I paced around the room until I knew she was gone. I didn't look out the window. I didn't even go near it. The last thing I wanted to see was her looking up at me.

The hotel had room service, but I didn't use it. I headed downstairs and around the block to a convenience store, picked up an expensive bottle of whiskey, a cheap bottle of booze, and lingered on the cigarettes. They had my brand.

Got the asari cloves instead. If I was going to have a pity party, figured I might as well go all the way.

When I got back, I cracked open the expensive stuff first. Always leave the cheap stuff for when you're too drunk to care. I only used a glass because the room came with several. I didn't bother with ice.

I grudgingly righted the table I'd flipped, took a seat in the easy chair, and cracked open the pack, stripping off the plastic and tearing the foil. I like to have something to do with my hands, even if it's just simple muscle memory. Helps me focus on something else.

But even when I set myself fully to the task of chain smoking and drinking myself into a stupor, I couldn't stop myself from thinking. I kept replaying the day in my mind. Couldn't help but wonder if maybe I should have just given in and taken her up on her offer, much as I knew I'd regret it. Didn't imagine I'd ever see her again.

Halfway through the first bottle, I had thrown out any plans for sleep.

At some point, my thoughts shifted away from Amina and toward my reason for being here at all. What I'd hoped to achieve by coming to Taetrus. No reason and nothing at all, were the only answers I had. Or the only ones I was comfortable admitting to myself.

But liquor, good liquor, has a way of getting you all... nostalgic. And at the tail end of that first bottle of two hundred fifty credit Epyrean whiskey, I took a deep breath of the scented smoke in the air and finally started that spiral downward.

I booted up my omni-tool, set it on the table in front of me, and started a holoprojected slideshow of the photos I kept on the CPU. Most of them were work related, schematics or locations, various different wide shots of construction sites. A few shots of friends. My assistant. Old war buddies. My time at C-Sec, shots of the Citadel and messy desks and Vakarian making obscene gestures at the camera. Then a few shots from various deployments. Various crewmen. Various women. Most of them dead, the ones that weren't I didn't keep in touch with much.

And then, of course, there were pictures of her.

I shouldn't have kept them. I knew that. Told myself I'd go through and delete the whole batch one day, but I always put it off. Never seemed like a good time.

Deep blue skin. Flowing crest. Elegantly edged white marks around her eyes and cheeks, like colony markings, but born with them. Big eyes, but not too big, always half-lidded, like she could see you just fine, but you weren't quite worth her full attention. Long fingers, thin waist, and full lips, curved into a wicked smile that never really left her face.

Her father was a turian, her mother some fancy matriarch. I think she came from money. She never said, and I never asked. She'd wandered into my life one day and simply never left. Kept saying she would, but she always thought of a reason to put it off. Always smiling at me like I was the only one who got the joke she'd told.

The slideshow played on. I reached down to the floor and fumbled with the jacket I'd dropped after I collapsed into the chair, pulling out my wallet. I opened it and plucked out the photo.

She's smiling, but not at me. Something off to the side. One arm draped around my neck, the other dangling a cigarette from between two of her five fingers. She's wearing a dress, high cut, one she liked to wear whenever we went out. One leg crossed over the other, revealing just enough skin to draw the attention of everyone in the room.

Whatever had caught her attention, I wasn't interested in. I was staring at her. I did that a lot.

Five months and twenty one days. Twenty two, if I felt like being technical.

One night she was there, smiling like nothing was wrong. Lips against my mouth, hands on the best places, whispering all the right things.

The next morning, she was gone.

At first I wasn't worried. She'd left before, without warning. Gone away, then came back in a few days, a week, two. She'd be back. She always came back.

Except she didn't.

Cop in me started trying to figure it out. She'd left all her things behind, abandoned her skycar near the starport. The only things missing were one set of clothes, her purse, and her omni-tool. Had to be foul play. Had to be.

Couldn't have been her making good on all those playful suggestions that she'd be leaving soon. Couldn't have been her finally getting tired of the broken-down turian and moving on. Couldn't be that there wasn't a single thing in that life that she valued enough to take with her.

It took me far longer than it should have to work it out. She was a little over three hundred, the prime of her life. I was just another brief stop on a thousand year journey.

