As had become her habit in the past several days, Solana, balancing Shepard's breakfast on a tray in her lap, used her elbow to let herself into the cabin. This time, however, instead of finding the commander already up and either slaving over the book or attempting a course of absolutely-not-doctor-approved physical therapy (that mostly seemed to entail falling from the bed and pulling herself back up again), she found both the cabin's principal occupants still asleep and facing each other, hands entwined in the swath of empty space between them.
Her breath caught, and her mandibles flared in surprise not only because the arrangement seemed a vast leap from where she'd left her brother and Shepard only the day before, but because Garrus was, in fact, asleep. She recognized his snores, exaggerated by the strange way he had to contort himself to lie comfortably on the human bed. Before Solana could retreat as swiftly as she'd entered, Shepard turned her head slightly and opened her eyes. Very slowly, with her free hand, she held a finger to her lips. Her expression wasn't sleepy, though it seemed a little regretful; Solana felt certain Shepard had been awake and just as relieved Garrus was sleeping. Though it was too soft to hear, a sigh lifted a strand of Shepard's hair, and a moment later Garrus stirred.
Solana averted her eyes, feeling oddly voyeuristic though all her brother and Shepard were doing was looking at each other.
"We have company," Shepard murmured. "Looks like it's breakfast for me but none for you. I think your sister likes me better than you."
"Mmm. She probably has a dextro ration bar I can pilfer."
"She'll definitely like me better if you steal her breakfast."
He chuckled, low and still pleasantly groggy. It spoke of a certain kind of trust that he wasn't already alert and ready for a fight. "I think I'll go make sure nothing exploded in the drive core overnight and find my own breakfast along the way."
It was just as well neither of them were looking at her, because shock recognizable even to human eyes slipped across her features. Solana wondered how much Shepard truly understood about reading the intricacies of turian subvocals. Something, she hoped. If anyone deserved to hear how clearly her brother's voice had shifted away from distrust and toward belief—hope, even—it was Shepard. She heard the shift of bodies rising, skin and plates against fabric, Garrus' sigh as he stretched and yawned, and Shepard's soft laugh as that yawn turned into a groan.
Solana glanced at them just long enough to see the brief brush of fingers, Shepard's to Garrus' scarred cheek, his to push a lock of her hair behind one ear. The intimacy of it was palpable, and for a moment—just a heartbeat—Solana let herself feel a pang of envy. The whole galaxy had been flipped upside down and backwards since the last time anyone touched her so tenderly and on dark days, on stare at the alcohol all you want but don't you dare fall face-first into it, Sol days, she feared those tender touches were gone forever, buried in the rubble of what once had been Cipritine.
No more words were exchanged; perhaps they didn't need them. Perhaps they didn't want an audience. Making herself as inconspicuous as she could, she rolled herself carefully down the makeshift ramp to the lower part of the room and settled the tray on the end of the bed. Only a little of Shepard's drink had spilled; everything else was just as pristine as it had been when the human down in the mess hall gave it to her. Shepard began to wriggle her way toward the tray, but Garrus plucked up the mug and handed it to her. She sighed happily, raising the cup to her nose. Shepard was too busy inhaling to notice the fond glance Garrus sent her way.
On his way to the door, he rested a hand briefly on Solana's shoulder. "Take it from an old pro, Sol: don't come between her and her coffee. Three more sips and she's yours, but before that you're taking your life in your hands."
"Jealousy is so unbecoming, Garrus," Shepard retorted, but she closed her eyes as she swallowed the first mouthful. If bliss had an expression, Shepard's was it.
"Right," Garrus drawled, but said it with a smile. A little strained, still, perhaps, but much less so than the day before. Solana swallowed her intrusive curiosity—what had been said? What had been done?—and satisfied herself with a wave as her brother turned to leave.
After Garrus had gone, Solana watched Shepard enjoy her drink for several more sips before speaking. "So, uh," she began, hesitating and then feeling even sillier for the hesitation. "Sleeping is good."
This time, instead of blissfully swallowing, Shepard inhaled a mouthful of her coffee and promptly began choking on it. Before Solana could worry too much, the choking became a chuckle. Shepard's eyes were leaking; as far as Solana understood, that was not a good sign in humans. Shepard waved away Solana's concern, running her free hand over her cheeks to catch the moisture. "Yeah," she said, "sleeping is good. Some people, as I understand, weren't doing very much of it."
"Some people like to think the rules don't apply to them. Including the ones that dictate necessary sleep requirements."
"He—" Shepard stopped, shaking her head. In that mercurial human way, her expression changed rapidly, signifying several shifts of emotion more quickly than Solana could keep up. Most of them, she thought, did not look particularly pleasant, and Shepard's voice, when she spoke again, was sad. "He has trouble sleeping when he thinks he's about to get shot in the back. Doubly so when he's fearing friendly fire." Settling her mug on the bedside table, Shepard replaced it with Through the Looking Glass. She lifted her eyes, and Solana thought it odd to see they were still damp. "I'm glad he slept. He needed it. But it didn't fix everything. It's not that easy."
"A step forward's better than a step back," Solana insisted, wheeling herself to Shepard's side.
Shepard snorted lightly. On Solana's confused look, she waved her hand to include both their malfunctioning sets of legs and said, "Stepping anywhere's really beyond both of us at this point, isn't it?"
"Funny."
Shepard smiled, and Solana knew the subject had been deliberately changed, not to be revisited. For now. Solana reached for the papers she'd been working on the day before. Shepard opened the book to the beginning for the thousandth time. They worked to the faint beat of club music in the background, and Solana found herself strangely cheered every time she looked up and saw the lasting indentation her brother's head had left in the pillow next to Shepard's.
