Nine
She thinks of practicality, after the fact. Disabling the blackbox was a necessity—without the IFF, without any identifying signal, she can't be so easily followed. Maybe Cerberus was counting on that, though, tying navigation control to it. She makes it out of the system and then drifts, uncertain of the next step.
No food, no water—just the undersuit, her boots, and a pistol. A passing merchant freighter spots her on ladar, and she trades the shuttle for passage.
"Accident," she explains to the captain, who exchanges a fast appraising glance with his first mate. "Just trying to get home."
The captain comes at her in the middle of the night, but she isn't asleep and breaks his jaw. The rest of the crew is just as hungry but not nearly as stupid, and she hacks the environmental controls, using the threat of depressurization to keep them in line. She changes transports at the fuel depot—choosing a converted turian cruiser, some kind of scientific vessel, headed back to Council Space by way of Omega, for charting or something.
She can access her accounts now, and withdraws enough to buy a coat and different shoes from the depot's downtrodden service workers. The turians' captain takes just enough to overcome his fear of inspectors, and she settles herself between crates in the cargo-hold.
Civilian travel is slow but steady. She reaches Omega in a week.
She ducks inspection at the docks, sliding between the guards and an oddly cooperative pack of vorcha.
A batarian stands just on the other side of the door, perched on a slowly collapsing box, gesticulating at the crowds.
"Repent!" he demands. "The end is nigh!"
He stands with his arms outstretched, head back, and there's a flash of neon that washes the color from his face and clothes. He is bright-white, suspended by wires and tubes, haloed in green and orange, wild eyes seeking hers.
"Quiet, please," she whispers. "Make it stop."
The emptiness of David Archer prickles beneath her skin, and she steers clear of Afterlife, of Gozu District, of any members of Aria's guard who've seen her face before. Kima District's a gamble, but safe enough—someone else owns Archangel's building now, having cleared it of blood and bodies. All she needs are its markets, for their size and selection.
She starts simple: a Phalanx, a Mattock, an easily concealed shield generator, an off-market Logic Arrest omnitool. Cerberus's gifts find their way into various bins, but she can't let go of the Kassa Locust, strapping it in her shoulder harness, pulling the tattered coat protectively over her new purchases.
She finds the garment district, and chooses a stall staffed by a quarian woman, who is puttering around behind the counter, folding lengths of brightly colored silk and cutting with a pair of shears longer than her arm.
"Please, feel free to look!" she says, substituting for a smile with wide-stretched arms. "Don't mind Vrall—he's just the help."
The vorcha hisses at her.
"I am Rala'Tor vas Omega," the shopkeeper continues, neatly slicing a section of fabric. "Mostly I sell the bolts, but I sew, as you can see. I don't get many human customers, though I relish a challenge."
Shepard's barely listening but nods at the pauses between the woman's words, plunging her hands into the cloth draped across the table, covering her colorless skin in greens and purples and reds. The vorcha hisses again and makes to grab her elbow.
"No touching!"
"It's alright, Vrall. She won't hurt anything."
Rala turns her head to Shepard, tilted in questioning.
"Will you?"
Shepard draws a pinch of orange silk over her healing knuckles.
"No, of course not."
Rala carries on in silence, snipping fabric, then turning to pin it to a vaguely turian-shaped mannequin, checking the pattern against her vidscreen. Vrall glances between them, hand tightening on his pistol's grip, as Shepard twines and twists and drapes different swatches over her arm.
"That particular pattern is based on some popular aquatic designs. Khelish symbols associated with the afterlife."
Shepard holds up a stretch of deep blue, sprinkled through with waves and dots of dull gold.
"I've heard lots of cultures associate large bodies of water with death and what comes after—the drell, the hanar, even your own people—we're not different. Our ancestors, when we were trapped on a planet instead of a fleet, believed the souls of the departed dispersed into the water, and when we drank, we absorbed their wisdom, their experience, even their beauty."
Rala laughs, quietly, and returns to her pinning.
Shepard looks back at the fabric, running its edge against her skin. Blue and gold—Mom used to joke she was born that way, faded, and spent the rest of her life trying to get back. She's spent so much time in uniform, of some sort. Even her shore leave was always spent in fatigues.
