Chapter 1
The smell of rotting garbage still burns her nostrils after all these years, but she's able to push the urge to gag aside as long as she doesn't concentrate on it for too long. Walking further into the alley, she could think of nothing but finally getting to Liam's hideout. For once she's gotten a decent cut of the bets in her fight tonight, enough to pick up some decent food and new tech for him to tinker with. She adjusts the strap of the bag she packed everything into and casually looks over her shoulder, but this area of the city is mostly old, abandoned industrial buildings and she hasn't even seen anyone else around.
A pair of strong arms suddenly grip her shoulders and spin her around. Pure reflex and residual adrenalin cause her to drop her bag and ball her still-bloody fist, biting back a hiss of pain as what feels like a broken knuckle makes itself known. She aims a punch at her assailants jaw, but he is just as fast at blocking her incoming fist.
His face is hidden in shadow, but she knows his features almost as well as she knows her own. Parts are like staring into a mirror; others are foreign, taking after a father neither of them ever knew. She almost relaxes as she recognizes him, but something in his demeanor keeps her on edge. She had been careful to detour and change her route more than once to ensure she couldn't be followed, or at least she'd thought so. But if he had followed her, chances are someone has followed him.
"You're being stupid, Alexis!" his low, angry voice pulls her from her musing. "The bounty those guys offered you could finally get us off the streets and into the life we deserve, the life mom would have wanted for us!"
The mention of their mother still causes her to shiver, an icy hand grabbing her heart. But she pushes it down and focuses instead on the anger she so often uses as a shield, wrapping it around herself like a cloak. "Don't call me that!" she hisses as she pulls herself out of his grasp. "No one needs to know that name. And do you honestly think that mom would have approved of you trying to get me to sell out my friend for money?"
He scoffs at her, ignoring her point about their mother. "What, you mean you haven't even told him?"
She glances away from him, cursing herself as she realizes that her bottom lip is already between her teeth. No matter how hard she's tried, she has yet to succeed in breaking her telling habit. Between that and her silence, she's told him everything he wants to know.
"You're giving up the chance for us to get the hell out of here and you haven't even told him your real name?" He looks incredulous. "He's a freakin' biotic sand junkie, Alexis! He's only exploiting you for cheap sand and sex!"
Alexis glares darkly at him. "For your information, I've never sold him any sand, nor is our relationship anything like that. We're friends; no more, no less." Blood rushes in her ears, but her voice is hard as she draws her anger even tighter around her. If he weren't her brother, and her hand weren't absolutely killing her, he would be lying on the ground with a broken jaw for speaking to her like that. But as it is, she's never actually hit him. Jon Shepard may know exactly how to get under her skin and piss her off, but she could never bring herself to hit him. Even if he did deserve it a lot of the time.
"So why the hell are you protecting him?" His frustration is evident, but she is tired of trying to make him understand.
"Because he's my friend, Jon! The first one I've had since we ran away, and I'm not giving him up for money!"
Just as she starts to turn away, a spray of strong coppery-smelling liquid hits her face. Her hand slaps at it, her mind not registering its identity until she feels the hot stickiness against the pads of her fingers. Time slows to a crawl as she turns back towards Jon, her puzzlement changing to horror as she watches a stain of deepest red bloom from his abdomen. Their eyes meet and she's sure that the horror and shock displayed on his face mirrors her own.
He clasps the wound with one hand, and an icy fear fills her as she realizes it is probably all in vain. Tears prick her eyes as she takes a step and reaches out to him, her mind screaming at her to help him staunch the flow. Her fingers just brush his arm as a hot, excruciating pain slices across her face just below her right eye. She clutches and covers her eye, a scream tearing from her throat as something punches into her left shoulder hard enough to knock her remaining breath from her lungs. She gasps as her legs buckle beneath her, sending her sprawling to the ground. Adrenalin pours through her veins as she drags herself behind a dumpster and looks over with her good eye to see if Jon's also taken cover. But her gaze finds nothing but his unmoving body lying in a growing pool of blood. The pain of her wounds fades as her mind tries to reconcile what she's seeing. Another shot hits the dumpster, but her mind is blank and doesn't register anything more than a hollow ting.
Razor sharp grief and shocked disbelief clutch and claw at her. Her lungs are burning with the sobs she is forcing back. She can't allow them to consume her. Instead she forces her mind to turn them into rage and allows it to rise like lava from within her, mixing with the adrenaline to push her physical pain aside. There will time to mourn later, now is the time for survival and vengeance.
She glances in the direction the shots had come from, but she can't see anything, and the sound of her racing heart and ragged breathing drowns out all other sounds. Each breath burns worse than the last, and she knows she won't last long if she doesn't escape. She drops the hand covering her right eye and forces her eyelid open. By sheer luck she'd turned her head just enough for the bullet to miss her eye and graze her cheek. She blinks back the tears pooling at the edges and notices the pistol Jon had attempted to draw. It had fallen from his hand and is lying not too far from her, but before she can reach it, a large black boot kicks it away. She watches it skitter down the alley out of sight.
