July 9, 2187 10 hours of daylight remaining
Shepard gasped, allowing the current to haul her downstream a little while she caught her breath. When she'd hallucinated Balak before, it had always just been his voice, never visual. Seeing him outside a dream . . . what did it mean? Was he strengthening? Was she losing ground? When she remembered landing on Alchera, the bastard seemed to lose his hold over her. No way could she let him take it back. Not with all the Scion madness. He did not get to destroy her family with his lunacy. No, she wouldn't allow that to happen. She couldn't allow that to happen.
Finally, a couple of hundred metres down the river, she recouped enough to let go with her good hand and yank loose the ties holding the belly shield in place. She wrestled it over the side, letting out a sigh of relief as the weight lifted. Grunting, she kicked hard, boosting herself high enough to hook both elbows back over the boat. Savouring the way it dug solidly and painfully into her armpits, she kicked for the opposite bank. Behind her, she heard the varren fighting at the water's edge, frustrated that their prey had eluded them. Hopefully their fear of the water overruled their hunger. At least for a little while.
She fought the current for another ten minutes before she managed to kick her way to shore, only her prosthetic leg able to provide any kick. Broken arm clutched against her chest, she crawled on her hand and knees up the rough gravel and broken cement of the bank, dragging the boat behind her. Once her upper body cleared the water, she collapsed, face down, gasping. After a few minutes, the heat on her back forced her into motion, and she crawled the rest of the way to the base of the cliff.
Shoving herself up until her back pressed against the cliff-face, Shepard collapsed and checked her gear. Her bag, water bottles, lighter, and mud remained around her neck, soggy but otherwise intact. The sexy bowl hat had fallen off in the boat-a bit of luck there-but her glasses had set sail for the sea. She'd lost her walking stick, but it wasn't going to be much use for the next leg of the journey anyway. Looking up, she groaned. "Going to be a minute or two before I can face that climb."
After wrapping her belly band around her middle, Shepard covered all her exposed skin in a thick layer of mud. She leaned the boat against the cliff to make a small shelter, then curled up, sipping her water and watching the varren on the far shore. Despite struggling not to sleep, to keep her eyes on the varren, she dozed. Dreams of rescue, of being cool and sheltered and safe, wrestled with ones of Balak and varren and endless burning heat.
She woke to the sun blazing down on her face. She winced away from it, then yelped as moving her face cracked the mud and it peeled off, ripping away a couple layers of blistered skin.
"Oh, that was bright, Shepard." Judging by the boat's shadow, she'd been asleep at least an hour. She shoved herself upright a couple of centimetres at a time until the skiff shaded her once more. Once out of the sun's scorching rays, Shepard's attention snapped to the deep, angry throbbing in her broken arm. When she held it up, her fingertips greeted her with an ugly shade of black-purple. "Damn, I can't ignore this any longer."
Glancing outside her shelter, she saw that the varren had moved on to prey that involved less swimming. Might as well take the time to try to save her one real arm.
She unwrapped it, not encouraged by the mess of burns under the material. They really didn't overstress the whole 'Palaven will cook humans in their shorts' angle. She ripped the sleeve of her dress blues to relieve the pressure. A hand's width above her wrist, one end of her ulna stuck out about a centimetre and a half. No wonder the arm had swollen to twice its usual size and turned such a disturbing shade of violet.
"This is a problem." She looked around. "How am I going to do this?" She put her leg over arm, grinding her teeth together as the blistered skin under her sleeve peeled back. Gripping her elbow under her knee, she wrapped a cloth strip around her wrist and bit down on it. "This is going to hurt like a bitch." Shepard pulled back with her head, bracing her leg to provide traction the other direction while she used her fingers to ease the bone back into position. With a slight crunch and a long string of muffled, vulgar curses, it slipped back in place. Gasping, she collapsed against the rock, the arm hugged to her chest. "Where is all the medigel when you need it?"
When the pain dulled a little, she pulled the sleeve of her dress uniform back down and applied her splint over top, securing it with extra strips of material. Once she had it wrapped tight, the pain faded to a tolerable level. She glanced up the wall.