She glances down at her dirty undersuit. There's a spot of dried blood on her belly. She considers wiping at it, but Rala is watching her, reaching beneath the table, producing a small mirror.
"A test," she says, still smiling, and gestures for Shepard to lift the fabric, to hold it up to her face.
"Is...is this me?"
There's a crack in the mirror—it falls across her mouth in the reflection, diagonal, near the corner.
"I think it is," Rala says warmly. "And I know just what to do with you."
She works fast, measuring, cutting, aligning, sewing, everything in a few hours. She shows Shepard into a small curtained-off room behind her stall.
"Don't mind the mess," she says. "I'm not much for entertaining."
Omega's dirty heat blasts Shepard's skin as she peels off the suit and steps out of the shoes. Rala trades her, passing the new clothes from the other side of the curtain.
"Mass-produced," she sniffs. "You can tell, the way it wears on you. If you don't mind me saying. Your left foot looked a little swollen. And those shoulders. Military's the height of fad at the moment, though."
The new fabric runs smooth over her skin.
"There's no appreciation for craft now," Rala says, and Shepard can hear the suit stretching in her hands. "You humans, all your beautiful coloring. Satisfied with the same ten colors, the same six styles. Such conformity. Ridiculous. Not everyone need look like the asari."
The zipper's teeth click over her navel, and Rala chuckles to herself.
"Sorry. Showing a bit of my bigotry there, I suppose. How's it fitting?"
Shepard surveys herself in the larger mirror before stepping out.
"This is me," she says, enveloped by the heat.
Rala promises more, with time, so Shepard gives her two days and guesses at the credits. Rala's humbled, bowing and scraping, so it must be enough.
She finds better shoes at a batarian stall of Rala's suggestion, soft boots with laces to her knees, hard-soled but pliable, meant for a traveler, or so the merchant tells her.
"You look like a traveler."
"I could be," Shepard says. "I am."
A cab drops her outside what used to be Morinth's building—that apartment's been rented out as well, lights on and figures visible on the balcony. She looks up but can't make out the faces.
She could belong here now, or at least her clothes could. Women wandering up and down the street behind her move differently, posture loose, heads tilted, eyes roving casually across the buildings and each other. Her training is too deeply ingrained to be given up, but she tries at least, calling up the woman who curled sinuously into Morinth's lap before snapping her neck.
She tries to inhabit that woman, to force those thoughts and memories into her uncooperative limbs. But there's none of the liberation she wants, just a dull ache behind her eyes. Shepard pulls the hood of her new silk jacket over her hair and walks back to her rented room, hand curled around the unfamiliar weight of her pistol.
An assumed name is not enough, apparently, to protect her: a batarian and a turian in Aria's colors wait at the boardinghouse's front doors, and they fall in when she passes, brushing her elbows with each step. The asari herself is inside, lounging on Shepard's cot.
"I don't mind squatters, for the most part," Aria says. "And you've always provided the proper tribute. But let's be honest. Things tend to get..tense around you."
Shepard balances her weight on both feet.
"Still angry about Patriarch, then?"
Aria smiles cruelly and shrugs.
"A little. But that's not my main concern. You're missing a few pieces, Commander."
She gestures for Shepard to sit.
"I don't know what you mean," Shepard says carefully, remaining upright, too stiff to move.
"Of course you do. You've slipped the leash, which I'll admit, I do admire. But I don't want trouble from the Illusive Man."
Aria smoothes her hands down her shirt.
"We have arrangements. I'd rather you weren't around to fuck them up."
No hiding, then. Shepard looks at her feet, at the black boots, the grey trousers, the blue-and-gold hem of her jacket, the white edge of her rough vest. It's not quite who she is, not enough to save her from what she was.
"This isn't an eviction. Or, at least, it doesn't have to be."
"A few days," Shepard chokes out.
"Getting your affairs in order?"
"Something like it."
Aria smiles again, bringing her hands together over her crossed knees.
"Okay. I like you, Shepard. Not really sure why. You have the potential to be a pain in my ass, but you can have three days. I won't give you up, but I won't protect you from inquiries."
