Beyond the slum was a quiet lakeside neighborhood. Liara had described it to her, before they'd split up. Vance was to go there and find her, once the danger had passed them by. Beyond the slum, Liara had told her, you'll come to narrow arroyo. On the other side, you'll find a neighborhood that fronts onto the lake. Liara had warned her about going near the lakeshore, but had instead advised her to hang back, find a red house with a big garden that faces a quiet street. We'll find a friend there.

Vance had found the arroyo just fine, and with a little luck she'd left the men who had been chasing her well behind, or so she'd thought, until at a junction between two alleyways, she and one of her pursuers had nearly crashed into each other. She'd reached for his weapon, just as he'd tried to raise its against her, and there had been a struggle over the rifle that Vance might have won, if the man hadn't pulled the trigger.

Vance had left part of her left palm on the hot metal, but it was likely that her right elbow had broken the man's jaw. An even trade, she thought, but the gunfire had drawn the others in her direction.

The slum ran right up to the edge of the arroyo. The slumside bank had burned in the last few years, stripping it bare of all but weeds and patches of grass. The rest was strewn with garbage, and debris from a few houses that had collapsed as the bank widened over time. At the bottom, a slow-moving thread of green water tumbled over loose rocks. Up above, on the far bank, trees and tall grass grew in abundance, and provided better concealment, if not cover, from her pursuers. Something whizzed past her head, a bug or a bullet. Whatever it was Vance kept moving.

She had to climb a tree to get out of the canyon. Over the edge, and back onto level ground again, she found herself in an open area. A vacant lot, that had grown up around the hulk of an ancient human freighter that had crash landed here. Use it as a landmark, Liara had told her, but stay away. Too much open ground.

Easily said, harder to do when you walked right up on it. There was almost no cover beyond the edge of the canyon, apart from a mound of red earth, and a few tufts of waist high grass. Beyond that, fifty meters of more red dirt, packed hard, and rutted by decades of rainfall. The ship would provide good cover, but beyond it, was another hundred meters or more of open ground. Just above the ship's drive cone, Vance saw the name of the ship, Ancon, on one of the few ceramic panels that had not been looted from the ship's outer skin.

She remembered the story of the Ancon. Spacefaring had always been a dangerous, lonely business. But the Ancon was a bit of a special case, in that it had disappeared from orbit over Mars, after having dropped off its load of supplies at the Schiaparelli base. Schiaparelli was a secondary prothean site that had only recently been unearthed. Vance had followed the news as a young girl along with her older sister. They'd had an entire wall of their cubicle inside the housing allotment devoted to the newest discoveries—even if most of them weren't necessarily technologically significant. Then the Ancon had vanished, no debris, no cryptic transmissions. Just one day, it was departing Mars orbit, and the next it had not failed to call at Benning, where it was supposed to begin its next run.

The extranet had abounded with conspiracy theories, of course. The most enduring one was that the ship had been carrying some sort of top secret artifact, a beacon or maybe a new type of unstable power source that was to be studied at a black site. Even Vance and her sister, Alyssa, had been quite taken with the idea for a time. But none of the stories ever made sense. The Schiaparelli base was already under Alliance control, and Mars remained largely uninhabited. Anything they'd found, even something hazardous, could just as easily have been studied onsite. Or simply moved a few hundred kilometers away, to a new section of the sandy waste that was Mars. A competing idea was that the freighter had collided with a stray bit of debris from the Shield cloud, the orbiting debris field left behind after the combined fleets had met the full reaper strength over earth. But even, then, it didn't really make sense. The Shield Cloud had a predictable orbital period—every April, its orbit crossed that of the Earth, and most of the field was well inside Mars orbit.

The third, and possibly the most frightening, and subsequently the theory that had caused the greatest amount of Alliance activity in the Sol system, was the possibility that the ship had been taken by force somewhere in transit between Mars and the Charon relay. The idea that pirates were operating within the heart of Alliance territory had been enough to guarantee that Vance would apply for officer candidate school on her eighteenth birthday, and that her sister, too frightened to join, would never leave the surface of the planet where she had been born.