Seventeen years, on and off. Sometimes together, sometimes not. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we made up. Sometimes I swallowed my pride and apologized, sometimes she just wandered back in like nothing happened.

Seventeen years, and none of it mattered.

I crumpled the photo in my hand, stood, and threw my glass across the room. It shattered, spilled what was left of its contents. A perfect waste of good whiskey. I didn't care. Sank right back into the chair and reached down for the cheap bottle.

I didn't bother getting another glass.

I was still in the chair when I woke up. My mouth tasted like ash and my head was starting to hurt. I didn't know what time it was, it was still dark out, but since I had the beginnings of a hangover, I guessed it must have been late. I rubbed at my eyes with the pads of my fingers, pushed myself to my feet and stumbled for the bathroom, knocking over the mostly-empty bottle on my way.

The fluorescent piping around the mirror flickered on when I flipped the switch and nearly blinded me. I shut it off and decided to take my chances fumbling in the dark instead. A splash of cold water on my face woke me up some, but didn't help the headache. Took a washcloth off the rack and wet it, rubbed on the back of my neck.

I was starting to feel better until I looked up and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. Even in the dim twilight of a hotel bathroom, turian vision is better than you'd think. I wanted to put my fist through the glass, curl up in the bed I hadn't touched yet, and sleep until four in the afternoon.

It was a good, solid plan. But there was something I needed to decide first.

I walked back into the living area and searched the ground until I found it. I straightened the picture as best I could, smoothed it against the wood floor. I knelt there, staring at it. Trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

That's when I saw the light shining under the bottom of the front door. And the shadows of two sets of feet.

I pushed myself up and crept closer as quietly as I could. The walls were thin enough that I could hear voices.

"You sure he's still in there?"

"Positive. I heard him walking around a minute ago."

Great, I thought. Fucking great. This couldn't end anywhere good.

"I don't hear nothin'."

"Then tell the others while I prep the door. Let's get this barefaced son of a bitch."

I hate being right.

I pinched the bridge of my nose hard, tried to sober myself as best I could, and considered what I had. A bunch of broken glass, some chairs and tables I could barricade with. Windows, if I felt like jumping fifteen stories and taking up permanent residence between the cracks in the sidewalk. My omni-tool.

My fucking omni-tool. I grabbed at my wrist and momentarily panicked before I spun around and saw it sitting on the table. I tried to be fast and quiet and only really succeeded at the former as I pulled it on, keyed up the offensive protocols, and started analyzing my options.

I'm ashamed to say it took me a solid minute to rig something up. In my defense, I had killed two large bottles of hard liquor that night and slept poorly for the last three days.

When the shape charge they planted on the door finally exploded and it fell inward, two of them rushed in. I got a good look at two more flanking the door before they tripped the proximity mine I'd fabricated and planted on the wall. Of course, if they had shields, that wouldn't be enough. Which is why I'd plugged the sink and let it overflow, coating the floor around the door and kitchen in water. And then generated a localized electric shock using my omni-tool from behind the counter.

Turns out, they didn't expect resistance from a scarred up vet past his prime, and they didn't have any personal shields. Odds were they were dead before I sent fifty thousand volts through their bodies, and the whole thing was overkill.

Felt good, though. Even if the smell afterward was less than pleasant.

"Spirits," I heard one of them curse. I peeked out and saw him almost rush headlong into the exact same water trap as his friends, but the other one at the door stopped him. He stuck his head out and I couldn't get a good look at his face or markings. Not that it mattered much.

"Give it up!" he shouted into the dark. "We've got you outnumbered and outgunned!"

"Oh yeah?" I started flipping through secondary defense protocols, omni-blade programs and close range stunners. "How would you know?"

"Because even if you get past us, you won't make it past the rest!" the first one taunted. I heard an audible smack and smiled as I imagined his partner cuffing him upside the head.

"Really?" Picked two. Forked omni-blade with incendiary application, and contact-explosive generated across the knuckles, just in case. "And where are they?"

"Everywhere!" The smarter one again. "You're not leaving his building alive."

I keyed up the proximity mine protocol, overclocked it, reprogrammed it to work on a timer, and started the fabrication process. The Arbiter had the mine in the palm of my hand inside of three seconds. Thank the spirits of the Serrice Council Technology Conglomerate.

