Chapter 37: She Blinded Me With Science
I'm not locked up in a holding cell. Not yet.
In Dakan's arms my consciousness fades in and out. We're in the ballroom with the scent of sweat, blood, and o-zone, then the avenue, surrounded by the shouts of the surviving crowd, the whimpers of the injured. Circulated, scrubbed air is a welcome refreshment, then it's gone. The hum of a skycar drones around us. Cool leather gives under my heavy, heavy body. Blue and white lights flash at the windows. I blink at them and pass out. There's pressure at my arm. Someone shakes me awake. The hand gripping my bicep is hard. It has claws. I holler because monsters have claws and I think a monster has me until Dakan's face swims into view.
The turian's jaws open and shut like a ventriloquist dummy's wooden mouth. His mandibles flap. What he says escapes me. I'm too involved with the landscape of his features to pay attention. Placing my hands on the sides of his face, I trace the amber colony markings stamped on his cheek plates with my thumbs. His carapace is warm and rough with the dings and scrapes life has dealt him. He twitches at my touch, but doesn't pull away. Hands circle my wrists. I touch my forehead to his. No one's taken me away yet, just like he promised.
This won't last, a small, insidious voice inside me whispers. He can't shield you from C-Sec. Remember, you can't trust him.
Dark thoughts gather at the edges of my mind. The corners of my mouth turn down. There's something I should remember about Dakan. I don't want to think about bad things now. For a few minutes, I don't want to worry, I just want to be.
The rear vents in the skycar's roof blast cold air on my back. I shiver. The tattered gown plastered to my body doesn't offer much insulation. Teeth chattering, I curl against the warm, solid body next to me. I cast my arm over Dakan's chest and scrunch my fingers into the tailored material of his dress tunic. The great biotic well inside me is depleted. I feel it like stale hunger. Energy flows all around me in invisible currents. I can draw in power if I try. Clutching Dakan tighter, I bury my face in his side. The drug hasn't let me go yet.
The steady intake and release of the turian's breath makes my lids droop. The skycar cabin fades from sight. When I next crack open my eyes, we are in my apartment. Dream fog hazes our whereabouts. I can't shake off the lingering sleepiness. I try sitting up. The drug weights my body. My head tips back first, the rest of me follows. While my mattress cushions most of my fall, I crack the back of my skull on Dakan's carapace. A disagreeable sound comes from me. My voice is distant and muffled like I've heard someone cry out in the apartment next to mine. Arms come around me, attempt to prop me up. The blunt, broad sides of a couple of talons stroke where I've injured myself. Tenderness isn't what I want.
Lurching over, I tear at Dakan's clothes—why he's fully dressed in bed is a mystery—and crawl halfway atop him before my drug addled equilibrium starts pulling me back to the mattress. Dakan grabs my hips, steadies me. He's speaking. With my mouth against his, I silence him. No more talking. There's an emptiness in me that needs filling. If Dakan's in my bed he can do that. I remember his head between my legs, the way he made my body sing. How he filled me utterly when he thrust inside. The way he made me cry out when I came. How rage burned me from the inside out when Chellik strapped me to a chair and showed me a vid, the truth, about the turian in which I'd placed my trust.
My eyes snap open. For real. We're not in my apartment, but I am straddled on top of Dakan in the back of a C-Sec skycar and I can't ignore that little voice at the back of my brain reminding me why this turian should remain at arm's length. When the anger and adrenaline hit, I don't see red. I see pink.
The charge dances over my skin. I shake off the full body tingles induced by the small bit of energy I involuntarily draw to myself. When I strike Dakan's chest, trying to get myself off him, blue-violet circles radiate from my palms like shimmering ripples over a still lake. The light concussive force isn't enough to injure either of us, but I reel as that awful incandescence sheaths my arms. I'm huddled against the far side of the skycar's cabin with my sparking appendages pinned by my thighs and Dakan cooing at me when the vehicle's hatch opens.
Shadowy figures crowd the space outside the C-Sec skycar. Dakan scooches out of the cabin. Holding up his hands, he shouts warnings to the alien bodies that shove passed him. The detective is ignored. A salarian in med whites crawls into my upholstered cave. He grabs at my legs which I kick at him, clipping his fingers. I don't want anyone near me, not even with this iota of power I've absorbed. Bit by bit, the well within me fills. When it overtops, no one near me will be safe. With a hiss and a growl and a shake of his hand, the salarian lunges at me again. I throw myself against the cabin wall and swing one of my arms at him.
That's a mistake.
A biotic shot sweeps off my forearm. The salarian takes the minor blow in the face and chest. Grunting, he tumbles off the skycar's back seat and lands in a jumble of arms and legs in the trough partitioning the front and rear of the vehicle.
