on the floor with a brutal, simplistic beauty.

Vorn slides a fresh clip into the bottom of the rifle and listens to it click and lock as the last of the blue fire dissipates into nothingness.

He had studied her drawn and snarling face, the twisted crests, the bloody jaws and the burning eyes. He took them all in, remembering each detail in that brief moment when time seemed to stop on the precipice between his charge ending and the rest of reality catching up to him. The Asari was fully a monster. Whatever she once was, gone. That knowledge detached him from the work of surgically pointing the tip of the rifle at joints and systematically dismantling her piece by piece.

He would remember her face, as he remembered so many.

He checks the faces of every dead cannibal they leave in their wake, hoping not to see the familiar features of his beloved among them.

In his prayers every morning, he gives thanks that he does not see her. He prays, even though his prayers will never be heard and answered.

“Vorn? You still alive out there?”

There is no noise in the background behind Clarke’s voice. Only his words, breathy.

There is more to the question than could be answered.

“Yes,” he responds.

A short pause. “Good man. We’re getting out of here. East side exit. Will you be able to meet us out there or do you need help?”

This wing of the building is quiet and dark. Once this place had been alive. The broken storefronts speak of a better time. Now it is dead and cold.

Everything appears lighter than it actually is and in the silence of the building. He can hear the quiet mechanical twisting in his head as the artificial eye moves back and forth and adjusts for the darkness, tricking his brain to see light that is not there. His field of vision is painted in broad strokes of damnation.

He lives only so that she could live.

Khar’shan is destroyed.

If she is gone, he will follow.

He touches the button on his comm to respond in the affirmative, letting the digital tone speak for him. He turns the rifle around, pressing the barrel to the cold metal of his upper left eye. His finger touches the trigger as he balances the gun in his hand.

Will he see her, when this is ended?

He cannot know for sure.

There are others who need him, for the moment.

He lowers the gun, turns and walks toward the exit.

The fan of red blood flies out of his brother’s head, spraying across the back wall and ceiling of the kitchen.
He tumbles backward, his skull striking the edge of the table before he bounces into a pile on a floor.
They hadn’t even spoken a word to him.
Walked in.
Pulled the pistol.
Executed him.
Now the gun is in Vorn’s face, finger pressed tightly on the trigger.
“I am tired of chasing people around,” the man says. “I want my credits and I want them now.”
Charak hadn’t even had a chance to make excuses this time.
He had come here, looking for help.
He was beyond helping.
Vorn is glad he had told the little girl to hide in the bedroom, so that she didn’t have to witness such brutality at such a young age.
“How much does he owe?”
“Four hundred thousand,” the man with the pistol says. “And a car he destroyed.”
“I don’t have it,” Vorn says.
The truth.
There was little to gain from honest work on Khar’shan beyond rectitude, which held little value in the failing Hegemony.
The response is the clicking of the hammer being pulled on the gun.
“That didn’t work out well for your brother.”
“Take my vehicle, if you want it. Whatever else you want, take it. You don’t need to hurt anyone else.”
Possessions are temporary.
Life is priceless.
The thug pulls back, his arm bending at the elbow as he lifts the pistol away from Vorn’s face.
“That’s a start,” he says. “You’re going to work for me, until you work off your brother’s debts.”
Vorn nods.
He has little other option.
“I will work for you.”
The man holsters the pistol.
“I’m happy to see you’re reasonable.” He turns to the other two men wielding short-barrel shotguns. “Strip the house. Take the girl.”
“No,” Vorn pleads. “Let me take her somewhere safe. She’s just a child.”
“She’s collateral.”

“Anderson out.”

The holographic image fizzles and fades in Clarke’s palm. He settles back down onto his chair, seeming exhausted. The six chairs stand in a ring so that each might look at the other. One chair is empty. The human rubs his hand across the hair on his chin.

It is a curious habit of his. He seems to do it when he is thinking, considering. It means indecision.

The message from the System Alliance leader was short and desperate.

One final push.

All survivors to gather at the following locations.

The galaxy will make its stand here in three days time.

Vorn wonders if the humans will survive that long, having broadcast their message across all channels. The Reapers would be listening and they will surely go there to meet them. They will seek to stamp out the last of the resistance before the armada can arrive. Whether that armada stands a chance at all is an unanswered question.

“We have to go,” the Asari says confidently. Then her eyes change as she looks at the human. “Don’t we?”

“If they’re going to fight, I want to be there,” the Krogan declares. His head lifts and his shoulders push back, a sign of his confidence and strength. He is a fighter, through and through, and has no fear.

“It will be a bloodbath, little brother, even if it does succeed,” the Salarian says. He fidgets too much. His eyes move constantly. They only slow when he closes them in a sign of contentedness. He is more difficult to read, because he is deceitful. He looks often at Vorn, because he knows that he is being watched.

“So what, we just sit on the sidelines, big bro? Just sit here and let them fight our battle?” The Krogan’s wide-set prey eyes narrow in a challenge.

“I did not say that,” the Salarian answers, because his words are carefully chosen and deliberately narrow. “I only commented that it is likely we will all perish if we go.”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” the Krogan answers.

“I did not suggest you were,” the Salarain replies, once more stopping short of saying what he truly thinks and means.

Clarke’s fingers pinch at the corners of his mouth as he squeezes his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger. Then he releases it. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. Isn’t this why we all stayed?”

Vorn stayed because he had nowhere else to go.

He had been locked in the human prison, confined to the alien wing, wearing the bright orange jumpsuit they had bestowed upon him. He shared a cell with another Batarian, a pirate who had killed two people during a failed raid of a cargo shipper. The man boasted often, talking constantly of what he would do when he got out, except that he was never supposed to get out.

Vorn did not speak to him or any of the others. He went from his cell to the showers to the mess hall for breakfast to the common room to the mess hall for lunch to the recreation yard to the mess hall for dinner and then back to his cell for the night. He had followed that routine silently every day for five years of the nearly nineteen he would need to serve before his own release.

Then came the day when the walls of the prison shook, when there was a great rumbling outside. It was the day when the power went out, when guards corralled everyone back into their cells and locked the doors. And then the red beam tore through the walls of the prison.

He got his first look at the Reapers descending from the sky, floating down like spiders on silk into the city of London. The sun was shining but the city was darkened with the smoke of destruction.

As they all fled toward the mangled walls of the prison, toward escape, freedom and certain death, he struck his cellmate across the back of the head with a chunk of concrete as they ran. As the man hit the ground, Vorn quickly grabbed either side of his head and twisted until it he heard the bones of his neck crack and separate and for the body to fall limp.

He prayed as he ran for cover that he would be forgiven for doing wickedness in the name of justice, as he been forced to do for many years of his life.

“This is why we all stayed,” the Asari agrees with a nod that is distant as her mind wanders far, far from the room.

“Then we fight?” Clarke asks.

He raises his eyes first to the empty chair, lingering there for a moment, then turns to the others.

The Turian had been sad and lost. He spoke with humor to try to mask that he was far away from home and alone here on Earth. Vorn wondered if he went to his end willingly, or if he only paid his life begrudgingly.

“Yes. I want to fight,” the Krogan says without hesitation.

The Salarian gives a short nod of approval.

The Asari smiles. “I’m with you, Clarke.”

Clarke turns his head, looking at Vorn. His eyes are unsteady. The human never looks at him for long. He only looks in quick glances before averting his eyes. He does now, as he always did, and turns his gaze toward the rifle resting on the floor.

The Asari looks at him too now. Her large, light eyes are full of innocence and salvation. He can see his beloved reflected in her. She is the kind of virtue he has willingly blackened his own soul to protect.

“I will fight,” Vorn says. The Asari’s small smile at his words warm him.

Clarke wrings his hands together and nodds, as if accepting a conclusion he had known would be reached but did not want to follow himself.

“Then we’ll fight.”

The young man rolls on the floor, clutching his abdomen to try to soothe his broken ribs.
They had kicked him more than a dozen times after taking the container of red sand.
It is only half as much as they demanded.
“Shoot him.”
The order is simple.
The pistol is thrust into his hand.
His fingers wrap around the handle as if by instinct.
Vorn points the pistol at the young man’s head.
He considers for a second, then lowers the gun.
Another man places the barrel of the shotgun against the back of the man’s head and fires, exploding his skull into the warehouse floor.
“Do not disobey me again,” Jorvan scolds with blazing fury in his eyes.
When they return, he calls Vorn into his room.
On a single monitor, he sees her, sitting at a table with a man looming behind her.
“Little star,” Vorn says as he presses his fingers to the screen as if he could reach through it to touch her cheek.
“I want to come home, Uncle Vorn,” Aja says and sniffles.
Jorvan interrupts as he pulls the screen out of reach.
“When I tell you to do something, I want it done. Everyone does what I say or they suffer the consequences.”
The man steps behind Aja in the screen.
“Take one of her fingers.”
Strong hands hold him down into the chair.
Aja shrieks as the man grabs her wrist and hold it against the table.
Vorn is screaming.
It won’t happen again.
He will do whatever they say.
Don’t hurt her.
Aja wails in horror as they carve her smallest finger off her right hand and present it in front of the camera for him to behold.

More white dust settles on the shoulder pads of carefully polished midnight blue armor as bullets strike the concrete barriers.

“God damn bitch,” Clarke curses to himself as he pops another empty clip out of the bottom of his rifle.

The resistance has been exceptionally thick ever since they started south. Clarke had decided to try to keep on the divided avenue as long as possible as it would be the most direct route toward the Alliance forward base. It is turning out to also be exceptionally dangerous.

Vorn peeks over the edge of the low retaining wall, spotting even more reapers closing in on their position.

Clarke touches the button on his comm. “Give me an outlet out of here, Bug.”

“Searching,” the Salarian responds over the channel as the sound of sniper rifle fire quiets for a moment.

Clarke glances over the wall again, ducking quickly as white hot fire flies over his head. He shakes his head as he punches another clip into the rifle, locking it. He mutters to himself as he works.

“Grog, flank wide right. I’m going left. Pinch them into the center of the street. Dess, when they get close, give them a pull. Then Vorn, you do your thing.” Clarke delivers the orders concisely and confidently. He touches the button on his comm again. “Time’s up, Bug. What do you have for me?”

“We’ve got to get off this avenue,” the Salarian responds from his perch on top one of the apartment buildings. “Multiple contacts further down the road. There’s no way we can fight through that. I’m picking up some chatter that Alliance teams have secured a position southwest of here at a ‘Kensington Palace?’”

“You know, I’ve always wanted to visit a royal estate,” Clarke says to no one in particular.

“You heard him. Once we buy some breathing room, we’re heading southwest to rendezvous with the Alliance garrison. I’ll stay back and cover the retreat,” Clarke says. He begins to crawl to the left flank behind the cover. “You know, we’re going to pass right over Abbey Road. No time to stop for souvenir photographs, though.”

Vorn looks blankly at Clarke as he crawls past into his position. “Earth thing. Abbey Road. Beatles. Greatest music to come out of England ever. I’ll have to give you all an education when we’re not being shot at,” he promises as he takes his position on the edge.

“A little Here Comes the Sun would do us all some good right now…” he mutters to himself. “All right, Grog, ready? Let’s give these reapers a little hell!”

“That’s what I like to hear!” The Krogan bellows and pops out of cover, his shotgun spraying downfield. Vorn hears the sound of Clarke’s rifle chittering to his side and the buzz of shields as they stop projectiles.

Vorn lowers his head, planting a kiss upon the tiny, metal ring wrapped around his smallest finger. It is plain and silver and unornamented. It is not the one she gave him. They took that away in the prison and he could not get it back. Even as an imposter, it brings him the same comfort. She would understand.

“Dess! Hit them now!”

The thin, flexible white armor is soundless as the Asari stands, as gracefully as flower petals rising and opening to the sun. The blue flame sparks around her hands as she moves in the precise, practiced patterns required.

Vorn touches that place in his mind, reaching for the cold, intrusive metal jammed into the depths of his brain. He feels the eezo. He can feel it pressing like little pebbles in his veins, scraping their way toward the surface. He holds his teeth together at the grating pain as the energy phases through his flesh and gathers across his limbs.

He holds it there in the sphere he imagines around him. He shapes it carefully, forming it like a shell around the front of his body, wrapping it around him. The blue fog covers his field of vision as he is encompassed within the field. Through the hazy azure lens, he beholds the world, glancing at the Asari frozen in time, nothing but the slowly emanating waves of the mass fields around her hands shifting and twisting.

He can see the frozen muzzle flash around Grog’s shotgun He can count the individual red-hot pellets spilling from its mouth. The smoke from the burning building hangs still and solid as if it were a single, black puff of fiber being pulled from the gaping gash in the side of the structure.

There is nothing here but a quiet peace, a moment caught in between the destruction as he sits on the edge of time, waiting for it to all collapse and begin again.

Vorn stands. He hoists the Argus into his palms. He glances down the field at the dead and torn limbs of husks floating in the hazy biotic field. He sees the transformed, mutated, defiled, deformed Batarians lifted off the ground.

He wonders if any of these are her.

The eezo burns and he can feel the sharp, electrical stabbing on the implant in his head. This world, this moment, it could never last. Nothing so perfect and beautiful could exist forever beyond a few, fleeting moments.

His body lurches forward, hurled through time and space. Vorn turns his shoulder and places his finger on the trigger. He remembers that the recoil on the gun jumps sharply upward with each of its three rounds.

There is a flash of light.

The force rumbles through his body.

The shell around him collapses, time accelerating moment by moment as the blue fire dissipates, objects begin to fall toward the ground and the creatures begin to move. He stumbles to plant his feet firmly back to the earth in that final moment of transition.

And then he hears the crackle and boom as time resumes in full force. The twisted Batarians fly away, their bodies flailing wildly as they careen through the air. Their bodies crack and crumble as they strike the buildings and fall lifeless to the street.

Vorn hurdles the missing chunk of asphalt, a few paces away from the synthesized Turian leader. It sees him, it moves its pulse rifle as the biotic flames collapse its shield. It is too late, as Vorn swings the rifle down, pointing it at the V where the chest plates meet.

He pulls the trigger. The gun kicks upward hard. The three high-powered rounds strike in chest, collarbone and head. The Turian teeters backward and falls. Behind it, two husks. Vorn begins to backpedal, his feet carefully stepping back one at a time as he jams the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and pulls the trigger again, punching through the grey dead guts of the first.

The second is hit from the left side, the concussive shot blowing it backward and away. The comm in his ear flickers to life.

“Six targets inbound to you Vorn.” The Salarian’s voice is quick and chirpy. “I’m falling back. Get out of there.”

He can see them rushing down the avenue, the blue, dead eyes and broken jaws spilling unnatural light out of them. He rips the power through his blood again, feeling the eezo tear through him as he forces it in a rush to his hand. He pulls it off the hand of the rifle and drives it down into the pavement, driving the shockwave forward.

“I’ve got you covered.” Clarke’s voice is confident in his ear, and the burning red hot rounds fly past toward the approaching cannibals.

He cannot see their faces.

He hopes she is not among them.

Vorn turns on his heel, leaving them behind, as he retreats.

“He’s got eezo blood.”
The doctor throws a datapad onto the table.
Jorvan picks it up and leafs through it.
He lifts his head and smiles.
Vorn has killed six men in his name.
“Let’s make use of that,” Jorvan decides. “Implant him.”
When Vorn awakes from the surgery, he can feel the throbbing pain from the poorly patched red cleft in the back of his skull.
He tries to lift his arm, but cannot move it.
His legs are paralyzed, too.
“That’s normal,” says the large Batarian sitting in the ripped chair in the corner.
He is one of Jorvan’s enforcers and he wears battered, worn military armor.
Vorn tries to speak, but he feels a sharp pain in the side of his head.
“Everything you knew how to do,” the enforcer says, “you’re going to have to learn again.”
He stands up, holding out his hand and summoning a little blue smoke around it, lifting the chair off the floor and letting it fall.
“And more,” he finishes. “You’re biotic now. Either you’ll learn, or you’ll die.”
He can’t die, yet, because she’s not safe.

He dabs the blood from under his armpit as he tries to shift more of his weight to his own legs.

The Asari is tired.

He told her that she owed him no debts. He had only done what was necessary. But she insisted. So he reluctantly wrapped his right arm around her shoulder and allowed her to help carry him.

The medigel is effective as it snakes around the sheared pieces of armor and knits its way through the flesh. Ahead of them, the large red-brick building is battered but standing and stalwart, with heavy guns planted on the roof and the subtle glint of shields peeking out of the many tall, broken windows. Clarke said this was a palace. It appeared more like a fortress.

And a graveyard.

The yard surrounding the long approach from the twisted gates is littered with bodies. Most of them are reapers. A few are human. There is crisp, green grass in the places that are not pockmarked by burns or craters.

The others are several meters ahead because he is slowing their pace. But for once, there is no need to rush as they are within the Alliance’s sphere of protection.

“Thank you,” the Asari says quietly as soldiers emerge from the large front door of the palace to meet Clarke.

“No need,” Vorn says as he looks at the slick, near-black blood that coats his fingertips. He lowers his hand and drags his fingers across his thigh plate to wipe them clean.

“I mean it,” she presses. “I don’t think I would have made it without you.”

The brute smashed through the wall, not even phased by the blast of ice from the Krogan’s omni-tool. She was too close. Her biotic energy twisted the beast’s armor, but there was too little time and too little firepower in her hands to stop it.

He charged ahead as its large, clawed hand came down toward her. There was no time to maneuver away and as time came back around him, there was little he could do to avoid it slashing through his left side. He ignored the pain, bursting his power around him just enough to stagger it backward as he raised the rifle in his hands despite the agony and separated its right arm at the shoulder.

By then, both Clarke and the Salarian had turned their attention to the brute, shredding it from angles until it teetered and fell, shaking the floor under its girth.

Vorn stumbled to a knee, pressing the keys to begin the auto-inject medical sequence in his damaged suit, clenching his fist around the small ring on his littlest finger as the others cleaned up the last of the reapers. It was their last fight before arriving here.

“You would have done the same for me,” he says. She couldn’t have. She shouldn’t, if she had the opportunity.

The Asari smiles and dips her shoulder slightly in fatigue. He slides his arm from behind her neck and steadies himself, letting her know that he is capable of making the final few steps to the palace on his own. She nods in relief.

“I noticed you don’t really talk to the others,” she says as her eyes turn up to look at the numerous snipers perched on the roof the building. “But you’ll talk to me.”

Vorn looks at the roof too and notices as one of the guns turns and points toward them. “You remind me of my niece, Aja.”

“Is she safe?” She asks. It’s the first question everyone asks when the survivors speak of their loved ones.

“I don’t know,” Vorn says. It is a version of the truth. It is more optimistic than he believes, but she does not need any more darkness than that which hangs around them. “I haven’t spoken to her in more than four years.”

“Oh.” The Asari shifts uncomfortably.

“I was imprisoned here,” he confesses, not because she needs to know but because he wants to tell her. “My crew was trying to bring a shipment of red sand to Earth. The humans were waiting for us. We were surrounded. I chose not to fight.”

“Oh.” She says it again. “I didn’t realize you were--”

“I have done much that I’m not proud of,” Vorn says.

He has ended eighty-nine lives in Jorvan’s name. He stopped counting the cases of red sand long, long ago. He does not know how many had been bonded into slavery because of his actions. The number is in the hundreds. He prays it has not eclipsed a thousand.

“What matters is you’re setting it right now,” the Asari says cheerfully. She smiles again and nods to try to make herself believe it. Her light cannot help but shine outward, unable to be contained.

“And for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came back for me,” she says. There is a deep sadness in the words and in her eyes, that dims the spirit within her. The loss of her in that moment makes Vorn feels the darkness too.

He can hear the motor in his artificial eye twisting open wider as they come under the shadow of the blasted brick manor. The quiet mechanical twisting inside his head is hollow and dead. It is a reminder of what he has given to keep her safe.

He has lost a quarter of his soul.

Maybe more.

Twelve dead lie on the floor.
These, he has killed in his own name.
His blood aches and smolders as he expels the used clip from the bottom of the gun and opens the first door.
The children cower in the corner when they see him, bedecked in armor and carrying a smoking gun.
They are emaciated and terrified.
In the third cell on the right side of the hall of the slave’s quarters, he finds her.
She is as scrawny and frightened as the others.
He tosses the gun on the floor, descends to a knee and opens his arms.
A moment later, her tiny, shaking arms are wrapped around his neck as he holds her bony body close to his chest.
“I never gave up on you, my little star.”
She wouldn’t ever be safe with him.
He tries not to weep as he hands her off to the missionaries.
He leaves her with a promise that he’ll come get her when he is finally free.
He fails to restrain himself when the door closes, she presses her small hands to the window and the ship lifts off.

Vorn does not acknowledge that he hears the jeers spoken just too loudly from the other side of the room.

The two humans are tossing cards down on the floor, playing some game that he does not know. They glance over from time to time, while muttering to themselves.

“My brother was killed in the Verge, you know,” the one with the close-cropped brown hair says. “Fucking spider-eyes raided the hospital he was working at. A hospital! Goddamn savages made a mess of the place.”

“I know,” says the other with the black hair and the targeting eyepiece pulled up across his forehead. “Did I ever tell you I one of them tried to knife me? Was working security on an eezo shipper making a pickup at Omega. I’m right there on the docks and this drunk fuck comes up and tries to shiv me.”

“You bust his head in?”

“Nah,” the black-haired one says as he lays down a card. “I was on official Alliance business. Got to be the ‘good soldier’ at all times, you know.” He tosses a sarcastic salute and they laugh.

Vorn continues to wipe down the components of the rifle, making a few minor tweaks. He had taken it from the trunk of a burned out police car. Its previous owner had probably never fired it. It showed. It was for the best. It was an unreliable weapon with its heavy kick.

“I’m surprised he’s here to kill reapers,” the black-haired one says.

“Probably gunned down a few survivors too for kicks. You know how they are,” the other replies.

Vorn has killed many humans. But he has never killed a child. And he has never taken joy from the task. He had not been born to kill. He had been engineered for it. In time, it had become a simple, mindless task.

There was no wealth nor glory to be had from it. There was no joy in watching a man fall to his knees and beg for his life, only to execute him anyway. There was no salvation in getting back in the ship and mopping the blood off his armor as he listened to the screams of women and children being corralled into the cargo hold bound for life in slavery.

Maybe he could have stopped it. Maybe he could have lashed out and turned his gun on Jorvan’s men. Maybe he could have tried to force his way into the lair, shattered walls and twisted men into pieces with the biotic powers they gave him in an effort to cut off the head of the organization and watch the arms and legs maim each other.

But he had a made a promise to her.

As long as he obeyed, he was safe. She was safe. And one day, he, too, would be free.

The Reapers had swiftly slaughtered their way through Batarian space. All of the worlds had fallen. Few refugees escaped. The military, the gangs, the free spacers were divided, which made them all the easier to break.

He had not seen her face among the dead yet.

He would not believe that she had gone to the afterlife until he knew for sure.

And then, he will try to join her.

The two men scoop up their cards and leave as another man comes in the doorway looking tired and dour. Clarke is not happy and he appears weary. He sits down, more like falls onto the floor, and pushes his back against the wall, rubbing his palms across his face.

“Shit,” he says to open the conversation. “I don’t know what I’m doing any more.”

Vorn clicks the last two pieces of the Argus back together, locks the bolts and places the gun on the floor. He does not speak.

“Things must be pretty desperate,” Clarke continues. “They’re scraping for officers to lead this attack. So they put me on the line with this fucking Major Coats. And he’s a goddamn Brit who’s been here since day one too. ‘Ohhh, we need men like you Clarke.’ ‘Ohhh, you know this city just like I do.’ ‘Ohhh, all that shit on Torfan happened so long ago.’”

His head bounces from side to side as he speaks each mocking line with disgust on his lips.

“I know what I should tell him and then when he puts me on spot, what do I do? Of course I fucking say yes!” Clarke bangs his head hard against the wall, perhaps trying to give himself trauma. But at the same time he does it, he is laughing.

He rubs his hand across the facial hair on his jaw again. He pinches his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger. He lets it go.

“Why are you following me around, anyway? Is it just ignorance? Let me introduce myself. I’m Alliance 2nd Lt. Greggory Clarke and I killed a fuckton of Batarians in a massacre on Torfan. Nice to meet you!” He extends his hand to Vorn while his face is drawn and serious despite his unusual words.

Perhaps he did not expect it, but Vorn clasps his hand and gives it one firm shake.

