There is no disagreement among cognitive neuroscientists theythat human cognitive abilities depend principally on the size and neuronal organization of the cerebral cortex. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scientists wondered whether the reductionist approach of developmental neurobiology and the interpretive approach of cognitive neuroscience could ever be fully harmonized. The work of Dr. Miriam J. Kowalski in the 2040s was vital to our understanding of the human mind…

The clock chimed the half hour, and I put the book aside. There was a part of me that liked being under house arrest. It was a glimpse into a road not taken, a life where I had stayed in the military just long enough to get my college money, and the heroics at Elysium had been done by someone else. I'd have been a doctor now, like Gavin Archer, only with better ethics. I didn't regret it. Someone had to stop the batarians and someone has to stop the Reapers, but it was good to keep the mind sharp. I wouldn't be one of those old soldiers fit only to hold a gun and to retire to a small farm after they finished their service. Someday the Reapers would be here in force, and I'd do my part to blow them to hell; but someday they would be gone, and the galaxy would need people to create instead of destroy. I intended to do my part there, too.

The pain drilled through my temples like a mining laser. It was like it knew when I had a doctor's appointment coming up and put in an appearance just in time to mystify the old windbags. I knew what it was: Object Rho. The headaches had started after that business with Kenson and popped up every few days since. Scans found nothing wrong with me. My memories were still my own, and I sure as hell didn't feel the impulse to worship the Reapers, but I knew what it was. Kenson and Harbinger had fired their opening salvo in the war against my brain. I'd managed, somehow, to survive, but only Shiala had ever been freed of the Reapers' pernicious influence. I had to kill them before they could destroy me.

Hence picking up my old interest in neurobiology. You had to know the terrain to win the battle.

The door opened. Serviceman Moss didn't salute me like James did, but there were other compensations—like the dark auburn hair she always kept in a bun and eyes almost as green as mine. Her body was lean and hard. She was exactly the kind of woman the Alliance would use in recruitment ads to convince teenage boys with the habit of thinking with the wrong head that they might want to enlist. She licked her lips when she saw me, an unconscious, subtle gesture. It would be easy to talk her to bed. My brain leapt into overdrive at the thought. She was athletic and beautiful, and I hadn't had sex since the last time the Normandy had docked in Nos Astra, and I'd used iPartners to find an asari with a thing for blond humans. Yeah, I could probably talk Moss into it. Just the thing for a war criminal in legal limbo and a bored serviceman stuck on Earth during peacetime.

Except for the part where it could seriously fuck up her career. There were rules about these things. No fraternization ever, and no sleeping with anyone if they might get hurt by it.

"Time to go, Shepard." Her eyes fell on the book, and she smiled a little. "Enjoying your book?"

I fished a credit chit out of my pocket and tossed it to her. "Thanks for buying it for me. The exchange doesn't carry stuff like this." I gave her my best Hero of Elysium smile. "I really appreciate it."

She blushed. "Thanks. I shouldn't tell you this, but the brass is thinking about letting you have monitored extranet access. Maybe even increasing weekly recreation time."

I looked out the window. Vancouver was cleaner and shinier that Moscow had ever been. The grass seemed greener, the sky bluer. A few more hours out there would be heaven. I touched her forearm ever so lightly. "You are a treasure, you know that?" There were rules, but sometimes you had to bend them.

The blush deepened, and her lips twitched as if she were fighting a giggle. "Time to go, Shepard."

People had mostly stopped staring at me as I passed. They didn't hate me, they didn't pity me, they didn't even care about me. I was another marine who had gone Cat 6, just a little more flashily than most. I used to expect that Kaidan would show up and say hi or that Liara would use her contacts to spring me. Hell, the Illusive Man might decide he owed me for giving him the Collector base and order Miranda to mount a rescue. But months passed, and no help ever came. I was surrounded by strangers.

Moss stopped outside the door to Dr. Markham's office and let me enter. Markham was a picture perfect doctor, with an impressive mane of gray hair and a spotless lab coat. That would explain how he had risen to the rank of major despite being a complete quack.

But it was the woman in the room with him that made me catch my breath. Miranda. Her hair was blonde now, almost gold, and pulled back in a way that practically begged a man to pull the pins from her hair. She'd used some kind of dye to turn those vividly blue eyes of hers an ordinary brown. She carried herself differently, her posture loose with easy confidence. Whoever she was pretending to be had nothing to prove to anyone. But I would know that intelligent, measuring gaze anywhere. Heat sprang over me as memory flooded my senses.

Miranda was irritated, but not angry. She didn't tap her foot like that when she was angry. "Do you actually plan to accomplish something by awakening the geth, or were you also born with the desire to poke hornet's nests and press big red buttons?"