"I'm going to need to be able to dangle from this thing," she said, chewing at the inside of her lip. "How am I going to manage that?" She sagged back against the rock. "I guess I hope I only broke the ulna and that it will take my weight."
She drank a bottle of water, smeared more mud over her broken, weeping blisters and then turned her attention to the escarpment towering above her. "That's a good eighty metres there, Speck. There has to be a way up. I know there was a proper path your dad used, but I have no idea where it is." Sighing, she looked back to the river without really seeing it, her vision turned inward. "I'm not so sure this was a good plan any more, kid. We could be a long way from where he showed me. I know it wasn't this close to the city."
Shaking her head, she weighed her options. "I would have thought we'd hear them searching by now. I don't know, maybe we should stay here, but if they don't find us soon, we're toast." After a moment's indecision, she saw movement in the rubble. The varren. "Guess that's our answer. If they're back, it won't be long before they're hungry enough to swim."
Levering herself up, she leaned against the rock, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Bowl plunked back on her head, she started walking down the base, looking for the best slope for climbing. Maybe the universe would take pity on her and let her find Garrus's path. She chuckled bitterly at that. Not the way her day was running.
A few hundred metres down the river, the smoothly chiselled stone turned to natural cliff. Tussocks of hardy grass and brambles stuck out of the rock, overlaid by long, thick roots. Shepard stood back and raised a hand to shade her eyes. It looked like there were a few shelves of rock wide enough for her to rest on.
"I don't know, Speck. What do you think?" She grimaced, staring up the height. "Not sure this arm is going to hold up that long." She sighed and looked down the wall of rock. From there, it seemed to stretch on forever. "Don't suppose your dad could just show up and save us the effort?" Turning to look at the city, she saw no sign at all of rescue. Surely they were out searching for her? Garrus would tear the planet apart to find them, he just would.
Shepard sighed. "We've just got to make it easy for him. Okay, climbing it is."
She shifted her bag around to hang behind her, tucked up the dragging ends of the robes, and reached up, scrabbling with her fingers until she found good, solid holds. She tested her broken arm, slowly putting more and more weight on it, crying out as the pain ramped up from severe to horrendous to 'I give up, just let me die'.
"Come on, Shepard." She clenched her jaw hard enough to make her teeth ache. "Pain is just an illusion." Her arm screamed and railed, but held, so she reached up with her other one, and slowly, centimetre by centimetre, gasping wail by gasping wail, she began to climb. Around the ten metre mark, her arm stopped shrieking like a banshee, settling into an ache that throbbed all the way to the center of her chest. She started testing the long roots for strength and looping them around her prosthetic arm just in case she fell.
Her fingernails chipped and broke, peeling back when she lost holds. Slowly the skin on her fingers eroded, and patches of blood stained the rock. She focused on her breathing and each new hold. One hold at a time: fingers, toes, fingers, toes. The sun beat down on her, feeling like a giant, scorching hand pressing her into the cliff. After too few metres of climbing, the heat turned to a sharp sting that spread across her shoulders and down the back of her one leg. As the time dragged, fingerholds and toeholds beginning to slow and becoming harder to grip, that sharp sting turned into a tearing that accompanied every movement, even breathing.
Her stamina and energy disappeared long before she reached the closest of the shelves. Leg trembling, arm shaking, head reeling, she started tying the heavy roots around her torso so that she could lean back against them to rest her arm a little. Her prosthetic arm and leg worked tirelessly, but even the fake skin and fingernails showed the mileage. Her index through ring fingers had worn through to the silicone pads that cushioned her fingertips, and all but the nail on her thumb had broken right off.
"Gotta rest, Speck," she sighed, despite the constant alarm going off in the back of her head that screamed at her to keep moving. Eight or so hours in the sun had already eclipsed what most people could survive. Implants or no, she remained human, and she felt each second slipping away. "No." She reached up, digging her fingers into the rough clay. "I've got to keep moving. For you."