“My name is Vorn. Offender ID 2081-1289HS-0003945. I’m serving twenty-five years in HM Prison Wandsworth for red sand trafficking. I was previously employed for the criminal lord Jorvan, the fourth most powerful man in the Harsa system.”

Clarke swallows as he lets go of Vorn’s hand. “That’s… surprising. Although I can’t really say it’s the same thing.”

“Batarians killed humans on Elysium. Humans killed Batarians back on Torfan. Your people did a better job at it. But that is in the past, is it not?”

Clarke smirks at the question, although Vorn does not understand why. He lets go of a single chuckle, too, and shakes his head. “I wish it were that easy,” Clarke says. He quickly clarifies. “Not against you. You’ve saved my ass at least a couple times already. Just, Torfan… it’s not the past for me. Maybe never will be.”

Clarke’s right hand clenches quickly into a fist and then releases nearly as quickly. He stretches his fingers, drumming them one by way against his leg.

“Why are you fighting now?” Vorn asks. He does not know the answer. But he wants to understand.

Clarke scratches the back of his head and grins again, as if everything serious somehow had a humorous twist to it. Maybe this is just how he is, unable to process the difficult without downplaying it to a joke.

“I don’t know,” Clarke says. “Not for glory, that’s for damn sure. Reapers have got to go, for one.”

“For the Asari?” Vorn asks. He has seen how they speak to one another, how they seek one another out. He had seen the look of relief on Clarke’s face when he took the wound from the brute instead of her.

Clarke chuckles softly again. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I do it for Dess. I do it for you, and for Grog and Bug. For Tark.”

“Then let that be enough,” Vorn says. He is glad to hear it. “To live and to fight for another, and not for the self, there is no greater purpose.”

Vorn believes it is the truth. It is the truth that he has made. It is the truth he has clung to, because he must.

It is enough.

Clarke nods his head slightly as he processes the words. He rubs his hand across his chin covered in hair. He pinches his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger. He lets it go. Clarke exhales a small, contented puff through his nose.

“We’re moving out first thing in the morning,” Clarke says.

“Welcome to Hammer.”

“Where is she?”
Jorvan demands it as he drives the club into Vorn’s knee once again.
His hands clench behind his back, fingers squeezing tightly in the stun cuffs at the renewed burst of pain.
“She isn’t yours to keep.”
The defiant statement brings the club into his bloody and broken knee again.
“You killed a dozen men. MY men!”
He does not say anything this time.
The butt of the club strikes him in the center of his chest.
“I am worth more than all of them combined.”
“You are worth nothing!” Jorvan insists as he throws the club to the ground and drives his fists into Vorn’s mouth over and over and over again until they are smeared with blood.
When he is done with his brutality, Vorn lets the blood drip from his broken jaw.
His words bubble as he forces them between broken bones and bloody lips.
“Name a price. I’ll work it off.”
Speech is agony.
Jorvan laughs as he wipes his bloody fists in a rag.
“You’re right, Vorn. I’ve invested too much in you to just waste you.”
He pulls the knife out of the sheath.
“But the price for disobedience and disrespect is high. Very high.”
He grabs the back of Vorn’s head roughly in his left hand as he presses the point of the knife down.
He digs it down, driving it into the corner of Vorn’s upper left eye.
He scrapes and twists, as if he is wedging a nut out of a shell.
Vorn cannot even scream as he chokes on the globs of blood filling his mouth.
The soul lies behind the eyes.
Jorvan releases his hold as the single, black eye pops from the socket and falls to the floor.
He stomps emphatically down, crushing it into ooze.
Vorn is denied eternity.
He plants the knife in Vorn’s left thigh with a single downward stroke and wipes his hands.
“Fix him,” he commands. “He owes me a great debt.”

The price was worth paying.

Chapter Text

Citadel Court Records -- Alliance Embassy Access
Cause No. 57D03-L5-8512-F6-0011033

Name: Jorgal Grog

Charges: Possession of a controlled substance w/prior, a Level 6 felony. Possession of paraphernalia w/prior, a Class A misdemeanor. Battery, a Class A misdemeanor. Disorderly conduct, a Class B misdemeanor. Public intoxication, a Class B misdemeanor.
CCS Entry 1: 2/03/86 -- Initial hearing held. Defendant appears in person. Charges read. Defendant enters plea of not guilty. Bond set. Indigent. Court appoints public defender James Adams Esq. No contact order issued. Pretrial hearing set for 06/03/86 10 a.m. CST. Defendant ordered to appear.
CCS Entry 2: 2/03/86 -- Clerk directed to distribute copies of no contact order.
CCS Entry 3: 2/05/86 -- Defense, by James Adams, files motion for discovery. Court grants motion for discovery.
CCS Entry 4: 2/19/86 -- Prosecution response to discovery entered.

CCS Entry 5: 06/03/86 -- PT conference held. Prosecution by Janelle Deveraux, DPA. Defense by James Adams. Defendant does not appear. Warrant issued.

“Please state your name for the record.”

“Grog.”

“Your full name, please,” the crackling voice from the speaker said. The hazy blue hologram of the Salarian in a jacket with ID on his left breast folded his hands in front of him.

He rolled his eyes. “Jorgal Grog.”

“Please state your age.”

“Don’t you have a file or something on me up there?” Grog said, annoyed, as he glanced up at the window overlooking his room. There were three Salarians standing there with datapads in their hands and one more carrying one of those slick-looking pistols at his hip and a big-ass rifle in his hands.

The Salarian hologram lifted its right hand. “We do, but for our records, we’d like to hear it from you as well.”

“How long is this going to take?”

“Not long if you are willing to cooperate,” the Salarian doctor said with a blank look on his face as he folded his hands on the table again. Wherever he was, he wasn’t anywhere where Grog could see him from the floor of his clean, sleek, hi-tech, minimalist medical room. 

A bed, the table, a curvy, hard plastic chair and a few monitors. All of the walls were transparent, shatterproof glass -- the first chair hadn’t even made a nick in it when he struck it, but the chair splintered into about five pieces -- and shielded too. He was suspended over a jungle or marsh or something. On the top of the one wall, the room was connected to the rest of the complex near the ceiling, where the door and its retractable steps were out of reach.

He was still covered in multiple white tech bandages, each monitoring individual wounds, speeding tissue regeneration and controlling pain. The biggest of them was taped over the left side of his chest.

“Where’s Bug? I want to talk to Bug.”

“He is not currently available,” the doctor hologram crackled again.

Grog pounded his hands on the table. It was sturdy too, not budging even under the powerful strike. “It’s been how many weeks? You told me they did it. You told me they killed the Reapers. So what’s the hold up? Where is Bug? What happened?”

The doctor’s eyes blinked in that flitty, buggy way while he continued looking blankly ahead. He needed to play some cards, with a stone face like that. He could clean up in some of the dens on the Citadel with a pair of icy eyes like that.

“That’s what we want you to tell us, Jorgal Grog.”

Grog felt good.

Really good.

The bullets ricocheted off his armor as he lowered his head and charged forward, feet pounding the dusty floor of the broken up shop. His finger on his left hand danced over the pin on the grenade like he was feeling up a nice blue tit in that skin bar on Omega. The fingers on his right hand squeezed the handle of the shotgun, hard and excited and ready to burst, just like on his crank right after dropping the rest of his credits to take home that little dancer. He was pretty sure he left her hobbled for a night.

His blood was pumping. 

And when his blood was pumping, Grog felt good.

Really good.

He could feel the pressure as each slug hit his armor, like getting punched from six different directions in a really good bar fight, as he smashed through the side of the wall into the little reaper lair. As he came through the bricks, he could feel that popping, poking sensation pick up. There were a lot of those puffy ugly Batarian shits in here. All of them turned toward him with their four blue, stupid eyes and their dopey Batarian mouths hanging open.

“Surprise, you cum guzzling--”

He punched the tech armor, the nova of orange energy bursting off of him and crushing the reapers into the walls. He flicked the pin out of the grenade, tossing it into the clump of reapers in the back of the room just out of reach as they punched rounds into his shield. As it popped and they floated off the ground, he casually stepped forward, lifting the barrel of the shotgun and picking them out of the air, one by one. The last one, he gave a little -- well, not so little -- push out of the hole in the roof, the blue-black explosion sending the thing hurtling up into the smoky black sky.

He checked the readout on his omni. His shield had only dropped to half. “What a disappointment,” Grog said to himself as he lit up the comm. “Clear on this side, Clarke.”

“When I said see if you could dislodge them out of that cover, I didn’t exactly mean go bull rushing in there,” Clarke’s voice said into his earpiece.

Grog exhaled, feeling cool, calm air filling his lungs as his blood slowed down. He could feel that dull ache across the front of his skull again as the batteries refilled his shields, but as the immediate lack of danger sapped his buzz.

“You got something else for me to kill?” Grog said back into the line. “I’m getting bored.”

The dust was slowly settling around him as chunks of the blasted walls crumbled toward the floor. One of the cannibals was still twitching in the corner. Grog bent down, pulling the blade out of his omni and sticking an uppercut into the monster from the gut up into its ribs. The four-eyed goo bag crackled and powered down.

“We’re clear for the moment, little brother,” Bug said across the comm.. “But it sounds like Blue Company is in some trouble. We’re getting orders to move in to assist.”

Grog let the blade retract and gave the cannibal a little slap upside the cheek to let it know there were no hard feelings between them. He did try, after all. Just not nearly as hard as he needed. He and his buddies had been a little bit of fun. That part when the tech armor went bzzzt-vrrrmph and tossed him into the wall was fun. 

Grog now wished he had frozen them first, so then they would shatter when he hit them with the pulse. Maybe next time.

The community channel opened up with its signaling beep in his ear.

“Red Company, new orders. We’re moving south by southeast to relieve Blue Company. They’re pinned down in a firefight with some heavy reaper guns. We’ll flank the Reaps from the north. Expect heavy resistance.” Grog liked the sound of heavy resistance. “Check your omnis for updated maps and mission objectives. Platoon leaders report in. Captain Turner out.”

There was a momentary pause as the platoon leaders checked in. After a few seconds, the comm broke in again. “Scarlet Platoon acknowledges new orders.” There was a temporary break in Clarke’s voice as it transferred from the company channel down to the platoon level. “Squads prepare to rendezvous at the following coords. Check in and report status.”

Grog glanced down at his omni as the new location popped up on the map, then hit responder to acknowledge that he received it and to send his vitals back. 

Since taking on the responsibility of another couple dozen fighters -- fighters, not soldiers -- the human had seemed to change personalities. His laid-back, fun demeanor seemed to disappear. Now he was issuing concise, calculated orders and following a strictly defined plan. He was even more cautious than before. Grog had been surprised, then excited, when Clarke gave him the OK to go flying across the field. Normally he only let the Batarian break lines.

He shut off the omni display and dug his fingers into his pack. One small container. One crucible. One needle.

Grog popped the cap and tipped it until one of the small blue capsules fell into his palm. He slipped the cap back in place and dropped the container back into the pack. The pill plopped into the bottom of the bowl caked with brown, burnt residue that stuck like tar. He punched up the torch on his omni, roasting the bottom of the small metal cup until white smoke and the smell of chemicals began to fill up his nostrils.

It smelled kind of like burning plastic as he watched the waxy coating begin to melt away, sloughing off the sides of the capsule. He stuck the point of the needle in, carefully moving it aside like gently pulling the thinnest lace panties off the rounded blue ass of a high-class Citadel escort.

A single drop of water from his canteen. Increased the heat until the flames licked up all sides of the cup. The gritty tablet fell apart into pieces, falling into solution. The whole thing thickened slightly and began to brown like caramel. Grog added one more drop of water, swirling the cup slightly to keep it from burning to the edges.

He stuck the point of the injector into the mixture. The plunger pulled back, drawing it into the chamber. Grog set the cup down to cool as he pulled down the neckpiece of his armor, craning his neck slightly to the right.

It was the best part as he jammed the thick needle into the side of the pulsing artery. He could feel that sharp sting of pain as it cut in. It had once been razor sharp, but months of use had dulled it. He could feel the thick, brown fluid dispersing into his bloodstream, carried away with the rhythmic duet of his hearts thumping in his chest.

He yanked the needle back out, ignoring the small spurt of yellow-orange blood that followed it. He slipped the still-warm crucible back into his pack along with the dirty injector. He bent his neck left and right, slapping his cheeks with both of his hands.

And then Grog could start to feel it as the stim diffused through his system.

He could feel his hearts thumping faster. He could feel the gurgle in his nearly empty stomachs. He could feel the stiffening in his crank as his balls clenched.

Grog’s blood was pumping.

And when his blood was pumping, Grog felt good.

Really good.

“Now this is a good fight!”

He punched the sizzling, spent thermal clip out of the side of the shotgun and slipped a new one in. Just three left. Ammo running low. Power cells getting close to empty. Legs burning with fatigue. And a no-man’s land strewn with bodies, shattered concrete and charred and blackened skeletons of vehicles between them.

They had dislodged the force that had Blue Company pinned down. Then a wing of reapers had moved around their flank. Rounds started flying and the reapers started separating out the fighters from the soldiers. A banshee had decimated an entire fireteam. Then a brute came charging through their cover and ripped that one human in half and broken bones on three others before they could put enough fire on it to bring it down.

The Alliance was supposedly rolling in a column of Makos to break the reaper line. For now, they had battled to a stalemate. Grog was looking forward to the fireworks.

“I don’t know that the humans share your enthusiasm,” Bug said from his nest in the bed of the burned-out truck, long gun balanced in the shattered back window and keeping an eye downfield. The reapers had more or less learned not to move out of cover, because Bug had taken the heads off the last five who tried. Grog didn’t know if reapers feared death, or feared the end of their technological undeath, but they were being more cautious now.

“Humans are cowards,” Grog said. He watched the way their hands shook as they changed out ammo on their guns and how timidly they lifted their heads up out of cover. They had shields. The shield would let you know if something was about to take your head off.

“I’ll remind you they only have one set of organs and they don’t have hardened skin,” Bug said.

“It’s because their homeworld is all soft and pretty. Soft planets make soft people,” Grog quipped.

“Hard planets make hard-headed people,” Bug countered. “What about Lt. Clarke? Soft?”

Grog glanced around the rear bumper of the truck. Nothing. Reapers all sitting in their cover. Catching their breath, maybe, if they still breathed. “Nah. For a human, Clarke’s got a big old quad. He’s been out there. He knows.”

“I’m sure he would say he knows too well,” Bug said as he turned his eye away from his scope for a moment. “Do you have another one of those lift grenades?”

“All out,” Grog said, patting the bandolier across his chest and its multiple empty loops.

Bug blinked and smiled and turned back to his long gun.

Grog fiddled with the bottle of pills and the paraphernalia in his pocket. He hadn’t needed it since the fighting got good, but if they sat here any longer, it might be a good opportunity to burn one. He slipped his hand out of the pocket, peered around the edge of the truck again, didn’t see anything, and pulled back behind the bumper.

“So where were you supposed to take me after bailing me out? Back on the Citadel,” Grog asked.

The Salarian had showed up at his holding cell in the Citadel lockup. On the other side of the forcefield, he tucked his hands behind his back and said he saw the security video of the brawl that Grog had started in the cantina.

He said he wasn’t from the public defender’s office. He wasn’t from the prosecutor. He wasn’t C-Sec. He just claimed that he was a friend and that he’d be willing to pay the bail if Grog agreed to travel with him.

Grog’s exact words had been: “Go squish yourself, bug.”

The Salarian had done that same blink and smile and chuckled softly to himself. Then he sweetened the deal and claimed he had a cure to reverse the genophage infection.

When Grog agreed and asked him his name, he said “Bug” would be fine.

“Sur’Kesh,” Bug said. 

The rifle boomed as it launched a shell down field and Bug quickly worked the slide to ready the next round.

Grog snorted. “Glad we didn’t do that.”

“It’s the humid season,” Bug said. “Not my favorite time of year, either.”

“I still don’t believe that the bugs made a cure. And I really don’t believe that they’re just volunteering to give it to Krogan.”

Bug pulled back from his rifle and hit his omni. “Crimson 1, this is Scarlet 2. It looks like the contacts are moving your direction behind the cover line. Stay sharp.”

The comm buzzed and the human on the other end patched in. “Copy that, Scarlet 2. Thanks for the heads up. We’ll keep an eye out.”

“That’s what I was told,” Bug said, picking the conversation back up as he settled back behind the butt of his rifle. “The Dalatrasses do shift their stances when it is politically expedient. Despite what the pundits say. Being threatened by a race of superior technological beings from beyond the edges of the galaxies encouraged them to ‘evolve’ their positions on the Krogan.”

“And the bugs aren’t just planning to use us again, like with the Rachni?” He could hear the clunking sounds of metal and the humming of engines in the area. Maybe the Mako parade was finally showing up.

“That I wouldn’t bet against,” Bug said, honestly. “Salarians like to try to keep an edge on everyone. I doubt we’d ever be able to keep pace with Krogan breeding, unless we allowed more female births, which would allow for more overall births, but then it would throw the entire matrilineal line of political dynasties into turmoil and then we wouldn’t have to worry about the Krogan because we’d be fighting a civil war across the core worlds.”

The comm crackled in his ear. “The cavalry has arrived,” Clarke said. “They’re going to break the reaper fortifications on the south. It’ll be up to the infantry on the north end. Any volunteers to lead the charge… Grog?”

He smiled at the notion of getting to run headfirst into the enemy line as he tapped his comm. “You’re talking dirty to me, Clarke.”

“Just try not to get yourself killed. They’ll fire up a flare when it’s time to go. Don’t charge before then,” Clarke scolded.

Grog charged out of position that one time and stirred up that nest of ravagers and no one ever seemed to forget it… The heat from their rounds exploding just off his backside and the clink-clink of little metal swarmer legs growing louder behind him had been damn exhilarating.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t just cart me straight off to Sur-Kesh,” Grog said as he tinkered with his omni to calibrate for extra forward shields.

“You’re the one who put the gun in my face, little brother,” Bug reminded him.

“From what I’ve seen, you could have snatched that gun right out of my hand and turned it in my face,” Grog said.

“I could have,” Bug agreed with a slight, proud titter. “The humans have a saying. ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’”

“Sounds like something you bugs would say,” Grog said with a snort.

“Salarians have a similar saying, although, for the last time, we don’t eat flies… any more,” Bug said as he trailed off. “The point being, would you have come willingly if I demanded that we go to Sur’Kesh?”

“No.” Of all the places in the galaxy, the bug homeworld was the second-to-last plant he wanted to go. “So you decided to come to the burning asshole of the universe so we can be buddies and go together?”

“ You wanted to come here,” Bug reminded him. “It’s working, isn’t it? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Grog hadn’t had any of those in, well, ever.

Krogan on Tuchanka liked him because he was the same species as them. But they didn’t like him because he was young and they were old and crusty and bitter.

Gangs on the outlying space stations liked him when they needed to break somebody’s legs or go charging into a gunfight. But they didn’t like him when he wasn’t breaking something.

The Blood Pack liked him as long as he was toeing the line, following orders, pointing his gun where they said and keeping his hands out of the loot pile. But they didn’t like him when he started talking about how Commander So-And-So Bigshot was a skirt-wearing varren bitch and needed to go.

Citadel smugglers liked him when he was lugging crates of contraband and scaring C-Sec into taking half the bribes they usually asked for. But they didn’t like him when he started wanting his fair cut plus extra because he was doing most of the work.

Dancers, strippers and hookers liked him as long as he was raining credits on them. They didn’t like him after the credits ran out.

Bartenders liked him… no, bartenders never liked him. Something always got blood on it when he came around drinking.

Maybe Bug was just working him up to take him to Sur’Kesh and push him out an airlock. Still, the Salarian was as tough and hard as a Krogan, wasn’t afraid to run tell Grog when he was acting like a pyjack and didn’t try to make him do this or follow that order or break this guy’s knee or pay extra if you want to do that or stop snorting that shit and get over here and put that box in the cargo hold…

Good enough. 

Best he had ever had.

“Yeah, big bro, we’re friends.”

The chorus of explosions from the south started rumbling the street underneath him and the single red flare curled up over the top of the buildings with a trail of smoke behind hit.

Grog pumped the slide on the shotgun in his left hand and banged his first against his chest plate three times to get his hearts going again.

“Now be a pal and cover my fat ass.”

Grog could see the spurt of red blood spray across the concrete as Clarke fell backward.

He fell onto pavement, his shoulder banging hard against the twisted skeleton of the car. He gritted his teeth as his fingers dabbed the new hole in the shoulder of his armor and the shot that had punctured it. He grunted as he tried to roll his shoulder and punched the auto-injector on his omni.

“Goddamn bitch,” Clarke muttered to himself as he dabbed at the blood trickling down his chestplate.

“Bad?” Grog asked as his shield popped just as he ducked back into cover. The stress of multiple recharges were draining his power cells down, fast.

“I’ll live,” Clarke said, his head ducking instinctively as more fire grazed over the hood of the car, sending sparks flying with that satisfying ping noise of metal on metal. He glanced back up and shook his head. “Maybe.”

Clarke pulled up the platoon vitals on his omni, gave it one quick glance and closed the floating projection as quickly as he could.

The three Mako tanks had allowed them to push deeper into the heart of downtown London toward the shining blue beam that sheared down from the sky. The reaper resistance thickened with every block they crossed, until a ravager ambush blew apart all three tanks and decimated Burgundy Platoon.

Then the entire machine ground and the reapers weren’t playing around letting them pick up any more ground.

“INCOMING!”

The shout from down the line was followed shortly by an explosion that lifted one of the burnt out vehicles on a cloud of flame and sent two more soldiers flying backward across the street. Their guns skittered out of their hands and neither moved after they landed.

“How long do we have?” Clarke asked.

Grog shook his head as he stood up, the blue flame dancing around his hand as he pushed back a group of charging husks, their fragile bodies breaking in two as the biotic force slammed them. He came back down into cover. “Not long.”

Clarke touched his omni. “Red Command, this is Scarlet 1. We are being overrun. Repeat, overrun. Request immediate support.”

Grog could hear the crackle across the line and the sound of gunfire and explosions in the background as the response patched in. “Negative, Scarlet 1. We’ve got nothing to send you. Yellow Company ETA is ten minutes. Hold that position.”

“We’re not going to survive that long, Red Command,” Clarke tried to argue.

“Hold that line, Lieutenant, no matter the cost.” The orders were spoken as blunt as the death sentence they were. “Red Command out.”

Grog sprayed his shotgun over the roof of the car as two husks crawled over the top like ants as Clarke’s omni blade gutted a third coming around the other side of the vehicle, spilling blood and oil and sparks onto the asphalt. Down the narrow street squeezed close together by the multi-story buildings on either side, the waves of reapers went back as far as he could see in the dark.

The view was punctuated by the scream of another human as three husks mobbed him and chewed him to pieces. His squadmate turned out of cover to run, a spray of gunfire striking him in the back as he stumbled face-first, dead, onto the street. A beam of blue streaked from the far streetcorner, bursting in a flash as Vorn cut apart the husks with controlled bursts from his rifle before ducking back into cover.

Clarke grimaced as he forced himself to lift his left arm, moving his wounded shoulder, and touched his omni. “Scarlet Platoon. Yellow Company is inbound with reinforcements. Our orders are to hold this line until they arrive.” 

He omitted the rest of command’s orders.

“They’re not coming!” A shaky, young voice broke in over the comm. “They’ve left us to die out here!”

“Scarlet 30, hold your position!” Clarke commanded back into the comm, but it was too late. On the right flank, the soldier popped up, spraying his rifle wildly down the street as he backpedaled, ducking into a building and he was gone.

Another two men did the same. Then a third. The line began to crumble.

Clarke leaned on the hood of the car, steadying his rifle, as he pumped a concussion round down the line to push the encroaching reapers into cover. Grog didn’t waste any time, charging behind the line of destroyed vehicles littering the street and the twisted, burning hulk that remained of the last Mako.

He caught one soldier by arm as he tried to stand up and violently threw him back down onto the ground, stamping his foot into the pavement as he hovered over. 

“Stay and fight, you coward!” Grog bellowed as he lifted the man up, spun him, and tossed him back against the cover facing forward.

Grog pumped the last two rounds out of his shotgun into the approaching cannibal line and punched the smoking, empty clip out. His left hand flared, pushing back the line again as Clarke bobbed from cover to cover, coming toward him.

