Chapter Ten - Unmasked

"I should go." Irina was standing hesitantly at the bottom of the stairs up to the airlock. "I don't want to intrude on your private moment."

She started to turn to go, but I reached out a hand to stop her as Sal'Ris kept going up the stairs. "Irina, you're a friend. Mena likes you almost as much as us, and Nia positively adores you. They're not going to mind, and you deserve to be here." I offered a shy grin. "Especially since we'll be having you here a lot while your cabal recovers. Right?"

Her head dipped down and I thought there was a slightly purple tint to her cheeks. I had to be imagining it though. There was no reason for her to blush. "I guess you're right."

I smirked. "Then come on up, girl. It's time for the grand reveal of the resident lovely ladies." A glance at Sal'Ris, in a set of nondescript clothes rather than her almost omnipresent armor, saw me amend that statement with, "Well, two of the three." The Batarian huffed and flipped a rude gesture at me.

It took several minutes for the airlock to cycle, but it felt like an eternity. Sal'Ris kept one set of eyes locked ahead on the door but the other kept flicking over to where Irina was stripping out of her armor. She had the undersuit on, but as I'd noticed before it was rather tight. In an effort to keep from laughing, which failed miserably, I ended up covering my mouth and snorting. Irina was confused, stacking her armor in the set of stands I'd put in, but the Batarian knew that I'd seen. Her glare promised death if I said anything, her hand resting casually on the knife that I'd returned to her at the clinic. I just rolled my eyes and shrugged stiffly, freezing up as the door opened. Before I even saw anything, I could hear a high voice humming something like the music Fillna'Seni had played in her store.

Mena and Nia were waiting, the latter kneeling between the former's legs as a brush ran through her hair. The hair itself was different from anything I'd ever seen, more akin to the bristles on the brush than what my own follicles produced. Nia's was longer, not just comparatively, and the way it arced down seemed unnatural to me. Instead of being pressed close to her skull the white fibers only started bowing about half an inch down their length. It ended in a ragged line near her waist, the strands on the side hiding her face from us and ending in a line along her shoulders.

The younger Quarian had on a vibrant yellow dress, shot through with grey chevrons, that left her arms bare. Only patches of her skin were visible under shorter clumps of the same bristly hair covering it down to a fine fur on the back of her hands, the grey speckled with lavender dots. The same fine fur covered what I could see of her legs, except it was shorter and laid flatter than higher up on her body, seeming like streaks of white paint on her skin.

The older one had shorter hair, pulled back and falling to her shoulders, with just a few strands dangling in front of her face. Her skin was a couple of shades darker than her daughter's, but with the same lavender spots starting on her face and trailing down her neck and, presumably, connecting to the patterns on her arms and hands. They focused around her eyes, the watery orbs that seemed to glow even in this light outlined in lavender that offset the massive silver irises. Her eyes had to be easily twice as big as mine or Sal'Ris's, with next to no sclera visible around the edges and just a thin oval of a pupil oriented vertically.

Her face was thinner than a human's, slightly more angular. Sharp bones were outlined in the flesh above her almost gaunt cheeks, the rounded arch more prominent than in anyone else I'd seen. The memories in my head had shown Quarian faces to me, without context, but they seemed more primal than this. Feral, with the gleam of intelligence in their eyes muted instead of flaring out as Mena's did. The two of them were breathtaking, far more so than foreign memories and the corrupted VI that Nia had made of her father. I found myself smiling as I saw Mena's tongue, slightly forked and a deep purple that contrasted greatly with her dark grey lips, flick out between her ivory teeth as she yawned.

The woman blinked, a tracery of veins visible even at this distance from the backlit glow of her eyelids, and her lips quirked up in a human-like smile that showed the pointed nature of her front teeth. Predatory. Her voice was accented, but much crisper than when it was fed through her suit's speakers. "Nia, I think you can finally show off your dress now." The mother laughed, the sound throaty and sibilant

The girl apparently hadn't heard the airlock opening, which was something I really needed to fix. Her humming stopped the moment that her mother spoke and she'd shot to her feet in the blink of an eye. The bristling mane of hair swished to the side, revealing a smaller, smoother, less-gaunt face with the same luminous silver eyes and a similar pattern of spots, though on her they formed two vertical bars on her cheeks as well.

Her face was practically lighting up with excitement, her eyes glowing a little brighter. Her dress stretched down to the upper of the two joints on her digitigrade legs, the fabric twirling as she did. Her giggle was light and almost like a bell, lacking the static that had always plagued her suit, as she started running toward us and shouting our names.

