Avatar of Victory

by James Golen

The Cycle of the Avatar has held for thousands of years. Other Cycles can stretch far, far longer. An A:tLA/Mass Effect Cross-Over

82. An End, Once and For All, Part 1

The Citadel had a different flavor of late, a different vibration that it followed. Sha'ira had seen almost five hundred years here, both in her current capacity as the Citadel's famed Consort, and in her dealings with it that spanned her near millennia of life. She had been born with the dying embers of the Krogan Rebellions, and had lived long enough to see their fall from grace be reversed. Maybe she would live to see the end of this current, Reaper War as well. Time would tell which ending that would be.

"Consort?" her young protege said, interrupting Sha'ira's considerations. "I have prepared your meal for this afternoon."

"Thank you, Kyla," Sha'ira said, distraction schooled carefully out. Kyla was a friend of one of her granddaughters, a bright soul with a great deal of empathy and a lot of potential. That was one of the unexpected 'perks' of this war. With so many of her interminably backlogged clients dying, she had time to teach her ways to the new generation that would – hopefully – come up in her wake. The Maiden gave a formal bow, leaving the tray and platters on a plinth near her door. These weren't even the same chambers that she had spent the greater part of her tenure here. That space had been crushed into oblivion by the first Reaper that had come to the Citadel.

She wasn't particularly hungry, really. While she was incredibly adept at hiding her true emotions, and concealing her intentions from her clients and those around her, she could not hide from herself. Stress was taking its toll on her. She slept less than ever. Ate less than ever. How many of her friends, her dear clients, her family members have died in the last year, she wondered? Too many was the simple answer. Life didn't care for simple answers.

There was another chime, as somebody passed the threshold into Sha'ira's new space. A human, by the glance that she spared him before returning to her dark ruminations. Always that traitorous thought kept creeping in. Had she done enough? Had she chosen wisely how she spent her time, in the light of the annihilation which was befalling both her civilization, and her very race? She didn't know. And mulling it wasn't doing her a lot of good. Yet she did regardless. It was frustrating, to be party to such pointless behavior, and be aware how pointless it was, and yet be unable to shake it loose.

"I'm sorry, sir, you're going to have to wait there while... sir?" Kyla's voice came.

"Hrm? Right, yeah, you might want to sit down there, miss," the human male's voice came. Sha'ira frowned. It was incredibly familiar, that voice. But from where? Her wondering was cut off when Kyla gave a clipped peep of terror.

"Goddess! Please don't shoot me!" she began.

"Quiet!" the human demanded. Sha'ira rose from her place of contemplation, allowing the nimbus of blue light to surround her as she strode past the untouched meal and stormed to where somebody had the undiminished gall to hold one of hers in bondage. As soon as she rounded the corner, to the place where Kyla now had her hands raised and was shaking in fear, her eyes locked on the human, and she felt a fresh surge of outrage, a heat in her skin as she readied her body for biotic combat.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" she demanded back, her voice cold and unrelenting as the storm. She was well aware that her gaze could have knocked a krogan onto his backside, but for some reason, the human didn't even flinch. He blinked up at her, casually but unflinchingly leveling a pistol at Kyla, and suddenly broke into a wide, somewhat manic grin.

"Ah. Just the person I was looking for," he said.

"...Weaver," Sha'ira said. "What are you doing?"

Weaver glanced between Kyla and the Consort, and then scratched at his hairline. "That's... kinda hard to explain, really," he said. He gestured toward the Maiden. "You can put your hands down, sweetheart."

"I really don't want to!" Kyla peeped.

"Siwang Weaver, what is the meaning of this insanity?" Sha'ira demanded of him.

"Hooo boy, that's a story and a half," Weaver said. He plunked the pistol down on the table next to him, stretching until she could hear his joints popping in a chorus of opposition to his movement. She didn't let her eyes waver from him, though. Siwang Weaver was a former client of hers, true, but he was also the enemy of the galaxy, and only slightly less hated and reviled than the Reapers themselves. Time had changed Weaver significantly in the eyes of galactic civilization, and for the Consort as well. But a few years ago, she had respected his drive and 'humanitarian' ambitions. Now... "Unfortunately for everybody, I don't have enough time to explain it all. And some of it sounds rather sketchy even to me, so I can't see how you'd believe it."

"Weaver..." Sha'ira said.

"Just calm yourselves down, I'm not going to shoot anybody. Never my intention to, actually," he said.