Seeing the Ancon, perched on two of its landing skids, both of them partially crumpled and its spars bent and cracked amidships, made Vance stop dead in her tracks. It might have been that moment of hesitation that saved her life, as one of her pursuers emerged from the brush, about ten meters to her right. Almost immediately he began to trot across the red dirt, his rifle aimed at the far end of the clearing. He'd crossed about half the distance to the ship, when she fell upon him, kicking his right knee out and wrapping her arm around his neck. The man grunted and struggled, his hands letting go of the rifle to claw at her arms and face, but she held on. In another instant he was unconscious. She held on, still, and shuffled her feet to drag him toward the shadows where the Ancon had crumpled into the dirt. He fought her, fingernails clawing into the flesh of her forearms, but then perhaps realizing he couldn't get free, he whispered, No...wait—

By the time she'd reached the ship, the man was probably dead, but from concealment, she counted to thirty, while her arms stayed clamped down on his throat. Best to be sure, her instructors had told her. When she finally dropped him, she was panting and dizzy, nearly on the point of passing out from the effort.

One last look at the man. One eye was open, its pupil so dilated it was nearly black, the sclera a pink blur of burst blood vessels, the other was nearly closed, his mouth slack, a terrifying little void of black beyond his lips. Vance scanned the edge of the arroyo for more pursuers, and realized the rifle lay where he'd dropped it. Vance hesitated, wondering if she should sprint to grab it, or leave, when a bullet struck the metal directly in front of her. She fell onto her back and scrambled away, pushing with her legs and feet, until she had become entangled in the dead man's limbs. Still she pushed, finally rolling over as another burst of rounds struck the dirt beside her.

Vance ran. She'd killed one of them. It wouldn't stop the others from coming. Maybe it would only make them angry. She ran left as she passed the hulk of the freighter, trying to keep it between her and the shooter for as long as she could. There were still nearly a hundred meters of open ground to cover, and beyond that the path was uncertain. Up ahead, the nearest way out might be blocked by a wall made of scrap metal.

Her burned hand throbbed and bled. She wasn't getting enough air. More shots whipped past. One burst a fist-sized hole in the wall of the building in front of her. She ran right now. More ground to cover but would throw off her attacker's aim. Another shot, and she turned again, and again, until she'd reached the fence, just high enough that she would need to clamber over it. Which she did. As she went over, she saw a turian aiming his rifle at her and then a hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her over the edge of the fence into the dark alleyway behind. Bullets raked the top of the fence.

The hand was still on her shoulder. Someone was shouting, and there was more shooting, this time from a nearby window. Quietly someone said, "They're down." Liara helped Vance to her feet, and the two of them followed the alley into a market square that had grown up around a small inlet from the lake that filled the center of the caldera.

"We're safer here," Liara said. "This area is controlled by the Hound's Children."

"Doesn't sound safe," Vance said. They walked in silence for a moment, then Vance stopped and pretended to examine an array of fruit, piled high on a cart at the edge of the market. "The ship—" she began. "Have you heard of the Ancon?"

"Enough to know the rumors on the extranet are mostly false."

"Nothing to do with stolen prothean artifacts, then?"

"Oh, no," Liara said. "That part is entirely true. I arranged the theft myself."

"But what about the crew?"

"It was my crew," Liara said. "When I say I made all the arrangements, I mean just that."

"And where are the artifacts?"

"Here and there," Liara said. Vance shook her head. "This way," Liara whispered. Taking Vance by the elbow, she directed her companion toward an open doorway, and then into the dark within. Inside was a krogan, so big he nearly filled the entire room they'd entered. Without a word, he searched them for weapons, and pulling a length of scrap metal that could have been used as a knife from Liara's waistband. "I'll keep this here for you," he said, folding the makeshift blade in half and tossing it into a bin.

"She's inside," the krogan said, and stepped out of the way. "Good to see you again, Liara." Vance made to follow, but the krogan stopped her. "Not you."

"Come on, Kadkech," Liara said. "She's with me. I'll vouch for her."

"Your funeral," Kadkech said.

Vance followed Liara through a doorway, past rooms where bodies lay draped out on couches, as though sleeping, though some were swaying their arms to and fro, as though conducting music that only they could hear. Down a flight of stairs they came to another doorway, and here a young woman holding some kind of fighting stick stood aside to let them pass. Beyond the threshold was a parlor, of sorts, with ancient furniture from earth arranged around an elaborate rug and low table. The room overlooked the lake, but most of its windows were shuttered, the slats only partially open, leaving the figure who stood opposite them hidden in shadow.

"How did you know to find me here?" the voice asked. It was a human, a woman, Vance realized, and likely earthborn.

"I had a suspicion that Ilium would turn its back on you," Liara said. "The way it did me." She touched one of the long sofas. "Your grandfather's furniture?" Liara asked. "He was a collector, was he not?"