She hugged Sal'Ris first, sending the Batarian stumbling back into the door of the airlock with a muted grunt. Most of the chatter coming from her was in Khellish, but Sal'Ris apparently understood it. She was murmuring things back that I didn't understand and could barely hear. It sounded like Khellish, but with some kind of a different accent. I had no idea that she knew it, and Mena seemed surprised too.

Next, probably since I was right next to the her first target, she did a little twirl in front of me, the edges of her skirt flaring out as she gave me a gentler hug. She knew how unstable I was with my leg after having knocked me over several times with the tackle-like shows of affection she seemed to favor. As she wrapped her arms around me I felt little claws dig through my shirt and into my skin. "Thank you so much Mr. Selos. That yucky suit was so terrible!"

I awkwardly patted her on the head, feeling her hair and marveling at how different it was from a human's. While I was doing that and her head was buried in my stomach, Sal'Ris snorted. "You won't be thanking him when you get a cough and a rash everywhere from allergic reactions."

"Nuh-uh!" She shook her head, and from the feeling I noticed she had no exterior ears. "Itchy is ok!"

The Batarian snorted again as the girl's claws released their grip and she moved over to Irina. The girl squealed when the Asari picked her up, literally, and spun her around. She always seemed so much more comfortable around kids than anything else. It was adorable to watch, especially with how both of their faces lit up now that the suit wasn't in the way.

My eyes were drawn away from the scene as the young girl's mother stood from the couch, a flowing shirt of some kind of blue fabric going down to cover the waistband of black shorts that ended at her knees. Everything looked loose and comfortable, something I could imagine was a relief after being stuck in their suits for so long.

"We really can't thank you enough for this Selos. We haven't done anything to deserve it, but you went through all the effort to have this done just for us." She smiled and hugged me. "I know you'll say that it was just the right thing to do, but it really means so much to us. People just don't do something from the goodness of their heart in the Terminus, not like you have. You're a gem, a real gem."

Her eyes shifted to Sal'Ris and Irina as her shoulders slumped slightly. My stomach churned as she continued, "There's something that..."

Whatever she was about to say was cut off as her daughter jumped down out of Irina's arms, her legs flexing in a way that made me kind of jealous, and grabbed Mena's hand. The rapidfire Khellish was too fast for me to make out anything, but the girl dragged her mother back into their room.

We'd walked out of the hallway of doors by the time I spoke next. Irina was on the couch next to me, with Sal'Ris having limped over to the kitchen and started sifting through the cabinets for something to eat. From this angle the ugly scar from where her amp had burned was visible, a puckered oval of sunken flesh glistening with medigel.

"So, you speak Khellish?"

The Batarian grunted.

"I never knew that you could speak it. Or that you and Nia were that close. It's kind of adorable." I smiled and went on as Irina chuckled. "Who knew the Reyja'Krem would have a soft spot for little alien girls?" She growled and I decided to shut up. Even if she was still recovering I knew she could move faster than me. Needling her, as multiple bruises from the last few weeks could attest to, wasn't the best thing for my health.

Irina let out a sigh of contentment as she stretched, something in her back popping. "This was the first time I'd seen an unsuited Quarian. They're both so cute! Nia always reminded me of my little sister back home, but it's just more now that I've seen how happy she is to get new clothes." She chuckled. "Their fur is so much different from yours."

"I told you it's called hair! Not fur!" I threw a pillow at her, which she stopped in midair with biotics and lightly tossed it back at me.

Our banter was interrupted by the door to the two Quarians' room flying open and the girl prancing out in a deep purple dress that accented her skin. It was pretty obvious now that we'd be a captive audience for her own little fashion show, something that left even the gruff Batarian relaxing with happiness in her eyes.

The turn of the shift, about four hours later, saw both Quarians starting to sniffle and rashes spreading across their visible skin. At Mena's insistence, both of them were wearing breather masks to keep from passing anything back and forth between them as easily. Sal'Ris was still in the shop, relaxing or napping or something. I wasn't sure what, especially since Irina had forcibly evicted me so that she could drag me to the restaurant she'd mentioned before.

It wasn't any kind of fine dining, the manners displayed by the other patrons horrible even compared to Sal'Ris and the kids back home. It was some kind of Asian food, which if I remembered right was a country or continent back on Earth. My parents never really wanted to talk about that planet, so I only knew the briefest of history and geography and stuff from it.

