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Prologue: The Lost Girl
The night was red.
Crimson light. The pulsing limbs of a thousand bodies born to dozen species, entwined in lust, in desperation; an ocean of organic life pulsed to the electric heartbeat of Afterlife. Blue skin and silvered fringes, beetle-black eyes, and appendages with indecipherable names. Bodies bathed in sensuous anonymity; all lips and claws and forgotten sobriety, alive and asleep in the writhing diversion.
It was no place for a child.
She cut a soundless swathe through the oscillating hive of depravity; each booted step measured. Deliberate. Unknowing fingers brushed her by chance, but when the eye sought her - just a trace of a scarlet hood, evanescent in the web of forms pairing and posturing in the feverish dark. She reached the edge of the crowd; veiled eyes fixed on the batarian silhouette leaned over in the furthest booth, tilted toward the sensuous forms of the asari dancers on display. An untouched Palaven Sunrise perched glistening at his hand - the code confirmed.
She slid in the booth without a word. He didn't move his many-eyed stare from the azure bodies.
"The bouncers didn't give you a problem then." he stated, detached and condescending.
Two slender hands folded in their fingerless gloves on the gleaming table. She leaned in, her weight balanced firmly on unassuming little wrists. She lifted her head. A ray of blood colored light ghosted across her colorless eyes, which burned like embers beneath her hood.
"Krogan bribes are getting expensive. I'll be needing a charge number."
The batarian snorted a dry laugh, not breaking his gaze on the spectacle of latex before him.
"Not my kind of operation. You'll be paid in cash. Clients, as well as myself, prefer it that way."
She held her penetrative gaze; unyielding and strange against her youth; a piercing stare that weighed more than the handful of her years.
"Not my concern as long as it pays better than the Reds. What's your cut?"
The shaded alien chucked almost coyly at her naivety.
"That depends entirely on you. Perform like shit, and I take more. Snatch some regulars, and well, we can deliberate. Don't worry that sweet little keratin-stranded head of yours – human girls are especially hard to come by, so expect to be fought over."
He turned to face her, setting all four of his glinting black eyes on her as his mouth split into a sharpened yellow smirk.
"You would be amazed at what certain Volus would pay even for common blue ass, let alone something exotic, let alone young. Fortune will undoubtedly be yours, even with my, er, reasonable fee."
He smiled unfalteringly, the strobing light glancing off his offset teeth as they wrought their black words. She glared back at him, her brow hardened, eyes unmoving, divulging nothing. "Now," he remarked, bouncing both palms on the table, "What say you we drink to your new life?"
Her eyes narrowed. She nodded curtly and averted her sight, crossing her arms tightly at her chest in agreement. It was done.
The batarian tilted his near snarling, smirking head abruptly to the side and snorted almost gleefully. This was going to be painfully easy, he thought, his ego overflowing with self-satisfaction. He turned his head, caught the eye of the bartender adjacent to them, one of his kin that he knew only too well, and raised two gnarled fingers. Across the distance, the bartender twisted his lips into a subtle, acknowledged grin and began to move his practiced hands, catching the barely imperceptible blink of his accomplices' upper left eye - the finespun sign to fix the second drink with just a slip of extra effort.
The alien interlaced his phalanges cunningly, tilting his head again in his oily way, drinking her in as she sat as still as stone, determined to keep her glance clean of his."So the Reds just aren't paying the bills anymore, eh? Got loftier goals I take it." he pressed, his voice silky. She continued to glare at the blue dancers, the beat dropping low and tense.
"Actually, I do. Ever since our little "Earth-bound" group decided to start running Hallex off this rock I haven't been able to leave this piece of shit."
"In over your head?" he chided, in a mockery of concern. Her eyes flicked to him, murderous.
"Let's just say the Reds aren't exactly keen on my request for reassignment."
The drinks seem to appear on the table. The batarian wrapped his fingers wryly around his glass without breaking his tensed stare with the young human, his lips still dancing in that awful smile."You want more than they can give, I take it?"
Her eyes blazed into him. "That's one way of saying it."
He chuckled acidly, raising his glass. "Then…to fresh beginnings."
He tilted his glass back and drank deeply. After a moment of iced observation, she followed suit. His many eyes contemplated her, from the many slender fingers that wrapped around the tipped glass to the lips that pursed the crystal rim which poured the poison down her narrow throat. She was already affected before she opened her eyes; her face and body flushed with artificial heat.
She wavered in her seat, hands sluggishly reaching to steady herself amidst the spinning, blurred carcass of her fading consciousness.
"Wh…"
"Shh…" He cooed, now fearless, pushing a thick, brown finger against her lips – enough to push her rag doll body effortlessly against the seat. So, so easy…barely any sport in it. His stained smile twisted, filthy teeth glinting, and whispered "Shh my little prize…to grandmother's house we go."
Reality returned in a supine fog.