"We taking bets?" I said as I threw the mine into my bedroom.

"Only with your life!" the dumb one yelled.

I grinned like an idiot and got up on my haunches. "Good stakes."

Once I started sprinting, they opened fire. I heard the rounds hit the door frame and ducked my head, and as the wall above my bed exploded, I leapt through the hole my jury-rigged shape charge had created.

I think it says a lot about how much I drank and where my head was at that I didn't consider that the room next to mine would be occupied. Thank the spirits it wasn't. I rolled off the bed into the hotel room that was a mirror image of my own, and made for the front door, hacking it open with a few twitches of my fingers across the haptic interface of the omni-tool.

The pair of stooges were right behind me, but they weren't bluffing when they said there were more. I stormed out into the hallway and nearly collided with one of them, a tall man with pale markings. I didn't have time to fabricate the blade, so I went with the gel. The left hook to the jaw sent him careening into the wall, mandible hanging loose and broken on his face. He might have been dead, I couldn't be sure, but I was certain that my hand hurt like all hell. I grabbed the weapon he'd held, some submachine gun I didn't recognize the model of, and sprayed behind me.

The two from before nearly ran into my fire, but once again the smart one was quick on the take, and held the other one back. I backed up, nearly tripped on the legs of the tall man, and made for the elevators.

I wasn't drunk enough to think leaving out the front door was a good idea, or stupid enough not to know they'd hack the thing the moment I stepped inside. Instead, I pressed the button for down, then hacked the door myself as I kept my gun trained on where I'd come from. When the doors slid open, I turned and leapt across the shaft.

I'd worked a few bomb threats on hotels before. I knew the service layouts by heart, because we'd had to search them, top to bottom, a full three times before we could clear the building for reentry. That was protocol. So I knew how the elevators worked, where they went, and every maintenance shaft and platform attached to them.

Again, it was colossally stupid. I didn't recognize this hotel, and I hadn't been in this city in more than thirty years, post-war. I had no idea if they'd use the same building guidelines as they used to. Yet, somehow, my luck was holding out, and I managed to land cleanly on the service ladder as the doors slid shut behind me.

I stuck the SMG in the crook of my cowl and started to slide down as fast as I could, trying to look forward and not down, and stay focused on not letting go of the ladder. I stopped every few seconds to make sure I wasn't about to hit the ground or the elevator, which sped promptly upward, then descended as quickly, sheathed in the blue light of a mass effect field that lit the shaft long enough for me to realize how long a fall I'd enjoy if I slipped.

When I found a maintenance crawlspace close to what was marked as the second floor, I got inside and shimmied through the tight quarters as fast as I could. It led into a small chamber barely big enough to stand in, with access panels for the major heating and cooling systems, and several other crawlspaces leading in multiple directions, including up and down.

I headed down. I ran into one more of the small chambers and still kept going. Ended up kicking out a vent cover and hopping out into the sub-basement.

Vallum was an old city. You wouldn't know it to look at it now, of course, but it's been around for centuries. Millennia, even. They'd built and rebuilt the city numerous times long before Facinus or the Reapers razed it to the ground. There weren't exactly ruins underneath—no one cared enough about the history of Taetrus to preserve anything more than a couple hundred years—but there were a labyrinthine network of tunnels that the city's utilities and service workers had co-opted. Most lead to dead ends or cave-ins, but the ones that didn't were lined with cables and pipes the width of a man's cowl, and nearly every major building in the city center had access to them.

And, of course, they were regularly patrolled by cops and militia, and updated maps were issued to every officer. Not that I wanted to run into either, but with any luck, once my new friends from up above figured out where I'd gone, they'd think twice before coming down after me.

I couldn't remember this section of the tunnels, and I didn't have a map. I just ran, made a few corners, found an access point with a ladder, and climbed up before a patrol happened upon me.

It lead to an alley. No idea where I was anymore, but anywhere outside was good. After I climbed out, I tried to figure out which way the starport was. Maybe I could get an emergency shuttle off this shithole.

"Pstt," hissed a voice behind me.

And, like an idiot, I turned around and met the butt of the rifle with my face.

I should have known they'd have men watching the nearby exits. But I was too drunk and too high on adrenaline to think more than one step ahead.

Humans say it's better to be lucky than good. What a crock of shit that is, huh?