The restaurant was about twenty minutes from my shop, located on a corner of a rather quiet intersection of streets, for Omega anyway. An awning kept the rubbish from the floors above it out of the small outside eating area, which was connected by wide, slightly-tinted windows to a fairly clean inside eating area. A short woman with grey hair held the counter, alternating between choppy Batarian and some other language. Irina had insisted I not wear my armor, something that made me really uncomfortable and self-aware, so I had no translator to tell me what language it was. Through the old-fashioned swinging doors behind the counter I could see a few younger people of the same ethnicity working the machines to make the food, and it all smelled delicious.

"This woman, she's amazing. Even the Krogan don't mess with her. Rumor has it that she pried the crest off of the last one to attack her and that she uses it as a soup bowl."

I wasn't sure how much of that sentence to believe, but it didn't surprise me in the slightest that people said that. She seemed to be a very domineering, short-tempered, and capable woman in the short time it took for me to order some kind of sweet-and-sour dish that Irina recommended. We took one of the inside tables to avoid the majority of the outside stench. Irina wasn't in her armor either, instead in a dull green sleeveless dress or gown that ended partway down her calf. Our guns were obvious, though, and I had a jury-rigged shield generator ripped from an armor suit on a belt around my waist. It never hurt to be too careful.

We hadn't spoken much during the trip down here, but after we were settled I asked, "Why did you insist I not wear my armor?"

"You don't wear armor on a date silly."

I blinked. "A date? What does a time have to do with this?"

She shook her head and laughed. "Not a calendar date, a date. You know, like when two friends spend time alone together having fun and getting to know each other better." She paused and her cheeks flushed darker. "Well, it's also what people call romantic things too. Elana said that not everyone considers the two the same like us Asari."

A light burn settled into my cheeks as she kept blushing. "Uh... ok?" Awkward silence followed for a few minutes as she wouldn't meet my eyes. "So... you talk to Elana about this stuff? Dates and everything, I mean?"

She rolled her shoulders. "Most of the time. She..." the girl paused and thought for a second. "She looks out for all of us, but especially me. I'm the youngest in our cabal, and she's like my surrogate mother. I talk to her about everything, especially the first time I've gone out with someone by myself since I left home."

I blinked and volunteered something I hadn't told anyone yet. "I've never done anything like this before. There were just a couple of dozen families back home, and most of them were Turians. I spent a bunch of time with my friends, but there was never really anything possible to do that could be called a date."

"Wow! The tower I grew up in on Illium had a few thousand people, by itself. I can't imagine living somewhere that small."

I shrugged, changing the topic as fast as I could. "It's what I knew growing up. So, to me living with that many others is weird. This station is a constant headache whenever I'm not inside."

She laughed. "That's not just because there are so many people. I'm pretty sure there's something in the air here that does that to everyone." There was a pause. "Why else would so many people be ripping out their crests without even being on drugs?"

I shrugged. "This place should be empty by now, with how many people die every hour. But it just keeps getting more crowded. There have been a few good people, you included of course, but this place could give any slaver den or Blood Pack colony a run for its money in terms of scum and insanity."

She sighed. "I know what you mean. This place sucks in people with nowhere else to go and then washes them out with the tides." She shook her head and smiled. "But this is supposed to be a happy time. So let's focus on good things."

The food came out after that, and as we ate the conversation slipped into a comforting loop of trivial topics. It went from kindhearted arguments with both of us claiming our homeworld's sunset was the best, to her trying to convince me to watch biotiball. Then it was just general advice from her about surviving on Omega. A lot of it I'd seen or learned in my time here, but a lot more was stuff I really appreciated hearing. For some reason, I kept having to jerk my eyes up from the open triangle in her dress. It was more modest than almost everything I'd seen Asari wearing here, but compared to Batarian and human standards it was very unusual. Not a bad view, but something I felt weird and bad for staring at.

My stomach felt weird, like it was warm inside, and my throat was dry from all the talking as we left, and I found myself holding her hand. Her skin was smooth and cool, the fingers weaving in between mine like they were made to. I didn't feel like I was split between anything, whether humanity or protheanity or my heart and mind or anything like that. I was just me, the person that Irina saw something special in.

Then my omnitool dinged and didn't stop. It was a direct message, like how I talked to Mellaris, but there was no sender displayed and it didn't stop going off until I opened it.