"Fair enough."
It isn't fair—nothing is anymore. She closes the door behind Aria and her henchmen, and leans into it, face flushed with heat. She presses her lips together and tries not to scream.
The manager doesn't even look up when she leaves, somehow trusting that she hasn't left any corpses to surprise the cleaners. All she has is what she's wearing.
There's no set standard for days on the station, everyone running their own schedule, so the markets are always open, always teeming with filth and population. Someone's decided that it's mealtime, anyway, and a few other stalls follow suit, throwing up canopies, frying meat in massive pans over poorly-controlled fires. It's a Blue Suns market, and blue cloth means dextro, so Shepard keeps an eye out for orange—batarians and the occasional asari slaving over cauldrons of grey levo slop.
Shepard finds one towards the middle, with a plump asari proprietor, and perches at the counter between two wordless batarians.
"A few more minutes," the asari says, waving away her customers' impatience. "You want to eat, or taste metal for a week?"
"Hardly a difference, your cooking," one of the batarians grunts, but goes back to his omnitool without further fuss. The asari rolls her eyes and lugs her cauldron off the fire.
"Sweetheart, you can't sit in Mommy's way."
She's speaking to a little blue girl, half-tucked beneath the counter, playing with a pair of krogan figurines. Shepard watches the girl scoot out into the light, latching on to her mother's knee.
"Hungry, Mama," she says.
"I know, baby. Just a minute."
The asari moves around her as she ladles out servings. Shepard holds out her credit chit and accepts her portion, eyes on the child. Bored, the girl smashes her figurines together in mock battle, then tosses them aside with a huff, then crosses her pudgy arms and stares into the face of each customer.
"Mama," she says loudly, pointing at Shepard. "Is that a human?"
The asari throws Shepard an apologetic look.
"Yes, sweetie, this nice lady is human."
"You look like me," the little girl says to Shepard, clambering up a stack of crates to eye-level.
"Do I?"
The girl reaches out, hand brushing back the hood. Her fingers twine into Shepard's messy hair, tugging. The asari gives a little cry of shock and pulls her daughter way.
"Goddess, I'm so sorry! She's at that inquisitive stage. You know kids."
No, she wants to say, I don't know at all.
"It's okay. I don't mind."
Shepard twists the spoon around her bowl, tongue thick around her words.
"How old is she?"
The asari glances down at her daughter, attached now to her skirt by tiny, dirty fists.
"Ten years. But it seems like just yesterday her daddy walked out on my pregnant ass. Everyone wants the maiden, not the matron."
She smiles at Shepard, small and ugly, and reverses the question politely.
"You got any?"
"Yes," Shepard hears herself say. "A son."
"Oh," the asari says, with the same polite indifference. "How old?"
Shepard leaves the stew half-finished and wanders, scanning the crowd for families. She's no stranger to station-living, and she sees the ghost of herself in the children she passes, waiting in a cruiser's chow line on her dad's shoulders, passing hand to hand between unfamiliar officers and friends.
A turian woman and a human man wait at the cabstand ahead of her, a turian toddler swinging from their outstretched arms. There's something alarming in their domesticity, and Shepard slides behind a column, watching, reading the man's posture. Broad shoulders, wiry build, a shock of gold hair, and a laugh that carries through the open air. She catches a glimpse of his profile—the same straight nose and wide cheekbones—and then the woman calls him Zack and her heart stops.
Shepard falls back, pushing herself into the darkness, but then he turns—it's not Toombs, the eyes and mouth and jaw all wrong. All the same, she waits out the next three cabs.
She finds an open public terminal near one of the transport stations, ten minutes before her shuttle is scheduled to leave. The seat looks no cleaner than its fellows, so she's reluctant to sit, standing instead to the side and tapping in her pass-code. It's likely Cerberus has put a tracer on her account, but she's never been very good at stealth.
There is only one message, looked to be sent from herself, but it's not—something is off in the encryption, creating a jumble of code interlaced with the message she'd sent weeks ago. Only one line remains intact, followed by a backslash and the letter K.
Let me find you, it says.