He stopped, perching his rifle in the broken window of a van, the muzzle flashing brightly as burst after burst of burst of red-hot incendiary rounds sprayed out of the gun.

And then, the gun stopped and Clarke slid down the side of the vehicle.

“Clarke!” Grog ignored the snapping at his shield as he charged down the line. He grabbed the first husk trying to crawl over the roof and slammed its head into the bent hood, freezing the second with a blast of ice from his omni before kicking it into giblets.

He crouched down, expecting to find the worst.

Instead, he found Clarke’s fist locked around the collar of his suit and entire arm shaking. 

“Where’d they get you?” He scanned the human, but couldn’t see any blood fresher than the dried streak of crimson running from the shoulder wound. There were no bullet wounds or shrapnel around his neck, no burns or punctures or cuts.

But the wheeze. He could hear the loud, whistling wheeze and see the strain in the man’s neck, the bulge in the veins across his head, the red color to his face and the sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“There’s something wrong with Clarke,” Grog said across the squad line as he reached down, wrapping his hands around the neckpiece of the armor and bending them outward and away from his chest.

“What? What’s wrong?” It was Dess. He had expected it to be her.

“I don’t know,” Grog said. “He’s shaking. Looks like he can’t breathe.”

“He’s having a panic attack,” Dess said.

“Panic?” 

Grog looked at the soldier. Clarke had a Krogan quad on him. He had walked into dozens of battles. He wasn’t afraid to go first. He wasn’t afraid to push into the city. He wasn’t afraid to order men to walk into situations that would get them killed.

But the look in Clarke’s eyes as he glanced back up said that it was true. It was a pathetic, helpless look in his eyes. It was quickly followed by another grimace as the muscles in his neck spasmed and the wheezing between his lips sputtered.

“I can help him!” Dess said, her own breath labored. He could see her white combat suit at the far left flank darting in and out, her tiny SMG opening holes and the blue biotic fog floating around her. “Just keep him safe until I get there!”

“This is Scarlet 2, assuming temporary command,” Bug’s voice patched in as soon as Dess’s quit. “Left flank, lay down suppressing fire on the approaching cannibal line. Right flank, tighten up and hold that line. Scarlet 10, watch approaching marauders on your left side...”

Clarke gagged, a choking, sucking sound as he struggled to pull the air in. 

Clarke was no human coward. 

But he was scared.

Grog knew something about that.

“Dess is coming. Hold on, buddy. I’ll keep you covered,” he said as he ejected Clarke’s power cell and jammed it into his own suit. Clarke didn’t need it, and it wouldn’t do him any good if Grog failed now.

His hand dove into his pocket, pulling the bottle of pills out. He popped off the top, spilling them all into his hand and squeezed his palm, crushing them roughly. He’d need this too, now, more than ever.

Grog pressed his palm to his nostrils, snorting in the roughly crushed pile of powder and bits of broken capsules. No time for anything more.

He reached down, taking Clarke’s rifle in his other hand, snorting inward to try to force anything in that hadn’t made it before.

“Little brother, what are you doing?” Bug’s voice crackled in his ear.

“Don’t worry about it, bro,” he said. “Just cover me.”

Grog took a breath, cocked the slide on his shotgun in his right hand and rolled around the side of the van.

He banged the shotgun against his chestplate, one, two, three times. The bright orange, glowing tech armor formed around him. He could feel the thump in his chest. A chill ran through him as he looked at the wave of reapers and felt the tingle as the secondary shield stopped the first shot.

He fired the shotgun once in the air to draw attention and bellowed.

“Come and get me you fucking ugly ass bitches!”

The Reapers were happy to oblige as the spray of gunfire turned on him, the buzz of the techno armor stopping fire as it pinged against his chest. They felt like the stinging of the hostile swarms of insects that would sometimes sweep through the filthy Tuchankan settlements when he was a child.

Grog lifted his right arm, tracing a charging husk, and separated it into three pieces with a single booming blast. He lifted his left arm, eyeballing the muzzle flash of marauder rifle in a broken window on the left side of the street and squeezed the trigger of Clarke’s rifle, barely feeling anything as the dainty gun spit a trio of rounds up and the corrupted Turian tumbled over the sill and into the street.

He swung his arm, the short barrel of the shotgun knocking a head off another husk hungry for his arm. He stomped a foot down on the falling body, crunching the electronic components in the chest under his heel. He fired a long shot downfield at a duo of cannibals moving between cover in the alley on the right side of the street.

A puff of orange pixels evaporated around him with a brrrzzzttt-wommm as the tech armor failed, followed by the higher-pitched bzztt-bzztt of his shield as it got pelted from the left side.

He turned, squeezing the rifle and mowing down a husk. He swung his arm, the kickback from the shotgun jarring his shoulder as it tore another in half. He eyed another cannibal ducking behind a car and pumped three rounds into its head as it peeked up to shoot at him.

He tucked the shotgun under his left arm, turning his fingers as he wound the mass effect field around another cannibal, the shifting, energy twisting it. His palm slammed forward, a roaring detonation, as the mangled body was thrown backward into the building.

Bzztt-zztt, the shield said as it died, followed by the tink-tink of gunfire striking his armor. He could feel the burn as one shot grazed the side of his face. That sting, he remembered it, like the dirty knife the once powerful, now disgraced, often drunk Jorgal warlord had used to cut him because he could, because he was old and falling to pieces and Grog was young.

He jammed another magazine into the side of the shotgun and cocked it, slamming his omni to resummon his tech armor with a beep-bwwwmmm. He could feel his hearts thumping, ba-dum, da-dum, ba-dum, da-dum, a battle drumming deep inside of him as the pile of dead began to form before him, as his blood rushed, his vision narrowed, his hearing faded as the uppers washed through him.

Every reaper seemed to move at half speed, every movement capturing his full attention, his arms swinging, fingers pulling, bullets spraying, powers crackling, shields falling, armor shredding, blood spilling, hearts pounding, mind racing, blood coursing, gunfire roaring, bodies falling, lungs heaving, body aching.

The grazing wounds felt like the teeth of his father’s snarling varren hound, the beast he would set on his son to “toughen him up” as a hatchling.

A flash, like the muzzles of rifles in the black midnight as the Clan Jurdon raiders came roaring over the ridge.

The clenching in his chest as hard and fierce as watching his mother bleed to death with no one there to help her. 

The men, enraged, shouted at each other for hours, blood and bodies piling up as arguments turned to violence turned to an all-out riot.

The trembling in the ground as the thresher bursts through the earth seemed to shake the entire planet, the screaming of the young warrior Urgan as it tore him and his krantt to pieces.

Grog’s feet were unsteady as he stepped forward, his foot uneven on the pile of twitching husk bodies, slickened with oil and blood. He squeezed his left hand and the gun clicked, empty. The red-lit magazines at his belt, all gone, empty. He punched his left hand forward, the wild, unfocused wall of biotic force slamming everything in front of him.

He felt so out-of-body. So tired. So drunk. So barely there. His right hand mashed against the keys of his omni. He could feel the burning in his left leg, the sharp metal stink of metal in flesh. The glow of orange light obscured his vision.

“Grog!” A voice in his ear screamed. “Get out of there!”

The growing blackness parted, barfing a hulking, metal giant before him, tearing through the curtain of growing shadows. Charging. Deadly. Brute.

Grog lowered his head and turned as much as he could as the long, clawed fist slammed into his left shoulder, thick, jagged blades driving through tech and shield and armor and flesh and bone. For the first time, he could feel the burst of pain. It tried to pull back, but its claws were dug deep.

A shower of sparks fell around him. 

Pieces of metal fell around him. 

Grog’s right arm felt like a dreadnought as he lifted it, a million million tons of steel. The brute shook, trying to pull its arm away as it took shot after shot from the desperate line of defenders behind him.

The brute roared, its mechanical jaws nearly detaching like a snake.

Grog flew that dreadnought right into the black hole with the last of his strength. Moving forward. Never backward. Unafraid, with nothing to lose and no way out. With nothing but ruins behind him it, charging ahead, wherever it might lead, was the only way.

BOOM

His father, enraged, inconsolable, unshakable in his hatred of his son, fell backward. The steaming, impossibly wide hole in his neck was a flood of blood.

The trigger clicked as it returned to neutral position as Grog lifted his finger from it.

His fingers shook so much the gun spilled out of his grasp.

There was no going back.

Grog fell.

“I can’t really concentrate with all of you standing there, you know,” Grog said, glancing up at the medical team observing from the window. “And what is this garbage?”

He cringed as he watched the large-shelled Krogan stud pummeling that Krogan female flat on the floor. He didn’t know where the Salarians had picked up this porn and he didn’t want to think of what kind of conversation someone had to have with a superior at Salarian intelligence about why they needed low-budget Krogan skin flicks, but it was laughably bad. Also disgusting. Sure, Grog was Krogan, but he didn’t want to have to think about what he looked like while humping. The hookers always closed their eyes, because it wasn't a pretty sight.

His junk felt like a soggy hose. They required a “sample.” They had given him a clear cup and pulled up a display. He didn’t understand why they couldn’t just use one of their fancy ass syringes and extract what they needed. Then again, what scientist was stupid enough to try to stick a needle in a Krogan’s scrote without expecting he’d leave with his neck not bent at a ninety degree angle? There was no romance to any of it.

That, and his head was pounding. With most of the bandages off, they had pulled back on his pain medication. The few weeks of painkillers had been different, but not unwelcome. Now that he was fully recovered, they wouldn’t give him anything. No downers. No uppers. He had made a demand for some uppers. When they refused, he destroyed his bed. They still hadn’t given him anything. And now he had to sleep on the ripped mattress on the floor.

“I apologize, Jorgal Grog, but we need to closely monitor your vital signs during…” the female Salarian doctor over the intercom trailed off. At least he thought she was female. Might have just been a scrawny, high-voiced guy. He couldn’t tell. All these Salarians looked the same.

“How about a little blue on human? Female human. Or blue on blue. Come on, this is disgusting,” he said over the rugged grunting of the Krogan who was flexing his biceps while going hands-free in the most ridiculously comical display. It was killing the mood. “I’m going to throw up.”

The display blinked off for a moment, then flipped back on as a middle-aged, busty Asari slipped into a glass-windowed shower with a young, skinny brunette human with tattoos of black ink stars at both hips. They didn’t waste any time jumping into it.

“Now that’s hot!” Grog said as he tightened his grip and his blood got pumping. “Why didn’t you start with this instead of that other shit?”

The Salarians didn’t answer as Grog went about his business, trying to ignore the fact that he was being watched. He didn’t mind being watched if it was Hooker No. 2 watching from the motel room chair while he was one the bed with Hooker No. 1, waiting for her chance to jump in, but this, this was no good.

“Bug said the genophage was cured,” Grog said, while keeping his eyes on the screen and his hand stroking. “So why do you need my infected cum?”

“We want to run a comparison between healthy and damaged Krogan gene sequences to anticipate whether there will be any unexpected side effects of Dr. Solus’ cure,” the doctor’s voice said over the intercom.

“I don’t buy that,” Grog said as the human grabbed the Asari’s crests and pulled her head in tighter.

“That is your prerogative,” the doctor replied.

“Bug promised me he’d get me that cure,” Grog said. “I haven’t received it yet.”

“You will,” the doctor answered. “Once we are finished with our tests and interviews.”

“Salarians are liars. Can’t trust you bugs.”

“Yet you trusted Bug?”

“He paid my bail.”

“In exchange for you coming back with him here to Sur’Kesh.”

“We didn’t go back to Sur’Kesh, did we?”

“No,” the Salarian doctor said. “Why did you go to Earth?”

“Good fighting to be had at Earth.”

“Earth had been mostly destroyed by the Reapers by the time of your release from Citadel holding.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to go.”

“Did he try to stop you?”

“Bug? No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I stuck a gun in his face and told him I wanted to go to Earth.”

“He knew your record. He knew you weren’t a murderer.”

“I’m a good actor. How do you think I always got out of trouble on the Citadel?”

“Why didn’t you want to go back to Tuchanka?”

“There’s nothing on Tuchanka for a green-hide.”

“You grew up on Tuchanka.”

“Why do you think I left in the first place?”

“Why did you leave?”

Grog grunted in annoyance as he readjusted his hand and turned his chair slightly away from the viewing window.

“When your daddy wanted to have you, he went and squirted his jizz into some muck puddle or however it is you bugs do it. Then you happened. My mother laid two-hundred, eighty-six eggs in my clutch. You know how many of us cracked shells? Two. Me and Gurg. Gurg died three days after taking his first breath. Not like it mattered anyway. Krogan need females. They don’t need any more quads running around.”

“That doesn’t explain why you left Tuchanka.”

“You bugs don’t get it. You and all your little tadpole brothers and sisters get born on day one, climb out of the water on day two, learn to use a damn omni on day three and die on day four. Then the next wave of tadpoles start climbing out of the water. 

“When you’re born on Tuchanka, you’re one of two things. You’re either everyone’s hope for the future or you’re a damned insult.”

His quad clenched as he held the rim of the cup to the end of his crank as it filled with spurt after spurt. 

The human in the video had her chest and face pressed to the shower wall, her hips and ass sticking out with the Asari’s face buried between her cheeks, tongue lapping up and down. It suddenly all seemed so fake and wrong on an interspecies level now, even as he breathed hard and could feel his hearts racing in his chest.

“Come get your damned sample,” Grog said as he tossed the cup of semen down to the ground, not caring that half of it spilled as it bounced and rolled against the glass floor of his cell.

Grog felt good.

Really good.

Feeling good was all he had to live for most days.

“The entire galaxy needs you one day then kills you the next day. You grow up on a planet that your people destroyed because they didn’t know who to lash out at except themselves. You watch every clutch of eggs come out warm and wait for them to slowly grow cold because they’re all dead on the inside.

“Krogan live forever. Feuds on Tuchanka live forever. You fight and kill each other just so someday you can claim that your clan was the last one to die out. They tell you to complete this ritual and respect this tradition and none of it matters.”

The shaman had instructed him on the rite. To truly become part of clan Jorgal, he would need to face down the thresher. He spit in the shaman’s face. What was the point in becoming the last in a dead line that would not accept it was dying?

His father yelled. His father swore. His father beat and battered.

His father called him a coward.

His father died, falling backward as the still-smoking chunks of metal ravaged his throat.

Grog left Tuchanka.

The door of the medical room slid open. Two Salarian soldiers stood on either side, each with one hand wrapped around the handle of their slick black rifles and the other holding the grip further up the barrel. The narrow, steep staircase slowly slid down from the platform and touched down to the floor of his chamber, locking into the ground.

“Please step to the back of the room, Jorgal Grog,” the doctor said now, in the flesh, as she slipped sterile gloves onto her hands.

“I thought I was just a patient,” Grog said, looking at the two soldiers with guns. “Or am I a prisoner?”

No one moved or reacted to that. The Salarians continued to stare, their eyes flitting open and closed. For bugs that only lived for a blink, Grog might have thought they would have a sense of urgency. He lifted his pants back up, tied the cord at his waist and stepped to the back of the room, sitting down on the ruined mattress on the floor.

The soldiers lifted their guns in unison, the dots of the green laser sights dancing on his chest. That seemed a little excessive, he thought. The doctor slowly descended the stairs.

“Where’s Bug?” he asked again, for what felt like the hundredth time across the multiple days of interviews, examinations and tests. “I want to talk to him.”

The doctor crouched down, grabbing the bottom of the cup and retrieving a lid for the collection bottle, ignoring the rest of the tainted sample that had touched the floor. “As you’ve been told before, Jorgal Grog, we cannot disclose his current location.”

“Why not?”

“It’s classified.”

“I want to talk to Bug,” Grog said as he stood up and took a step forward. The green laser lights jumped with him, now dancing across his throat and cheeks as the guards shifted their aim. “Now.”

“Please sit back down, Jorgal Grog.”

“Not until you tell me where Bug is.”

“I can’t.”

“Is he dead?”

The doctor slowly lowered the sample cup into the pocket of her coat without taking her eyes off the Krogan. No emotion. No twitch. No tell.

“That’s classified.”

He was dead.

Grog thought about charging across the room. He’d be able to grab the doctor and snap her in half before those guards pumped him full of bullets. No gun in existence could spray enough rounds to stop a Krogan across this short of a distance. He could probably throw her body into one, charge the other, break his arm in half, take his gun and shoot the other in the face four or five times.

He could probably charge into the lab, shoot the rest of the interviewers and guards and lab techs and whoever else in their faces, too. He could piss on all their computers and shit in all their test tubes and beakers. He could bull rush down the hallway and try to take down as many of them as possible before the bugs took him down.

But what would be the point? 

Bug wouldn’t approve of him ripping up the lab or killing people just because he could.

This situation wasn’t so unlike the rest of his life. 

By himself. Isolated. Everyone looking down on him every day. 

Sur-Kesh was the second-to-last place he ever wanted to go, but it was just like everywhere else, just slicker and cleaner and always buzzing. The bugs would get fed up with him sitting around eventually and shove him out to the next place.

Maybe it was time to go back to Tuchanka. The rest of the galaxy had turned out to be just as rotten and shitty as his homeworld. Everyone else just dressed it up better.

Grog backed up a step toward the wall as the doctor sighed in relief and the guards lowered their guns again.

“I promise, Jorgal Grog, you won’t be kept much longer,” the doctor said.

He didn’t believe her.

“Can I get some uppers at least?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head as she ascended the stairs, slipped through the open doors and touched the panel. The stairs retracted, sucking back into the wall as the two clear doors slid together and sealed.

The doctor spared him one pitiable look between the panes before she turned around and pulled the sample cup out of her jacket for analysis.

Grog plopped back down on the broken mattress and rested his shell against the clear wall of his prison. They’d let him out eventually. Then he could move on to the next place, get into the next fight, eat or snort or shoot the next pile of pills, guzzle the next cup of liquor and screw the next hooker he could afford.

It would get his blood pumping and get him to the next day.

When his blood was pumping, he could forget.

Grog could forget that he felt bad.

Chapter Text

STG Intelligence User Access
CLASSIFIED Lvl. 3 Priority Clearance Required CLASSIFIED
WARNING -- Unauthorized users attempting to gain access
to secure systems will be prosecuted.

Enter ID: ***********
Password: ***************

Verifying credentials…
Lvl. 3 clearance approved.
Scanning connection...
External access detected.
Identifying location…
Location detected. Planet: Earth. Local coordinates: 51.4978N, 0.1594W.
Access point is not recognized.
Limited access granted.
Some information will be restricted until accessed through secure STG channel.

Welcome, Sgt. Torik.

The numbers on the rangefinder in his scope were ticking down fast.

Too fast. Far too fast.

Even with what remained of all three companies united — the well-provisioned Yellow Company, the decimated Blue Company and their tattered Red Company — the streets of London were too narrow and the reaper resistance too thick to get anywhere quickly. The Conduit, the blue pillar of energy falling from the sky was only about two miles away.

But it would be a bloody two miles, two miles the Alliance would bleed badly to cross.

It would be all their blood on the streets if the reaper reinforcements arrived before they could break the line. And the numbers on the rangefinder continued to tick down. Too fast.

Bug swung his rifle back to the east, over the small brick parapet of the building. The Alliance’s Primary Battalion could break that line, would break that line, in time. But it would take more time than they had.

“Clarke, reaper reinforcements are inbound from the south. Ravagers. Brutes. Banshees. If you don’t make headway soon they’re going to fall on your flank.”

The return transmission was filled with the sound of gunfire as Bug spied down on their entrenched position. There were more lifeless bodies slumped along the street than there had been an hour previous. Most of them wore yellow bands tied around their left arms. The bandaged wound around Clarke’s left shoulder was nearly as red as the red identifying band he wore around the left bicep of his armor. One-hundred fifty-eight meters out, sixteen meters down.

“Then they’re going to fall on our flank, because we’re not going anywhere soon.”

Bug turned back toward the reapers, checked the numbers ticking on his scope again and tapped his omni.

“Whatever it takes, you have to get moving,” Bug said as he shouldered his rifle and the heavy black backpack as the digital buzz of the tactical cloak wrapped around him. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”

He never heard the response as he cut the comm, piping in some of the Earthling music on Clarke’s recommendation he had downloaded during their brief respite at the English palace. “The Beatles” lacked a certain rhythm and fast-paced beat of popular Salarian music, but the vocals were excellent.

His long legs glided across the rooftops, dodging debris, vents and satellite dishes. He lept confidently across the narrow spans between buildings, quickly crossing along the row of buildings toward the south and toward the approaching reaper forces.

As he approached the stories-tall hotel building, he pointed his wrist, fired the grapple toward the edge and let the quick-reeling motor vault him up to the roof. Reapers six hundred meters out, thirty-five meters down.

He settled into the southeast corner of the roof, behind the parapet, propping his gun on the corner as he slung the pack off his back and opened it for the first time. He pulled the short black case out, punching in the four-digit passcode on the lock.

Smooth lines. Cool-colored metal. Streamlined and efficient. Pure Salarian make, through and through.

Here comes the sun. 

(do do do do) 

Here comes the sun 

(and I say) 

It’s all right

He hummed along as he screwed the pieces together until they clicked and then dropped the charge into the tube. The weapon notes had been brief. New tech. Anti-armor. Maximum spread. Only good for one shot.

Bug lifted the slim launcher to his right shoulder, flipping the sighting reticle out as he eyed the approaching reaper column. The mechanical legs of the ravagers all seemed to move in perfect unison, their movements orchestrated by their mechanical overlords orbiting the planet. The flash of lights in the night sky and the flaming hulks of wreckage streaked the sky as they burned down through the planet’s atmosphere. The majority of those coming down were Citadel ships.

The offensive in the skies above the planet had begun hours ago, keeping the sky lit with flashes and fire.

“Get us to that beam,” Clarke had said. 

Bug smiled to himself at the lieutenant’s imprecise language in his issuance of orders. “Get us” there was different, very different, from “get” there. Even now, as he aimed, tilting the launcher upward as the computerized targeting system laid out the blast zone, he could successfully complete that mission. 

He barely felt the metal tube on his shoulder flinch as he pulled the trigger and the single, smooth projectile blasted forward like a white-lit flare with a train of thin, twisting smoke behind it. It flew straight and true, bending upward, high above the street.

Then a small flash. No sound. A few seconds passed in silence. And the streets erupted in a roar of thunder and flames as the clustered ordinance plummeted down to the ground and detonated in the reaper lines.

Bug tossed the launcher aside and ducked down behind the butt of his rifle. His hand fell into place around the grip, finger resting lightly on the trigger. He could feel the light balance in his hand, the subtle weight from the thermal clip, the gentle smell of thermal grease wafting up from the chamber, as he settled his eye behind the scope. It was his instrument, his masterpiece in which he would write this last unfinished symphony.

He zeroed the scope around the single-shining blue eye of the harvester leading the pack, on alert and scanning as the column it led burned behind it. Bug depressed the trigger, working the slide and loading the next shot as he watched the reaper’s neck jerk backward, sparks and fluid spilling from the head as the entire body flailed and tumbled.

“Target neutralized,” he whispered to himself.

Bug swept to the banshee, the next highest-value target, activating the disrupter, zeroing the head, pulling the trigger. He fired a second shot, discharged the magazine and snapped the next into place.

“Target neutralized.”

The side of the building shook as the ravagers located him, pumping artillery into the side wall. He ignored the dust particles fluttering up in front of the sight and held his breath to steady the gun as he lined up a shot on another banshee’s chest, driving the disrupter round straight at the heart, working the slide, adjusting the next shot up, blowing the head off the shoulders.

“Target neutralized…”

Bug swept the gun down, finding the first pot-bellied ravager he could, pulling the trigger, watching the rachni hulk crumble as the sac burst, spilling tiny metal-legged spiders on the street.

“Target neutralized,” he grunted as he expelled the spent magazine, folded in the gun, hit his cloak and bounded to the other side of the roof, vaulting the edge and sprinting down the block as the focused fire of ravagers disintegrated the corner where he had just been, just moments too late.

He scaled the metal gutter pipe, hands and feet clutching closely to it as he threw himself on top of the next building, sliding, settling into the corner as he stretched the long gun out once more. Four hundred meters out, twenty-eight meters down. Wind, slight inward left push. The rangefinder numbers in the scope ticked, the data pouring in and calculating distance and drop, calculating gravitational effects, analyzing target data and highlighting weak points as he slid the next magazine into the gun and took a breath.

“I’m over here now,” he whispered to the ravager lined up in the scope.

Target neutralized. Target neutralized. Target neutralized.