Come to Afterlife. Alone. Wear armor, skip the line. Tell the bouncers you're there for a meeting in the Waving Tides room, then tell them your name.

Consider this an order. We don't need to remind you of the consequences of disobeying your sponsor.

It could only have come from the Corsairs, but this was the first time that they'd contacted me directly like that. They'd told me how unsafe it was to leave traceable messages like this. And just like that I was sick with worry and conflicted again.

Irina's fingers slipped from my hand as I stopped in the middle of the street to read over it again. I'd just finished when the message just disappeared, a piece of extranet spam appearing in its place. My insides felt cold now and I could feel it drip like ice in my veins. It was almost like watching my happiness evaporate.

"Irina, this has been wonderful... but something just came up." My words were choked as she turned to look at me, her smile fading as her eyes widened. "It's not anyone from the store. They're all ok, as far as I know. I can't stay here, though. I need to go."

She couldn't hide her worry. "Selos, are you in some kind of trouble?" She didn't wait for me to reply before saying, "If someone's threatening you know you don't have to go through it alone. I'm here, and I have a couple of friends in the Wave that I could convince to help. I..."

I cut her off there. Lying made me feel like a monster, but I couldn't bring myself to do anything else. "It's nothing like that. Just... someone I know had something come up. I need to go help them."

"We..."

"No, Irina. I need to do it alone." I pulled her into a hug and sighed. "Just walk me back to the shop, ok? I need to get my armor before I can go. This-it's urgent, ok?"

The servos installed into the armor clicked and whirred, my face crinkling in pain as something pushed into my leg. The pressure let off after a second as the supporting ring locked in around my intact upper thigh, and for the first time in months I stood and took a step without my cane or someone else's support. The first few were wobbly, the servos whirring and adjusting with each one. At least one step sent something sharp into my leg, warmth dribbling down inside of it, but the important part was that it worked. The modified armor let me walk normally, which would be important for this.

Trying out the suit I'd been tinkering with in my free time on the first solo trip outside of the store might not have been the best idea, but it was something I was set on. One of my pistols, which I really needed to get around to naming, was on my hip on a magnetic clamp, and I could feel the weight of the third extant copy of my Starfire shotgun on the small of my back. Irina was watching me from the stairs as I prepared. I trusted her not to follow me, even though I knew she was worried.

"Thank you for understanding," I told her. My voice, even to me, sounded muffled. I was sweating from nerves, which meant the climate control in the armor started cooling down and I had to suppress a shiver with how that affected my sweat-soaked clothes. "Just tell them that I had to go help a friend, ok? I don't know when I'll be back, but I will be."

She didn't move as I went down the stairs to the shop, closing and locking everything behind me as I left. The machinery had adjusted by now and only about every third step saw something press into my leg. My gait was a bit uneven, a slight lurch marking every step with my bad leg, but it was nothing like openly carrying around a cane. While I got a few looks, mostly hateful ones from humans because my walk and posture was much more Batarian than anything else, nobody approached or tried to harm me.

I'd seen the massive nightclub that was Aria's fortress before, you couldn't live or walk through Fumi without doing so, but I'd never even set foot in the attendant district it dominated over. An elevator, guarded by the White Tigers on this level, took me up to the Fumi-end of one of the main pedestrian bridges to Afterlife. The homes on this level were some of the most opulent I'd ever seen, personal guards of whatever people owned them mingling cordially with Aria's own, the latter also lining the path to their mistress's centerpiece.

Afterlife's own district was the cleanest I'd seen, by far. As I walked up the path, it was also the calmest, even compared to the Brotherhood's territory in Doru. It wasn't as quiet, but it was crowded with people minding their own business. The glow of Afterlife's exterior spotlights and the many signs of dancing flames and scantily-clad Asari lit up everything better than even the massive lamps that served as the main lights for the open cavern that was the Core.

I could just see the door when I started to pass a massive line of people. Every race, including Drell and a Hanar, was represented in it, and most gave me filthy looks as I walked past. The vast majority weren't in armor, though, and weren't willing to step out of the line to confront me. The vast steps in front of this entrance were a tougher challenge, sending spikes of pain through my leg, as I passed lines of deactivated turrets and walked up to the massive Elcor bouncer. Mounted on his back was what looked like a vehicle-grade cannon, one which swiveled to aim at me as I approached.

The flaps on his face vibrated as he spoke, the tone making my insides vibrate. "Menacing; the line is not a suggestion. You are not priority; wait or leave."