The woman nodded. She stepped forward, into a shaft of light. Dark hair, blue eyes, dressed in a close-fitting, formal outfit with soft-soled boots made for moving fast and quiet. She placed her hand on the back of one the couches, and bid the two of them sit.

"You'll forgive me for the dust," the woman said. "We've only just arrived."

A servant brought in a tray with tea. Watching her go, Vance wondered if the little stoop-shouldered woman was a slave, like the ones she'd seen on the pier.

"You don't mean to stay permanently, do you Kiera?"

"No, just until this whole thing with Deniri blows over. Not that I'm stupid enough to think I'm beyond her grasp, even here." The woman, Kiera, had seated herself across from them, and now, placing her forearms on her knees and leaning forward, she said, "Tell me what you know. I'll see if I can fill in the gaps."

Liara began, "About ten years ago, Deniri summoned me to the Citadel. They were tearing down some old buildings on Tayseri Ward, and happened to come across a data cache that my mother had left behind. It had been tampered with, of course Deniri's scarcely even tried to hide that from me, but still I looked. And it led me to an old asari colony world, not so far from here." Liara went on, telling this woman everything, about the turian intelligence officer, Varian, she'd collected on Omega, and about the wounded quarian they'd saved, about the human colony world called Pirin, and more files that Benezia had stashed all over the galaxy, including one in an old prothean colony that had somehow survived the initial reaper invasion, about Aria and about Afterlife, and the death of the rest of her team, and about the years she had spent, hiding in plain sight, fighting with different operations as a mercenary grunt, here and there, across the Traverse.

"And your friend?" Kiera asked.

"A hostage, and now an ally. I took her off a human carrier, after they'd tried to interrogate me." Liara paused to sip her tea. "Now, what do you know?"

Kiera seemed to weigh her answer carefully before she answered. "There's a war on. It's bad, and it's everywhere. The entire council is at each other's throats. The entire citadel government has fallen apart, as far as we can tell, asari fighting humans, humans fighting turians, turians fighting salarians. It's been brewing since I was born, but now everyone got the spark they wanted."

"The fall of Pirin was all it took," Liara said. "It's excellent for Deniri, because it makes her appear innocent"

"And, of course, to top it all off, all the council races are hunting everywhere for the leviathan. They all think they've broken the Dekkuna accords, in the midst of everything."

"They're a distraction in all this," Liara said. "Deniri wanted a war, and now she has it."

"Over what, though?"

Liara shook her head. "I was hoping you could help with that." She put down her cup and leaned forward. "The last time I spoke to your mother, she was here. She said she had something for me, but disappeared before I could find her."

"That was before my time."

"She told me so much about you, your mother."

"She'd been gone for half a century before I was even born."

"Yes, but you'd already been conceived," Liara said. "In a sense that was part of her plan. Miranda wanted you to have a chance at a clean life, clear of all the people like—"

"Like you? Yes, I suspect that that's the case." Kiera shook her head. "Still. It would have been nice to know her. She was my mother, after all, even if I was grown in a tank." After a pause, she rose and said, "Come. Let's get you cleaned up." A servant led them into adjoining rooms, where she told Vance and Liara to wash. By the time they were done, fresh clothing was laid out for each of them. When they were dressed once more, Kiera came to find them. "I have something to show you," she said.

She led them out of the parlor, and into a study. Against one wall, biometric storage boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, the other wall was a giant picture window looking out over the lake. In the center of the room stood an old wooden desk. Kiera pulled out the center drawer and flipped it over on top of the desk.

Vance stepped closer to have a look, but didn't see anything. Liara pulled out her omnitool and played the ultraviolet beam across the ancient wood. A set of flickering numbers‚—303— appeared in the beam, as the light hit them.

Liara touched the numbers, and then felt around with her fingertips, until something—a bit of transparent film came away into her hand.

"The desk arrived at Ilium a few weeks after she disappeared. The story was always that she'd come here to buy it. I never noticed the numbers until about a year ago."

"Did your mother write this?" Liara asked.

Kiera shook her head. "I never knew. She must have though—" she gestured toward what Liara had in her hand "—perhaps that might tell you."