She needed only to taste the air to know she was no longer in Afterlife. Daring not to open her eyes, she listened, drawing a map with her senses. Oily fabric was beneath her, the harmonic purr of a corvette-class engine, the thick scent of filth and reconstituted oxygen, a shifting ruddy light gliding over her left eyelid from what could only be an observation window. She sensed no bindings.
A satisfied, bragging alien voice, seven meters away, the vibrations of his words cut by what sounded like a thin steel wall. He was pacing, distracted, excitedly recounting the details of his quarry to an unknown voice in the comm unit housed the next partition. She lay still, mastering herself through her breath, each lungful cleansing her gut of fear and her mind of doubt.
This is it. Whoever is listening…don't fail me now.
The beating drum of her heart rendered down to a controlled metronome; this dance would call for a very specific rhythm. Moving not a hair else, her right eyelid slid open and her eye rolled down, sighting in the position of her captor through the wall in the cross hairs of her mind.
With both eyes open, she made the movement in a soundless slip, and was swallowed beneath the sheer veil of stealth.
"You're going to lose your mind Kharn, she was willing. Willing! It was too simple!...Yes, yes a human female…Underage my friend, pure as the Noverian snow…We're going to be rich my friend, very very rich…Oh yes, we're going to start a bidding war of unprecedented magnitude-"
When he rounded the corner, that yellow smile slid off of his face and landed heavily somewhere in the now frozen pit of his gut.
His bed was empty.
"…I'll call you back."
He rapped his omnitool violently, snapping off the transmission in mid-conversation and killing the warm orange haze of its given light. He froze in a disbelief that was quickly oxidizing into something more ominous, something closer to fear such that he had to make a conscious effort to push that irrational feeling deep, deep down. His four eyes blazed, searching, brows furrowed, nostrils flared – yet he remained rooted to where he stood in the darkened room.
The girl had literally vanished.
He blinked all of his eyes and shook his head, reality was not fitting into feasibility. He looked again and yet his eyes did not betray him. His expression contorted into and in a flash he stormed across the room and-
THWHACK!
Blinding pain – the ceiling rushing away – falling and BOOM! The batarian crumpled and smashed into the brushed steel floor with a clang before his brain realized he would never walk again, screaming in bloodcurdling agony.
"So…Batarians do have an Achilles tendon…"
He turned his head in abject horror; there was a gun in his face and a knife in her hand. Like a pale demon from a feverish dream, she lay wedged beneath the bed in a long black shadow, her unblinking eyes conflagrant, terrifying and clear.
"Wait – NO!"
Her finger fired. At that range, her Stiletto X detonated the back of his skull like a crimson geyser. The scant remainder of his head hit the floor like a dropped stone. She wasted not a moment tucking the still hot gun into her fly and clawing her way out of the impossibly narrow space through a warm tide of batarian blood. In a flurry of movement she flipped his still pliant corpse over, grabbed his arm and ripped off his omnitool. From a hidden pocket she extracted a small nondescript widget and unfolded it until its metal prongs were revealed, marrying it to the hard data port of the omni-device. His pathetic personal securities split open without a trace of protest. It was favorable; she had little time.
It fit her poorly, but it worked. She crossed the small room in stride, rounding the partition to his personal counsel – working as fast as her hands could move she hacked the counsel and cobbled together a rudimentary bio-scan across the tiny vessel. Only two, batarians again, in the cockpit;she gathered that the ship was a small slave runner under civilian disguise.
Fortune was smiling on her, and she allowed herself a smile back. The girl leaned back and glanced out of the window, and watched the rust colored leviathan of Omega sliding away as the ship took relative altitude.
She so close to free, but there was little time for emotion.
Pulling her hood back over her crimson head, she scanned the ship's simple layout once more, took a breath, raised her pistol, and walked calmly out the sliding doors that opened to the next cycle of her life.
The small figure ghosted through the dark lit vessel, the soundless shadow of death wrapped in a young girl's flesh. The slavers were dead before they turned around, two point blank shots and a cockpit full of blood. She would turn the ship away from Omega, vowing hollowly never to return, and out of the Attican Transverse as fast as she could, thinking for sure she would die as she blasted the ship through the mass relay while barely knowing the controls. She flew to Sol on stolen wings, her system, marked by the rings of Saturn and a small yellow sun that shone on the closest thing she could call a home.
It was already April there, and her birthday was coming soon. She would be 18. In a few days time she would eject the bodies, wipe the deck, and guide the ship to the first Alliance base she could find, to her only option, to her salvation. She told herself she would be the best, that she would change, that she would succeed where she was told her whole life she would fail. Survival had been against her odds since her parentless birth. Death licked her with every breath she took, so what the hell was the difference. She knew nothing else but craft, patience and a few good ways to deal death. She might as well put her atypical education to good use. For the first time in her life, she would come to use the name that was tacked to her infant wrist many years ago in the sunless place where she was left to forge her own future.
Shepard.