She climbed another metre then reached the end of her current safety line. Before she untied the roots looped around her, she took a few sips from her water bottle, noticing the thick, bloody fingerprints that covered it. Just one more thing. Well, at least the varren couldn't attack her there. If only there was a patch of shade, a square metre protected from the damned sun.
Each breath became a heave in and a quick sigh out as she set her eyes upward, searching for a higher set of roots. She needed to tie off in case she fell, the possibility of which became more and more likely. Once a new set of roots looped around her, she sipped a little more water. It helped, but the effects of being exposed to the sun for so long began to spiral far beyond what water could overcome.
She leaned forward, her forehead pressed to the back of her good hand, gasping for breath. "I'm so sorry I got us into this, Speck. I never listen." She closed her eyes, digging her knees into the stone, forcing the roots to take most of her weight. "I never listen." After a moment's rest, she started back, clawing at the loose soil, stone and plants to inch her way upward. "I'm not going to make you pay for this, though," she said, her voice a soft, dry rasp. "I'll get you out of it. No matter what."
A half hour later, Shepard finally found a ledge wide and strong enough to crawl up onto. Fingers burned, bruised, and bleeding, nails broken down past the quick, she scrabbled at the dry clay, digging out fingerholds where none existed. Once she hooked her exhausted arms over the edge of the shelf, she pulled up, toes scraping the rock, helping push. She rolled onto the narrow shelf, stretching out with her back pressed to the cliff. Lying there, limbs trembling, lungs gasping in searing breaths of air, heart hammering in her chest, Shepard curled into a ball, tucking her screaming hand in against her chest. She tilted her bowl so that it shaded her face, then closed her eyes, savouring immobility.
She licked her lips and realized that her mouth had dried out again, so she fumbled with the buckles on her bag, trying to undo them. Swollen fingers slick with blood and lymph just slid over the leather, unable to grasp it. Sobbing with frustration, she gave up, unable to do something even that simple. As the air under her bowl helmet heated up, water became less pressing than sleep. She pulled her knees up to her chest to keep herself from rolling off the edge and let herself drift.
"Just a few minutes, Speck," she whispered. "Just give me a few minutes, and we'll start climbing again."
The low drone of a shuttle engine broke through her sleepy haze. She forced her eyes open and smiled. He'd found her. Thank god. She pushed herself up, her helmet falling off her head to hit the rock with a hollow metallic gong. It didn't matter. Lifting a hand to shade her eyes, she scanned the sky, but didn't see anything even though the sound grew louder and louder.
"Shepard!"
She grinned and let out a sobbing laugh of pure relief. "I'm here!" Her voice rasped, but made no actual sound. She clawed at the buckles on her bag, finally wrenching them loose with her prosthetic hand and grabbed a water bottle, drinking it down in a few gulps.
"I'm here!" she tried again, this time breaking the background sounds. "Garrus, I'm down here."
The shuttle noise became a roar and a downdraft of thrusters as it maneuvered over the edge, lowering down until the hatch drew even with her shelf of rock. It opened, and there he was. Garrus stepped over onto the ledge with one foot, wrapping a strong arm around her. When he lifted, James and Herros helped pull the both of them inside.
Then he laid her down on the shuttle floor, her head and shoulders supported in his arms.
"I knew you'd find us," she whispered, letting her eyes slip closed. "I knew it."
He held her gently, his mouth close but not touching her. "Of course I did, Shepard. I'll never let you down, you know that. I'll always come for you, always be there. I love you."
Shepard pulled back as Garrus's soothing flanging tone changed into the rough grind of rock over gravel. She looked up, not into the ice-blue eyes of her mate, but four black ones. Scrambling backwards, Shepard pressed herself into the far corner of the shuttle. "What is this? Balak?"
He pushed himself up into a crouch and eased toward her, an arm outstretched, entreating. "You know that I'm your salvation, Shepard. The turian will give in to his weakness and doubt. He'll betray you and leave you alone." A terrible smile parted his lips, showing the teeth within. "I'm never leaving you, Shepard. I'm always as close as your next thought, and I'll never leave."