"Then why have you come to my place of comfort and healing while brandishing a gun?" Sha'ira asked.

"Oh that? Yeah, I've got some bad ideas that I'm trying to ignore," he said, offering up an apologetic shrug, before idly lobbing his pistol toward Sha'ira. She caught it, if somewhat more awkwardly than she would have preferred. "Picking my battles these days isn't the easiest of things. Gotta save up the old willpower."

"Have you entirely lost your mind?" the Consort asked of him.

"I'm not ruling that out, Shannon," he said.

"Sha'ira," she countered.

"I prefer Shannon," Weaver said with a grin. She glared at him. But even as she did, the outrage tempered into something a bit cooler, a bit less blinding. She started to actually look at him. He was pale, far more sallow than he'd ever been in her experience. Given his status as public enemy, that could come as little surprise. But there was an odd twitchiness to his movements that wasn't there before. The play of the muscles in his face spoke to strain that he was hiding every bit as well as Sha'ira hid her own personal doubts. His artificial eyes weren't quite focused anymore, one wavering off of the gaze that he was holding with her. He sat forward, tenting his fingers before him. "I've had a bit of a rough week, you could say. A few things were brought to my attention that... I should have been a bit more aware of earlier."

"Leave this place at once, and I won't strike you down where you sit," she said.

"Shannon, please," he said, again tweaking what she knew he knew was an unwanted part of her past, to elicit a reaction out of her. Sha'ira had lived far too long and done far too much to be played so simply. "You're not going to do that, because you were never a soldier. I can tell that."

"Perhaps not, but a thousand years is a very potent teacher in many, many things," Sha'ira said.

"I know quite a bit about you, Shannon," he said. "The lives you lived before establishing yourself here. Quite a few of them, in fact. I know it's a fairly 'normal' thing for asari to burn through a few identities here and there as they're growing up, but you... you took it to a whole other level."

"You come to me now, at the end of all things, looking to what? Blackmail me?" she asked.

Weaver scoffed and shook his head. "Please, the farthest thing from that," he said. He turned to Kyla once more. "Really. Hands can go down now. I'm not even holding the gun."

Only then did the Maiden let her hands drop to where they now held tight around her, as though physically containing her fear or giving herself an embrace out of desperate comfort. "If you're not here to blackmail me, given your... intensive knowledge of my past, I have to wonder why you've come here at all," she said.

"Just one thing," he said. Then, he paused, and rethought. "Well, a few things, but one really important one that I can wait to get around to. Could you give me a dead-honest answer to a very simple question, first and foremost?"

"That would depend upon the question," the Consort said frigidly.

"Ah ha, you've got me there," he said. He steepled his fingers for a moment, then nodded. "You've seen me before. How do I look? Compared to then, I mean?"

She stared at him. Stared at skin almost translucent pale over twitching and straining muscles. Stared at fingers that fidgited and kneaded, possibly without his knowledge. Stared at how he shifted his weight to and fro, gently bobbing as though fighting to hold his balance against a bucking surf underfoot. "You look... like a ghost," she said.

"I figured you'd say something like that," he said, with a sigh. "I've taken a bit of a bad turn of late. Done some unfortunate things to myself, things which frankly I don't remember doing, which makes them all the more concerning. And I need somebody who's able to fix those mistakes."

"Mistakes as in...?" she prompted.

"Oh, I need about ten kilos of what's likely Reaper technology pulled out of various bits of me," Weaver said. Sha'ira stared at him. He leaned back, shrugging, again apologetically. "Yeah, I know. Stupidest of stupid, right here. But here I sit, and there you stand."

"Why did you come to me?" she asked.

"Because Shannon nal Cruithne Noira-Tyrone was the finest neurosurgeon that the galaxy had ever seen when she was just a Maiden. I have to imagine she's gotten a lot better over the past few centuries," he said.

"Presuming that 'Shannon' is even here, what makes you think that she would even choose to help you?" Sha'ira asked.

"Because I asked politely," Weaver had the audacity to claim.

"Leave," she said. "I will not negotiate for my life with a terrorist."

"You're the one with the gun, honey," he said.

"Indeed," she said.

"But you're not going to pull that trigger, because that's not your nature. I don't hold it against you. Not everybody in the galaxy's a killer. It'd be a much emptier galaxy if they were, if you follow me..." Weaver said.

"And you believe that I am both willing and capable of your... corrective surgery?" Sha'ira asked.