#
"What if we've been thinking about this the wrong way?" Shepard asked several hours later, lifting the increasingly-ragged book and waving it in a vague circle.
"Obviously we've been thinking about it the wrong way," Solana replied mildly. "Or we'd have figured it out by now."
She was evidently well-accustomed to impertinent replies, because Shepard only shook her head and laughed, pushing her hair back from her forehead. "Save me from smart-ass Vakarians."
Solana's mandibles fluttered. "Ah. Sorry."
Shepard's smile pulled one corner of her mouth higher than the other; Solana was pretty sure it was how humans distinguished wry from merely amused. "Oh, I wouldn't feel like myself without a Vakarian quipping sarcastic remarks at every possible turn." Something about the words stole the smile, though, and by the time Shepard had finished speaking, her voice no longer sounded light, and her shoulders were slumped. The grief lasted only a moment. Before Solana could think of an appropriate reply, Shepard had straightened and carefully smoothed her face.
"Are we over-thinking or under-thinking?" Solana asked. "What part's wrong?"
Shepard's relief at the change of subject was tangible, and she shuffled through the pieces of paper onto which she'd painstakingly transcribed every symbol both human and turian they'd been able to find. "Over, I think. It's the mirror. I've been fixated on using a physical mirror somehow, but I'm starting to wonder if…. How many letters in the turian alphabet?"
"Thirty-four."
"Nice and even. English has twenty-six. So, I'm wondering… what if we flip the alphabet? Make a simple code where the first letter is equal to the last letter and backward all the way to the middle?"
"And then try to make words with the new alphabet?" Solana scratched the side of her neck and rolled her shoulders. "That seems simple. But elegant."
Shepard sighed. "EDI would've thought of it in something like 0.6 seconds. I keep worrying that whomever sent the message might've thought EDI's was the mind figuring it out. I'm afraid the rest of us just don't compare."
"Codes existed before computers were around to do the heavy lifting," Solana replied with more optimism than she felt.
"She wasn't just—fine. Let's give it a try."
Like all their other attempts, however, this one did not yield immediate results. "Anything?" Shepard asked, a touch of desperation in her tone.
"Not unless these are words in a dialect I've never heard of."
Shepard scowled at the book as though anger might make it give up its secrets. "It would be something in Garrus' dialect. They left it for Archangel."
"Did they know Archangel was Garrus Vakarian, though?"
"Yes," Shepard insisted. Solana wasn't sure where the certainty came from, but decided pursuing an argument wasn't worth the trouble. She glowered down at the book and the fan of papers all around her stretched-out legs.
And then she said, "Oh," at the same time Solana said, "Wait."
"Now backwards," Solana said. "If we flip the letters in that simple code and then read the words backwards…"
"'If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'" Shepard whispered. Lifting her stylus, she scribbled several notes. Her inhale was nearly a gasp, and when she'd finished writing she sat so still for a moment that Solana was half-afraid she was having some kind of terrible relapse.
"Aren't you clever," Shepard breathed, staring down at the piece of paper in her hands as though she expected it to explode at any moment. Her fingers tightened, making the paper creak, and all the color drained from her face.
Already wondering how fast Dr. Chakwas could convince the elevator to move in an emergency, Solana reached out and tentatively settled the pad of one finger on the back of Shepard's trembling hand.
As if woken from this the way a dreamer might jerk awake from a nightmare, Shepard crumpled the paper violently in one hand even as she said, "EDI, can you—shit. Solana, get your brother on your comm. Now."
Solana had the strangest urge to snap to attention, or reply with a deferential yes, ma'am!, though it had been many years since her last military posting, and she'd certainly never saluted a human. She routed the call to Garrus' private frequency through the interface of her omni-tool so Shepard could both speak to him and hear his response.
Before Garrus could say more than, "Sol, what—?" Shepard barked, "Garrus? It's me. And I'm about done with this no-tech vacation." Solana blinked, a little shiver running down her spine. All trace of the laughing woman vanished and was replaced in a heartbeat—in a single word—by the serious soldier Solana recognized from the wartime vids as Commander Shepard, Savior of the Galaxy, No That's Not An Exaggeration. "Joker needs to set a course for Earth. Something tells me Kaidan's return might be… hampered."
Garrus didn't argue. He said only, "All right. You want to give me a reason?"
"I'll give you several, but not over an unsecured line."
"On my way."
"Bring Brooks."
The pause was so long and so startled, Solana almost thought her brother was already gone and hadn't heard. Then, subharmonics thrumming with distress, he said, "Why, Shepard?"
"Because blown-out knee or not, she's had enough beauty sleep. Because she knows more than she lets on."
"You got all this from that book?"
"I got all this from one word."
Garrus growled a particularly vile turian expletive and the following silence was one of cut communications and not confusion. As her omni-tool went dark, Solana asked, "What is it? Who is it?"
"Ghosts," Shepard spat, and even subvocals couldn't have made the vitriol any clearer. Her hands clenched and flattened, pressing into the bed as though she was thinking about trying to get up out of it, healing bones be damned. Solana had never been more certain that, whatever pieces Shepard had just put together, no matter how injured she still was, the very last place she wanted to stand was between the commander and whomever'd so utterly pissed her off.
"Ghosts," Shepard repeated, her tone a dangerous promise. "Who should have known to stay dead, and who never, ever should have tried to use my own people against me."