Shepard pushed herself up, ignoring the agony of burns, abrasions and cramping muscles. "You're delusional. All you've done these past months is torture me with nightmares and pain. You've nearly killed me more than once by shutting my implants down, sending psychotics to play around inside my brain. You'd call that love? You're one twisted bastard." Sticking her chest out, she stepped into him, pushing him back a half step.
"The nightmares and other issues were an unfortunate side effect of trying to contact you." He held out his hands. "But, as you can see, it's all sorted and working perfectly. Now I can support you through your trials, as I should."
Shepard shuddered. "Balak, if you really love me, leave me alone. Let me just fade away and raise my family. I have no interest in being the salvation of anyone, and this baby . . ." She pressed a protective hand over her belly. ". . . I want nothing more for him or her than a happy life. The Reapers are gone. My job is done. Yours is just starting. Your people need to rebuild."
He sighed, but the fanatic light in his eyes remained bright. "Your turian will betray you."
Shaking her head, Shepard stepped back. "He won't. There's no one in the entire galaxy I trust more than Garrus Vakarian." Sighing, she dropped her shoulders a little. "I'm sorry that recent history took such a toll on your people, but we're rebuilding everything from scratch. The batarian people have a place in that as partners. You could build something for them rather than obsessing about me."
He nodded. "Very well. I'll step back, for now. But the trials will come, whether I am there or not. When it is darkest, I'll come for you."
"Balak … ." Shepard opened her eyes to the blinding heat and sun, both hitting her like a rocket into her shields after the cool, dim shuttle.
"Hallucination, Shepard," she said, her voice croaking and harsh. "Too much sun. You've got to haul your ass up and keep moving. If you start throwing up, you're dead within hours." She sat up, settling her helmet back onto her head, angling it to block the sun. At least it was starting to sink toward the horizon. Only another four or five hours until blessed, cool darkness.
Screaming with the pain, then clamping her teeth shut, Shepard forced her fingers straight, then flexed them a few times. "Pain is just an illusion," she whispered, taking hold of the buckles on her bag with her prosthetic fingers, realizing when she did how much her mental state was slipping. She drank down most of a bottle of water, then looked into the bag. "Four bottles left." Stowing the rest of that bottle, she rooted through to find the mud, plastering it over the crusty remains on her face and hands.
Moaning a long litany of truly vulgar curses, she wobbled to her feet, sliding up the wall of rock at her back. She wrapped a long root around herself and risked a look up. The top of the cliff looked closer than the bottom. That had to be good. She took a couple of deep breaths and reached up the stone. "I survived being spaced. I survived the war. I survived the Crucible. I can bloody well survive today. I'll be damned if I let that bastard kill me."
It took another hour to reach the top of the escarpment. Rolling up onto the grassland, she breathed a sigh for the faint, but unmistakable relief of having at least a little of the sun blocked by the tall purple grass . She rested a moment and drank the rest of her part bottle of water, but then forced herself up. No longer dangling from the side of a cliff made her vulnerable to attack, and she leaked blood from far too many places to fool herself into believing the predators missed her arrival. She needed shelter, height and the ability to build a fire. No. A fire with so much tall, dry grass and no means of control meant going back down the cliff a lot faster than she came up.
True to her memory from the holo-room at the turian cultural bureau, a large forest rose out of the grassland a few hundred metres away. Even from that distance, Shepard could see that the tree analogs bore the scars of Reaper fire, but like everywhere, nature rushed ahead with recuperation, beating the sapients to it by leaps and bounds. A thick canopy shaded what remained. It took a bit to get some momentum, and once Shepard got her legs moving, staying upright on them became her sole fixation. She knew if she went down, she'd be a long while getting back up … if she did.
Still, she trampled down a wide swath of grass from the edge of the escarpment to the treeline, just in case rescue came along. Couldn't hurt to leave them a trail of breadcrumbs. "I could really use rescuing right about now," she called out, her voice just a weak rasp of air.
The dark, cool space under the canopy felt like a million shades of heaven. Shepard leaned back against the velvety bark and just chuckled softly to herself. She'd made it. That victory was worth a few moments of standing still and maybe even drinking a little water before she put her mind to shelter and getting found.