My throat suddenly felt dry as I replied, "I have a meeting in the Waving Tides room. My name is Selos."

He squinted ever so slightly. "Challenging; we are expecting a human. Give your full name."

I was sweating again now. A slow movement with my hand retracted my visor, showing that I was human, as I explained, "I have no last name. That is my full name."

The tone of voice was the same monotonous baritone as he stepped back and said, "Cordial; apologies for the trouble. Proceed inside, the bartenders will direct you."

As soon as I passed through the door, everything seemed to start vibrating. The thrum of the music was shaking my insides, and the glare of the synthetic flames along the entry hall was so much different from anything else I'd ever seen. When the door at the other side opened, it was loud enough that my visor shrieked out a warning about flashbang grenades and automatically blocked most of it out.

I kept my eyes locked on the bar. Or, at least, on the nearest one. I was definitely not comfortable being around and looking at everything here, from the barely-clothed dancers to the people sitting in scattered tables and booths partaking in almost every kind of drug imaginable. It was sickening. At least most of the sweaty, dancing people avoided me because of my armor.

The bartender was a Turian. He pointed me to a back corridor and said that one of the guards would guide me. Sure enough, a Batarian who preferred to communicate by grunting walked me through soundproofed corridors lined with doors and camera. We stopped at one with a few Asari symbols etched above it, and he walked away after unlocking the door.

The room was about the same size as my shop, decked out luxuriously with what might have been real wood chairs and a table inlaid with holographic terminals. A boardroom of some kind. It was empty, except for two chairs on opposite sides of the table. A human in dull silver armor sat on one side, his helmet on the table revealing fiery red hair cropped fairly short and a beard that was tucked in to the neckpiece of his armor. Across from him was a helmetless Batarian with tan skin and dark blue armor, streaked with lighter shades.

"Finally," the Batarian growled out in highborn. "I have better things to do than this."

I slid into a chair at the end of the table as the human apologized, "We had not planned for such a sudden meeting, and this man was a fringe asset."

The Batarian just fixed one set of eyes on the other man, unblinkingly, while the lower set locked onto me. "Helmet. Off, now."

I shrugged and removed it, the seals hissing as the pressurized environment inside met the outside air. The ceramic clinked as it hit the table and I politely tilted my head to the Batarian. He didn't show any surprise, but tilted his head the opposite of mine. "Now, you two are the only Alliance personnel on station now, and that includes those pirate-hunting pets you keep in the Traverse."

"Now, personally, I'd rather throw the both of you out of the nearest airlock. You can never trust a spy. But, Aria's decided that credits, favors, and guns are more worthwhile for the moment." He gestured at the two datapads on the table, one of which the other man slid to me. "That has the full details of the agreement, but here's the gist; you two can do whatever that snivelling government of yours wants, but your messages have to route through our systems. Any actions you take, you run by me first. The Alliance itself is covering the bribes to let you two stay, but Aria wants twenty of those shotguns you have, at-cost."

I realized what was happening as he listed off a bunch of other laws. Somehow, probably intentionally, Aria knew that he and I both worked for the Alliance. I was lucky she hadn't just had the both of us killed. After the list was rattled off, he explained that we'd be able to keep doing our jobs, and that Aria would give my shop her official protection and patronage. In addition, she would turn a blind eye to an Alliance-sponsored mercenary team that would be operating out of Omega.

She was definitely getting the better deal, and I was uncomfortable with giving a criminal warlord so many of my Starfires. It was between that and forfeiting my entire life, basically, so this was the better option. I harbored no ill-will towards the Batarian or Aria, but the other human... that was another story.

About fifteen minutes later, it was done. "That sums it all up. Get out of here before the next shift, and take the datapads with you. We'll be in touch at some point, and if you know what's good for you you'll answer." He was halfway out the door when he turned and locked eyes with us both. "If you try anything in here, you'll be wishing you were dead for the next century. Aria isn't kind to people who abuse her hospitality."

Then we were alone. And, almost simultaneously, we said in completely opposite tones, "We need to talk."

Author's Note: I'm really sorry that this took so long. Life has been a big roller-coaster and I wasn't satisfied with what I was writing at all. So, I hope you all liked it. I'll try to get the next out in a more timely manner, but with college coming up fast I can't make any promises.

Thanks so much to everyone that's stuck with this from the beginning, and to all of the new readers that I'm hoping to get.