Hot shrapnel shredded the side of the building, his shield turning the burning metal away just as the next shot obliterated the corner of the roof underneath him, collapsing the small, upward-jutting wall and jerking the gun down as the next shot thundered out of the cannon. He pulled the gun hard upward, keeping his hands firmly wrapped around the stock and rolled right as the follow-up shell blew the chunk of wall into the sky.

He touched the retractor, the rifle folding as he tapped the cloak again, hopping up and sprinting before it had time to fully materialize. He felt the wind of shots whizz behind him as his arms pumped up and down, eyes plotting the course over roofs and across gaps to the next most suitable perch as the reapers wailed in frustration.

Bug flipped the comm back on as he ran, listening into the chatter pouring in.

“--whatever the hell it was, we better not waste it.”

“Gold Platoon, advance on objective!”

“Incoming brute! We need-----”

“Indigo 1? Indigo 1?”

“Blue Command, this is Cyan 4. Indigo 1 is down. We’re covering Indigo platoon’s retreat.”

“All Red platoons, we’ve got an opening. Push up the avenue and puncture that line!”

The chatter all seemed to link together in his head. He could see the different groups of soldiers moving down the street, keeping track of their progress in his head.

 Bug vaulted down to the low roof, kicking through the roof door and stutter-stepping down stairs as he burst into an apartment occupying the center of the building. The place was dark, frozen, as if it had been abandoned in the middle of the day, except now filled with dirt and water and broken glass.

Bug crouched onto one knee in the window, pulling the remainder of his magazines and laying them next to one another on the window sill. Reapers two-hundred eighty six meters out, twenty meters down. No wind in the narrow street column, heat density higher due to the burning streetside.

He reached into his pocket, withdrew the Star of Sur’Kesh, and clipped it to his left his breast.

He clicked a magazine in, sighted the broken and confused reaper line scanning the rooftops and firing randomly at the corners of the buildings. He took a breath and tapped the comm.

“Clarke.”

“Bug? Bug is that you?”

“Clarke,” he paused. “It’s been an honor to serve with you. If you ever see Grog again, tell him I’m sorry.”

“Bug, don’t.” The words were a plea. They were shaky. Frightened. Desperate. “Don’t do this. That’s an order.”

Bug swallowed, reset his palm on the handle of the rifle and rested his finger on the trigger. He considered it for that brief moment as he placed another ravager in the crosshair of his gun.

He could disobey this order, too. The mission came first. Whatever the cost.

“Negative, Clarke,” he said as he closed the comm line, pulled the earpiece out of his ear and tossed it over his shoulder. He wouldn’t need that any more.

“It’s my life.”

He pulled the trigger on the rifle.

Each round that came out of his gun felt like a parade he’d never get through the streets of Talat. Hot sparks exploding from the muzzle of the gun like fireworks, bullets leaving trails like long white streamers flying down onto the street, the dust from the crumbling around him like glitter and confetti falling from the sky.

The empty magazines tumbled down the side of the building as he ejected them from the gun, slapping the fresh cartridges in. His blue, electronic shield buzzed and snapped and disappeared. He could feel burns and cuts and tears across his cheeks as the shells pummeled the side of the building even as he rained celebration down upon the reapers until the chamber ran dry and his magazines were all spent.

And when the final shell exploded in the third-floor window of the downtown flat in a burst of flame, crumbling concrete and the long, black gun and single Salarian body tumbled in a free fall down to the street, Bug’s face was frozen in a final, contented smile.

For the first time, Bug had chosen his own way.

When Earth’s sun rose behind the thick clouds and smoke that blackened the sky, Bug withdrew from behind the gun and headed downstairs from the roof to wake the others.

The rest was short, only a few hours, but everyone needed it. The humans who had survived looked paper thin and ready to tumble over. Bug looked at his omni as he descended the stairs from the roof and smiled to himself as he ignored the blinking notification.

They could call for him as much as they wanted. He wasn’t answering. 

Not any more.

Not after what they did.

Not after what they were responsible for.

Clarke awoke with a startle when Bug nudged him and grabbed for his gun out of instinct, until his eyes blinked a few times and realized it wasn’t an attack.

“Shit,” Clarke said, swallowing and blinking again, sitting up on his elbows and looking toward the window. “Morning already?”

“O-five-hundred,” Bug said as he presented an open box of “granola bars” he had found while scavenging the building while everyone else slept. Bug had allowed himself to close his eyes for about one hour overnight, never truly losing consciousness, but relaxing enough to recharge his body for another day of combat that was sure to be as grueling as the last.

Clarke dipped his hand into the box, pulled one of the bars out and glanced across the room at Dess, who was still sleeping curled up into a small ball with a thin blanket pulled over her.

From this room, the light of the Conduit in the distance was the greater source of light than the weak rising sun, casting a blue glow through the windows.

“Lieutenant, I feel it’s necessary to apologize and explain for my behavior,” Bug said as he placed the box down on the carpet. He had been thinking for most of the night about what he would say.

Clarke squinted slightly and rubbed his hand through his facial hair, looking confused. “What are you talking about?”

“About last night, sir. I should not have hidden my identity. If I had said something sooner, perhaps they could have helped--”

“Forget it,” Clarke cut him off as he peeled open the granola bar, wrapper crinkling quietly.

“With all due respect, lieutenant--”

“Stop. Don’t. And stop calling me that,” Clarke said, waving his hand dismissively as he broke the end of the bar off between his teeth. “I served. I know how it can be. Saying something wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“The Special Tasks Group could have provided assistance. We might not have lost nearly as many men. Grog… and Tarkus, too--”

“Stop,” Clarke said again, moving his fingers horizontally as if he were closing a zipper. “What’s your real name, Bug?”

Bug straightened, his hands clasping behind his back as if answering to roll call. “Sergeant Sur’Kesh Maegas Talat Barr Easa Torik Chursh, Salarian Special Tasks Group, Krogan Surveillance Team.”

“You’ve never lost someone in combat before, Chursh?” Clarke asked.

The corner of Bug’s mouth bent and he exhaled. “That’s a complicated question to answer.”

He’d been trying to answer that question ever since the Colonel accepted his enlistment and gave him his assignment. He’d been trying to answer that question since being assigned to the STG. He’d been trying to answer that question since hacking the personnel files looking for the truth.

What he had found had answered it on a literal level, but it had left him even more lost than before.

If Clarke was curious, he didn’t press it.

“Thinking about everything you could have done or should have done or how it might have turned out differently will cost you your sanity,” he said. “Drop me on Torfan eight years ago and I’m confident I won’t send thirty-five bodies home in flag-draped coffins again.”

Clarke took another bite of the granola bar, nodded as Vorn came into the room and silently tossed him the box. The Batarian grabbed one of the bars, tossed the box back and silently paced toward the window.

“I can’t go back to Torfan. I can’t go back to the mall and save Tark. I can’t go back to yesterday morning and save half the platoon. I can’t go back and save Grog.” Clarke clenched his left hand into a fist and released it slowly. 

It was clear that Grog pained him most. The disappointment written across his face was clear. His panic had caught him at an inopportune time and it had nearly cost Krogan his life.

“But I can go out there and fight today for those who are still with us. If we can break the Reapers and fire this Crucible thing, we can save billions .”

Bug could feel a chill run through him. Clarke’s eyes were deep, hard, sad, determined, all at the same time. They had seen the reality behind the promise. 

Bug could remember the identical look in Kirish’s narrow, black eyes.

That look had always made him believe.

“I require new orders, lieutenant,” Bug said now, lifting his chin and tightening his shoulders again.

Clarke gave him that confused look again.

“STG command recalled me, but I refused to go back,” Bug said. “Since childhood, I always wanted to be a soldier. I was taught to always follow orders. I now have no orders. I require new orders.”

He couldn’t properly explain it. Ever since looking at the STG agents standing on the edge of the gangway into the ship, seeing the outstretched hand, and deciding not to take it, something felt broken. Bug had made this decision. He couldn’t return to the STG, yet now that he was here in defiance of its orders, he couldn’t help but feel like a saw was tearing up his insides.

He knew Clarke couldn’t understand the reasoning, or lack of it, behind the request. It didn’t matter. Knowing or not knowing, understanding or not understanding, Clarke never seemed to care about the underlying reason. Whatever was most pragmatic was most prudent.

The lieutenant turned his shoulder, motioning with his right hand, the half-eaten granola bar in his palm, and extended one finger to point toward the blue pillar of light connecting the ground and the sky.

“Get us to that beam.”

“All units, this is Yellow Platoon. Take cover, bombers are inbound to dust the AO.”

Even as the brute fell, its claws detaching from Grog’s shoulder and the new, gaping hole in its head spewing blood, sparks and fluid, Bug pumped three more rounds into its body as it fell backward just to make sure.

Grog crumpled backward, the empty shotgun falling out of his hand, as the roar of Alliance air support buzzed low over the tops of the buildings and the first burst of ordnance exploded in the street.

Bug vaulted the roof, folding his gun as he fell, and landed hard on the lower roof, his hands pressing down to steady the shock running up his legs. The streets were burning as the late-arriving Yellow Company swept in from the west, fresh soldiers and tanks flanking the surviving reapers and shattering their ranks.

Bug’s legs glided over the broken ground, zipping past rubble and bodies, passing by Clarke wheezing for breath with Dessia T’Bena’s long, blue fingers pressed into his temples. He ignored the blue streak of light as the criminal Vorn Deagh pushed up the lane to join the offensive without orders.

He only had one priority as he slid across the blood-slickened pavement and rolled the hulking Krogan body onto its back.

His fingers grazed over the pieces of broken armor, his left hand pressed down onto the chest plate and right hand fumbling through the gushing blood at Grog’s neck. He couldn’t feel any movement in Grog’s chest. He couldn’t feel anything in the shredded flesh around the left side of Grog’s neck.

“Come on, Little Brother, don’t give in on me,” Bug pleaded as he retrieved the syringe of adrenaline and slammed it through the thick hide and pushed the plunger down. He noticed the white powder on Grog’s nose and shook his head. If the pills and the injection couldn’t keep him going at this point, nothing would.

Bug wiped his bloody fingers on the front of his armor and punched the frequency manually into his omni, entering the encryption and opening the secure channel. He waited as the protocols ran, security checks and tests running, clearing, and moving on. After a few seconds it cleared, the green light coming on and the channel opened.

“This is KST agent Torik Chursh, requesting immediate medical evac for patient, one Krogan male, Jorgal Grog, Tracking Number 15354. Patient has sustained multiple gunshot wounds and severe puncture wound to the left side shoulder and chest. Patient has no respiration, no detectable heartbeat due to severity of injuries. Repeat, requesting immediate medical evac, one Krogan male, critical injuries.”

“We copy you, Torik. Evac is inbound. ETA ninety seconds.”

Bug pressed his mouth down, breathing into Grog’s lungs and pressed his hands into the pile of blood and tissue that constituted what was left of the Krogan’s chest. Based on the bleeding pattern, the primary heart appeared to be dead, but the secondary might still function if he could get it restarted. With his entire body weight behind him, Bug shoved his arms down, compressing the steel-like chest.

He lifted and forced himself down again, not even paying attention as an errant shot from down field dinged his shield.

Eighty-two. Eighty-one. Eighty.

The massive shoulder wound was flooding blood onto the pavement and he could feel the dampness seeping into the joints of his knee pad. He lifted his hand, both covered in crimson, and grabbed the medigel injector from his belt, jabbing it into the exposed trauma and pushing the plunger. A single tube couldn’t stop that bleeding, not even if he could find the broken artery in the tangled mess of flesh and armor.

Seventy. Sixty-nine. Sixty-eight.

He slammed his palms back down onto Grog’s chest, the compression causing another bloody spurt to spray from the gaping wound as he manually forced the blood through his chest cavity. His shoulders and back were already burning from the amount of power he needed just to get the Krogan’s body to move under his hands.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. Fifty-six.

Human soldiers marched past, the yellow insignias on their armor flashing through the periphery of his vision as they secured the street, the sounds of their rifles popping nearby. A soldier with a white armband with a red cross stopped, stooping down next to him.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the young man said. “What happened?”

Forty-five. Forty-four.

Bug slid over, giving enough room. “Do what you can to stop that bleeding,” he ordered, not answering the initial question as he motioned with his head toward the mangled shoulder. “Medivac is inbound in… thirty-seven, thirty-six.”

Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Thirty-three.

Grog’s lips still hadn’t moved. His body was corpse-still. The jagged pieces of armor cut the sides of Bug’s hand with every compression. As Grog’s blood seeped into the cuts, he could feel the sharp stinging burn with every movement of his hand.

Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two.

The human medic tossed a medigel injector aside, pulling a second and looking for the right place to use it. His face was pale and his hand was shaking. Maybe he was raw. Maybe it was the sound of gunfire still echoing behind them. Maybe it was unfamiliarity with an alien patient.

Twelve. Eleven. Ten.

“Sgt. Torik, this is Sky. We have visual on your location,” the radio crackled in his ear. “We’re setting down as close as we can. LZ is hot. Repeat, LZ is hot.”

The slim, sleek, black ship seemed to materialize out of the smoke and clouds, the blue fog of its drives streaking across the tops of the buildings as it came to a sudden halt and a quick drop into the street behind the row of damaged vehicles and the remains of Red Platoon.

Three. Two. One.

The bay door of the ship clanked down exactly on time, Salarian troopers exiting first and fanning out to cover the ship, followed quickly by another crew guiding the large hover gurney.

Bug lifted his hands up, watching Grog’s thick, hot blood pour off his hands like syrup. The Krogan’s face was still frozen and blank, his chest still not moving on its own.

“I’m sorry, Little Brother,” Bug said quietly to himself. “This wasn’t how I intended it to end.”

He stood and stepped back as the team arrived, quickly and carefully hoisting Grog up and onto the gurney, then quickly sprinting him back toward the ship. Bug followed, more slowly, his bloody hands dangling at his side as he stumbled toward the ship as if walking through a haze.

The CO stood at the end of the bay ramp. He lifted his rifle up, waving with his hand and shouting.

“Hurry, Torik! We’ve got to take off. Now!”

All he had to do was walk up that ramp. Strap himself into one of the seats. They’d take him home, debrief him. If Grog lived, they’d congratulate him on a mission accomplished, pin another accolade to his chest and hand him his next assignment.

He’d go wherever they said to go. He’d do whatever they said to do. He would follow orders without question.

They’d study Grog. They’d run tests. They’d never give him the genophage cure. They’d experiment on him until they were satisfied with the information they collected.

When they were done, they’d euthanize him.

He hadn’t planned to turn in his Little Brother. He’d continue to find excuses not to report back to Sur’Kesh. He could keep them hanging for months after Earth, if he was careful.

But when Grog was lying there, inches from death, he had no choice but to call the STG to pick him up.

Maybe his injuries would cause irreparable damage and cause the STG to release him once he was healed. Maybe he would be a valuable test subject and cause the scientists to change their mind about executing and dissecting him at the end of their study. Maybe Grog would realize what kind of danger he was in and kill his way out of wherever they were taking him.

He had preserved a shred of hope, no matter how small it was.

“No,” Bug said, the word tasting like poison as he forced it onto his tongue. He looked back at Clarke and Dessia on the ground behind the burned-out car. “I’m staying.”

“Don’t be stupid, Chursh! Get on the ship!” the CO shouted.

He shook his head. He couldn’t do it any more. Not after what he had learned.

“I made a promise to these people,” he lied. “To see this out to the end. Tell command that if I survive this, I’ll report in.”

The CO didn’t like that, but he didn’t have the time or patience to argue. The gangway began to rise as the ship lifted off into the air. A few seconds later it was vaulting above the rooftops, the nose pointed upward toward the sky, a flash of light and heat from the engines, and it shot upward into the atmosphere like a bullet and was gone.

He stepped forward and wiped his bloody hands down the front of his armor. He pulled his sniper rifle from his back, clicking the switch as it unfolded itself back into his hands.

Bug took a moment longer to look at the quickly fading vapor trail in the sky, knowing he’d never see Grog again.

Chursh stared at the blank entry fields of the terminal, the cursor blinking in and out. 

The bold-faced warning text that sat both above and underneath the fields warned of the stark consequences for trying to falsify one’s way into the secure server.

He sat in the corner of the roof, staring at the screen as he rolled the small data drive in between his fingers.

Tarkus Raetia, rest his soul, had been giddy at the notion of writing a crack capable of hacking STG systems. Over several nights, he had poked and prodded the Salarian access points, talking to himself as he turned from his test screen to his code. It had taken him a week, but he was confident he had created something capable of breaching the security, if only for a few minutes.

If it didn’t work as the Turian had promised, the consequences would certainly be stiff. If it did, perhaps Chursh would finally find the truth.

He slipped the drive into his omni.

Loading “Salarians Think They’re So Damn Smart”

The screen before Chursh’s face changed, lines of numbers and letters quickly scrolling past as the hack penetrated the encryption. It flew by, sheet by sheet, until the screen blinked dark, stayed dark for a second, and returned.

 And there he was, alone with the top-level personnel server wide open before him.

“You’ll only have about five minutes. Get what you need, get out, dump everything and never speak of it again,” Tarkus had told him. “And you’ll owe me a drink on the Citadel when we get out of this mess.”

If he ever made it back to the Citadel, he’d have to have that drink in Tarkus’ honor.

Query: Sur’Kesh Maeges Talat Barr Easa Torik Kirish

A single result appeared below his brother’s name. 

It was there, a personnel file that existed where STG said none existed, not even an unclassified, public record of the man being affiliated with the army. The bureaucrats could look Chursh in the eye and try to tell him that his brother never existed at all, because the STG had erased him.

The STG could never take away his memory and the same Torik blood that filled his veins.

Bio. Service record. Commendations. Mission assignments. Mission logs. Mission reports. Debriefings. Discipline reports. Psychiatric evaluations. Medical clearances. Test results. 

Chursh flipped past titles, navigating through file after file, scrolling downward until he found what he was looking for.

Operation Sable Talon: Result -- Failure

Chursh breezed past the written reports, still images, and piles of other documents inside the file. He opened the audio log of the mission, the one that STG brass told him didn’t exist either.

“Primary target is in range. Vehicle is on route to AO on expected path. Should be no problem. I’ll be home in time for dinner at the mess.

“Fifteen-hundred meters… One-thousand meters... Five hundred meters... One hundred meters…. Detonating charges.” 

The roar of explosives rumbles through the playback. A fumbling noise.

“Target is not destroyed. I have movement at the detonation site. I’ve got them in scope. Firing.” 

Two shots from the sniper rifle. 

“Target neutralized. I’ve got another coming out of the wreckage… it’s… it’s…”

A pause. 

“It’s a female. I… it’s a female. Repeat, female. We’ve got the wrong target. I’m aborting the…”

“Negative, Torik. Colonel confirms this is the correct target. Eliminate any survivors.”

“It’s a female.” Kirish repeats it, as if they didn’t hear him. “There are also, one, two, three, four… four juveniles. I repeat. One Krogan female and four Krogan juveniles.”

“You have your orders, Torik.”

There’s a long pause. There is no gunfire.

“No.” The pall in Kirish’s voice is infinite. “I’m not killing a female. Or children. Torik out.”

The audio recording ended abruptly. What followed it were pages upon pages of surveillance reports, casualty notices of other STG agents, oversight inquiries and responses, status reports and progress updates.

At the end of it all, a single video file. 

Chursh’s finger trembled as he opened it. Backed into a room, a dozen dead Salarians choking the doorway. Rifle and pistol, both empty, discarded on the floor. Kirish backed into the corner, his omni blade drawn and hanging at his side as he’s hunched over wounded. The STG agents form a semi-circle around him.

There is no audio to go with the video, only the flash of a half-dozen guns being fired in unison, bullets piercing him from every angle until he falls to the floor in the corner. The splatters of blood paint both walls like wings above the fallen body in black armor.

He stared at the grainy security video, the frozen image at the end of the clip. He stared at the indistinct shape of his older brother’s body in the corner. 

He stared at his hero, defeated.

Everything STG had fed his family over the years, that he had gone MIA in the Verge, that they didn’t have any information about his whereabouts, that they didn’t have anything to say about the mission he was on and what went wrong, all of it was lies.

Everything Kirish had told him as a child about there being no greater honor than to serve in STG, that there was nothing more important to protect Salarian interests throughout the galaxy, that there was no higher calling than to give your life to serve billions, all of it was lies.

They had killed him. The STG had killed his brother.

Everything Chursh had done his entire life, all of the brutally intensive training, all of the competition with his peers, all of the sacrifices he made to pursue this life, all of the orders he had followed without fault, all of the Krogan he had observed, intercepted, captured or killed, all of it was lies.

He only had a minute or so left before he would lose access, before he would have to leave and never be able to peer so deeply into the heart of STG again.

There was one more thing he had to know, one more curtain he needed to peer behind before he dumped the connection.

Query: Jorgal Grog.

Grog headbutted the brick wall, breaking the bricks, but also busting open his forehead.

He didn’t seem to notice as he paced back and forth with blood dripping down his face, running around the curves of his eyes. He probably didn’t feel it as a side effect of the amphetamines he had injected into his bloodstream after the fight.

The Krogan kept touching the dings in his armor where the reaper bullets had grazed him, as if they were bug bites itching his flesh. Every step was a frustrated stomp.

Grog had been stuck in the powerful mass effect field, powerless like an insect in a web as the banshee floated toward him, charging its biotic strike like black electric buzzing around its head. The long claws were pulled back behind its head, ready to strike its helpless prey.

The charged shot from Chursh’s rifle had gone through its slender throat and penetrated out the other side.

He had charged in, swapping the long gun for his Scorpion. He wove through the income fire, unleashing the explosive slugs with pinpoint accuracy, decimating the remaining reapers as the shots erupted.

Grog sat on the ground, wheezing for breath, stunned, as Chursh holstered the pistol and offered him a hand up.

“I should be dead,” Grog finally said after a minute more of pacing back and forth.

“My older brother always said there’s no such thing as ‘should,’” Chursh said. “Whatever happened is what happened.”

Grog wasn’t amused by philosophy. “I’m not joking. I’m not cut out for this type of fight.”

“That’s why I’m here to watch over you,” Chursh said.

“Wasting your time, if you ask me,” Grog said with a sigh.

“I get paid by the hour.”

Grog looked at him for a moment. Chursh blinked and cracked that smile again. The Krogan burst in a guffaw at the ridiculousness of the idea. For some reason, Chursh always found it easy to find the humor in almost dying.

And Grog laughed. For the moment, he stopped his pacing, stopped his fidgeting, and just laughed. After a solid minute, when his bellowing finally subsided to quiet chuckling, he wiped his mouth with his forearm.

“I’ve told you you’re insane, right?” Grog asked.

“It was your idea to come here,” Chursh reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah I guess it was,” Grog said with a nod and a tone of regret in his voice. “Anyway. Thanks. It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”

“That’s what big brothers are for,” Chursh teased.

But Grog didn’t take it that way. His whole stance seemed to change as he considered it. He nodded again slowly, replaying it in his head perhaps.

“Brother…” he said, testing the word on his tongue. “Never had one of those before…”

The pistol was steady, even if the Krogan’s stance betrayed that he was uncomfortable holding it in another person’s face.

“Change of plans, bug.”

Items were strewn all around the apartment. An overwhelming smell of spoiled food filled the air. He had said he wanted to return home to grab a few things for the road, but even in the mess, he had known exactly where to find the pistol in the chaos.

M-6 Carnifex Pistol. The identification plate was scratched off. The handle was wrapped, likely to prevent it from holding fingerprints. Even with a strong Krogan hand on it, the triggers on the older Carnifex models were stiff.

The gun was close enough to his head that Chursh could easily knock his hand aside before the Krogan could react. As long as he didn’t charge forward at first contact, Chursh should have enough time to subdue him with a full charge from the stun probe on his omni.

“You’ve got a ship. Take me to the human homeworld,” Grog said.

“The Reapers have invaded Earth. The system is currently under siege. Alliance Military have abandoned the planet. Traveling there would be suicide,” Chursh said.

The Krogan readjusted his fingers on the gun, edging forward slightly and pushing it even closer toward Chursh’s head. 

“Yeah, I know. That’s where I want to go. No one is coming looking for me there.” He pulled back the hammer on the pistol, the mechanisms making a grinding click that said the gun was not well-cared for. “Take me to Earth, bug, or I pull the trigger.”