Building a fire that didn't set the entire grassland ablaze proved to be an issue she didn't know how to overcome. Oh well, she had time to think about it. A fire wouldn't be a whole lot of use until it got dark and cooled down a little. For now, she needed to build some sort of shelter high enough to avoid varren or other predators. At least the kind that couldn't climb. Suddenly, she wished she knew a lot more about Palaven's wildlife.
Shepard spent the next half hour gathering together long pieces of fallen trees, propping them up against a tree with a lovely wide fork three metres up. Angling one between the ground and the tree trunk, she crawled up, setting her salvaged logs across the fork to make a small platform. She climbed up and pulled off her bag, setting it beside her, feeling like things were looking up for the first time since the shuttle went down.
Leaning down, she carefully pulled up more logs, making a roof over her shelter to block more sun. Once she had some solid shade, she laid down, sipping water and just enjoying the first relief she'd felt in hours. She dozed, but without worrying about it. Once the sun started to set, she'd build some large torches at the edge of the escarpment to signal her location. The wind seemed to blow away from the forest, so hopefully any sparks would burn out before setting anything aflame.
"You've done more than enough burning for one day, Shepard," she sighed. "It's time to get rescued, fall into a tub of medigel, and forget this day ever happened."
A couple of times, she thought she heard thrusters, voices calling, but she stayed up on her platform. They seemed so far away, and she couldn't trust whether they were real or not. She closed her eyes tight. Surely, it was just another hallucination. Damn Balak. He didn't think it enough to haunt her dreams, he needed to trap her in the waking world with this Scion lunacy and hallucinations? Damn him, he wasn't going to steal her chance at a normal life. If the rest of her life was going to consist of hiding from him, she might as well just walk to the edge of the escarpment and throw herself off.
A thought shot through her head, so fast and with such fury that she failed to grasp it. "No," she said, her voice a soft moan. She knew. She knew for sure that god, or her father, or someone had sent her something infinitely precious, and she'd let it escape. "No, no, please. I wasn't ready. I missed it. I wasn't ready."
"We never are, kitten."
Shepard sobbed, her face breaking into a smile so wide it made her cry out in agony, but she didn't care. "Daddy? Was it you? Did you send it? That thought? It was gone so fast."
"It hasn't escaped you, Jane. It's there. You might not hear it or see it, but you feel it, don't you?"
Shepard searched, digging through the pain and exhaustion, both laughing and sobbing as she found the thought—the gift. "Oh god. Daddy … how didn't I know?"
"You've needed to heal, kitten. You've both needed to heal, and Garrus is a little behind you, but you're ready. It's time to throw away the training wheels. You're a mother and a wife." His warm chuckle wrapped her in love and admiration and an awe that struck her to the core, humbling her so profoundly that she felt hollowed out. "You are the most brilliant star in the heavens, kitten. Trite or not, I'm going to say it, outshine them all. Don't wait another moment."
Shepard nodded, crying without tears. "I understand, Daddy." She grabbed hold of the gift he'd sent her. "I understand."
"I won't let you choose my life for me, Balak," she called out, her voice nothing more than a cracked whine of sound, drowned out by the cacophony of rescue, growing closer. "I'm not going to live some small, narrow life hoping to disappear under the radar. I'm going to live as largely and loudly and gloriously as I can. If you want to come at me, come at me, you bastard."
"Shepard!"
Garrus?
Balak appeared before her, looking sad. "You've passed your trial, Shepard, but I can't force you to see wisdom, to pay heed. The Ascension is coming. It's coming, the Reapers were but its heralds, the darkness before the Scion's dawn. We shall eclipse them with glory." He reached out, closing his hand around hers. "I cannot force you to see wisdom, but know that the turian will betray you. I cannot change events, I am merely The Prophet, as you are now The Vessel. It is to your Blessed Scion to set the wheels in motion. I'll do as you ask and leave you until you have need of me again."
"Hey, Scars, the grass along the edge here is all beat to hell."
James?
"And we've got blood. There's a trail. Although by the looks of it, either Lola really wanted us to see it, or a herd of cattle climbed over that ridge."