"Says the only woman who can put resurrections on her resume. A talking geth, Lawson! This could be the greatest scientific discovery since we found the Archives, and I want in on it. Don't tell me you don't."

Lightning fired through her eyes as curiosity warred with caution. It was that lightning, not her body, that made her so damn close to irresistible: that desire to see, do, and experience the impossible. And it didn't get much more impossible than a talking geth. "I suppose someone should be on hand in case you botch the interrogation." She smiled, and I suddenly wanted to punch Jacob for ever being a big enough idiot to let her slip away. "I'll meet you in the AI core in five minutes."

But also…

Wilson had called Miranda an ice queen when we first met, but her mouth was hot and soft under mine. My shoulders scraped the metal of the bulkhead. We'd barely escaped being blown up on Heretic Station, so we were doing the most alive thing we could think of to celebrate. Blood flowed southward, and my pants were suddenly way too tight. I reached for the zipper at the front of her jumpsuit.

But she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me away, gently but firmly. "No."

"No?" I repeated incredulously, trying not to think about how good she looked with her hair mussed.

She started pacing the length of the captain's quarters. "We know how dangerous this is, how likely it is that the Collectors will kill one or both of us. Now's not the time to let our hormones compromise the mission."

Her words somehow managed to penetrate the fog of lust, and my brain started working again. Cerberus didn't have fraternization regs, but the reason those regs existed was so that commanders could do what was necessary and not have to worry about sending the woman they were sleeping with to certain death. That went double when the enemy was a Reaper pawn. "No, it isn't." The words tasted like sawdust. "I hate the Reapers."

"Getting killed doesn't motivate you, but the desire to sleep with me does? I'll have to remember that."

And suddenly it was all too much. I closed the distance between us and seized her hands in mine. Her hands were mostly gloved, but the knuckles were tantalizingly exposed. I brushed my lips against them like the knights in the stories I used to read while trying to get warm in the library. "After the war is over…"

"After."

But then Jacob had gotten killed and Miranda had gotten reassigned, and there had been no after. I hadn't even known whether she was alive or dead. Until today.

"And here he is now," Markham said. "Mr. Shepard is suffering from severe posttraumatic stress disorder. Hardly worth your time, Dr. Solheim."

"On the contrary." She'd adopted a slight Norwegian accent, just enough to be exotic. "Mr. Shepard's implants alone make this a fascinating case study. I was delighted when your superiors called me in to consult."

I heard the message as clearly as if she had spoken aloud: the cause of my headaches had something to do with my implants and Lazarus Project's director was here to fix it.

"Yes, his implants," said Markham with a contemptuous sniff. "Cerberus mad science. They rescued him from Alchera and jammed technology I've never seen into him. I wouldn't be surprised if they implanted him with some sort of control mechanism and forced him to blow up that relay."

Miranda didn't flinch, I'll give her that, just gave Markham a little scowl. "You believe that anyone with a strong enough will to survive exposure to a Prothean beacon could be constrained by a Cerberus control device? He would shoot anyone who tried."

Not true. I only threatened to shoot Miranda when she told me what she'd tried to do. It took her saving my ass from a thresher maw for me to get over it. "You know me, doc. Nobody's ever been much good at forcing me to do anything."

Markham just barely resisted rolling his eyes. Miranda's expression was carefully blank. "I'm quite familiar with Shepard's history of insubordination, mutiny, and causing general mayhem. He does not, however, have a habit of malingering. If the logs gathered from the SR-2 are to be believed, he had to be physically forced to receive medical treatment on several occasions. Your inability to find the source of these headaches is a testament to your skill, not Shepard's truthfulness. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd like to take his history myself. In private."

Miranda's act didn't falter until thirty seconds after Markham closed the door behind himself. The smile she gave me was the same large, crooked one she had worn when she reminisced about Niket. "So nice to see you, Commander."

"Likewise, Ms. Lawson. What brings you out of my neck of the woods? Can't possibly be the weather. Don't you know it rains a lot in Vancouver?"

"I see you've retained your oh-so-charming sense of humor." She picked up a datapad and light-pen. "Liara heard of your difficulties and asked me to help. I said yes."

"So Cerberus hasn't abandoned me after all? I was beginning to wonder there for a while."

The tension in Miranda shoulders, always slightly present, knotted and spread until she was as stiff as a piece of rebar. Her voice was like an arctic wind. "My association with Cerberus has been terminated. I'm here on my own authority."

I collapsed into the nearest chair. "You… You left Cerberus?" I looked at the door, just in case Kaidan wanted to burst in and announce he was going AWOL. Even before Lazarus, I had known who Miranda was by reputation: the Hound of Hell is responsible for most of Cerberus' successes and none of its failures. It was she who had made the organization a threat throughout the '70s and into the '80s. She had made me believe in them, that I could actually make a difference instead of fighting for a society so ossified that it only cared about preserving itself. "Why?"