"Let's have a look," Liara said. But having a look took some doing. The transparent foil contained a decryption key, and an extranet address that linked to a number of small files embedded in an otherwise innocuous-looking site. What were they seeing though? The first ten or so pages were all reports from the front lines of the reaper invasion, all but one of them produced by field commanders who hadn't lived long enough to file the data themselves. They were chilling, Vance thought, the stories of desperate fighting and sacrifice, all just to hold on long enough to evacuate one or two more civilians, most of whom wouldn't survive any longer than the soldiers who were helping them. There were a hundred more, each one worse than one before it. Until Vance came across something entirely different, a strange looking photograph embedded in the middle of one of the reports. On closer examination, it wasn't a photograph at all, but a mosaic of black and white dots, arranged to form a coded message.

"Look at this," she said to Liara, handing over the data pad. "I think this is a message."

Liara held up the image. "So it is." They studied the image for a long time. The image was composed of dots of varying size, and from that they deduced there was a code. Liara ran it through a half a dozen programs before she began to see the system. "Grid coordinates," she said, after a time, "Most of the data is junk, meant to throw someone off, but—" she paused to highlight a string of digits near the bottom left corner, "—these map to a place that I know. It's an old Blue Suns mercenary base on Korlus. The asari military had set up a listening post there centuries earlier, before they turned the place into a ship breaking ground."

Soon enough, Liara and Kiera were poring over a holographic display of the planet, pinpointing the location's exact coordinates. "Does it match?" Kiera was asking.

"It's close. Not perfect. We will have our work cut out for us, that's for sure." She got up and went over to the windows, open now. The sun had long ago set over the edge fo the volcano's rim, but far above on the peaks, light still flared on the long tails of snow that blew eastward on the storm winds. She went out onto the terrace, and Vance made to follow her, but Kiera stopped her.

"Let her go," she said. "She needs to think."

But Vance was feeling nervous. The morning that began in danger, followed by a peaceful afternoon of tea and cakes and gossip between veteran intelligence professionals. It didn't quite fit, like someone had let them slip away, and were now closing in again. You get a feeling, her training officer had told her, you damn well better listen to it. Walk away, even if it means giving up on a potentially big win. Kiera seemed to understand what Vance was thinking.

"Palmyra," she said. "What's eating you?"

Vance shook her head. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

Kiera smiled. "No," she said. It was a lie.

"I choked a man to death this morning," she said. "It wasn't what I thought it would be."

Kiera was quiet. For all Vance knew, those could have been men that she'd sent. You can't really trust anyone, after all. They could have been sent just to push Vance and Liara in Kiera's direction. There was a breath of wind that stirred the trees all along the lakeshore. All along the water it was black as night, with lights coming on in the homes all along the water, and on boats that lay at anchor a few hundred meters offshore.

Vance stepped outside. "Liara," she said. "We should get some rest. We've a long way to go to get to Korlus."

Liara seemed to wake from a dream. Her body shivered, and she stepped away from the stone balustrade. Vance went out to meet her halfway, and Kiera hurried out with them too. The three met in the middle of the terrace and then they all had begun to turn. Just then, the wind died, and all was still, impossibly quiet. Then waves were lapping against the shore, and the wind was again in the trees. A hydrofoil raced along, far out on the horizon. None of them heard the shot.

Not until Kiera slumped to her knees. The projectile had taken her just below the shoulder, and taken off her arm so that it dangled by little more than a thread of skin and flesh. There was a second shot as they dragged her inside and threw her down on the couch, but Liara had put up a barrier, and it glanced off into the night. A medical drone came to work on Kiera's arm almost as soon as they were inside, while Vance put out the lights and scanned for the sniper. Another bullet struck nearby. Whoever it was shooting wasn't experienced enough to pull off a shot from this far away, or—or perhaps—Vance looked up and saw the hydrofoil that had been far out had turned and was now racing hard across the water straight at Kiera's compound, firing rockets as it came. The first two missed high, and struck one of the upper levels of the building. Everything shook, and the power went off.

Liara was standing over Kiera as the drone worked, muttering, no, no, no, and then something about the wind, that it wasn't her fault, Kiera, it had been the wind, otherwise it would be me, lying in your place.

"We've got to get you out of here," Liara was saying now, and Kiera had her hand on Liara's face, and was saying something about an escape plan. A way out. "Not far," Kiera said. "Through the passageway to your right, and down the stairs."

Kiera's hand dropped from Liara's face. When she spoke her voice was only a whisper. "Go," she said. Her skin was already white and it had the slack, clammy look of someone who had already bled out. She was dead, her heart just didn't know it yet, and so it kept pumping.

"We have to go," Vance said. Liara lingered.