She looks up and glares at the three people now standing over her. Hatred, shock, and rage all war for supremacy within her, but hatred wins the battle as she recognizes Randle, one of the Reds' top enforcers, loosely clutching his rifle as he looks down at her. Smirking in what she can only assume is amusement at her injured state. Her vision narrows as she snarls and bares her teeth at him, ignoring his two companions for the moment.
The unknown men back away, looks of unease and fear on their faces as they take in her wounded and bloodied state. She tries to focus on what they are saying to him, but she only catches a few words. Something about how without her alive, they will never be able to lure the biotic out of hiding, and Randle will never see a single credit if they don't catch him. She glances over at them and feels another surge of rage and adrenaline. These were the same suited guys who had approached her. She springs from her crouch and lunges at the closest one, but Randle strikes her with the butt of his rifle. A loud crunch fills her ears as she falls back to the ground in a heap, the left side of her face throbbing almost as bad as the right.
Her shallow breaths come quicker now as she fights against the blackness creeping at the edge of her vision. She's sure that her cheekbone is broken, but her instincts scream at her to get back up. Her eyes flash to Randle as he kneels down in front of her, placing his rifle beside him.
"Lina, Lina, Lina," he mockingly scolds. "You know, if Jon had just done what was asked of him, none of this would have happened." He gently caresses her throbbing cheek with the back of his hand, almost as though he's sorry he hurt her. "But what's done is done, and now that we're here I think I'm going to enjoy toying with you." His eyes change from mocking gentleness to cold hatred as his hands encircle her throat, lifting her up off the ground before she can do more than gasp.
Her feet dangle just above the ground as he holds her at his eye level and begins to flex his fingers around her windpipe. She claws at his hands, her gasps becoming more and more desperate as she tries to break his hold as black spots start to invade her vision. He laughs at her feeble attempts before a kick from her flailing legs catches him in the crotch. He snarls in rage and throws her across the alley as though she is nothing more than a rag doll.
Alexis's back impacts the wall and she falls to the ground in a heap. She lets out a shuddering gasp as air again floods her deprived lungs, but it's loving caress is driven back out of her as Randle's boot slams into her midsection. A cry of pain escapes her lips and she has to fight the blackness that is now permeating her vision.
Randle steps back, laughing heartily as she rolls onto her less injured side and pulls her knees to her chest to protect herself. "I've wanted to do this for a long time Lina." she looks up to glare through the tears now coursing down her bloodied cheeks, and a sickening grin spreads across his face as he stalks towards her again. "By this time tomorrow, you'll be begging me to kill you. Who knows? I might even do it."
A numb, cold fear spreads through her. She's seen the same, ugly hunger in his eyes once before. Remembered the pained screams, louder than anything her current injuries would elicit. She whimpers as he bends down, reaching for her. His fingers are inches from her throat when a strange blue/black glow surrounds him, and he freezes in place. She hears the suited men shout and looks beyond Randle's frozen form to the mouth of the alley for the source of the commotion.
Someone is there, but her vision swims too badly to make out more than a blurry figure. The two men rush towards her rescuer, one of them activating his omni-tool while the other draws a pistol from under his jacket. Her rescuer gestures with his hands, flinging Randle away from her and into a dumpster at least ten feet away from her prone form.
A new kind of fear washes over her as she realizes rescuers identity. Scrabbling at the ground, she manages to push herself up onto her knees, going for the knife she always had hidden in her boot. A pained grunt of exertion escapes her bloodied lips as she uses the last of her strength to throw the knife. Pride blooms in her gut when it sinks into the armed man's back. He screams in pain and falls to the ground, his weapon clattering away under one of the many garbage piles.
The strange blue glow surrounds her rescuer as she watches him rush the other suited man and punch him in the jaw. His neck lets out a resounding crack as his head twists to the side, and his body falls to the ground, motionless.
Alexis sighs with relief, her strength spent. She's dimly aware of the ground rushing to meet her face, but the pain she expects to feel from the contact never comes. The last thing she feels before the blackness crashes over her is a pair of strong arms catching her and gently lowering her to the ground.
"I'm sorry, Lina," The whisper sounds as though it's coming from kilometers away as her mind shuts down. "I'm so sorry."
A startled gasp escaped the throat of Lieutenant Commander Alexis Shepard as she shot upright in her bunk. The thin, overstarched military blanket lay almost entirely on the floor, and the little bit left on the bed clung to her sweat-drenched body. Her eyes quickly swept the room, searching for a threat years in the past, as her foggy mind attempted to reconcile with her actual location: women's temporary quarters, Arcturus Station, 2183.
She flopped back down on the mattress, grimacing as her head bounced off the bare mattress. Where the hell did her pillow go? She rubbed her head and let out the long breath she'd trapped in her lungs. Her heart hammered almost as fast as it had that fateful night. She frowns as she registers the cool, wet trails of tears streaked across her cheeks. Closing her eyes, she counted to fifty. After Elysium the brass had sent her to a therapist. She'd hated every second, but he'd at least taught her a few tricks to deal with the aftermath of that hell.