"It's not important right now." Her expression changed, tender and more than a little pleading. "I was sorry to hear about what happened on Aratoht."

Despite what Miranda thought, I didn't always poke the hornet's nest. Subject changed. "I'm sorry it had to be done. If I could have warned them in time, we might have at least saved a few people. Damn Kenson. And it's only going to get worse once the Reapers are here."

"You did what you had to."

"I'm not looking for sympathy from you, Lawson. I know I did the right thing." Did it make me a bad person that they had stopped haunting my dreams weeks ago? There was truth in the old cliché: one death was a tragedy, but three hundred thousand was a statistic. Numbers flashing on a holoscreen. "I'm more worried about Object Rho. If I am indoctrinated, well, I hope you brought a gun with you."

"I have the reports, but tell me about it in your own words."

So I did. I told her about seeing Object Rho for the first time and realizing what it meant that someone as smart as Kenson had left it out in the open. Harbinger's voice taunting me. Visions of the Reapers' arrival and our inevitable extinction. Being knocked out. Waking up two days later to realize that I had mere hours to do what should have been unthinkable. "I kept waiting for weird dreams or that feeling of being watched that Chandana had, but so far it's just the headaches."

Miranda listened intently, pausing only to ask the occasional question for clarification. When I was done, astonishment and sadness warred on her face. "Direct exposure to an artifact like that should have turned you into a mindless husk."

"I know! I was there in that damn mine, remember?" I raked my hands through my hair. "If you're worrying about a nice way to tell me it's hopeless, don't bother. Just kill me." God help me, I was not turning into another Saren.

"I don't think it's hopeless. Far from it." Her voice was quiet, and the sheer conviction of it warmed me. I'd seen her tentative and anxious around Oriana and me so much that I forgot how certain she could be. It was a lifeline, and I clutched it with all the strength I possessed. "I have a theory, but I'll have to run some tests to confirm it."

Well, that was the best news I had had in months. "Theory? Do tell."

"I don't want to say anything in case I'm wrong."

"I thought you were never wrong?"

She cringed and rubbed her shoulder. "Yes, well, the past few months have taught me to have a more cautious view of my predictive ability. No hope is better than false hope. I think your headaches were caused by Object Rho, but I don't think you're indoctrinated."

"Anyone ever told you that you're a damn tease, Lawson?"

"A tease, am I?" Her eyes sparkled with sudden amusement, and I forgot how to breathe. Miranda was a beautiful woman, even with hair and eye colors that weren't her own. I'd have been lucky to have a woman who looked like her even on my best day. But it was more than that. A sudden fit of amusement like this one would come over her, or she would stay up long into the night helping Mordin and me with an experiment. There was passion in her, that mysterious energy that drove people to do the extraordinary. And I wanted some of that passion for myself. And this time, there was no mission, chain of command, or ghost of a dead friend to stop us.

"A terrible one." I stroked her cheek with my fingertips. Yes. Just as soft and smooth as it had been the first and only time I had touched her this way. A man could stroke that skin for hours and never grow tired of it. She sucked in a long, shuddering breath; and I took that as an invitation to continue. She wore no perfume, but a strong, clean scent filled the air. No nonsense, just like her. My fingers fluttered over to her lips. I pressed down and—

—and she caught my hand in hers. "Shepard, the cameras." I tried to take some comfort in the way her voice was shaking, but it didn't really work.

I looked at the ceiling, and the telltale red light blinked at regular intervals. Shit. It was video only, but exhibitionism had never been one of my kinks. I dropped my hands in my lap like a good boy. "There has to be somewhere we can get some privacy in this place. If I'm going to go crazy, I'd prefer to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. Assuming that offer is still good?"

Miranda shook her in exasperation. "You are incorrigible." She sobered. "Let's focus on the tests for now."

"Right. Tests." Worst-case scenarios flashed through my head. I was out of the loop these days, but that might've been a good thing. The Reapers could make me lead an army, or sabotage our defenses, or assassinate our politicians. "Wouldn't want me to strangle you in your bed if you are wrong."

"Shepard... Alex..." She leaned forward in her chair; and her hand hovered over my knee, almost but not quite touching. Her movements were stiff and awkward, but the heat from her fingers leaping towards me made up for it. "Before I joined the Lazarus Project, the scientist in charge said that you couldn't be saved. I proved him wrong. It took two years, but I did it. And I will do everything in my power to see that you last much longer than two years."

A hot lump formed in my throat. I had been wrong. Cerberus had left me. Kaidan had left me. The Alliance had thrown me under the bus. But I hadn't been abandoned. It was a very long time before I trusted myself to speak.