None of it made sense. The psychological evaluation included in the dossier did not mention any previous indication of suicidal tendencies. STG had not identified any confederates connected to him in that system. Nor had it identified murder as part of his modus operandi.

Chursh hadn’t told him anything about where he intended to take him after bonding him out of the detention center. Perhaps the Krogan assumed he was there to transport him to Sur’Kesh, even though he did not say it. No doubt a lifetime of affiliation with the criminal underground made him naturally suspicious and paranoid of strangers.

If he wanted, Chursh could trip his alarm on the walk toward the docking bay and a half dozen STG agents on the Citadel would swarm in and subdue the Krogan, peacefully or not.

There’s nothing more valuable in this galaxy than trust, Little Brother.

“We can go to Earth, if that’s what you want,” Chursh agreed.

Even though that’s what he wanted, the Krogan jammed the gun forward again.

“What are you planning? Why are you messing with me?”

“I have orders to protect you,” Chursh said, calmly placing his hands behind his back to show he wasn’t a threat and that he was unphased by the pistol. “That is all. I’m with the Krogan Surveillance Team. We are tasked with tracking and corralling the more… errant young Krogan in an effort to preserve the species.”

Bug blinked and smiled. That wasn’t totally true, but true enough. The STG was trying to help. He believed that. It was why he had joined. It was why he had followed in Kirish’s footsteps.

“I am not a threat,” he said. “I’m only trying to help protect you from yourself.”

Grog spun the pistol on his finger, pulling it back and clipped it to his side. He laughed, loudly.

“You’re wasting your time then,” he said as he flipped through some of the junk cluttered on the dirty couch. “Thanks for bailing me out.”

Chursh grimaced as the Krogan picked up some kind of box, sniffed it, then ate whatever half-eaten thing was sitting in it out of refrigeration for who knows how long. Even though the joke back in training was that the Krogan stomachs were so resilient that a male could eat a loaded magazine and defecate empty shell casings, it was still disturbing to see it in action.

“Come with me to Earth,” Chursh said, now being the one to offer it, as crazy an idea as it was. There was no logical reason anyone would want to go there now beyond self-destruction. But maybe self-destruction on the grandest scale was what this Krogan wanted, what he needed, before he would be ready. “My orders won’t allow me to just let you go. But if I’m dead, you’ll be free to do as you wish.”

“However, I must warn you, the Reapers won’t have an easy time killing me ,” he added.

Many Krogan couldn’t resist the invitation of a fight, most couldn’t resist accepting a challenge and fewer still could take an insult to their manhood. So Chursh offered all three.

Grog’s eyes narrowed a bit, a slight growl as he took the emphasis exactly as it was intended. A wager. Outlive the Salarian and do whatever you want. He burped, loudly, then followed it up with a hearty laugh.

“Put up your ship. First one to die loses. Winner gets to keep it,” Grog said.

There was little to lose. STG wouldn’t want him to lose a vessel, but if he was dead, they wouldn’t be able to reprimand him. He extended his hand to the Krogan. “Deal.”

Grog clenched tightly, squeezing Chursh’s smaller fingers. He made sure to squeeze back, just as hard, to show that he wasn’t scared, despite the size difference.

“You’re my kind of crazy,” Grog said. “What’s your name, bug?”

Chursh blinked and smiled.

“Bug will be just fine.”

“I have the target, requesting permission to engage.”

He traced the moving man inside the center of the scope, slowly rotating the rifle on its stand from his concealed perch on the cliffs.

“This is Command. You are clear to fire, Specialist Torik.”

“Copy, command. Prepare for extraction at the rendezvous, 06:30.”

The target came to the side of the jeep, hopping into the driver’s seat. He reached down for the ignition. The engine flared up, roaring as it revved. The rumbling of the dirty-tech desert vehicle masked the sound of the two shots, in quick succession, from Chursh’s rifle.

Both rounds pierced the windshield, both striking the Krogan in the head. The upstart Tuchankan warlord’s head was thrown back into the seat, then bounced forward, slumped over the wheel.

Chursh folded the rifle quickly, re-establishing his cloak, and began sprinting back across the plateau toward the extraction point.

“Target has been neutralized,” he reported. “I’m en route to extraction.”

“Good work,” the voice from command praised. “Clean and professional. Just like your brother. I have a feeling you’ll go far with the KST, Torik.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He touched the breast pocket, over his heart, where he kept Kirish’s medal tucked away. If his brother could see him now, he’d be proud, Chursh thought. 

Maybe someday, he could aspire to be that good.

He twirled his food around with his spoon, staring blankly, eyes unfocused, into the middle of the slate-blue plastic bowl.

“Eat your food, Chursh,” Mother scolded.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Eat anyway.”

He lifted a spoonful of his mother’s salty noodle soup. It was delicious. It was always delicious. It took her all day to make it, so she only made it on special occasions.

Chursh wasn’t sure if learning that one of your children had been missing in action for a month qualified as special. The excitement that usually came with sucking noodles loudly into the corner of his mouth and gulping aromatic broth were severely dampened.

He wished the Colonel would go home. The officer sat quietly and politely eating from his bowl, making small talk with Mother as if he were on a casual visit. He was talking about the changes happening on the Presidium, while Mother sighed and wished she could afford to take another holiday to the Citadel soon.

Nobody had even mentioned Kirish’s name since this morning. Nobody had mentioned Kirish’s name to him directly, or any of his other siblings sitting around the long rectangular table munching soup politely in front of company. If he hadn’t crawled out of his bedroom to sit at the top of the staircase and eavesdrop, he wouldn’t have known anything was amiss.

How did Kirish go missing? 

He always came home.

He had received so many medals that Mother had to buy him a third display case for the upstairs bedroom. Kirish’s room was kept in pristine condition for his return home with its crisp green blanket folded on the bed and pillow fluffed and ready for a weary traveler’s head to plop down on it.

He had captured the entire Batarian Black Hole slaver gang without firing a single shot! He took over command of the heavily damaged frigate Dagnes after its captain was killed in bridge console explosion during an ambush in the Viper Nebula and safely maneuvered the ship through the relay back to Salarian space! He didn’t even get a little sick after being stuck by one of the super-poisonous Prickle Biter plants on Tuchanka that time he was there to capture the notorious pirate Urrrk the Urrrkful who was wanted for murder in eight systems!

He was a shoo-in to become the next Spectre!

“What happened to Kirish?” he blurted to the Colonel as he dropped his spoon into the bowl, unable to contain the question any longer.

“Chursh! Be quiet!” Mother scolded again.

“No, I want to know,” he said defiantly. He’d get extra chores for that.

“We’re not sure,” the Colonel said, lifting his hand to quiet Mother. “We’ve got our best men searching for him. I’m sure he’s still out there and we’re going to find him.”

“But Kirish is the best! He wouldn’t just go missing. He’s going to be a Spectre. Spectres never mess up!”

“Even the best soldiers make mistakes sometimes,” the Colonel said with a comforting smile that instead looked patronizing.

Chursh looked back down at his soup, lifted the edge of his spoon. Mother began apologizing to the Colonel and they went back to making small talk. He lifted a string of noodles up out of the broth, watching them dangle, then dropped it back into the bowl.

“I want to enlist,” he announced.

“No, Chursh,” Mother scolded more fiercely this time. “You’re too young.”

“I’m the same age Kirish was when you let him sign up!”

“Absolutely not.” She meant for that to be the end of the conversation.

“I want to enlist,” he repeated as if no one heard him the first time. “I want to be a soldier. I want to serve. I’m sick of waiting.”

“I want to find my brother,” he added in his head.

“We will talk about this later.” Mother was quickly losing her patience.

The Colonel turned toward him again, folding his hands in one another as Chursh crossed his arms over his chest and pouted.

“It may not be my place to say, but we are always in need of young, enthusiastic men,” the Colonel said to Mother. She tried to not look offended, although she was. “If you’re serious about enlisting and if you can get your mother’s approval, I would personally vouch for your application. The Torik family has always proudly served.”

The Colonel nodded to the young Chursh.

“I’m sure you’d be no exception.”

“Got a present for you, Tadpole.”

Chursh swung a clumsy punch that his brother easily sidestepped. “I’m not a tadpole. I’m almost four!”

“Four?” Kirish asked skeptically, squinting both his eyes. “When I was four, I was already flying speeders on the marsh circuit.”

“You were not!”

“Yeah, well I would have been if I could have convinced Mother to buy me that fixer-upper I saw in Selat. Could have made that hunk of junk a real beauty, I bet. Could have beaten all those slugs running the courses that year.”

Kirish unclipped the utility belt from his waist, carefully placing it down on the messy pile of blankets on his bed. The sunlight coming through the window reflected off the polished black metal of the holstered pistol and the pins in the flashbangs jingled softly like bells.

He pulled the rifle from the magnetic clip over his shoulder. With a press of a button, the compact box unfolded and locked together. Kirish pointed the barrel of the gun up at the ceiling — in about the same spot as the bullet hole from that time it accidentally discharged — and ejected the magazine from the gun. He tossed the clip onto the bed too then set the rifle on its bipod on the dresser.

Kirish sat down on the edge of the bed and yawned. “You know, I could go for some more sleep.”

“You slept for like five hours yesterday!”

“Yeah, I could sleep for six today. You ever heard of relay lag? I got it bad.”

“Where’s my present?” Chursh asked, not getting distracted by his brother’s tangents.

“Never can throw you off, can I, little brother?”

Chursh shook his head proudly.

Kirish popped open one of the pouches on his belt, dug inside of it for a second. As he turned back to Chursh, he unfurled the small black ribbon with the silver medallion at the bottom of it. He smiled.

“A medal?” Chursh asked as he reached up toward it.

“Yup. The Star of Sur’Kesh. ‘For bravery in action against an enemy of The Salarian Union.’ I want you to keep it for me.” He lowered it into Chursh’s outstretched palm.

“Don’t you want it?” Chursh asked as he ran his fingers along the edges of the pointed star, inspecting the insignia of the army engraved in the center of it.

Kirish shrugged. “It’s my second,” he said. “Besides, this way you can always look at it and think of me when I’m away on a mission. And, of course, show it off to your friends at school and make sure to tell them how awesome I am.”

He patted Chursh on the head and leaned back onto the bed, glancing around the room. Out of the last two years, he’d only been home a couple days. Even if he did send video messages home all the time, he seemed like a stranger inside the house.

“I’ve got to be going again soon, Little Brother,” he said.

“Where to?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “They’ll tell me when I get there.”

“Sounds fun,” Chursh said.

“Maybe it will be,” Kirish said. He glanced around the room, then half-smiled at Chursh again. “I wish I could be here to see your tournament. Mother says you’re the best shot by far. You had a good teacher, right?”

“Taught me everything not to do,” Chursh teased.

“Hey, you could do worse than me.”

“When are you coming home for good?”

Kirish rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged again.

“Can’t say. I’ll get to come home when the STG says I can come home. Orders. You remember what I told you about those, right?”

“Always follow orders,” Chursh recited, snapping a proud salute, just the way Kirish taught him.

“That’s right, little brother,” Kirish said, patting him on the head again. “Follow your orders and you’ll always stay out of trouble.”

Chapter Text

Dear Ambassador Siana;

I appreciate you taking the time to consider the application from my former student, Dessia T’Bena. I am writing to offer my recommendation for her placement in the ambassadorial staff in the Sol system.

Miss T’Bena was a student at my academy since her earliest years. Due to some unfortunate circumstances she has been residing at my school year-round since her pre-teenage years. She completed our rigorous curriculum with highest honors while also participating in innumerous extracurricular activities including sport, fine arts, debate and student government and leadership. She had also completed the military pre-training program, finishing just below the top of the class but with highest marks for biotic ability.

Since graduation from the academy, she has completed two post-graduate degrees in philosophy and political science. Her thesis “Starving Piracy: How Food Aid Programs in Batarian Space Can Reduce Crime” attracted the interest of several progressive policymakers here on Thessia and a trial program is scheduled to begin in 2187 CE.

Through her long education and her return to my academy as an instructional assistant since, I have grown to know Miss T’Bena as if she were my own daughter. Beyond her credentials, I would offer that I believe it is Miss T’Bena’s strong sense of empathy that would make her most suited for diplomatic work in Alliance space. If there is anyone that can connect to the humans on a personal and emotional level, I suspect you will find no one better suited to the task than Miss T’Bena.

There is no one I would more highly recommend.

Respectfully,

Allyria Dilitios

Headmistress, Goldenlake Academy, Thessia

Thessia 2067

On the last day of the semester, Dessia sat on the bench at the water’s edge, where you could see shuttles making their approach from the atmosphere down toward the landing pad.

She smiled every time another ship dropped through the fluffy clouds with a small puff as they zipped over the lake. Some of the pilots would skim low, sending ripples across the surface of the water until those waves lapped to where the water met the beach of shiny, rounded stones.

She’d crane her neck every time one landed, listening to the triple-tone bell that rang before the announcement came over the speakers about which students needed to report to the landing pad with their luggage to return home for the summer.

She crossed the names of her peers off the list in her head one by one as their names were called. By the time she pulled the plastic cover off her bento at lunch time, about half of the school was gone for the mid-year break.

The wind changed to the east during the afternoon and the clouds thickened. The temperature began to drop as the sun dipped under the now-heavy clouds and the setting sun turned the water into a pool of shimmering gold.

When the gold faded and the sky was touched with just the slightest purple and no more shuttles came piercing through the clouds, the Headmistress walked up behind her and laid a gentle hand across her shoulder.

“Come inside, Miss T’Bena,” she said. “I’ll make you some supper and we’ll have the staff fix your bed for the night.”

Dess gave one more look up toward the sky, hoping to see the lights on one last ship descending out of the sky. 

There was none.

She sniffled, nodded, and pushed herself up from the bench.

Hers was the only name left on her list.

Earth 2186

She ignored the pain and the smears of purple blood she left on the jagged pieces of brick as she clawed through the pile.

“We have to go!” Clarke shouted as the soldiers rose from their cover and began to charge down the street toward the next block.

She grabbed a large chunk of concrete and gave it a tug, but it held steady in the rubble. She reached around, grabbing the smaller pieces that had broken and wedged around the base, tossing them over her shoulder. She gave the concrete another pull and it moved an inch before she summoned her power, lifting the block inside the biotic field before throwing it to her side. As it moved, other pieces crumbled and fell into the hole, filling the empty places.

“Dess!” Clarke shouted again, as if she didn’t hear him the first time.

“I’m not leaving him behind,” she said steely and tossed another chunk of brick away.

On the other side of the crumbled wall, pummeled nearly to dust by the harvester shells before it had been brought down, was Vorn. The entire company had swarmed across the intersection, scrambling for cover as the winged monster had descended nearly on top of them, exploding shells into their lines the second it landed.

Vorn had ducked inside the building just as three shells burst into the wall and brought down the building around him.

“If we stay here, we’re going to get shredded!”

“Dessia,” Vorn’s voice said quietly over the radio. “Go.”

If he had died, if he had been crushed under the wreckage, she could have turned and did as Clarke wanted. She could have swallowed the loss and run. She would have pretended that he was never there at all, as she had with the others. She would erase them from her memory in order to walk on without them.

But Vorn wasn’t dead. He was alive, trapped on the other side of the wall.

“Come on!” Clarke said, reaching down and grabbing her by the right wrist.

She flailed, instinctively, jerking her hand out of his hold, followed by a sharp shove to his chest that knocked him back onto his heel.

“I’m not leaving him behind!” 

She said it again, this time a scream, nearly a shriek. The hole that the escaping words emptied in her chest felt wide and empty and she could feel the tremor in her stomach like a stone had been dropped from miles into the sky down into her.

Her wet fingers trembled and she felt ill, a hard lump caught in at the top of her throat as she looked at Clarke and the splotches on his chest armor where her bloody palms had struck his chest.

“Either help me, or leave me behind too,” she said after a moment that lasted too long for the vibrations of gunfire behind them in the street.

Clarke stared her down, as if a hard gaze would crack her resolve. Then he looked at the broken rubble of the building. Then he jumped at the sound of another explosion behind them in the streets.

“Fuck,” he cursed to himself then lifted his omni to his mouth. “Scarlet Platoon, dig in and cover my position. We’ve got a man trapped and we’re not leaving him.”

As he finished the command, Clarke stepped forward too and began pulling pieces of the rubble away at her side. He grunted as he pushed aside broken rebar and tossed concrete and brick. She wrapped fields around the pieces that were too heavy to hoist on their own.

Behind them, she could hear the gunfire getting closer, could hear the frantic chatter over the comms and could almost feel the pain herself as the other soldiers spilled their blood. Behind her, just a few meters away, they were fighting and dying because of her.

Her heart lifted as she saw the black metal of Vorn’s armor, until they pulled more pieces away and could see him lying on the floor, his leg wedged under the stones. He looked so calm, so peaceful in the way his eyes settled on her as he lifted his head off the ground where it lay.

He always looked so sad and distant, she thought. Even now, as she worked to save his life, his gaze spoke of disappointment. She could almost read his thoughts from the sag around his mouth, not because of pain at the mangled gash that zagged down the length of his shin, but because she had felt it before, back before the palace.

He thought it was the wrong choice to save him.

She disagreed, now, as she had then.

Clarke extended his hand downward as Dessia sagged with fatigue. He pulled the Batarian to his feet.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“I’ll manage,” Vorn said, his rifle still clutched in his dangling left arm as he shuffled with a noticeable limp as he tried to put his weight onto his wounded leg.

“Husks!” the voice broke over the radio. “A lot of husks!”

Clarke poked his head around the crumbled edge of the building and looked down the street where the soldiers were focusing their fire. He immediately lifted his omni to his mouth.

“Scarlet Platoon, get across the river! Go, go, go!”

Dessia peered around the building, seeing four, maybe five blocks down, what looked like a wave of black and grey and blue electronic light. As it grew closer, it engulfed and swallowed the debris on the street, pulsing up and down like an ocean storm churning through downtown London.

“Run!” Clarke shouted.

Vorn tried to take a single step and bent at the knee as blood gushed down the side of his wounded leg. Dess’ hand stretched out without even thinking to catch him before he fell, even as she lifted her eyes to watch the encroaching wave of husks, hundreds of them, too many and too thick to fight off.

“Go,” Vorn pleaded again as he tried to push her hands from their grip under his arm. “I’ll be right behind you.”

She didn’t want to, but she knew she didn’t have a choice now. She let him go. She had to believe him. She had to trust him, even though the roiling in her stomach told her she shouldn’t leave.

And then she was sprinting down the street, trying to keep pace with Clarke as she trailed behind him, his arms and legs pumping high as he bolted across broken pavement toward the rest of the Primary Battalion forces at the next rally point.

She didn’t turn her head to look back as she heard the scream of the wounded soldiers stranded in the intersection as the husks washed over them.

She felt the air rush past her as the blue streak whizzed along her side, bursting in a flash as the light materialized back into the shape of Vorn. He turned to their rear as he sprayed white-laced cryo shots down the field into the pursuing husks, only visible a moment before Dess and Clarke sprinted past him.

As she hurdled fallen bricks and concrete in the street, she could hear the rhythmic burst of Vorn’s rifle until it stopped, she heard a crackle, and the blue streak blurred across her periphery again.

She could see Vorn stumble on the bad leg, just for a second as he came to a halt, before he raised his gun, continued to fire, and then was out of sight as they passed his position once more.

“They’re gaining,” Vorn’s voice said over the radio amidst the bang of his rifle in the background behind his voice.

She could see the wide intersection opening before them and the curves of the bridge supports. She could now hear the thump of heavy guns, artillery, from across the south side of the river where the Alliance had dug in fortifications. She could see balls of flame piercing the sky as Citadel ships burned through the atmosphere in pieces from the orbital battle overhead.

The blue streak burned past them one last time, ending as Vorn came to the edge of the bridge and fell as his knee buckled with fresh blood coursing from the gash in his leg. She looked back at the sprinting wall of husks coming from them, closing faster and faster.

“Clarke!” she shouted and he stopped and turned back as she ran toward Vorn. He sprinted back as she draped Vorn’s right arm around her shoulder. Clarke grabbed the other arm and threw it around him as they tried to run, carrying the Batarian between them as they shuffled up the bridge.

And when they came to the top, for the first time Dess saw that the bridge was broken.

The gap wasn’t terribly long -- short enough to jump with a running start as the soldiers before them were doing -- but it might as well have been kilometers wide as she looked down at Vorn’s bloody leg.

Vorn lifted his head, looking at the crevice that lay before them. “Go on without me,” he said to confirm her suspicion.

There was more screaming behind them on the street as the husks swarmed over another soldier who had fallen on the pavement as the reapers tore him to pieces.

“We don’t have a choice, Dess,” Clarke said as he looked at the gap in the bridge.

She clenched her eyes together as she felt Vorn lift his arm off of her and she could feel Clarke stepping away. As he got free, Vorn shuffled and stumbled until he balanced on his one good leg, moving back away from the span.

“Dess! Come on!” Clarke shouted again as he edged toward the gap in the bridge. “We’ve got to go now!”

She didn’t move, instead moving her hands as they flared with blue biotic flame as she wrapped a field around Vorn and lifted him off the ground, slowly, carefully moving him through the air over the crack in the bridge.

“Dess are you crazy!” Clarke said as Vorn slowly hovered over the break, suspended in her biotic bubble.

“I can make it,” she said confidently as she concentrated on getting the Batarian across the bridge. Her brows bent inward as she tried to concentrate, to try to focus on holding the field steady so that it didn’t throw Vorn or slam him down when she let it go.

She startled at the sound of Clarke’s rifle, the ping of metal on metal and the electronic death scream of a husk as he gunned it down. It fell, landed on the concrete just a meter or two from where she stood. She was almost there, just a little further to go.

Clarke hoisted his gun and fired another two bursts from his rifle. She felt the air move across the back of her head as a husk’s arm reached for her, just short, before Clark dropped it. She watched as the blue biotic field crossed the edge of the broken bridge and she let it go. Vorn tumbled down toward the pavement, landing hard on his hip.

Clarke had his rifle pressed to his shoulder and was now firing full open, picking targets one by one and cutting them apart as a pile of husks built up just before them. The mob of reapers was on top of them now, no room to step backward to get a running start. Clarke pulled the trigger on his Vindicator and the gun clicked, empty.

“Hang on!” Dess shouted as she threw her right arm around his waist and pushed her left hand down toward the ground.

The biotic force slammed into the concrete of the shattered bridge, crumbling the edge as the wave shoved them up into the air with a hard jerk. She watched down at the sea of husks as they approached the edge of the bridge and continued running, falling over the edge and down toward the river, unable to stop the impulse to charge suicidally forward.

She could see the break in the bridge, where the jutting, broken pieces of steel rebar cage sat and the dark water far below as they sailed up higher into the air.

They rose, slower and slower until they hit the peak of their ascent, a dozen meters or more above the ground. Her arm slipped from around Clarke’s waist as he slowed before her, reaching the peak of his curve even as she floated slightly higher into the air.

Dess rotated, looking down at the river below and the angle which she had risen and calculated the arc. She looked at Clarke, who was already beginning to fall.

He wasn’t going to make the gap.

She began to fall out of the air, pulling up her biotic power inside herself again as she tried to twist in air, turning so that she had the right sight line. She glanced down, to make sure that she was going to make the span, as she pushed the biotic energy into her palm again. Clarke’s arms flailed outward as he turned over, stretching toward the broken edge of the bridge, perhaps now realizing himself that he wasn’t going to make it.

The wind beat against her face as she tumbled faster and faster back toward the earth. She steadied her body, legs tucked underneath her, arms stretched out to her sides like wings as she came back down.

It was just like the aerial twists Mamah had made her practice for hours and hours and hours as a child, trapped in the gymnasium until she completed the maneuvers perfectly. No matter how minor the flaw, no matter how tired she professed to be, no matter how many tears she cried, the exercise was not complete until it was done correctly, done flawlessly.

She reached her hand down, jerking it back toward her body as the biotic energy pulled, tugging Clarke hard forward and onto the edge of the bridge where he crashed and rolled across the pavement. The pull jerked her body too and her hips rotated, legs pushed out of alignment.

She tried to recover, but too late, as she crashed down onto the bridge too, her left side slamming hard into the street with a bounce and a roll as a blunt pain rushed through her hip and ribs at the impact.

Dess rolled onto her right side, pressing one hand into her instantly sore hip as she brought her other wrist to her face, touching the tip of her nose to the button to activate the medi-gel sequencer. She could feel a cool rush through her suit as her throbbing hip suddenly numbed.