She rose just as a rocket passed directly over them and burst in one of the upper floors. Kiera's people had taken up positions in the windows and were returning fire now, but there was the sound of small arms from the street, too. Her men couldn't fight in every direction, what few of them there must have been.

Vance grabbed Liara, and pulled her into the corridor. They found the stairs and ran down and down while the building shook with more rocket strikes, until they came to a blast door, made of concrete and steel. Liara spun the crank and hauled it open, and the two of them pulled it shut once they were both through. Inside, blue light reflected off walls that had been painted yellow, giving everything a greenish cast. The room stretched out long in front of them, a number beds, stacked like shelves, and the beds themselves stacked with supplies. Liara shone a light toward the far end of the room, where the corridor dead ended against a blank wall. Electronics stood stacked nearby, but none of it looked useful. There were weapons, too, none brand new, but all well kept, and ready for use, what little the two of them could do to fight off what might very well be a company-strength unit, deploying this very second from the hydrofoil.

"You're hurt," Liara said. Vance looked down. There was blood all over the blue tunic that Kiera had given them just hours earlier, though she hadn't felt anything at the time. Now there was an odd burning sensation in her cheek and chin. "Here," Liara said. She pressed the locking mechanism on the bunker door before overloading the panel with her omnitool. She produced a medkit from one of the shelves and plucked a fragment of bone from Vance's chin. And another from her cheek. The wounds didn't bother her, but the bone made her think of the man she'd killed, and Vance suddenly collapsed to her knees to vomit. Liara waited patiently, even handed Vance a bottle of water from the stash they'd found. But at last she said, "Listen, they'll already have found the door." It was quiet outside, but that didn't mean anything. The building shook again, but that was far away. "In ten minutes they'll be here with a frame charge to blow it open. Likely they won't even need to kill us. The blast alone in this tiny compartment turn our bodies to jelly. We need to get out of here."

Vance collected herself. "How?"

"We look for a way out," Liara said. "We're still alive. I aim to stay that way." The look in her eye was wild, and, not for the first time, Vance realized she was locked in a small room with a dangerous alien, one who could crush her with little more than a thought.

They began by examining the far wall, then the floor, pulling up the mats that covered the bare concrete, then by shoving aside anything that wasn't bolted to the floor. Outside there was the distinct sound of someone pounding on the concrete. "There they are," Liara said. "Five minutes before they blow the door."

Vance grabbed a pistol and readied it, just in case. Then she had a thought. Searching through the supplies, she found something that looked like it would burn. With Liara's omnitool, they set it on fire. A current of air pulled the smoke under one of the rows of beds. "There," she said. Liara grabbed the stack of beds with her biotics and ripped them from the floor. Another moment of concentration and she had heaved them clean across the room. She fell to her knees. At first Vance thought she was looking for the way out, but soon realized that Liara was dazed. Outside, there was the howl of a drill. They were already screwing the frame charges in place.

Vance felt around on the floor. There was a clear seam at the base of the wall, and after a minute of hunting, she found a cavity. When she shoved her finger inside, there was a mechanical button that released a heavy panel of concrete that swung out to reveal a passageway big enough for the two of them to fit through. Liara was still dazed. Vance grabbed her by the collar and shoved her through the opening before following Liara through. On her way out, she grabbed a handful of ration packs and shoved them into her pocket. The drilling stopped as she pulled the hatch shut and spun the locking bar closed. Vance tore open the ration pack and thrust it at Liara, then she held her breath and covered her ears as the whole island seemed to shake, and concrete dust rained down on them from above, but the door held.

"On your feet, Liara," she said. Her former captor staggered, but stood. Where they were, there was hardly room to be fully upright. They were in the interior of some sort of geothermal exchange's spillway. A torrent of scalding water ran through a deep channel just to their right, while the two of them stood on a narrow platform that ran alongside the water, all the way to where the channel bent to the left. The water stank of sulfur. There were yellow stains everywhere, on the concrete, on the ceiling of the cavern, on the metal railings.

They progressed as best they could, Liara staggering and holding her side as thought she had a cramp, while she stuffed another ration bar into her mouth. The path rounded a bend, and the spillway widened, and again, at another turn. The island shook again.

"Sounds like they found our way out," Liara said. She was putting a brave face on things, but her skin gray and scaly in a way it hadn't before she'd used her biotics.

"How is it you can even use your biotics?" Vance asked, after they'd gone another kilometer, and made it around another turn in the cavern. "When we took you captive, we made sure to pull your wetware."