Shepard chuckled at that, then the thrusters, footsteps, armour rattling, and voices calling back and forth faded into background as she stared her nightmare in the face. "Fuck off. I'm not holding back. Come at me, I'll be waiting," she whispered. "Whatever you've got, I won't just survive it, but come out the other side even stronger, even more determined to stuff my life so full that it bursts."
Shepard pushed herself up and took a deep breath, her entire body screaming with the pain of it. "Garrus! I'm over here!" She heard the sound of his long, loping run and sank back onto her platform, looking toward the horizon where the sun still had an hour or so to burn before slipping into twilight.
Garrus appeared above the edge of the platform, his face wearing an expression of such exquisite pain and relief that Shepard knew instantly. "It's real. You found me." She grinned, laughing softly. "I did it. Bring it on, you bastard. I did it. You've got nothing on me."
"Spirits, Shepard," Garrus whispered, reaching out to touch her, but stopping short. "You've had me worried sick." He let out a half-sigh, half-sob, his mandibles flicking hard.
A sleepy smile curved her lips a little. "Hasn't been a gold star day for me either, big guy."
"You okay there for a few minutes?" When she nodded, he reached up to his comm. "Normandy, we've found her. Dr. Chakwas needs to meet us in the shuttle bay. We're at least fifteen minutes out. I'll call when we get her on the shuttle."
Shepard reached out with her prosthetic arm, running her fingers over the arm resting on the edge of her shelter. He shifted, lacing his fingers with hers, and she smiled, letting her eyes close.
"We made it, Speck. I told you that your dad wouldn't let us down." She grinned, her lips cracking as Garrus squeezed her fingers. "We made it."
"Cortez, bring the shuttle down on James's signal. We're going to need the stretcher."
Shepard let herself drift, the noise of the shuttle coming in, bodies moving, voices calling out all overlapping and moving past like smoke on the wind. Her two contacts of reality for those moments were Garrus's hand holding hers and the tiny light shining within her. They were all she needed. The rest would sort itself.
"Okay, Shepard," Garrus said, his voice close and soft, his sub-vocals rumbling in full comfort mode. "We've got to move you to the stretcher."
She opened her eyes and nodded. "Don't worry, it'll just be a few moments of hell. Been there a lot today." She clenched her teeth and pushed herself up a little, reaching out to put her good arm around his neck. "Just watch the . . . everything." She chuckled and then let out a thin shrill of pain, agony rattling between her clenched teeth in choking gasps as Garrus slid his arms under her.
"I'm sorry, Shepard. I'm so sorry," he whispered over and over. He pressed his face close to her ear but was careful not to touch her.
Several pairs of hands reached up to steady both of them as he backed down.
"It'll be over in just a second," he said, the soothing rumble louder than his words.
"It's … it's … okay," she said between sobbing gasps. "You're here." An exhausted smile whispered across her lips. Her eyes rolled back, another shrill cry of agony tearing from her as he stepped down onto the ground, that small lurch and accompanying tightening of the supportive hands a new brand of hell. They laid her down on the stretcher, and she flopped over on her good arm, keeping the broken one clutched tight against her chest.
"Keep it slow, people," Garrus said. "Try not to jostle her."
"Nice environment suit there, Shepard," Tali said, lightly gripping the admiral's prosthetic fingers. "We'll have to hire you as our fashion director on Rannoch."
Shepard smiled and squeezed her friend's hand. "You know me, always striving to be the height of fashion." She gasped for a few seconds, afraid to take too deep a breath. "You should have seen it with the giant bowl hat." Catching her breath again. "Now, that was sexy."
They set the stretcher down on the floor, the hard surface oddly comforting once the scorched nerve endings settled. Everything felt so gloriously cool and dark. Her eyes drifted shut, not sleeping, just savouring the lack of harsh, bright daggers digging through her eyes into her brain. She felt Garrus lower himself to the floor next to her, his fingers taking hers. She gave them a weak squeeze.
"I'll be okay, big guy. I'm tougher than a little sunburn. Way tougher than a little sunburn."