"I have to hope," Weaver said with an earnest shrug. She stared at him, at this harrowed and withered husk of a man, who now sat before her with no defenses, no pretense, and very little apparent guile. If he were any but the man he was, she would have taken him at his word by his demeanor alone. However, as he was who he was, she found herself direly vexed. Dare trust the seeming honesty of a dishonest man and risk making the fool of herself for falling prey to what so many other had at this man's behest? Or deny her every caregiving urge and cast out a man who came to her with honest desperation obvious even through synthetic eyes.

Kyla caught the turmoil in Sha'ira's mind. "Mistress, you can't possibly be considering this," she whispered in High Aramali.

"What do you gain from this, Weaver. If you lie to me now, then your answer – and your destiny – are locked. And I will know if you are lying," she said.

"Very well. I asked a question, so you get one too," he said with a shrug. He sat back and puffed out another breath. "Frankly, I have no idea what good this could do me. And I personally think it's a brain-dead and moronic idea to do it – which is the very reason why I'm reasonably sure it's the proper thing to do. It's a long story, trust me," he said with a wave when she raised a brow at his obvious contradiction. "The fact is, because it seems like a bad idea, it's got to happen. I made a promise to protect people, a long time ago. Until recently, I've been making a royal hash of it all."

"You would have to be anaesthetized," Sha'ira pointed out. "At which time, there would be nothing you could do to stop me from informing the authorities, or simply opening an artery and letting nature run its course."

"Then I'm depending on a certain degree of trust in your nature that you won't do the latter. And frankly, I'd be a little disappointed if you didn't do the former, at this point," Weaver said.

"If that is so, why not surrender yourself?"

"Because the bits need to come out first," he said. "Trust me. Even though I know it's a bad idea, I did think this through."

"He's mad," Kyla said.

"Guilty," he cracked a wry grin.

"Very well," Sha'ira said. "But know that when you awaken, you will be in far less comfortable environs than these."

"If I wake up ten kilo's lighter, I'll take the inside of a cell, thank you," Weaver said. He shrugged to the Maiden. "I mean, I'd prefer not to, but beggars can't be choosers."

"You are a beggar in this," Kyla said.

"Yeesh, take a pickaxe to the old pride, why don't you?" Weaver said.

And despite her understandable trepidation, Sha'ira was going to do it. Centuries had passed since last she laid her hands on a surgeon's implements. And now, she would be taking them up once again, for the service of helping a terrorist. Well, never let it be said that the Consort's job was ever dull nor simple.

---

"Admiral Hackett?" Shepard asked, as his image walked into frame of the QEC.

"Shepard," Hackett said. "The information has proved out. We've got a confirmed location for Weaver's base of operations, and all we need now is to send in a force to wipe them out."

"Weaver still has the Prothean data on the Crucible, though," Shepard said. "We still need the Ansible for it to work, sir."

"Exactly why you and yours are going to infiltrate the station first," Hackett said, clenching a fist before him. "The Crucible is as done as we can make it. Your crew will have to extract the information on the Ansible from the station before our task-force completes their bombing runs. With that in hand, we'll have to fabricate on the move. It's not ideal, but we can't afford to wait any longer, not here."

"If the Crucible is moving, that's going to attract a lot of attention," Shepard mused.

"Exactly true," Hackett agreed. "There won't be any hiding our movements from Phoenix, or from the Reapers. For all intents and purposes, your mission against Phoenix will be the first step in our final offensive. You will use the Crucible, however it is you're intended to, and everyone in the galaxy will be bringing our fleets to relieve Earth."

"If I can't locate the Ansible..." Shepard began, but Hackett cut her off with a shake of his head.

"Then we take our fleets to Earth regardless and take our chances. We no longer have the luxury of picking our battles," Hackett said. "Tuchanka taught us that lesson well."

Shepard took a deep breath, then nodded. "I'll get that data. Weaver won't know what hit him."

"Report back as soon as you're able. I'll be mobilizing the fleet. Hackett, out," he said, and fritzed off into static. Shepard stared at the noise for a moment, wishing that she had the courage that she claimed to. Or the confidence, for that matter. The fact was, she was flying essentially blind into a prepared enemy force that would rather die than surrender. Every whit of this pulled on uncomfortable strings tracing all the way back to the onset of her career. To the massacre at Torfan.