"Out of my way." Another salarian, this one in a tattered and grime stained tuxedo, jockies for position with Dakan and a pair of asari med techs. As he moves, he sinks an object into the slender barrel of a delicate bodied rifle.
Before I let out a squeak, the second salarian aims his weapon at me and fires. The shot, which gets me in the hip, jerks my lower body to the left. Burning spreads up my torso and down my leg. I claw at my flank. My arm's so heavy I can barely lift it, can barely keep my eyes open either. A cool something protruding from my hip brushes my fingers. Taking a firm grip on the object, I grit my teeth and yank it from my side.
A dart.
I fling it aside and sink onto the skycar's back seat, unable to support myself any longer. I don't black out, but everything around me gets slow. I open my mouth and only strange noises come out. The salarian who shot me wings away from the cabin's entrance. One of the asari helps the battered salarian med tech from the skycar. Glancing over her shoulder, she calls to the other asari outside.
"We need biotic dampeners."
The devices are cuffed to my wrists, ankles, and neck. I can't fight the many hands working on me. I'm lifted from the skycar, strapped to a mobile gurney, and wheeled into a gleaming medical facility. Dakan calls after me, but I don't see him again.
"Tell me what you see. There are no wrong answers."
A human psychiatrist—male, dark hair, thick beard and moustache—holds a black splotched card before my face. We sit on opposite sides of a steel table in uncomfortable metal chairs. Shifting on my achy butt, I roll my eyes and finger the dampener weighting my left wrist.
Why haven't they removed these? I wonder. Detox was ages ago.
Drugged as I was, on Dalessia's concoction and the tranquilizer the salarian shot into me, when I was admitted into Huerta Memorial, I remember everything that happened. First, the staff put me through an intense detox regimen. All the toxins got flushed from my system while a network of support tech kept the shock to my body low. Two days of bedrest followed. I slept most of it away. Migraines and stiff joints plagued my waking moments. I asked everyone I saw to remove the dampeners. No one had. Didn't they know I wasn't a biotic? No more red sand meant no more superpowers.
Despite my enemy-number-one status to most of the Citadel's residents, I wasn't tethered to my cot. I was locked in my room and when that salarian, the one who tranqued me, stopped by for his first visit, he had me re-synched to C-Sec's monitoring network. In a standard C-Sec hardsuit on this occasion, the salarian—I learned his name was Sirrus—had the human technician who'd assisted Chellik during my interrogation insert a transmitter into my arm. C-Sec knew my position at all times, officer Sirrus informed me and he let me know he'd be back for detailed questioning after my doctors advised I was stable enough for the process.
I'd felt stable several days after the detox, but officer Sirrus had never returned. No one visited my room except the staff. I left my room only for whatever new pokes and prods my doctors had in store for me or for the endless rounds of mind-numbing psychiatric evaluations.
"Ms. Cezetti?" The shrink in front of me taps his splotched card with one thin finger. A silver ring bands the digit in the middle of his first and second knuckle. Similar adornments glimmer on all his fingers. They're distracting.
"Looks like a frame up to me," I mutter, uninterested in these tired techniques designed to probe my thoughts.
"Are you referring to the attempt you made on ambassador Udina's life?"
"Me?" I lay a hand on my chest. "I didn't so anything." I swivel in my chair and face the mini hover cam recording our session. "I don't know how many times I have to tell you people that! I was drugged. I had no control over my body."
"You seemed in control when C-Sec cornered you."
C-Sec must have made footage of the incident available to my treatment team. ANN certainly hasn't gone public with any material like that and they would if they had it.
"Yeah, well," I fiddle with the dampener at my neck. "That took a lot of effort. Are you even allowed to ask me about this stuff?"
The door to the small interviewing room bangs open. Officer Sirrus strides on in. The asari doctor in charge of my treatment shadows him.
"No, he's not," officer Sirrus says.
"And you're not supposed to intrude here, officer." My doctor, an asari with blue-sky skin and white pigment marks covering her face and scalp crest like tiger stripes, trots ahead of the salarian and blocks his path, spreading her arms. "Not without my written consent. In triplicate."
Officer Sirrus stares down the asari, his almond shaped, black eyes slitted. "This woman belongs in C-Sec's custody. She's been here nearly two weeks. You're impeding an ongoing investigation, not to mention risking her safety with the current political climate being what it is."
He means Udina. I'm not totally cut off from the outside world while I'm confined to Huerta Memorial. There's a vid screen in my single occupancy room and the ambassador is on the feeds everyday condemning me, drug trade on the Citadel, and C-Sec's supposed human hostile policies.
"If there were more humans in Citadel Security," Udina had blustered this morning. "You can be sure what happened to me never would have occurred."