She closed her eyes and took a breath, swallowing down the anxiety at the soothing feeling of the medigel. It made her feel better and she hated that. That feeling had consumed Mother.

When she reopened her eyes, she glanced ahead, seeing Clarke lying on his back just a meter away. He bent his knees up, slowly, as he reached across his body with his right arm to touch his wounded left shoulder. “God damn it,” he muttered between his gritted teeth.

“We made it Clarke,” Dess said, realizing for the first time that her cheek was getting scratched by the stones and pebbles she was lying on.

“Yeah,” he agreed, giving a groan as he tried to move his bandaged left shoulder, although he didn’t sound enthused by the notion. “We made it.”

Dess glanced across the room, to where Clarke was sitting perched by the window, alone.

He sat with one knee up, his elbow balanced against his thigh, and his hand cupped around his chin. His fingers moved up and down slowly, stroking the short, curly hair of his beard as he glanced out of the broken pane into nothingness.

She slid another forkful of the salty, chunky meat from the Alliance ration pack into her mouth and tried to swallow it as quickly as possible. She picked up the bottle of strawberry flavored carbonated water she had found and quickly washed the foul taste from her mouth as she glanced at Clarke again.

“Something’s wrong,” she said to Vorn, who had already finished his ration pack. How, she didn’t know. 

The Alliance medics had done what they could to remove the debris they could find from his leg, clean it and patch it. He was able to stand and walk again, with a slight limp. She couldn’t see how bad the wound looked, because he had patched the break in his armor with a roughly-cut, bolted-on piece from a dead soldier’s greaves.

The blue light from the Reaper beam was so close and so bright now that it was brighter than daylight in the building. The Alliance officers were trying to quickly regroup, assess their strength and plan the final push into the city.

The rumors said that Commander Shepard was here, nearby, in the command center, making the final preparations for the assault.

If he was here, no doubt he had to be worried by how few soldiers had made it to join him. Their battalion had barely made it at a third strength. Yellow Company had lost about half its men, Red Company had brought even less and there were only a few souls from Blue Company who had survived the trek toward the downtown.

Word was that barely anyone from the Secondary Battalion made it. There were no survivors from Green Company. Violet and Orange companies had limped into the rendezvous each with just a handful of bloodied survivors.

Hammer’s landing parties had fared slightly better -- those that weren’t cut out of the sky before they even had a chance to touch the ground -- but casualties were still heavy.

Of their original squad of six, only three remained and Dess was the only one who hadn’t been seriously wounded.

“He doesn’t want to be here,” Vorn answered.

Dess stopped her bottle of water before her lips. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe I’m mistaken,” Vorn said as he glanced back up at Clarke in the window. “But the losses weigh heavily on him. He’s walked this path before.”

That sounded… right? Just a few days ago, as they sat in a circle together after receiving the call to arms from the Alliance’s Admiral, he was the one who suggested putting it to a vote. He was the last to speak, the last to commit to fighting to get here.

That, and whenever she melded to him, amidst the swirl of thoughts, emotion and anxiety that whirled through his head, there was always that one place in his mind that he would not let her go. He opened himself to her, but he did not open himself fully.

She could hardly blame him for that, though. 

He wasn’t the only one guarding his past.

Dess stabbed her fork back into the half-eaten, mushy brick of meat and placed the plastic wrapper on the floor. She brushed her hands off and stood up, crossing the room to the window where Clarke sat. From here, there was nothing to see. There was another building across the street, empty and dark, and little else to see. Most of this block was still intact and the Alliance had set up strong fortifications to protect it.

It would hardly hold up against a Reaper, but thankfully, none had come for them.

Clarke turned his head, saw it was her, then turned his gaze back out the window.

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

“Those MREs? I’d rather eat my socks,” he said, without taking his gaze from outside. “We used to call them ‘Meals, Rarely Edible.’”

Dess chuckled. “It was really bad.” She sat down next to him although he still didn’t turn. “What’s wrong?”

“You almost got yourself killed today,” he said without having to think about it.

She didn’t expect that. “Gregg, I--”

“You almost got all of us killed.” He did turn his head now to look at her, his face drawn, tired and blank. “We lost seven men who I had to leave to cover us while we dug Vorn out. And we’re lucky any of us made it across that bridge before the husks overwhelmed us.”

“I wasn’t going to leave him behind. He’s our friend--”

“He’s a soldier,” Clarke interrupted. “He knows his duty.”

Dess recoiled at how grim and cold his voice had grown. His eyes, which had always been so playful no matter the circumstances, now seemed empty and dim.

“Would you have left me behind?” she asked. Her voice trembled even as she had to vocalize the thought.

“That’s not the point,” he tried to say.

“Would you have left me behind?” she asked more forcefully a second time.

“Damn it, Dess, this isn’t about whether I wanted to save Vorn or whether I want to save you,” he snapped back, his voice growing louder. “They put me in command. I have to make the hard decisions. I have to try to figure out what’s best not just for every individual soldier but for the entire goddamn group too!”

His left hand began to clench in and out of a fist again. “And when you disobey orders, when you go off and do what you think is right, you put yourself and everyone in danger.

“Trust me.”

The last two words were weak, barely choked out. His hand continued to flex in and out until it clamped shut tightly and began to shake. His neck grew tight, and when he inhaled his next breath, it came in as a wheeze.

He took another shallow, jerky breath as he pushed his right hand to his collar and stretched his neck upward as he began to sweat. As he pulled his shirt away from his throat, his left hand shook as he wheezed for breath.

She looked into his eyes and behind the fear at the rising swell of panic sweeping over him, there was anger too.

Dess lifted her hands as she watched him struggle once more. She placed them both over her mouth, to clamp in the sob that threatened to burst up her throat. She slid back away from him as he began to shake more violently, wheezing and gasping for air. She pushed herself up to her feet, inhaling sharply as she tried to stop the streaks of tears from coming down her cheeks to no avail.

She backed away one step, swallowing and forcing herself to drop her hand from her mouth.

“I can’t believe you,” she forced herself to say in her tiny, wavering voice.

His chest jerked as he wheezed, trying to breathe, tugging down on his shirt again as if it were suffocating him. The fingers on his left hand exploded out, then quickly retracted back into a tight fist, then stuck to his thigh like a magnet.

He was suffering, pitiable.

Dess turned around, turning her back to him, and quickly sprinted for the empty bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Only once it was closed, once she was alone, did she let a whisper of a wail escape her lips. It was a barely audible thing, quiet and pathetic and whimpering.

How many nights had she pressed her face into her pillow, alone in the dormitory of the empty school, weeping the same kind of pathetic sounds to an unforgiving darkness and loneliness? It came from the hole inside her stomach, that bottomless pit that had formed the bright summer day when the shuttles came floating down through the clouds.

She clamped her mouth shut, trapping such small, childish pain back inside of her mouth. She straightened, pressing her back to the door as she wiped the edges of her hands across both of her eyes.

The room was small, but empty. Perhaps it had once been a bedroom or an office, but whatever had been in here before was gone. The wooden floor was bare. The windows were still intact, the sets of mini blinds pulled up so that the room was filled with haunting blue light.

She swallowed, stepping into the center of the room, and took a single deep breath stretching her arms out to the side, slowly raising them over her head, then back down slowly until they rested once more at her sides. She turned her hands, pressing the curve between her thumb and forefinger against her hip bones, bending her elbows out to her sides. She crossed her left foot slightly behind her right and bent just slightly at the knees.

She raised her hands, slowly, fluidly as she took the first steps, a slight tiptoe to the left on the points of her feet. She regulated her breathing as she retraced the patterns from her childhood, recalling each of the precise movements. Steps. Bends. Kicks. Twirls. Leaps. Spins. Her legs moved through muscle memory, hours and hours of drilling that etched them deep into the muscle.

Her arms flowed separately, sweeping in gentle, delicate movements independently of her feet. They changed with each movement of her legs, imitating the movements of birds and flowers and trees gently swaying in the soft spring winds of Thessia.

She danced across the empty room, gliding across the dusty floor as each of the movements flooded back into her memories. She picked up speed, changing from step to step quicker, still making sure that every movement was defined and crisp, each individually unique and recognizable to a trained eye.

She lifted herself with the aid of her biotic gift into a jump and spin, allowing her to lightly touch back to the ground upon the toes of her left foot, her body bending at the waist until it was perpendicular to the floor as she spun in full revolution, right leg perfectly straight and extended behind her, both arms out to her sides with the gentle flutter of a butterfly.

She transitioned to the next move, her breathing quickening as she felt the tension in her muscles and the sweat beginning to bead upon her skin.

Faster Dessia! Faster!

She obeyed, her feet slicing across the floor as her body twirled into a vertical position. She stopped as her arms swept down into the next move.

Sloppy! Keep it tight!

She stumbled into the next step as the tension began to build in her left thigh. She tried to recover, improving to a different step where she could put the weight onto both her legs. She dipped, her knees quickly bending toward the floor, her muscles screaming as she came back up and lifted to her toes.

You’re falling behind! 

Keep up the pace! 

No, no, no! 

It’s step, twirl, step, not step, step, twirl! 

How many times have we been through this before? 

Why can’t you just remember?

No, we will keep going until you get it right. 

I don’t care how tired you are... It must be perfect and you are far from perfecct… Far, far from perfect... You need to be the best… Yes it does matter… I will not have a daughter who simply gets by… Now, do it again… No, that’s even worse than before… Again… Stop.... 

Are you trying to disappoint me?

Dess’ feet tangled as she tried to do the crossing exchange and she stumbled, falling toward the wall and the windows, as she extended her palms to catch herself on the wall.

Leave her alone! She’s just a child.

If she doesn’t learn now, she will never learn.

She’s not going to learn if you keep yelling at her! She’s tired and frustrated.

A feeling I know all too well.

Oh Goddess, there you go again.

Don’t be so dramatic.

Just leave the girl alone. She doesn’t need to be flawless at everything.

I’m sorry I want our daughter to rise to be something better than some sleazy den dancer.

She. Is. A. Child.

And she is already behind compared to the other students at Goldenlake.

I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. It’s like you don’t even hear me.

I am not the one pacing around the house and raving.

Me? You’re the one who is psychotic! I can’t take this. I can’t take this any more!

Oh yes, that’s what you need. More pills. How many is that today? Four? Five?

Shut up, just shut up!

You have a problem.

My problem is you! If I didn’t have to put up with you day in and day out riding and riding our Dessia--

I don’t want her to end up like you!

How dare… I hate you! I hate you!

Just take your pills! Go comatose while I care for our daughter as I always have.

“Please, stop fighting,” Dess whimpered to herself now, pressing her head against the wall as daggers cut her heart a hundred times more.

No matter how tightly she used to try to press the pillow around her head, curled up in her bed at night, she never could fully block out the shouting.

Every next morning, either Mother or Mamah would come into her bedroom to wake her up. They’d rub her head like nothing at all had happened, like nothing was wrong. 

If it was Mother, she would let Dess sit on the couch and play with her dolls while she prepared breakfast. Sometimes she’d whistle happily.

If it was Mamah, she would put on soft music and open a book at the kitchen table to the pages Dessia was expected to read while awaiting her morning meal. Often her food would be cold by the time she began to eat it, only being allowed to start breakfast when she was finished with her assigned reading.

She’d spend hours daily at the dance studio, or the gymnasium, or the air pistol shooting ranges with Mamah. They would practice and practice and practice. If she did well, sometimes, rarely, Mamah would take her for a frozen juice slush. More often than not, she would replay the long list of the day’s failures and expectations for the next day on the short trip home.

With Mother, she would go to the zoo or to the park. Sometimes, if the weather was warm, Mother would take her to the beach so she could play in the sand and the water. They’d walk down the beach where the water met the land, Mother listening intently to all of her daughter’s ideas, thoughts, stories and dreams.

But then there were other days when Mother would lie in bed, seemingly unable to get up. Sometime she’d be lying in drool or she’d wet the bed. She’d stumble around the house, banging into the walls and tripping over the furniture. She’d leave the house in the middle of the day without saying where she was going. Sometime she came back a little while later. Sometimes she didn’t come back until the middle of the night or the next morning.

Mamah would leave for weeks, taking a ship to whatever system she was needed in. Every now and then she’d send a video message home, but usually she was too busy or too far away to send anything at all. It could be months at the longest before Dessia heard from her. When she finally returned home, it was straight back to her studies and practice, before the next time she had to leave again.

The semesters at Goldenlake were sometimes a blessing. Until they weren’t.

Dess didn’t know how long had passed, but when the door the room finally opened, she was sitting on the floor in the corner farthest from the entry, arms wrapped around her legs, staring down at the dirty wooden floor.

“Dess,” Clarke said as he stepped inside the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

She looked up, regretting that she had left him. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” he said, as he sat down next to her with his back up against the wall. His hair was still wet with sweat and his eyes looked more bloodshot now, as if he had been coughing hard. “You?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I’m sorry about what I said out there,” Clarke apologized. “I’m not going to make any excuses for how I acted.”

“Can I show you something?” she offered, cutting his apology short.

“Show me what?”

“My past,” she said. She looked at her palms and at the rough scratches along her hands that hadn’t quite healed yet from clawing through the debris of the fallen store. “It will… it will be easier this way, than trying to explain it with words.”

“Umm, sure,” he said as he shifted. She had joined with him countless times before, but the prospect of it happening outside of a panic attack seemed to make him uncomfortable. “What do I have to do?”

“Same as always. Just try to stay calm and listen to my voice,” she said as she brushed her fingers through his beard, up the sides of his cheeks until they settled on either side of his head. She closed her eyes, took a breath and triggered her brain to begin the melding process.

All of the nerves throughout her body seemed to alight at once and tingle as she felt her mind kick into overdrive. She always held her breath when it happened, when her entire body seemed to flare at once. She could feel her consciousness reaching, as the electric in her body spread up through her arms and plugged into Clarke.

“Embrace eternity,” she whispered as she opened her eyes, making contact with his. His body jolted lightly as she connected to him. His eyelids fluttered for a second and dropped closed as he fell into her mind.

I’m here Gregg, she called to him through the telepathic field they shared.

I hear you, he responded in kind.

She summoned the memory of the bench at the water’s edge. The same sun high in the sky. The water lapping softly at the pebbled beach. The large, fluffy clouds slowly drifting overhead. And there she was, a smaller, younger version of herself in her school uniform, sitting on the bench, feet dangling down and kicking back and forth, too short to reach the grass.

Dess could feel Clarke with her now, almost as if he were standing alongside her, two adults waiting behind the bench, watching, invisible to the world of her memory. She remembered how she felt, eyes upward to the sky as the first transport dipped down through the clouds.

I can feel it, he said to her. What are you excited about?

It’s the last day of the semester. We’re going home for the summer.

She lets the memory play back, everything beginning to zip by in a rapid time lapse. Ships come and go. She eats her lunch. She walks along the edge of the water. She brushes her hands against the grass. Every time another ship drops through the atmosphere, she looks up to it, stops, waits and listens. The weather begins to change as the sun goes down. She goes back to the bench, leaning forward, her palms grasping the edge of the seat as the doubt begins to creep it.

“Come inside, Miss T’Bena,” the headmistress says as she approaches. “I’ll make you some supper and we’ll have the staff fix your bed for the night.”

She feels the sadness again, as deeply as she felt it then. She passes it along, so that Clarke can touch the hurt and experience it for himself. The memory stops as she looks at her younger self now and the way her tiny hands hangs limply in the headmistress’s hand, and how low her heads hangs toward the ground as they walk back to the school.

What happened? Clarke asks.

She shows him the next day, and the next, and the next. They all whip by one after the other, the same girl sitting on the same bench staring at the clouds. The trees fade into autumn and winter, then bloom again into spring, until the next year the girl sits on the bench waiting for someone who’s not coming. The cycle repeats, over and over until the little girl grows into an adolescent and older. Every summer, she sits on the bench and glances at the sky. In her older days, she brings a book or a datapad to occupy the time. She barely looks up then when she hears the drive cores of a ship descending from orbit. By then, she knows the ship isn’t for her.

Why didn’t they come?

She wipes Goldenlake away. In its place, she shows him her mother. It’s her mother as she wanted to remember her. She smiles. She dances around the house and is full of laughter. She gives her daughter big hugs every day before she grabs her bag and heads downtown for work.

She shows Clarke her Mamah, her paternal parent. She is tall and proper. Her military uniform is clean and crisp. But even she smiles, not nearly as wide as Mother, but even in those tiny grins there is joy and love.

Clarke feels happy, she feels, as he looks upon her parents individually. All he sees is the two Asari women at their best, at their highest point. She wants him to see, wants him to understand.

She pushes them together, replaying for him the memories she has. They shout and scream and throw things at each other. They accuse each other of terrible things when they are angry or hurt. Dess shares her emotions with Clarke, letting him feel the fear she used to feel when she would hide under the blanket in her bed, squeezing her hanar plush to her chest as tightly as she can as she wonders when the shouting will stop.

Her parents slowly devolve from the people they once were. 

Mamah grows stricter and stricter, more controlling and obsessive. She takes all the inadequacies she sees in her mate and focuses them into raw determination to make her daughter the best. She scolds and drills and hopes. She grows colder when her expectations are not met, which only drives her to push harder.

Mother takes her pills to try to escape from the problems she cannot fix. She showers love upon her daughter to try to counterbalance the rigors placed upon the small girl by her mate. She just wants things to go back to how they were once. She wants to go back so badly but she can never get there. The medicine helps to make her forget that, to make her feel good like she used to feel before.

She shows Clarke the long, brutal hours of study. She shows Clarke the moments when she looked at her mother, unconscious and foaming at the mouth on the floor where she had fallen off the bed. She lets Clarke feel the disdain that Mamah casts upon her, the resentment she oozes because the child reminds her of everything she once had and lost with her love. She lets Clarke feel the emptiness in Mother’s gaze when she shuffles around their house, barely even aware of her surroundings because of the pills she swallows to try to go back to a time when her daughter was first born and the future held infinite possibilities for their family.

She takes Clarke to the hospital on Thessia four years ago. To this day, her mother still sits in a wheelchair there, paralyzed, barely there at all after the overdose and the brain damage that destroyed her.

She takes Clarke to the deck of Destiny Ascension one year ago, where Mamah stands in her uniform. It is the first time Dess has seen her since her childhood, and the woman is cold and unwavering as she defends her decision to uphold her enlistment as a deck officer aboard the vessel, despite her obligations to her mate and her child.

She takes Clarke back to that bench on the edge of the lake, where a young, hopeful child sits, waiting, expecting her parents to pick her up from the academy for the summer.

They never came back for me. 

Tears begin to roll down her cheeks once again as she does not try to contain the agony that has torn her up every day since. She wants Clarke to see it, to feel it, to know it as she does.

How could anyone do that to a child?

The only answer she got was the feeling of Clarke’s arms wrapping her around, pulling her close to his chest as the link between them faded and broke. She placed her head upon his shoulder, letting out the sobs she always tried to hold inside.

When she felt him squeeze her, felt his hand cradle the back of her head and hold her close to his body, only then did she notice it.

Only then did she notice that Gregg was crying with her.

Everything shook every time one of the giant, metal legs drove into the ground.

“Get into cover! Go! Go! Go!” Clarke shouted at the top of his lungs as he waved toward the buildings lining the street.

Dess wasn’t sure if she screamed or not as the sky turned red once more, followed by the low-frequency thrumming and the sounds of London being shredded by the Destroyer’s beam.

The soldiers scrambled like insects running toward the empty buildings, getting out of sight of the stories-tall Reaper as it advanced forward, tearing Hammer to pieces as they tried to push toward the beam.

She watched the Alliance missiles spin uselessly around the Reaper, as if they were chasing a target that wasn’t there before superficially exploding against the Destroyer’s impenetrable armor. Their bullets, grenades, rockets, biotics and tech blasts didn’t even leave scratches on the black armor plating.

Dess had watched a direct hit from that beam turn a Mako tank into ash. The soldiers on foot who were caught in the blast were there one moment and completely gone the next as if they had never existed at all. The Destroyer swatted Alliance fighters and bombers out of the sky as if they were gnats.

She ran toward the broken glass doors and windows of the skyscraper, stumbling and falling inside as the Destroyer took another step, shaking the ground right out from under her. She skidded across broken glass, forcing herself up to her knees as she crawled behind a pillar in the ornate lobby.

The other soldiers all ran, seeking whatever cover they could, even though they all knew if one of those beams came through the building, no marble pillar or counter or concrete wall would do anything to hold back the blast. Their only chance was to hide and hope the Reaper didn’t turn in their direction again.

She ducked her head, covering her ears as the impossibly deep thrum sounded again and some other part of the city exploded as the beam fired again.

She felt Clarke’s arm wrap around her as he tucked himself behind the pillar with her, breathing heavily as he glanced around to see who had made it inside.

“What are we going to do?” she asked him in desperation.

He peeked his head around the corner at the Reaper as more rifle fire bounced off its thick armor. Another rocket exploded against one of its left legs. The giant limb cut through the smoke, unharmed, as it took another step forward, shaking the entire city again.

What did she expect him to say? There was nothing they could do. At best they might be able to sneak through the buildings and get around it, but even then, there was a flat, open kilometer or two between them and the beam they were trying to reach.

“Brutes! Brutes! Brutes!” another soldier yelled and guns began to burst as the soldiers sprayed rounds into the charging reapers. The first crashed down into the street but the second and third crashed through the wall. One grabbed an Alliance soldier, thrusting the man into its jaws as it ripped him easily in half.

She stepped out of her cover, grabbing the closer of the two brutes in a field and warping its thick armor as soldiers pummeled it with fire. It reared up onto its legs, struggling to break free of the field, then teetered backward and broke in two as another human biotic hit it with another blast, detonating it.

She watched the blue streak tear across the lobby as Vorn crashed into the flank of the other, knocking it back onto the street where soldiers continued to lay rounds on it until it crumbled into pieces.

“Oh fuck,” she heard Clarke mutter to himself. “EVERYBODY GET DOWN!”

Dess turned her head just as she saw the gaping red eye of the Reaper pointed at them.

She saw the beam long before she ever heard the deafening rumble of it sweeping through the building. She was blinded by the light of it as the energy sheared through the lobby, slicing through concrete and stone and steel as it cut roughly from the street up on a diagonal through the upper floors.

Then she heard the first sound of falling debris and, without thinking, Dess threw up her hands over her head.

The biotic field spread out over her in a wide dome, stretching across most of the lobby as it pushed upward over her head as everything began to collapse down on top of them.

She grunted as she could feel the building pressure on the field as she stared up, watching piles upon piles of burning wreckage crashing downward and landing on the surface of her biotic field. She dug deeper, forcing everything she had upward to hold it as she could hear the creaking of the massive steel beams of the building.

“Dess!” she could hear Clarke’s voice as he picked himself up off the ground.

“Get everyone out!” she shouted back between gritted teeth.

Clarke stared for a second at her, her arms upstretched straight over her head and her entire body engulfed in swirling blue flame as she poured every bit of energy out of her.

Mamah had trained her mercilessly to develop her biotic skills. She had forced her daughter to practice, lifting, pulling, throwing, shielding, twisting, everything that she could possibly think of. If her daughter was to become a lauded Asari Commando or a starship captain or admiral someday, she would need to be a peerless talent with her biotic gift.

She had finished easily ahead of every other pupil at Goldenlake in biotics in the pre-military program. They had placed her for fast track placement into the Commando program. She might have ended up there, running missions on some distant world or serving with the rest of the Asari fleet, if she had not declined the invitation only to spite the parent whose dream it had been for her daughter to serve, but who had instead chosen to abandon her.

She watched through the haze as the soldiers, those who had survived, scrambled out through the jagged jaws of the building made by the Reaper beam that had roughly sheared it. Every second they took to run, she could feel the load on top of her getting heavier and heavier, hear more of the building cracking and breaking around her. Dess could feel the edges of the field collapsing and hear the debris beginning to fall through the places where she could no longer hold the dome.

“Come on! Go! Before the whole thing comes down!” Clarke shouted as he wound his arm around in a wheel, pointing them across the street to the next building and the next bit of cover.

Her elbow began to bend as she heaved breath in and out, straining her mind. She looked up between her upstretched palms, watching debris tumbling down from the upper floors through the chasm the Destroyer had opened. There were bursts of fire and clouds of dust as everything above her shifted and spilled.

The building as a whole might hold together, but everything directly above her head was primed to cave in.

“Dess!” Clarke shouted as he stepped out onto the street, out from under the perilously hanging ceiling. “We’re clear. Get out of there!”