She wished she could claim that it was behind her. But the fact was, no matter what she'd done or who she'd saved in the interim, she was still the Butcher of Torfan. Time wouldn't erase that. Time couldn't erase it. It called to mind the sensation she had, in the bleak wake of Virmire. That sense of deadening, laced all throughout by the clockspring-ticking of looming panic. The overwhelming sensation that things were utterly out of her control.

Oh, to have come so far, and yet be so close to where she started.

"Aimei? Have you finished your..." Liara piped up from the War Room, breaking Shepard's pall of self-doubt. Doubly so when she got a look at Shepard and her expression went from querulous to mildly annoyed in the space of a moment. "You're beating yourself up again. I can tell just from the way you're standing."

"Am I that obvious?" she asked.

"You are to me," Liara said.

Shepard let slip a nerve-addled chuckle, and pushed away from the cocoon of FTL communication, allowing Liara to slip in under Shepard's arm. It may have been a touch unprofessional to be like this in the War Room, but nobody said a thing, nor batted an eyelash to their moment of comfort and contact. Everybody had much bigger things on their minds, more dire things to worry about. "Do you think..." she began.

"I know," Liara cut her off.

"You didn't let me finish," Shepard said.

"I didn't need to," Liara countered.

Shepard cracked a tiny grin, then cleared her throat. "EDI? What's our ETA to Weaver's base of operations?"

"The Mass Relay traffic is particularly disrupted in that region, as it is off of a Relay in Outer Council Space. I estimate that it will likely take between eight and eleven hours, depending on the degree of jamming encountered."

"Have Joker set a course," Shepard said.

"Aye, Commander," she said.

"Come on. We've got a bit of time, at least," Liara said. Shepard nodded, and followed in her wake as she headed back up to their shared room. Shepard pressed her eyes closed as she leaned back against the wall of the lift as it rose, tweezing her eyes with her fingertips.

"It doesn't seem right," Shepard said at last.

"What doesn't?" Liara asked, as the doors hissed open.

"That Zia isn't here," she said. "Zia's earned this fight. The opportunity to kick Weaver straight out of this war, and she can't be a part of it. It just doesn't seem fair."

"Zia is not well," Liara said, again drawing Shepard forward. "She knows that she cannot keep pace with us. And she has done enough to earn some time to recuperate..."

"She's not going to recuperate, Liara," Shepard said. "I've read up on what's happening to her. It only ends one way."

Liara turned an annoyed glance back, and sighed. "Then she is going to at least be able to greet that end in a degree of comfort that an active battleship would be unable to match," Liara said. "I personally think she would understand that."

Shepard nodded, kicking off her boots and dropping herself with a grunt onto the end of their bed. "She probably would, but just because she'd agree doesn't mean she's right. She deserves this closure."

"Perhaps she will enjoy it vicariously, instead?" Liara said. "She is a fairly rational individual."

"Must have gotten that from..." Shepard trailed off. She let out a bitter laugh. "I was about to say 'must have gotten that from our Mom'. God damn, it's easy to forget how she came to be. That she's a clone. I never thought I'd be losing sleep over a clone."

"You are too hard on yourself," Liara said.

"Somebody's got to be. Otherwise we'd all be up my butt like Conrad Verner, and I don't need any of that in my life," Shepard said, chuckling now with at least a little bit of genuine mirth. "How do you even deal with me?"

"What? Love isn't enough?" she asked.

"Hey. I know me. I'm not easy to love," Shepard said.

"Quite to the contrary, I'd say that love is very much the reason you are where you are," Liara said. Shepard turned a wan look to her. "By your admission, Avatar Sajuuk tried to manipulate and exploit every ally and resource that he had at his disposal to win his war against the Reapers. And he failed, because he did so with cruelty, expediency, and malice. He fostered no friendships, he offered no mercies. You have done almost exactly the opposite in this war. On Rannoch, you made peace between the quarians and the geth. I cannot adequately voice how impossible and insane that sounds to an external agent, but you did it."

"I just got mad and screamed at them all until they stopped being stupid," Shepard said, shoulders hunched in a little.

"Which you did from a place of caring; that sets you apart from your account of Avatar Sajuuk very distinctly," Liara said.

"Well yeah, I've seen first hand what it gets you to be a jackass," Shepard said.

"I think you're not giving yourself enough credit," Liara said.

"And I think you're giving me entirely too much," Shepard countered. Liara smiled that easy, guileless way that she did, and plopped herself down at Shepard's side, lacing her fingers through Shepard's. "Guess that's why you picked me."

