Liara cries out, and the shock of the sound is enough to break the meld. I sit up hastily, gripping my lover's shoulders. "Li, babe, you OK?"

She stares at me blankly for a moment, then shakes herself. "Yes. Goddess, I'm sorry, I just… I saw something in your mind, just for a moment, and it terrified me."

"Can you give me any detail?"

"Nothing concrete, just a glimpse of somewhere dark, red-lit, a terrible smell…." She shivers. "You were in agony. You were so badly wounded you were sure you were going to die."

I think for a moment, but I can't place the memory. "I've never been that badly wounded, as far as I recall. The Citadel tower falling on me hurt like hell, but I knew my injuries weren't fatal. Same with the Benning expedition, and Elysium. Nothing serious. Even that time after Cyone, there wasn't enough time for me to think about it."

Liara, oddly, brightens at this. "Oh, well… that's good."

"It is?"

"Yes. I'm starting to get flashes of what you don't remember. I think this is working."

"Right." I smile sheepishly, feeling a fool for not realising that myself. "So, we keep doing what we're doing?"

"We keep doing what we're doing." Liara's eyes ink to black, and vertigo upends my senses…


As soon as Admiral Hackett's shuttle clears the Normandy's hangar deck, I order Joker to set course for Hagalaz. Despite my protestations to the Admiral, despite the cold logic (the ruthless calculus of war, as Garrus would later term it), I feel sick, disgusted with myself. Guilty.

I killed over three hundred thousand people.

The handful who died on the asteroid, indoctrinated puppets of the Reapers, left me no choice, but the colonists and their slaves I have placed upon the altar of necessity, of my being right. Our first casualties are friendly fire, a pre-emptive strike to delay the enemy. That they would have died anyway had I not done what I did is cold comfort. Our victory over the Collectors feels a hollow thing, in light of what I learned on that base. We have perhaps a year before the Reapers come. A year at most to find a way to beat them, and I must face the consquences of buying the oblivious masses of the galaxy that time with the blood of three hundred thousand innocent people.

I want to scream in frustration. I can't deal with this alone. I don't have the strength to shrug off the doubt and guilt. Chakwas waits in silence beside me, an unspoken, standing offer of a sympathetic ear. I meet her gaze, and tears sting my eyes.

She steps forward. "Shepard..."

I hold up one hand, forbidding further comment, stalking past her out of the medbay and into the elevator, retreating to the loft as fast as possible. The crew don't need to see me like this.

It takes three days to get to Hagalaz, three days I spend brooding in my quarters, reliving the scenario over and over again, trying to figure out if there was any way I could have avoided the outcome, bloody-mindedly determined to suffer penance for my sins. Miranda, Tali, and Garrus all try to coax me out of my self-imposed exile but I rebuff all of them, albeit gently. I know they mean well, but there is only one person I can share this with.

When we dock with the Shadow Broker's ship, I am not given the opportunity to decide a strategy. A few minutes after Joker informs me of our arrival, there is a knock at the door, and a buzz at the intercom. "Shepard, it's me. May I come in?"

"Yeah, course," I reply, and the door slides open to admit Liara. As soon as I see her, the tears well up, and before I quite realise what is happening, she is beside me, holding my head to her chest as I sob, fingers laced in my hair, one arm locked around my shoulders.

After a while, I recover enough self-command to pull back and look her in the eyes. She brushes a quick kiss against my cheek. "Goddess, it's good to see you safe," she breathes. "When the Bahak system went dark, I... I feared the worst."

Her words confirm my half-formed fear; she already knows. I try to summon a response, but speech is beyond me. Liara takes my hands, squeezes them lightly. "I know what happened. Tali, Dr. Chakwas, and Miranda all called me independently, and I have plenty of resources inside the Batarian government. You destroyed the relay to stop the Reapers gaining control of the entire network in a surprise attack."

I pull free, stand and walk over to my desk to retrieve my report, and toss the datapad to her. "It's all there."

Liara fields the catch gracefully and frowns at me for a moment, then opens the pad and begins to read. It doesn't take her long, and my only delaying tactic is gone. "Oh, Rachel..."

"I don't want to hear that I did the right thing," I warn her. "It doesn't make me feel any better."

"Of course it doesn't, but nonetheless, you did what had to be done." Liara tosses the pad to the bed and beckons me. "You know we're not ready. And it's no comfort to be right in the face of so many dead, when so many refuse to listen. Goddess, it makes me so angry that such a decision should have fallen to you when it is rightly the responsibility of the Council. That their short-sighted stupidity has forced you to shoulder a burden that should never have been yours, a burden no soul should have to bear alone." Liara's voice rises as she speaks, trembling with suppressed emotion; wisps of blue-white biotic energy are starting to smoke from her arms. "Rachel, love, this is not your fault."