She dropped her head, looked across the smoky lobby at him standing there with his rifle down at his side, his right hand outstretched and waving her to come. He was only a couple meters away.

He might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.

Dess shook her head. She blinked, trying to force herself not to accept what she knew was about to happen. “I can’t move without losing the field.”

It was taking every ounce of her just to hold it where it was. Even if she thought she could walk without the entire thing fizzling, her bubble was the only thing holding the building up. Take one step and whatever part she moved from was going to start falling.

“Come on Dess!” Clarke shouted. “You can make it!”

She shook her head again, closing her eyes to keep the tears squeezed in. “I can’t,” she said.

“I’m coming in to get you,” Clarke said as he began to approach the edge of the bubble.

“No!” she screamed and even as she did and shifted, the farthest edges of the field gave way, spilling concrete and dirt and office furniture down onto the floor with a bang. A broken chunk of the stone fell just before Clarke, cracking the floor tiles as broken glass trickled on top of it all like rain.

Clarke stopped still, gazing through the hazy blue field, his hand still outstretched toward her. “Dess…” he uttered weakly.

She could feel the stiffness growing in her arms and legs and feel the overwhelmingly sensation of fatigue growing inside of her. Her head was pounding, a splitting headache that cut her skull in half at the continued exertion.

Dess made sure to look straight into Clarke’s eyes, so that she could remember what they looked like when the field finally failed and fell. She would remember last night, the way they held each other for what felt like hours, until they woke up in the morning at the soft knock on the door and Vorn’s gruff voice calling for them to wake. His arm was still wrapped around her body even when they stirred awake.

If they made it out of today, he started to say, fumbling over his words as he tried to figure out what came next. She chuckled and shook her head and clamped her hand over his mouth. There were more important things to think about, like reapers. All he needed to know was that it meant everything to her that he had come for her.

He stayed, when everyone else had left.

Now as she looked at the space that separated them, she swallowed and tried not to let the fear growing inside of her overtake the concentration she needed to hold this moment as long as she could.

“I’m sorry Clarke,” she said. “But you have to go on. You have to finish this.”

At the least, she’d been able to help him go on. She helped keep him from breaking in two. She helped him persist when he was ready to give up.

She smiled, even as the tears starting rolling down her cheeks again and her arms began to wobble.

“You have to leave me behind.”

Chapter Text

Jules,

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that you have to read this at all, under these circumstances. But you deserve to know. 

It’s my fault, about Migs. I’ve always tried to tell myself we lost him because there was no other choice. But I had a choice and I didn’t make it.

I left a box for you at Blue’s. Will has it behind the counter. You know the combination for the lock. I know you have a new life now, but if you want to find out the truth, it’s there.

You were right to hate me. I don’t ask your forgiveness.

If there’s a Heaven, and if, by some chance, I make it there, I’ll tell Migs how much you miss him.

Goodbye.

Gregg

He couldn’t let go.

The street was aflame around him. He was standing just a little way from where the asphalt was smoking and molten. He could see the building in front of him burning. He could hear the sounds of walls and ceilings crumbling.

He could see the mass effect field, a thin blue film, wavering like a soap bubble just about to pop. He could see the light around Dess growing dimmer. He could see the tension building as the exhaustion overtook her.

Clarke knew she was telling the truth. One slip, one hiccup and the entire thing was primed to collapse. The ground underfoot trembled again as the Reaper behind him took another step forward. The other soldiers had all found fresh cover and here he was, standing in the open, frozen, knowing that any moment would be Dess’s last.

He couldn’t bring himself to turn away.

The rifle in his arms felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He looked down at the gun as he heard the thrum of the Destroyer’s main gun fire on some other part of the city, rattling his bones with its deep frequency. What good was a tiny rifle against that kind of behemoth? He tucked it behind his back, clipping it to the slot on his armor.

If he stood here, waiting, watching, the building would fall and crush her. If he went in to try to pull her out, maybe it would still fall and crush both of them. What did it matter?

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he would be able to grab her and get her to safety before everything collapsed. If he did nothing, she would definitely die. If he went in, even if the chance was infinitesimal that he could save her, it was still a chance.

His life wasn’t worth anything, anyway.

He would have already ended it two years ago. He had held the pistol in his right hand to the side of his head, his dog tags clutched in his left so that the authorities would know who he was when they found him. He had his finger on the trigger when his entire hand started shaking and he began to wheeze.

He hesitated, stepped out of the shower, put the gun away and went outside to get some fresh air, calm his nerves and try to rebuild his resolve. He had wandered to the underground station, to sit on one of the benches and watch the trains go in and out. 

And then he saw her trying to puzzle out the route maps.

It wasn’t fate, Clarke knew, because he had spent so many years convincing himself that nothing happened for a reason. Bad things happened. There was no greater purpose to any of it. People suffered because that’s how it went sometimes.

Seeing Dess that first time, going up to talk to her, following her to her stop and taking her for a drink, it wasn’t fate. It was him, that last shred of him that had stopped him from pulling the trigger that morning. That last part of him that wanted to see tomorrow and the day after and the day after.

For a time, the chance to speak to her again was the only thing that kept his pistol locked inside his safe during the day.

If he lost her now, like this, what would be the point of going on? The only reason he was here, the only reason he had fought this hard and this far was for that tiny chance that they could win and that there would be a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that.

His life was since Torfan was nothing more than long odds and long shots.

Without her, without that reason to survive another day, what would be the point?

“Fuck it,” he said to himself as he looked at the distance between him and her. It would be shorter to go out the west side of the building. The edge was more ragged, but if they made it out, the structure was less likely to fall that way. He could maybe grab the belt around her combat suit, and with one strong pull, yank her halfway to the breach.

“Dess!” he shouted as he crouched slightly, setting his feet as he prepared to sprint. “I’m coming. I’m coming to get you!”

He rocked back, pressing the ball of his right foot into the ground. He set himself, looking at the path in and the path out.

“Clarke! Don’t!” Dessia begged, the tears still running down her face.

He pressed down, ready to take his first stride, when a hand grabbed his left arm around the bicep.

“No…”

The single word was weak, hacked from the throat of Vorn at his side.

Clarke nearly gagged as he first looked at the Batarian. His armor was scorched. His left arm and most of his shoulder was gone, with only bloody, burned remains of his flank remaining. The entire left side of his face was a massacred pile of burnt flesh. The single, mechanical eye in the top left of his head dangled in the socket, no longer functional. And the back portion of his skull was missing, with the metallic remnants of his biotic implant jutting out through the missing section of flesh and bone.

How Vorn was even alive, much less standing, was a miracle.

His grip released to an open palm as he pressed against Clarke’s chest, pushing him backward as he limped toward the ragged gash in the building.

He could hear the Batarian muttering something that sounded like prayers as he took each step. His right leg thumped down with each step as he dragged his scorched left behind him, swaying from side to side. Vorn lifted his right hand up toward his side, his fingers curling into a claw as a slight blue light began to form in his palm.

Vorn teetered as the implant protruding from his head began to spark and fresh rivulets of blood trickled out from around it. Clarke watched as he passed through the edge of Dess’s field, one shambling step at a time as he continued to voice his prayers.

“Vorn, no…” Dess cried out as he shuffled inside the building.

“Don’t cry for me,” he said as he wobbled, nearly falling backward as a crackling white spark jumped off his skull. “I’m already dead.”

The Batarian moved around the side of Dess, stepping just behind her as he raised his sole arm as high as he could, resting his palm in between Dess’s shoulder blades. The right side of his face, what was left of it, contorted and he grunted loudly in agony as the blue light began to swirl around him.

The mass effect field supporting the building began to fall as Dess’s arms crunched down, her palms barely up over her shoulders. The debris she supported began to come down with them, as more and more fell around the edges crashing burning material onto the ground floor.

“If you happen to find my Aja,” Vorn croaked as loudly as he could above the din of the crashing debris. “Tell her… she’ll always be my little star.”

The implant in his head crackled one last time, spraying a shower of sparks out of the side of his head along with a spray of blood. His entire body drooped and began to crumble toward the ground. His gaze went blank as his legs gave out from under him.

Dess gave a moan as the field finally collapsed and began to fall too, when the biotic pulse burst from Vorn’s hand with his last gasp.

The wave thrust Dess’s limp body forward, sending it spinning across the lobby and out toward the street.

The entire building creaked and collapsed. Clarke watched as the ceiling came down, piles and piles of debris engulfing Vorn before he even hit the ground.

He stepped forward, extending his arms out, and caught the now-unconscious Dess. The building continued to cave in, burying Vorn and belching dust and smoke out of the broken walls.

Clarke ducked his head and turned to cover Dess, lifting her up and stumbling blind away from the falling building toward the remaining standing structures.

“Over here!” he could hear another soldier shouting, opening his eyes enough to see the man waving him toward the propped open door of the building next to them.

The ground shook as the Destroyer took another step. As quickly as he could move, he made it just inside the doorway as the entire block shook again and another blast of the Reaper’s beam struck the damaged skyscraper again, having caught the machine’s attention in the collapse.

Clarke lost his footing and fell, landing on his back as he continued to cradle Dess, holding her draped across his arms and into his chest even as he crashed into the floor. Dust fell from the ceiling of the hotel they now found themselves in, but the structure held. Another step, the building shook and the Destroyer continued to move forward.

The soldier helped him up, a young man, Alliance, who looked as pale as if he had pissed his armor three times in the fight already. Clarke scooped up Dess again, turning and looking for somewhere, anywhere else he could take her. He carried her behind the counter and shoved his way through a door into the offices that sat in the lobby. He lifted his foot, kicking everything off the desk onto the floor and carefully laid her down.

Clarke pressed his ear to her mouth and held his hand to her neck, nearly fainting with relief as he felt the gentle thumping of her pulse in his fingertips and could hear the quiet sound of breath whistling in his ear.

He lifted her left arm and activated her omni, pulling up the medical protocols to begin the process of reviving her. The omni beeped as the auto sequencers began to collect her vitals and attempt to address problems.

Clarke placed her arm back down and stepped back until he bumped into the wall. He pressed his back to it, letting his legs slowly slide out from under him as he lowered to the floor. He pressed his hands to his across his forehead as he slumped, coughing and hacking as he could feel the stress boiling over once more, overwhelming his body.

His arms trembled as the building shook again, his chest heaving up and down as he tried to breathe. His skin felt on fire, even as sweat began to pour out of him. He could feel his heart thumping, pulse skyrocketing, beating so fast that it might break and fail.

He watched. Before he caught Dess in his arms, he watched as Vorn’s body tumbled lifelessly toward the ground. He watched as tons upon tons of debris caved in on top of him, crushing him to death. Even as he ran for cover with Dess slung across his forearms, he passed by bodies lying in the street, some so burnt and mangled they were hardly recognizable anymore.

He watched Vorn die. He stood, helpless, while Bug gave his life to stall the reapers from falling upon them. He was frozen, strangled by his panic when Grog stepped out in front of him to keep him alive. He had backed them into a corner, a corner they couldn’t escape until Tarkus paid with his blood to rescue them.

More than half of Scarlet platoon had perished under his command on the long, bloody trek to the Alliance FBO.

He led thirty-five men to their deaths on Torfan.

He remembered each of their names still. How could he forget, the way they rattled around his skull every day since then? He could see their faces in the barracks and in the drop ship. He could remember their voices, their hometowns, their specialties and weaknesses. Hell, he could even recall their specific loadouts they had opted to carry to that God-forsaken Batarian moon.

His Platoon Leader, 1st Sgt. Daniel Dawes grew up in Dublin but lived most of his life in London. The guys used to always used to rip him because he hated Guinness and Jameson. But he could throw a set of darts in the pub better than anyone. He caught a bullet in the neck while moving to fresh cover in that cavernous pit where the Batarians made their last stand.

Sgt. Jack Morris took Rook Squad down a tunnel and got flanked. All his talk about his glory days playing safety on some small American university football team didn’t do him much good when a grenade shredded him and two other guys of his squad.

Spc. Braden Corle spent most of the mission crawling up to guys who were already dead. He was a damn good field medic. If it weren’t for him, Sgt. Tremblay might not have made it back to the Citadel and Spc. Trufont would have lost more than just his left leg. He couldn’t save himself, though, when he took three rounds to the heart.

Pfc. Hemmings carried a Vindicator, too. He had spray-painted the trigger on the gun gold, and would never shut up about how every shot was “as good as gold.” He barely got a full magazine of shots off though, because he was the first one to run afoul of one of the Batarian auto-guns. The damn thing nearly sawed him in half when it cut him across the belly.

Sgt. Desmond Okebe never made it out of the dropship. As soon as the doors opened, a Batarian sniper shot went right through the glass on his helmet. He always talked about his wife and three girls back home in Nigeria and how he was going to get out of the city and buy a farm once he was discharged.

If Okebe didn’t go down, Migs never would never have had to step up to lead Raven Squad.

Allen. Brown. Clarke. Cunningham. Tremblay. Trufont. Zemeckis. 

Of his forty-two men, those seven were the only ones of his who made it off that rock still breathing.

Allen was killed in action on Eden Prime. Brown was drunk when he went off the road and smashed a tree head on. Cunningham’s ship went down in flames protecting the Citadel during the Sovereign attack. Trufont died two years after Torfan of complications after they took his leg. Zemeckis went out alone in a motel room with the heroin needle still in his arm when the coroner found him.

Who knew about Trufont. He was either up on one of the ships in orbit or he was down somewhere on the ground fighting this impossible war. Either way, there was a good chance he was going to die today, just like the rest of them.

The armor. The armor was so tight. He began to unbolt himself from his chestplate, even though he could still hear continued gunfire in the lobby. His fingers shook, fumbling over the clips as he grabbed them one by one and snapped them open until he could throw the armor off of him onto the ground.

His chest was soaked in sweat as he pulled the wet shirt away from his skin. He heaved for breath, his entire body feeling on fire. The building shook as the Reaper took another step. He wheezed as he pressed his back to the wall and closed his eyes. An explosion on the back end of the building snapped his eyes back open as he jumped, holding his hand to his heart as he felt it pounding out of his chest.

He looked at the Vindicator on the floor next to him. If he picked it up and ran outside, he could fire it at the first reaper he saw. He could turn off his omni, he could leave his chestplate inside. He could take a shot to the chest or the head. He could fall in the street and bleed and die and be done with it. He could join up with the rest of his platoon from Torfan. He could stand before Tarkus and Vorn and Grog and Bug and explain to them that they were all stupid for trusting him.

His left hand clasped into a fist again as his throat began to close once more. He forced his fingers out, but they snapped closed nearly as quickly as he could open them until his hand locked into a claw, the joints of his fingers frozen and painful.

Maybe this would be the one. Maybe finally his airway would close completely. He’d feel the burning in his lungs as his body burnt its last bits of oxygen. He’d spiral away, eyes growing dark as his head spun around into the abyss, until his muscles were deprived of air and his heart seized and stopped.

It would be time. It was inevitable. He had been sidestepping that moment for years now, always finding a way to just narrowly escape the end. But it couldn’t go on forever. 

The reaper was owed his due.

Maybe the mechanical monstrosities that bore the same moniker were sent to collect.

He struggled to push himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the wall. If this was it, if finally death had caught up to him, he wanted to collapse and die outside of this room. He didn’t want Dess to wake up and find him slumped against the wall with one hand clutched around the collar of his shirt and the other frozen into a damnable fist at his side. Let him walk into the street and die like a dog out there.

Clarke wheezed as he took the first step, his legs feeling numb underneath him as he choked for air. He braced himself against the wall with his right hand, stopping as the building shook once more with another step of the Destroyer, then took a second step. His left hand stayed glued to his left hip, his knuckles burning at the intensity at which they stayed curled into a fist.

When the Destroyer fired again and the beam shook the building, Clarke jumped as a pang of fear coursed through him. His hand against the wall slipped and he stumbled forward and fell, hitting the wall as he tumbled to the floor. He opened his mouth to breath, but it felt as if he were trying to breathe through the narrowest straw. The arteries in his neck thumped violently as he pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall again.

“Dess…” he wheezed, looking helplessly in her direction.

She didn’t move, lying still on the desk except for the slight rise and fall of her chest.

“Dess,” he said a little louder, using what felt like the last of his breath.

She didn’t answer.

Clarke forced his lips closed, inhaling what little he could through his nose as he tossed his head back until it hit the wall. He closed his eyes once again. He tried to open his left hand, tried to force his fingers out of the ball they instinctively curled into.

He couldn’t get his fingers to obey him

He couldn’t prevent it from happening.

He couldn’t do anything to stop it.

He couldn’t go back.

The soldier came back to the table with another three glasses of brown ale, each topped with a frothy white head.

“I keep telling you, Migs, no one drinks this Dog here,” Clarke said as he grabbed one of the glasses of Newcastle.

“It’s English,” Migs protested.

“There’s a reason why we sent it over the pond to the States,” Clarke said as he lifted the glass and took a gulp. The ale wasn’t bad, but compared to the dozens of other choices on tap or in bottles behind the bar, it was like drinking out of a puddle on the side of the street.

“Well I think it’s pretty good, regardless,” Jules agreed as she took her empty off the coaster and placed the fresh glass down in its place. She leaned over from her stool and planted a kiss on Migs’ cheek.

“Just wait,” Clarke said. “Put a couple more in me then I’ll be ready to whip your ass on that pinball machine.”

Migs nearly choked on his beer as he was mid-drink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he lowered his glass. “Please. You’ll just embarrass yourself again.”

“I think you mean, ‘Yes, sir. I’m pathetic and you’re the best, sir.’” Clarke said.

“One, I’d never say that. And two, we’re off base, sir ,” Migs mocked.

He waved off the insult as he hoisted his glass once more. Blue’s was a little more alive than usual tonight. There were two Asari sitting at the bar having wine and that had pulled in more uni boys than usual who spotted them through the window. They were pretty good at pretending the guys didn’t exist though and Will was doing all he could to shoo the men off with a towel.

Still, it was comfortably quiet and cozy. Clarke appreciated that, compared to the low-light, electronica music and trendy drinks being slung at a lot of the downtown clubs. Those places attracted nothing but girls looking to make mistakes and plenty of guys willing to be those mistakes.

It was getting harder and harder to get away with all the training ramping up. The Alliance had been flying them out three times a week for training simulations at the defunct coal mines in Yorkshire. The mission objectives were being tweaked every trip and personnel was constantly being shifted around to find the right mix. They had been swapping different riflemen in and out, but Migs and the other sergeants had been stable, so far.

Clarke hoped the Alliance brass made up their minds soon and locked in a roster. They were supposed to be relaying out to Sidon in the Verge in two months to run a more in-depth simulation there before finally making the jump to Torfan.

The criminal moon wasn’t worth half a shit strategically, aside from sending a clear message to the Batarians that they’d better think again before ever encroaching on another Alliance world.

“Were you able to get your fitting done, Clarke?” Jules glanced across the table with her hazel eyes and one eyebrow bent down suspiciously.

“Yeah, of course,” he lied, having forgotten again. If he got up early, he could get over there and do it before having to report in for evening meetings on base.

“Make sure you do it tomorrow,” Jules said, seeing right through him, as usual. She sighed and smiled as she looked across the table. “Just five more months until I’m Mrs. Julianne Perez.”

“And here I thought you were going to stay as a Fullenkamp,” Migs joked. “Or hyphenate.”

“Oh God.” She rolled her eyes at the notion. “See, now if you were a Catholic white boy farmer, you’d fight right in in my hometown.”

“I’ve seen you sunburn before,” Migs said, pointing down to his tanned Hispanic skin. It was a fair bit lighter than his paternal grandparents, but his dad’s Mexican blood mixed with his mom’s Texan had softened up his complexion. “Our kids will thank me someday.”

Jules had her wavy strawberry-blonde hair, a dusting of freckles across her cheeks and rounded Germanic features. She came straight out of the middle-of-nowhere southwest Ohio and its miles of flat landscape carpeted in soybeans, corn and chicken barns. So she said. It sounded like West Country, where you could learn more than you’d ever want to know about a dairy cow.

And yet, she had come here to follow Migs when he got reassigned to the Alliance base in London. Despite no signs that he was ever going to get released back to the States, she stayed.

“How much longer til you’re shipping out?” Jules asked him.

“Not really clear. At least two months.” Clarke couldn’t really say more than that. That Jules knew they were prepping to go anywhere was a breach of confidentiality. The Alliance was trying to keep this Torfan raid as hush hush as possible.

“We’ll be back in time for the wedding,” Migs reassured her for the thousandth time since she first found out.

“Assuming you both make it back,” she said as she rubbed her hand across her eyes as she often did when she was trying to come to terms with Migs’ line of work. She wasn’t cut out to be a military wife. Just as well, considering Migs wasn’t planning on staying for life. “I just don’t like that I can’t know where you’re going or what you’re doing.”

“It’ll be fine. Besides, I’m being led by the 2nd Lt. Greggory Clarke,” Migs said with a mocking tone. 

“Yeah, if anything I’ll get shot because all these illiterate Americans will go right when I say left because they don’t know the difference,” Clarke said. “No offense to you, Jules. I know you went to school. Migs on the other hand…”

“Hey, I dropped out because I couldn’t afford it,” Migs said, with a sly smile and a shrug. “It had absolutely nothing to do with house parties and kegs. Besides, without that I would have never rescued that naive freshman girl from Ohio who got way too drunk at our Christmas party.”

Jules smiled and sipped her Newcastle.

“I just worry,” she said.

“We’ll both be there,” Migs said. “Me at the end of the aisle. This guy right next to me. And as long as he doesn’t forget the ring in the hotel room, everything will be great.”

“Promise you’ll both come back?” Jules asked.

“You know it, babe,” Migs said.

Clarke gave a nod. “Promise.”

It was a gorgeous summer day when they lowered Migs’ empty casket into the ground.

Despite the midday Texas heat, Jules didn’t seem to notice the sun beating down on her black dress. Her red-gold hair was pulled back, twisted into a bun on the back of her head and pinned tightly. She wore blood-red lipstick.

She never seemed to blink, staring intensely at the flag-draped coffin sitting on the lift.

She never cried a single tear.

Right before they lowered the box into the ground, she stepped forward, twisted the diamond ring off of her left hand and placed it on the lid of the coffin.

When the service was over and everyone began to leave, she stood in the same place without moving and without averting her gaze. Clarke had stepped away, hoping to catch her before she went home, but when he saw her standing there, alone, for nearly an hour, he went back.

He approached, standing on the other side of the gaping hole in the earth. He looked down again, seeing the sparkle on the gem in the ring even with it shadowed by the walls of dirt six feet underground.

“What happened, Gregg?” she asked, without moving her eyes from the hole in the ground.

How could he answer that? 

The truth wouldn’t ease her pain. The truth was classified. The truth couldn’t do anything but make the hurt worse.

“He gave his life for the mission,” Clarke said. “For the Alliance.”

“Bullshit,” Jules said, her voice almost spitting disdain.

“We all lost a lot on Torfan,” Clarke said. He lost more than four-fifths of his platoon. That wasn’t an outlier, he found out during debrief. Some units had been completely wiped out, while most limped off the moon with no more than a quarter of the men who started.

The tunnels had been more expansive than their intelligence showed. There were many more Batarians than recon reported. And the majority of them fought like soldiers, not petty thugs and smugglers.

It was a massacre on both sides. Alliance intel reported the Batarians were already withdrawing from the Verge. They deemed the mission a success, despite the cost.

“Why are you here, Gregg? Why are you here and he isn’t?” she asked. “You promised me. You both promised me you’d come back.”

“I did everything I coul--” he began to say, then stopped as his left hand curled into a fist in his pocket, “I… I tried. But I couldn’t save him.”

She was quiet. Her eyes stayed pasted on the coffin. Clarke kept his eyes on her, looking for any change, for anything. Her skin was already looking red from the sun. Her eyes were dry, with no signs that a tear had touched the mascara on her eyelashes. The ring finger on her left hand had a pale band where she had worn her engagement ring for months leading up to today.

On a day like today, she should have been doing a final fitting at the dress shop, not standing in a cemetery.

Clarke unclenched his hand in his pocket, feeling a tightness in his chest as he looked down at the coffin in the ground again. Maybe it was just the heat, but he felt light-headed and soaked in sweat. Each breath hurt, like someone was sitting on his ribcage or as if he were trying to inhale while submerged underwater. He could feel his heart racing as he shuffled his feet, feeling fidgety all over.