Liara smiled. "You only took the external amp," she said. "There's a second, surgically implanted at the base of my spine."

"Those are illegal," Vance said.

"I work in intelligence," Liara said. "Just about everything I do is illegal." Vance smiled, but Liara's look was dead serious. "If you'd left me with both amps," she said, "I'd have torn a hole in your ship and there'd have been nothing you or the rest of the Alliance could have done to stop me." Vance didn't doubt her. They went on in silence, Liara's limp was getting better, but it was still slowing her down. The cavern they had entered was broad, nearly a thousand meters across, and the raging torrent of water had slowed as it had grown deeper and wider. Still it was moving quickly, a seemingly still sheet, its surface rough and pitted with intermingling eddies and currents that filled the air with a low hum.

But over the sound of the water, the sound of voices and footsteps carried on the wind.

"Do you hear them?" Vance said.

Liara nodded. "There's no cover here," she said, "Up ahead I see an opening. Looks like as good a place as any to make a stand." Vance nodded in agreement, but they had to make it there first.

They ran, Liara half-limping as she went, toward the opening. It was a tall arch, cut into the wall of the cavern, and behind it there looked like there might be something they could use as cover. As they drew closer, half running, half limping, they saw something else. Beyond the archway, the open area was a landing pad, and sitting in the middle of it was a ship, a newer model private transport, fast and inconspicuous, even if it was likely unarmed. The ship's name, painted in bold red and gold lettering across the bow, read Ancon II.

"Well," Liara said with a smile. "Our luck seems to be turning, doesn't it?" She flipped a power coupling on the ground console. The ship's running and cockpit lights came on, and the ramp slowly dropped down for them to enter. Liara hurried inside. Vance followed, and watched from the entrance to the cockpit while Liara was warming up the reactor. After a moment, Liara asked, "Do you still have that pistol?" Liara asked, without turning around. Vance did. "It seems we're unarmed, so I'm going to need you to guard the ramp."

"Right," Vance said. She hurried back out to the ramp, into the main cabin, where one of them had stained one of the white leather seats with a bloody handprint. The ramp was slung under the bow of the ship, so Vance had good cover from the ship itself, and from the nose gear that also blocked part of her view of the entrance. She took up position at the base of the ramp, right behind where the landing gear was thickest, and waited. Over the comms, Liara said, Three minutes. Enough time, Vance realized, for anything to happen. She might as well have said forever. She waited. The footsteps drew near and then seemed to stop. Two minutes, Liara told her. Still enough time for the world to fall apart. A head popped out beyond the side of the arch, and Vance fired twice. The head disappeared. Just on the other side of the opening, a deep voice was shouting orders. A group ran across the opening, and she shot at them—too late—as they took up positions on the other side. One minute, Liara said. Get ready.

Seconds passed, as Vance waited. Maybe the troops had paused for a heavy weapon to be brought up. A single rocket would more than ruin any hopes of getting away. Or perhaps they were wary of her. Never doubt the determination of the desperate.

Anyone who fights for a living knows one thing to be true. To attack is to be vulnerable. Sharks roll their eyes back in their head, cats toy with their prey, advancing troops may suddenly stop and start digging in, refusing to advance any further, and all for the same reason. Because what you hurt can hurt you back. Even a mouse has teeth and claws. And so there is the fear that make the finger hesitate on the trigger, that delays the charge for a moment too long. It has always been this way, the dreadful balance between attack and counterattack, since the first blow was struck.

But then something landed on the ground twenty meters away, and they were coming. The world stood still for a moment, and Vance's ears rang with silence. Six men were charging at her, while their comrades fired from cover behind the wall. She shot wildly at the afterimage of one of her attackers, and the man behind her target fell, his chest a giant wound. She fired again and again, and that sent them scrambling in all directions. She kept firing until her weapon overheated.

Liara was screaming for her to come on board, and so she ran, dropping the pistol as she went. The ramp was nearly a meter above the ground when she reached it, but she barely stopped to climb on, bounding upward, still running as the ramp lifted her to safety. The ship was already aloft, and lurching to one side, and Vance paused to look down at the landing pad, where two of the attackers had been killed by the downblast from the ship's maneuvering jets, and that made her happy but the ramp was still closing and then there she was on her knees, and Liara was telling her to hold on to something, and the ship seemed fall into a dark hole in the center of the world, while gravity, and some other incomprehensible force pinned her to the floor and all she could see was a mix of warring dark and light, until the darkness finally won, and overwhelmed the universe.