Prologue

24 August, 2401

The pretty quarian folds her hands in her lap, while the interviewer gives her a moment to compose herself. Behind the interviewer, a turian, about forty, with dark facial markings and leathery gray skin, two panels of lights and a recording drone. Behind that, a female turian, and a male, named Varian, standing by the window, where the waning crescent of Menae cast a dim blue glow over the trees and hills lopes beyond.

"I understand this is hard," the interviewer says. His name is Recto. Now he leans in. The Quarian folds her hands again, and looks up at him. There, in the camera light, you can read a feeling. Anguish, resignation, anger, maybe. She's young and old all at once. Life has asked too much of her, and likely that won't stop. Ever.

She gives a nod, and Recto asks, "Can you tell me what happened to you on Lorek?"

"We were sent there," the quarian says. "Only the message we got didn't call it Lorek. They called it Esan."

#

Pictures of ruins. Of a camera drifting across a city called Daybreak, first seen from orbit, then the upper atmosphere, and stitched together finally with footage shot by a drone at low altitude. In the lens: ruins. Crashed ships. Circular avenues imposed over a square grid, an urban plan commonly known as asari colonial. Then, up close, shots from the street of reaper husks and cannibals, the flesh stripped away, and only the mechanical parts remaining.

Esan, the narrator says. The old asari name, before the batarians gave it a new one. Before the reapers came, we knew it as Lorek. Now, no one mentions it at all. The batarians are gone, the asari are gone. In 2186, the reapers left no one on the surface alive. Anyone who survived, escaped—if you can call it that—to Omega.

#

"Why were you there?" the interviewer asks.

"We were looking for an object," she says. Her hands twist in her lap. Her geth show the image on screen, the characters 303. "This was supposed to mark the spot. Someone had left something there, and we were to retrieve it."

"And what was this object?"

"Our captain never told us."

"Your captain—Shen vas Vesta, correct?"

"That's right," the quarian says. "We didn't usually do surface work. Our ship was better suited to orbital and deep system work, not scavenging for things on the ground."

"And so what happened when you landed?"

#

More pictures of ruins, buildings burst open, furrows in the ground, filled with solidified nazarite. Wasteground. Old vehicles rusted and burned so that little but a vague shape remains. Then: newer vehicles, shot up, weathered, but clearly newer arrivals. All around the vehicles, dark stains on the ground, where bodies had lain, then been moved. A shot of an old structure: a mound of prefabricated housing units, covered in dirt and then in vegetation. More dark stains. An entryway partially destroyed by a blast.

The interviewer and the pretty quarian are there now. Now you can see how the look in her eyes has worked on the rest of her body. She's leaning on a cane like an old woman, though she isn't old. There she is in the blasted-out hole of the entryway, standing on a heap of rubble and gesturing.

"This is where it happened," she said. "We were inside, looking for the marker. I was in one of the central galleries off the main corridor. There were about twenty of us searching the lower level."

"Were you armed?"

"We had a few pistols," the quarian says. "Some explosives." A shudder runs through her and she looks again at the doorway.

"One of your crewmates was found with a rifle. Up on the top level."

"I don't know anything about that," the quarian says. "Anyhow, the only other weapons we had were blasting charges."

"Why explosives?" the interviewer asks.

"We'd been asked to destroy the location where we found the object."

Now they're climbing onto the upper level, looking out over the perpetual night to the east, the perpetual daylight to the west. They stand in a twilight, while the wind blows dust from the rubble between them and the camera.

"You were wounded," the interviewer says.

"I ran. One of the attackers shot me. I kept running and somehow I got away."

"Somehow?"

The quarian shakes her head. "I still don't understand. Someone else was here. Not with us, but looking for the same thing. She and her crew saved my life."

#

Ashana nar Vesta, EVA operator, had served two years on the Vesta, a deep system salvage tug, first near Palaven, then later in the area surrounding Omega. Her name is listed on the "lost with all hands" declaration issued by the joint investigation launched by the Citadel and the quarian government.

Records of her arrival on the Citadel are spotty at best. Her admission to Huerta Memorial is logged, but subsequently scrubbed from any other databases. Nonetheless, her DNA matches the numbered samples remaining from the lab-grown organs fashioned for her at the hospital's trauma and recovery center. When asked for comment, neither Council, nor the quarian legation had any comment.

But let us be clear. Ashana nar Vesta was supposed to have died that day.

"Can you tell the galaxy," the interviewer asks, "what you have to say?"

"I'm alive," the quarian says. "My name is Ashana nar Vesta, and I am still alive."