“I’m so sorry, Jules,” Clarke finally said when he couldn’t bear the silence any more.

For the first time, she made a noticeable movement as she inhaled deeply, her chest and shoulders lifting before settling back into her normal form. She swallowed, her lips opening just slightly as if the emotion that must have been inside her were trying to creep up.

But it didn’t. She pressed her lips together again, staring into the grave.

“Just leave me alone.”

He did.

When he returned to London, he tried to call her. She never answered.

When he went to her flat and knocked on the door, she was either never home or never answered.

When he checked at Blue’s, Will said he hadn’t seen her since he heard about Migs. Then he gave Clarke a pint, on the house, and left him to his thoughts.

Two weeks later he found she resigned her position at the hospital. 

He checked her flat again and found out from the landlord she had left, abruptly, even paid the penalty to break her lease. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.

She didn’t answer emails, texts, phone calls. He messaged her sister in the States, who said she didn’t want to talk. 

He stared at the list of unanswered messages he sent her the first time he pushed his pistol to his temple. When he lost his nerve, throwing the gun across the room, he called her again leaving a long, rambling, weeping message on her voicemail pleading her to call him back. He needed to hear her voice. He needed to talk to her about what happened. He needed someone, anyone, to help blunt the pain that was eating him alive from the inside out.

He begged, until he hung up the call, curled into a ball on the floor and wheezed, shaking, until he lost consciousness.

After two years, he stopped trying.

Every few weeks, he’d log on to the net and poke around to try to see how she was doing. He’d skulk around the fringes of her social media pages, admiring the photos he could see of her with friends or family.

He didn’t know whether to feel happy or to weep when he’d find a photo of her smiling. 

He’d come across search results for her name in the local news from time to time when she’d get a recognition from some nursing organization or the other. She was one of the judges at the 2182 Little Miss and Mister contest at the county fair back in her hometown.

In 2183, her last name changed to Cooley, although he never found an engagement announcement in any of the local papers.

Clarke stopped looking then. 

She had found a new life. 

He was forever stuck in 2178.

He felt the hard bump as the shuttle slammed down onto the rocky surface of Torfan. 

The pings of bullet fire were already dinging across the side of the ship. When the doors slid open, the buzz of blue shields surrounded them as they took fire. A single, booming shot from a rifle somewhere in the mouth of the cave exploded out. 

Clarke could feel the pieces of glass bouncing off his shoulder pads as Okebe’s helmet was penetrated and the sergeant fell backward deeper into the landing craft, spraying a fountain of blood through the broken, jagged faceplate.

“Go! Go! Go!” Clarke shouted across the comm as the soldiers piled out the door, charging for the stones and boulders that littered the field between them and the entrance to the cave.

His feet touched down into the blue-grey dust as his shield turned aside assault rifle fire. The HUD inside his helmet was blinking rapidly as shields of his platoon members dropped. He listened to the breathy, updates from squad leaders as they called in orders and updates on their progress forward.

Clarke popped up from behind his stone, sighting his rifle in the middle of the head of one of the Batarians suppressing a fireteam and pulled the trigger, ducking back down as he watched the splatter coming from the alien’s skull as it tumbled and fell.

“Squad leaders, prepare to move toward the first objective. Raven Squad, Crow Squad, enemy resistance at Point Alpha is too thick. Move around to Rally Point Delta. Rook Squad and command will provide cover fire.” He relayed the orders in as he glanced at the data coming into his omni. Okebe, Ferguson and Dimitriov were already dead. Vitals on Hankins were fading fast, but he was bleeding out in the open where no one could reach him without joining him on the casualty list.

He lost half of Crow Squad when they got hit by a turret emplacement that wasn’t on the maps. More and more Batarians seemed to surge out of the caves even as they carefully advanced forward, pouring rounds into the mouth of the tunnel. There wasn’t a second that went by when someone’s shields or vitals in the HUD weren’t flashing under fire.

By the time they got into the tunnels and the squads starting moving toward their individual objectives, his platoon was already down thirteen men.

It was a bloody slog through the tunnels. Every auto-gun emplacement they hit pinned them until they could coordinate to have a biotic hold a shield long enough to get one of the engineers into place to overload shields and then pummel the thick armor plating.

No matter how thick the fighting got and how many men were falling, command continued to press them to move forward.

And then there he was, at Objective Two, where several of the tunnels converged into a central junction. It was there he watched a frag shred Morris and two of his squad members. Clarke could still remember the Batarian lettering on the side of the large, metal shipping crate he had pressed his shoulder into as he tried to hold the corridor while the squads each began down their assigned tunnels to set the charges.

He was always here. That spot, crouched on the ground against the dull grey metal, turning out of cover to pick off Batarians one by one was the place. This was the one place he always came back to and couldn’t run from.

He curled up, Vindicator clutched to his chest, back pressed to the steel crate, breathing slowly as he waited until everything around him froze. He sat in the middle of the memory, a moment stopped in time, forever.

It’s where Dess could always find him.

Gregg, she says as he could feel the soothing emanations of her mind washing against the wall of anxiety and fear that suffocated him. I’m here.

I know.

He can see her now, inside this memory, as she slowly steps through the dark, narrow tunnel toward him in this moment of illusion. Each step she approaches, he can feel the tension lessening. He can almost feel it like gravity, like his consciousness beginning to tumble back down to where it will meet his physical body.

She crouches down in front of him, her soft blue hand reaching out to cradle his cheek. Her touch feels like a warm bath, so calm and peaceful, as if there was nothing wrong at all in the world. Here, inside these moments where they meld together, these are the only times he ever can feel truly at peace any more. 

Somewhere, beyond his head, he knows there is still a Destroyer marching down the street, still reapers prowling the alleys and battling the soldiers. They are both at risk every moment they linger here, on whatever transcendent plane she takes him to when she welcomes him into her mind.

Dessia looks down at the light on his omni for what seems like the first time, or at least, the first time he ever notices. The comm button, alight in red, is the key that keeps everything here paused, that keeps everything from devolving into the abyss.

Will you show me what happened?

The question sends a shock of cold through everything, a lance of fear that cuts him from his stomach up through his chest and into the back of his mouth where his tongue meets his throat. It sticks there, choking him.

He can feel the soothing touch of Dess’s other hand as it wraps around his neck and around the back of his head. Her fingers slowly slide through his hair as she pulls him closer. She leans her head down, until her forehead touches the crown of his head. Her quiet breathing is like soft music meant for only him.

His left hand curls into a fist by instinct as his wrist begins to tremble. Even her touch is not strong enough to overpower the compulsion. He can feel her squeeze him tighter as his breath shortens.

I can’t, he pleads. I don’t want you to see.

I can help you. But you have to let me in.

Nooo. The word wails as it slips out of him heavy with fear.

Please, Gregg. This is where your pain lives. If you share it with me, I can help you begin to heal it.

I’m scared. It is not so much an admission as a plea for her to stop.

I know. I was scared too. But you were there for me when I needed you. Let me be here, for you.

Everything begins again with an explosion of noise, of gunfire pelting the crate, of his heavy breathing inside his helmet, of the buzzing of his shield generator as it recharges and re-establishes itself. His right hand reaches, touching the button on his omni.

“Raven Squad explosive charges are set.” It’s Migs. Tired, but excited.

“Good work, return to rendezvous,” he responds back.

“Negative,” Migs answers. “There’s a console down here. I think I can hack it and shut down those auto-guns. Maybe throughout the whole complex.”

“Cancel that, Migs. There’s no time. Return to rendezvous,” he orders. “Crow Squad and Rook Squad are already back.”

“It’ll just take a minute,” Migs protests. “I can get this. We’re getting torn up by the guns. I can knock them out.”

They continue to hold the junction, keeping the Batarians at bay. Clarke watches the vitals in his HUD bouncing up and down as his squad exchanges back and forth with the defenders. He counts the seconds in his head, watching as the shields on the other members of Raven Squad begin to dip.

“What’s happening down there, Migs?”

“Batarian resistance. My guys got it. I’m almost through.”

The radio beeps out as command cuts in.

“Clarke, this is Kyle. What is the hold up? We’re reading charges are set. Other platoons are already advancing on the third objective.”

“We’ve still got men down the tunnel, Major.”

“We are reading inbound Batarian squads toward that junction. We need to close those routes down now or you’re going to have troopers bubbling up on your rear.”

He switches channels. “Migs, we’ve got Batarian squads coming toward our position. Command wants the tunnels closed now. Abort your hack and get your men up here now.”

“Negative Clarke, I’ve got this. Just a second more…”

“There’s no time, Migs. Cease operations and return to rendezvous now. That is an order.”

“How many more men are we going to lose if I don’t get those guns off, Clarke?”

“None of us are going to make it if those Batarians get on top of us.”

“I’m almost there.” There’s a loud burst in the radio and the HUD for Pfc. Urias blinks out. “Shit. Just a little more. Come on you bastard… Got it! Auto guns are powering down. Raven Squad, move, move, move!”

“Lieutenant, why aren’t those tunnels closed yet?” Kyle is back in his ear.

“Our men got delayed. They are on their way now.”

“Batarian squad on our six!” Dawes shouts out from his side as he rises and sprays his rifle back down the corridor.

“Rook Squad, double back and cover our rear,” Clarke shouts. “Migs! Get up here now!”

“Lieutenant, close those tunnels.”

“My men are on--”

“That is an order, lieutenant. Close those tunnels.”

“Major, I have six men in the hole. If I blow the charges it’ll bury them too.”

“This is a precision operation and we are out of time.”

“Migs where the fuck are you!?”

“We’re pinned down by a Batarian squad. McConnor is down. We’re trying to extract him.”

“There’s no time. Get out of that hole. I have orders from command to blow the tunnels.”

“We can’t leave him behind.”

“Migs get out of that fucking hole!”

“More Batarians coming up from below!”

Clarke raises his rifle to his shoulder and peppers six rounds into the soldiers percolating up from underground. His shield falls as he feels the bullet pierce the armor of his right thigh, penetrating far enough to pierce his skin.

“Cover the lieutenant!” Dawes calls out. Witworth moves out of cover and is cut down before Dawes himself changes sides to hold the position.

“Migs where are you?!”

“We’re free. On our way back up. We’ve got McConnor and… shit… take cover! Martin, Kessick I need suppressing fire on those Batarians.”

“Clarke we’re being overrun!” Dawes shouts.

Clarke’s fingers curl into a fist around the detonator in his left hand as the tunnel fills with more Batarian fire. The bars in his HUD are flashing violently in and out as his squads continue to get pummeled. McConnor is dead. Martin is dead. Migs’s shield drops and his vitals begin to fall.

“Migs!”

“We’re on our way up. Batarians got me in the stomach, but I’m--”

“Lieutenant Clarke, this is General Sampson. This is a direct order. Detonate your charges and close those tunnels. You are putting the entire mission in jeopardy. If you don’t close those tunnels from below, we all go down.”

His fingers open and reset on the handle of the detonator, left hand squeezing into a fist so tight it makes his knuckles hurt. His forearm is burning as he stares down the tunnel entrance from below, watching the flashes of light and smoke coming up from below. Kessick’s name is now dark in the HUD. Migs’ health bar has dropped below half and is continuing to fall.

His entire arm begins to shake. His shield pops again as another Batarian shot glances off his helmet. He holds his breath and closes his eyes.

Clarke pushes the button on the detonator.

The entire junction rumbles as the heavy explosives detonate one by one. The sound gets louder and louder as it climbs up from the subterrain. The Alliance soldiers duck for cover as the entryways belch fire and smoke and debris from below as the tunnels crumble and collapse in on themselves. The Batarians behind them are swallowed up as the explosions from below consume them.

The first sound he hears after is the comm clicking in his ear again.

“Good work, lieutenant,” Major Kyle commends, although Clarke knows he had to be watching the personnel displays at HQ. “Continue to advance toward third objective. Kyle out.”

When Clarke opens his eyes, the detonator is still firmly clutched in his left hand, his thumb pressed down on the trigger.

He tries to open his fingers, but they refuse to budge.

It takes his right hand to pry his hand open until the used detonator tumbles to the ground, bounces once, and rolls down the sloping floor toward the collapsed tunnels.

When he blinks again, the memory begins to fade, melting away as if it were being sucked into an infinite black hole.

Clarke opened his eyes, back inside himself, back on the floor of the hotel office.

He could feel a streak of tears down his cheeks. Dess, her forehead pressed lightly to his, had a matching set of streaks. He could feel her labored breath upon his face. Her body trembled as she absorbed all that she had taken in from him.

In his left hand, where his fingers instinctively curled into a claw around the detonator that had ended the lives of Migs and the rest of Raven Squad, he could see Dess’s blue fingers curled inside of his own.

Her body straddled his waist as she rested lightly on his lap. Her left arm was snaked around his shoulder and neck to hold onto him. She continued to rest her head on his.

“I understand now,” she said quietly as her entire body seemed to shiver as the realization of what he had done settled through her.

“I killed them,” he whispered back. “It was my choice. My hand. My finger that pressed the button.”

He expected that she would try to make excuses for him now, as he had tried to do for himself for years. 

They were being overrun. They were out of time. If the Batarians overtook their position they could have moved freely through the caverns and ambushed the other groups. Migs and his men were already wounded. Closing the lower tunnels was a key objective of the mission. The Alliance leaders had chosen him to get it done and he had accepted. He knew how critical it was to the mission.

It didn’t matter. 

When he pressed the plunger on the detonator, he knew that they’d die. 

And he pressed it of his own free will.

“I know,” she said instead. She shivered as she lifted her hand out of his, wrapping her other arm around his neck too. “But you don’t have to suffer alone.”

For what it was worth, her words planted a small bit of warmth inside him, inside the place where there was nothing but the empty echo of Torfan banging through him.

He inhaled and exhaled, finding his breath had returned and the strangling anxiety gone, abated. His muscles still felt weak, tired, sore. 

“I think I’m OK now, Dess.”

She didn’t move.

“Can we… can we stay like this a little longer?” she asked.

He could feel the vibration through the floor, still hear the muffled popping of gunfire and the hum of the Destroyer’s beam and crash of destruction it caused. This was still a battlefield. But in the small office in the midst of a battlefield, just him and Dess, he felt like he could ignore all of that reality to just soak up this one, private moment.

“Yeah.” 

He rolled his neck slightly and savored the way her head moved with his, staying connected at their foreheads. He placed his hands on the sides of her combat suit just above her hips as her body swayed slightly down into his.

Clarke’s breath slowed to match the pace of hers, their chests lifting and falling in sync. His thumbs moved slightly, brushing over the protective fiber of her suit toward her hip bones. Dess shifted her weight a little, sliding up on his lap as her hand slipped into the hair on the back of his head. She lifted her head off of his, pressing her cheek to his as she nuzzled lightly against the curls of his beard. Her cheek moved against his, sliding toward the center of his face. The tip of her nose brushed against his. He could feel her breath on his lips.

The building shook violently as a roar of an explosion rocked the street.

Dess instinctively ducked her head and Clarke covered her as the drop tiles rattled and fell out of the ceiling while the entire room seemed to pulse up and down. She rolled off of him as the drywall near the door cracked and split and the door popped open as the stress on the frame pushed it inward.

Clarke could see the roar of fire engulfing the street and feel the rumbling as the Reaper teetered and began to stagger. A second burst, heavy weapon’s fire, erupted in a ball of flame burst large enough to lick the lobby of the hotel. He could feel the rush of air and heat as the shockwave pushed past and the giant black structure of metal squealed, twisted and fell.

“Destroyer down! I repeat the Reaper is down!” a jubilant voice declared over the radio as Clarke flipped the channels back open on his omni for the first time since coming inside.

“Hahaha! Did you see that shit! Take that you mechanical fuck!” another shouted.

“Where did that missile come from?”

“That’s all Shepard, baby! Commander Shepard fucked that thing right in its beam-hole!”

The radio cut as the override came in from command.

“All Hammer squads. This is Admiral Anderson. The path is open to the Citadel beam. Mako transports are en route. Gather up, prepare for transport. We’ll make a final push toward the beam,” the radio said. “This is it. Anderson out.”

Clarke shut off his comm and let his wrist fall to his side. He glanced out of the now-open door at the smoking heap of black metal he could see up the block. A Reaper was dead. He glanced over at Dess, who was brushing herself off from the dust that had come down from the ceiling.

“We made it,” he said.

“I can hardly believe it,” she agreed. “But we’re not there yet.”

Clarke nodded as he pushed himself to his feet and collected his chestplate from the ground where he had discarded it. He snapped it back into place as Dess rose to her feet and brushed the dust off of her.

“I know,” he said. “We’re close. Closer than I ever thought we’d get. Let’s finish this. For the others.”

Dess nodded as she touched her belt to make sure her pistol was still in its holster. She ran her hands across her suit once more to toss off a bit more dust, then motioned to the door.

“I’m with you, Gregg,” she said. “Always.”

“No…” 

Dess whispered the single word as the Reaper dropped from the sky like a spider descending on silk. Her eyes, his eyes, everyone’s eyes followed the gigantic black ship as it lowered from the atmosphere landing behind the beam. The six white lights on the front of Harbinger seemed to see all of them, staring them all down at once, daring them to move an inch closer.

The entire convoy of Makos seemed to stop at once. Every soldier following them on foot stopped in their place, heads craned upward. In between them and the Reaper, there were hundreds of yards of barren, blasted ground sloping toward the beam.

Far to their right, he could see the movement of the first man vault the ring of the debris and the first Mako to lurch into movement behind him. Shepard, he knew, leading the charge.

“Stay close to me,” he said to Dess, extending a hand out toward her.

She quickly grabbed it and squeezed. He squeezed back.

“Try to stay behind the Makos,” he said, scanning the no-man’s-land between their position and the target. Wide open. No cover. “It’s our only chance.”

The radios jumped to life again, the last command shouted by Anderson in haste over the line.

“Hammer squads, go, go, go!”

Every soul on the ground seemed to move forward at the same time.

He let go of her hand as he clutched his Vindicator tightly with both palms. Clarke glanced up, ducking his shoulders slightly until he saw the wheels of the Mako begin to spin, spitting stones backward as it revved up its drive and lurched forward.

“Come on!” he shouted back to Dess as he sprinted forward, trying to stay behind the back gate as it began to roll and rumble down the hill.

Then the beams began.

The first one picked a fighter out of the air, bisecting the ship in a bright ball of fire. The second came not even a second later, pointed toward the ground as one of the Makos to their right exploded in flames.

Clarke stumbled as the ground shook under his feet with each strike from the Reaper. The Mako in front of them bounced over a broken chunk of ground as he continued to run flat out behind it. He felt a whoosh as Dess bolted forward with a quick push from her own biotics up over the uneven ground as he stomped awkwardly over the chunks of asphalt and concrete.

They were just two people in the middle of a wave of soldiers all rushing toward the same objective. His feet tangled and he almost fell as one of the beams struck just ahead of them. The group of three soldiers that were there were now gone, no sign of them except a burning jet of flame rising from the ground.

He pushed his legs harder as the Mako began to pull away from them, but there was no way he could keep up with the vehicle as it began to create a larger and larger gap in between them. His lungs burned at the effort as he ran. He let go of his rifle with his left hand, dropping his arms to his sides as he pumped them to build a bit more speed. 

No sense in being combat ready. Cannibals and marauders were the least of his worries now. His shield would stop a few bullets if the lesser reapers tried to jump them. There was nothing his shield or armor would do if the Reaper targeted him in the open.

The beams kept flying, one after another. They moved all over, picking target after target across the entire battlefield. One would shred a mako on the far right flank, followed by one picking another shuttle out of the sky on the far left. Then two would hit in the middle, one high, one low.

The red beams hit targets in the front and the back. It obliterated soldiers into ash and ripped apart thick Mako armor as if it were paper. All of the soldiers were spreading out, trying to put as much space between each of them as if that even mattered.

Clarke ducked, losing his balance and falling face first into the ground as a beam sheared just over his head, striking a group of soldiers following behind them. His armor scraped against the street as he tried to stop himself. Soldiers flew past him, not bothering to stop to help him before they were the next to be disintegrated. 

“Gregg!” He felt Dess’ hand around his left arm as he pushed his hands down and his feet scraped against the ground to lift him back up.

“I’m fine! Run!” he shouted as soon as he was back on his feet and he and Dess were off again. A Mako zoomed past his right side and he moved to try to get behind it, with Dess right at his side.

They were getting closer, but he watched as the Reaper lasers shredded anything that came within a hundred yards of the beam. It continued to fire multiple shots per second. Hammer was getting depleted fast and the entire field was filling with wreckage as destroyed Makos, shuttles and fighters littered the approach.

The Mako in front of them sped up, gaining ground. And then a beam began ripping up the ground, the red light so hot and intense he could feel it across his face as it struck ahead of them. It moved, tracing the path of the Mako until it struck the nose of the vehicle and sent it erupting into a fireball that bounced up into the air.

His shield broke as a piece of wreckage blasted back and struck him, scraping across his right shoulder as the jagged, burning metal blew past him. He dropped down, sliding on his legs as one of the heavy tires bounced over twisted head. He slammed his hands down to slow the slide until he stopped and bounced to his feet again.

When he turned his head to the left, he realized there wasn’t anyone next to him.

“Dess!” he shouted as he looked, seeing the white of her combat suit on the ground.

He turned backward, while everyone else ran forward.

She was squirming, barely moving. Her arms were stretched out and she already had a splotch of purple blood on the back of her head where she had slammed the ground. Her legs were pinned under a scorched and broken piece of metal that had blown off the Mako. Clarke shoved the edge, but the thing was three times his size and didn’t budge at all.

Dess’s head moved slightly as she opened her eyes as she regained consciousness, obviously dazed. She grunted and groaned as she tried to lift her neck and sit up, although her body could barely move.

“Hold still Dess,” Clarke said as he scrambled to her head, holding it in his hands as he slowly lowered it back down. From above her, he could see that both legs were pinned underneath the wreckage and the left side was smeared with her violet blood.

“What… wha…”

“Just try to lie still,” Clarke said. “You’re hurt.”

The beams continued to fire, the low-frequency hum of the Reaper cutting through his head.

“I can’t feel my legs,” she said.

“Close your eyes,” he said, tapping the buttons on her omni for her to get the medigel sequencer started again. He checked the bar for her vitals and scowled at how grim it looked.

Her lips moved, as if she were tasting something that wasn’t there. Her face contorted in pain as she moved slightly, until she settled and stilled. She swallowed and grimaced again.

“Gregg,” she said weakly. “You have to go. You have to get to the Citadel beam.”

He shook his head, throwing his gun to the side as he took up a position above her head. He leaned down, holding his face over hers as he rested his hands on either side of her head to keep it steady. He hoped the touch of his hands would help calm her as he looked at her left hip where the purple stain was creeping up the white of her combat suit.

“Not without you,” he said as he watched the beams continue to rip up anything that got close. This was folly. So close and still a million million miles away.

He saw her hand try to reach for him even as her face twisted in pain again. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply as a bit of blood dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. “Don’t. Don’t move. Just relax. I’m here.”

She licked her lips, her tongue brushing across the rivulet of blood before she pulled it back inside her mouth. “Are we going to make it?”

No, he knew as the Reaper made sure nothing got close. The Crucible was ready. Every species in the galaxy had banded together to resist the Reaper extinction. They all came here to play their one prayer against the mechanical monsters. And it was all going to come up short by a hundred yards.

Clarke reached out and took her hand, twining his thumb around hers as he bent it slowly toward her chest where he could hold it.

“Someone will,” he lied.

She swallowed again with another grimace and slight whimper. Her fingers tightened around his hand. “I’m scared,” she said as he could feel her arm trembling.

For once, he wasn’t.

His arms were sore from the day’s exertion, but steady. 

His heart was thumping from the intensity of the battle, but not racing uncontrollably. 

His breathing was labored from the sprint, but not choked off.

The fingers on his left hand weren’t curled into a fist.

He lifted his left hand and gently touched her cheek with it, moving his fingers until they traced slightly around the curve of her ear, like she had done so many times to try to calm him before melding. He couldn’t do whatever it was she did and open his mind to her.

“Just concentrate on my voice and try to relax,” he said.

He gave her palm a squeeze as he bent down and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. It was no meld, but he hoped it might have the same soothing effect for her as it did for him.

He closed his eyes, resting his forehead down on hers.

If he could give her that small comfort, at least, it might begin to make up for all she had done to try to put the shattered bits of him back into one piece.

Clarke never saw the Reaper beam as it tore up the street toward them.