It'd been a long time since she'd dreamt about that night. Over the years, work and missions have filled the hole that Jon's death tore through her. Still, every once in a while, a crack opened to drag her back into the darkness.
Once she managed to bring her heart-rate and breathing back under control, she rolled to the edge of the bed and retrieved the pillow and blanket. The adrenaline from the nightmare was dissipating, leaving her cold, shaking, and bone tired. She curled herself into the blanket and willed her mind to slow enough for sleep to embrace her again, but after what felt like an hour of staring at either the insides of her eyelids or the blank wall, she was forced to admit that she'd lost the battle for sleep.
Reaching out to the small shelf next to her bunk, she retrieved her omni-tool and flicked it on to display the time. She groaned in frustration as she realized there were still six hours until roll call for her new assignment, meaning she'd only slept for about three hours.
With a sigh of defeat she kicked off her covers, grabbed her shower kit and a fresh BDU from her packed footlocker. If she was awake, she might as well get ready, and nothing shook off the cobwebs better than a shower and fresh uniform. She had personnel reports to study and a mission brief to go over before reporting in. As Captain Anderson's new executive officer, it was her job to know the crew better than they knew themselves, though she knew reports could really only offer her the basics. Combat was the only thing that could give you a real glimpse into a person.
Sitting alone in the mess, Shepard pored over data pads containing the personnel reports of the officers she would be serving with. She was vaguely familiar with the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau, nickname "Joker". Anderson told her about how he'd commandeered the Normandy during its test flight to prove that he was the best man to pilot her. She had to admit, the guy had stones.
With a smirk she flipped to the next officer, Navigator Charles Pressly, formerly of the SSV Agincourt. The sight of that ship name gave Shepard a small thrill. It and its contingent of Marines had been some of the first to reach Elysium. They'd reached her position just in time and driven back the pirates that had be ready to overwhelm her. Her defense of the colony may have earned her the invitation to the Interplanetary Combatives Training ( ICT) program, but she owed her life to the marines on Agincourt.
She was just reaching for her coffee when she heard the doors from the CIC hiss open and heavy, armored footfalls began to descend the stairs. A frown creased her brow as she listened closer.
She lowered her data pad and reached into her boot for the knife she always kept there. With fluid movements, she drew the knife and silently ducked around to the opposite side of the elevator shaft. The footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs and a tense silence fell over the deck. Shepard heard the click and expansion of a pistol, and she clutched her knife a little tighter as she edged closer to the corner of the shaft.
A cool, dual-toned voice echoed around the empty deck. "I know you're there, human. Show yourself and state your business on this vessel."
Shepard's frown deepened. A turian? What the hell would a turian be doing on an Alliance ship? The Alliance and Hierarchy had collaborated on the Normandy, but all of their checks had been completed during the initial flight tests. Nothing in her brief said the Hierarchy was sending someone to observe the shakedown.
"Commander Shepard. Executive Officer of the SSV Normandy," she said as she stepped around the corner to face the intruder, her knife in a defensive grip in front of her.
The two of them stared at each other for a moment before the turian's mandibles twitched with what Shepard recognized as a smirk, and he lowered his pistol.
"Well met, Commander," he said as he collapsed the pistol and holstered it at his side. "Nihlus Kryik, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. I will be observing this operation on behalf of the Citadel Council."
Shepard's eyes widened slightly in surprise as she sheathed her knife. "Why would the Council send a Spectre on an Alliance shakedown cruise to a human colony?"
"This vessel was a joint venture between the Alliance, Turian Hierarchy, and Citadel Council. I was selected as a representative of both the Council and Hierarchy to observe this 'shakedown run', as you call it."
Shepard remained silent, watching Nihlus as he walked past her, heading for the lockers on the other side of the mess. She didn't have a problem with turians, far from it. The ones she'd worked with over the years proved to be competent strategists and fierce warriors. No, her issues lay with the council sending a Spectre along on a low-value mission. A low tingle of warning set in at the base of her skull, an instinctual alarm she trusted without questions. Something told her that a great many details hadn't made it into her mission briefing.
With a slight shrug of her shoulders she headed back to the mess table to gather her data pads, feeling that it was probably time to prepare to meet Anderson.
"Please inform me when your Captain arrives," Nihlus said as he began checking and storing his weapons in the locker next to hers. "I have matters of a sensitive nature that I wish to discuss with him."
Shepard looked up at him, her face a mask of passive neutrality, and nodded. This was going to be an interesting voyage.
Authors Note: So here is the newly rewritten first chapter of my fic :D HUGE thanks to MizDirected for all her help in getting this chapter to it's now polished state! She really is the best and most patient beta in the world! Also want to thank the members of the Mass Effect writers Facebook group! You guys are all awesome!