If I know you at all (and I don't, but I pride myself on being able to judge what a reader wants), you read that summary and knew how you wanted this story to end. When you clicked that link, you had a damn good idea of what you wanted to see.
I did too. I knew what just about anybody would want to see from the moment I realized I was going to write this little experiment. But I also knew that I probably wasn't going to be able to give any of us that.
I wish I'd been able to put down the book.
Pretty soon, you're going to wish Shepard had walked away from that house.
And it's not because of what happens. It's not because of how this is all going to end.
The thing about this story that scares us is not the smell you just noticed (don't sniff), or whether the walls are different than they were a minute ago (don't look). It's not the thing standing right behind you, waiting for you to turn around and acknowledge it so it can crawl inside and change you. It's not the quarter inch, or the cold, or the growl, or even Shepard and Garrus and Kaidan trapped in a place that confronts us with the darkest thing inside ourselves.
It's the emptiness. As we watch someone else confront that dark mirror, we, too are drawn to the edge. And then in past the edge. And as we desperately try not to look, we finally realize that there is no reflection.
There is no monster lurking underneath that water that is not lurking in you.
You have a choice. You can keep reading (even if this version isn't as pretty as the one you'll find on the AO3), or you can do the smart thing and click that little arrow, upper left, pointing backward. If you do, you can pretend that Shepard and Garrus and Kaidan passed that prefab by.
And maybe you'll be luckier than I was. Maybe if you get out now, you won't see what I see.
Without further ado, please allow me to present
the dark line where the eye persists in seeing something that was never there to begin with
1/4 inch
this isn't for you
The main colony on Horizon was empty and silent. Worse even than it had looked after the Collector attack. This time there were no frozen colonists. The GARDIAN was a smoking ruin.
But what really caught Shepard's attention was the haphazard growth. Someone had re-colonized to replace the families and workforce they'd lost. But the new houses looked like they'd just been airdropped in by indifferent volus, and the colonists hadn't moved them.
The bizarre new structural designs weren't making her feel any better about the empty colony.
"Strangest arrangement of prefabs I've ever seen." Garrus stopped to stare at one cell-block neighborhood. It might almost have been normal, except one of the buildings was diagonal to the rest, half-dividing a courtyard the way her mother had once cut sandwiches.
Kaidan made a little half-turn to survey the area, his hand not far from his side-arm. "I'm half expecting to find a pair of legs sticking out from under one of these."
"Definitely not in Kansas anymore."
"—can pull your head out of your ass—"
A woman's voice, just loud enough to be heard. Frustrated, but not truly angry.
Shepard held up a closed fist, the near-universal 'stop' gesture. The echo of footsteps behind her ceased. "What direction did that come from?"
They found the speaker. An asari with high, sharp cheekbones and no scales or face markings glared at them from a monitor. Her right arm was invisible; she must have recorded the message on her omnitool and left it at the family's terminal.
The woman started with: "Will, if you're watching this, I guess that means you made it out alive." She paused for a smile. It looked calculated, aloof, and yet it seemed wholly sincere.
Until the smile vanished as quickly as it had been pasted up.
"If you can pull your head out of your ass and not go back in there, I'm taking Shala and Dae toSanctuary. Come find us, if you want." The asari's lips curved down in exquisitely distant sadness. "If you can make yourself."
The monitor blinked on and off, then reappeared. "Will, if you're watching this..."
Kaidan tapped a key on the terminal. The asari's image winked out of existence and didn't return. He watched the space where she'd been for a moment. "Go back in where, I wonder."
"Maybe Cerberus had a secondary lab in Horizon?" It made as much sense as anything else.
"Must be," said Garrus, with something like reluctant awe curving in his second voice. "Who else could drive people this crazy?"
He pointed at the walls.
Straight black lines — too straight and even for organic hands to have painted — scored every wall. Someone had stencilled in numbers above the lines, at regular intervals.
Too regular. Shepard stared. "Did they turn this place into a ruler?"
Kaidan took a step toward the markings. "I've heard of measuring your kid's growth on the walls, but this...?"
"Could they be measuring distance from a certain point? The place the asari was talking about?"
"That'd make sense," Garrus said. "But I get the feeling they were measuring the distance from one wall to another."
Cerberus could drive the most grounded, psychologically normal people up the damn walls. Throw in the stress of the Reaper invasion, and Shepard was mildly surprised those measurements on the walls weren't written in blood.
She made her decision. "Right. If it is Cerberus, there could be something we can use here. Let's search."
Every room in the house had the measurements on the wall. They passed through a children's bedroom, a master bedroom, and some kind of study.
In the study they found two terminals, several camera drones, and a desk piled high with datapads and OSDs. Someone had used the corner to bookend a shelf, but the shelf's contents had toppled somehow.
Shepard played the recording on the datapad at the bottom of the stack.
There was silence for a moment that seemed to stretch, and then a man's voice said, "A quarter inch. I've measured five times and it won't go away."