The ambassador's interviews and press conferences play along with any footage of me ANN gets its hands on. My butt, from the stills and vids captured after the Shadow Matter riot, features prominently as does my brief interview with Emily Wong on Citadel Space. Dakan's skin vid hasn't made its debut yet, so Chellik's keeping that under wraps. I'd like to think it's because he's a decent turian of his word, but I can't imagine the shit storm that would rain down on C-Sec if a carnal link got established between me and one of their own.
Besides the "official" ANN broadcasts, dozens of private channels extrapolate on different conspiracy theories involving me and the Terra Firma Party—which didn't make sense until I found out the Terra Firmas dislike Udina because he's not aggressive enough in his dealings with the Council— and me and Eclipse and even me and Saren. One of the nut job private channel hosts ran a segment proving I'm a new geth model engineered to infiltrate galactic society. I groan and rest my head on the cold metal table, sick to death of people arguing over or about me.
"Current political climes aside," the asari doctor shoots back at officer Sirrus. "I can't release her in good faith at this point in her treatment. Not with the anomalies present in her system."
Anomalies? I perk up at that, ears twitching.
"Anomalies?" Officer Sirrus asks and I nod along with the inquiry.
The asari glances at me over her shoulder. It's clear she doesn't want to discuss whatever's wrong with me in front of me. I'm out of my chair so fast, I knock it over with a resounding clang and bump the table, bruising my hip.
"What's wrong with me?" I ask the doctor who holds up her hands in a placating manner and puts on that babying-calm voice professionals use with unstable people.
"It's not that anything's wrong with you, but there have been interesting…developments with your system over the last couple of weeks."
"Developments?" I probe.
Officer Sirrus interjects. "You mean mutations."
To my horror, my doctor's head dips in affirmation. "Precisely."
"Mutations?!" I claw at the sides of my face. Twisting my head around, I spin like a puppy chasing its tail, trying to get a view of my back, certain there's an extra arm or tit growing where I can't see.
"It's nothing so horrible as you're imagining," my doctor assures me, then signals the be-ringed psychiatrist still seated at the table. "Would you excuse us, doctor?"
"Of course." The dark haired man collects his ink blotted cards, stows them in a leather messenger strapped over his chest, and exits the interview room.
Taking me by the arm, the asari guides me back to the table and suggests I sit. Once I turn my chair upright, I do. She offers the other seat first to officer Sirrus. When he declines, she occupies it herself. The hardsuited salarian stands to the side, arms folded. The asari taps a finger on the table while she orders her thoughts, then shrugs and speaks.
"You know the affects of red sand and Minagen X3?"
"Yes to the first, no to the second," I answer, treating her not at all like a patient or prisoner and more like a colleague.
"Minagen X3 boosts biotic power temporarily. It's also extremely toxic. When red sand and the boosting agent are combined we see abilities like the kind you displayed at the gala."
I cringe. Does she think I'm guilty? I've been yammering at anyone who'll listen about Dalessia and Vlair and the drugs. All of them look at me like I'm crazy. Anxiety squeezes my chest and throat. Words, explanations, swarm in my mouth like angry insects. I want to explain my innocence to them right now. I want them to believe me. I want Dakan. That turian may have screwed me over, but he knows I'm not responsible for this. He swore he'd protect me. Not that there's much he can do for me now.
"The duration and strength of your abilities—"
"Not my abilities," I counter. "Dalessia Kella's."
The asari gives officer Sirrus a sidelong look and he almost imperceptibly shakes his head. The indulgent smile the asari shines on me pisses me off.
"The drug induced biotics were quite impressive. Astounding, actually. You've never demonstrated biotic ability before? Not ever?"
"No."
How many times do I have to rehash this? Everyone gets screened before and after puberty these days. My biotic status is a matter of public record.
"That's very interesting considering the proto-nodes we've detected." The asari's indulgent smile turns smug.
Proto-nodes. The term marinates in my brain.
"You mean like eezo nodules?" I finally ask.
"Eezo exposure has been known to stimulate biotic node development in humans. The nodes we've mapped in you are comparative to those of a human adolescent with an inborn mutation. Without an amp and intensive training, however, someone with these latent anomalies shouldn't be able to harness as much power as you can. Your nodes should be in a state of atrophy."
"But they're not." Under the table, I twist the dampener bracelets around my wrists. This is why they haven't been removed.
"No," the asari says and scientific and intellectual curiosity brightens her face. "In fact, they're growing. Getting bigger. Stronger."
I gape at her for a long while.
"You're telling me I'm a biotic," I say.
The asari doctor beams like she's pleased I've grasped her meaning because she didn't expect it. "Precisely."
What the fuck has Dalessia Kella done to me?