"I tried... I tried to warn them," I offer lamely as I move to kneel in front of her, "but I was overrun. Fuck, I should have taken someone else with me, Kasumi maybe, as backup."

"And if you had, the Hegemony would now be at war with the Systems Alliance, and any hope of defeating the Reapers would be gone. We would already be doing their work for them." Liara takes my hands again, rubbing her thumbs over my knuckles. "I don't say this to make you feel better, but the Batarians are digging into things they shouldn't. The files are heavily encrypted, but they have been recovering Reaper tech all across the Kite's Nest, including from the Bahak system, and researching it. Indoctrination will soon spread through their military, preparing them for the Reaper's arrival."

"And if we're already at war when that happens, there will be no way to rally everyone together. It'll be a slaughter."

"Combine indoctrination with the Batarian's culture of paranoia and supremacy, and you have the tinder for a galactic conflagration," Liara agrees with a grimace. "The Batarians trust no one, co-operate with no one, seek only control and domination of other races. For all that the Bahak colonists and their slaves were blameless in that regard, what happened has not altered their ultimate fate. We have to believe that. The Hegemony have signed their own death warrant in their quest for military superiority. We need to make sure they have not also signed everyone else's."

"Li, I'm sorry, I can't rationalize it away quite so easily. It was my hand on the control, my action that ended their lives. The fact that the Batarians are, by and large, warmongering bastards, has no bearing."

"It wasn't your action that prevented the Batarians being warned," Liara objects. "That was Kenson's doing."

"Logic can't fix this," I murmur, pulling a hand free and holding it up as Liara opens her mouth to protest further. "I need to process it in my own time, come to terms with it in my own way, but thank you. I feel better just being here with you."

Liara draws me in, pulling my head to her chest and stroking my hair gently. "I'm glad. I feel the same way."

I close my eyes and float for a moment, cherishing the peace that simply being held by Liara evokes. Surrounded by her, I can forget that my newly fledged dream of returning the Normandy to the Alliance, resuming my Spectre duties and keeping my team together, allied with Liara's information network, preparing for the Reapers, is already ashes. Hackett's assessment was brutally clear; I will be made the scapegoat, the rogue Spectre, while the Alliance does damage control through diplomacy. Hackett and Anderson will shield me as they can, but I could end up court-martialled, convicted and imprisoned as a war criminal. If I have succeeded in delaying the Reapers long enough to give us a fighting chance, it's a price worth paying. But it means breaking my word to Liara, and that bothers me far more than the prospect of being thought of as a criminal. The spell is broken, and I pull back to look up at her. "Li, I..."

"Rachel," she cuts me off. "I know what Hackett asked of you, and I know you won't shirk your duty. I know you have to go."

"I don't want to," I whisper. "I want to stay here, with you. If it were my choice..." I'm lying to us both. It is my choice to go; I could choose to stay, but that choice might cost us the galaxy. But part of me, most of me, really doesn't care about that right now. If Liara asks me, I'll stay with her. It's that simple. Dropping my gaze, face burning with shame, I test the boundaries of my conscience. "Li..if…if you want me to… to stay, I'll…"

Liara places her fingertips over my lips, shakes her head gently. "Don't, Rachel. Don't even think it. I wouldn't ask that of you. I couldn't. It would be like asking you to cut your own arm off." She slides her thumb under my chin, tilts my head up so she can look me in the eye, and she smiles affectionately. "Look at you. You can't even get the sentence out, it's so alien to your nature. Don't do this to yourself, love. It's all right. I understand why you need to go."

"I made you a promise," I protest.

"You did," Liara agrees gently. "Your promise to me was to always return, not that you would never leave."

"But that might not be within my control. If they convict me, I could be in prison for the rest of my life. Or if they extradite me, the Batarians will put a bullet in my head without compunction. And the Reapers are coming, we need to prepare. Li, I…"

"Shhh, Rachel." Liara pulls me up to sit beside her, and leans in until our foreheads are touching. "I'll do everything I can to support you, and I'll keep looking for anything we can use against the Reapers." She kisses me fiercely. "And I won't let them lock you up and throw away the key, or try to execute you, not after everything I went through to get you back. If you think the might of the Systems Alliance or the Batarian Hegemony can keep us apart, well, you've seriously underestimated the Shadow Broker."

"Oh?" The depths of Liara's newfound power and influence are as yet unplumbed, but the depth of her confidence in herself and in me is the balm I need right now. I lift her hands and kiss her knuckles lightly. "I'm glad she's on our side, then."

Liara smiles, tracing a finger down the rim of my ear. "Death couldn't separate us, Rachel. Nothing else will have a prayer."

Finally reassured, I return Liara's kiss with interest. "I need you, Li. Join with me?"

"I'll do more than that," Liara promises as she knocks me back on the bed and peels me out of my uniform…