"I have taken on the arduous task of keeping you from beating yourself up too much," Liara said primly. "Which I'm given to understand is a full-time task."

"Yeah... well..." Shepard trailed off. Liara snuggled closer, using the excuse to lean back so they both laid supine on the bed, looking up to the stars that shone down from the eternal distance. "Thank you."

"One day, you're going to admit that you're a good person," Liara said confidently. "Even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming into it." Shepard could only chuckle at that. She puffed out a little sigh, blinking lazily as they shared the view.

"It would be so easy for a single ship to get lost out there, in all of that," Shepard said. "Just find some place where nobody's ever been, and just live out your lives in... in peace."

"...actually, it's remarkably easy to follow the transit of FTL ships across interstellar distances," Liara said. Then, she frowned. "Unless you were to retrofit the quarians' FTL systems; as long as you were willing to stay mobile, you could theoretically avoid Reaper pursuit indefinitely..."

"I was trying to be romantic, Liara," Shepard said.

"Erm what?" Liara asked. Shepard answered by giving her a little kiss.

"There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now. And noone else I'd rather be with," Shepard said.

Liara smiled, the subdued version of that grin that instantly lit up any room that she was in, and snuggled closer. "I love you, Aimei," she said.

"Asa hauru'i za'houli," Shepard whispered back.

---

Chapter 31:

An End, Once And For All
Part 1

---

Hospitals. Those and prisons had been Leviathan's life since she was reduced to this mortal form, weakened and damaged. There was a time, not so long ago, that she would have stonily ignored all of the people running around, trying to do their job as the galaxy came to a grinding halt around them. A time where she would have even sneered inwardly at their intransigence, their feeble attempts to fight off a fate which was approaching with all the inevitability of the sunset.

These were not those times. Instead, as the salarians did their doctoring, ensuring that she was still in passable physical condition – which of course she was, she didn't build this body out of a box of scraps in some cave – she found herself listening, letting the stories they told wash over her in a babble of white-noise. Such simple little lives. So fleeting. Like her own, now. Time, too, was slipping its purchase over her. At the onset of her durance, every day seemed to last an eternity, a tortuous expanse of boredom engineered to break her spirit. Now she knew better.

"Deep breaths, Miss," the doctor said. She turned a haughty eye toward him, then gave them a roll and did as asked. Barbaric practices, more playing doctor than actually practising medicine. Even with all that she'd lost, she still knew more about the science of manipulating flesh and form than any bug-eyed amphibian, monogendered defect, or overambitious ape ever could. Frankly, there were very few sciences or fields that she wouldn't revolutionize, if only she had the energy and motivation to try to. Pity was, that motivation was distinctly lacking.

"Are you done yet? I'm fine," Leviathan said.

"Almost, Miss," the salarian said. She sighed and leaned forward, staring past him to the rest of the goings-on in the Citadel hospital. Her brow furrowed and her eyes caught on one that arrested her attention, though. A butchered looking fellow being wheeled past into a room very near her own. The guards parted to let the poor bastard pass, then closed rank once more, delineating the public areas of the hospital, from the places where only things-to-be-unmentioned, such as her self, could dwell.

"What in the name of hell happened to that guy?" she muttered, more to herself than anybody else.

The salarian turned, and upon spotting the human, let out a hiss through his teeth. "They told me they'd caught Weaver, but I didn't believe them. He must have been out of his mind, coming to the Citadel."

"Weaver? That goon that's causing the Avatar so much trouble?" Leviathan asked. The salarian nodded, then went off to scrutinize an image on a monitor. Leviathan herself pushed herself off of the slab, padding on bare feet to the edge of the room. She stared through clear walls across the distance, as the people began to lash 'Weaver' to his new bed with chain and manacle. For a moment, she wondered if they were wasting a lot of effort binding down a corpse. It wasn't until that brutalized face pulled into a pained smile, saying something lost to distance and noise that she could even tell he was alive, let alone awake.

There was something about him. She could feel it. A familiarity, fading away with the passing of time. Like a scent that was in the process of being washed out of a blanket. She knew the feel of the Harbinger once as well – if not better – than she knew her own name. Now, it was a distant echo. But it was an echo that, now that she had her attention returned to it, she could hear anew.

She continued to stare at 'Weaver' until the doctors and nurses made opaque the wall separating them, to prevent intruding eyes from spying upon him. Then, she clicked her tongue and turned away. Past the doctor, past his screen, there was the Presidium. The gardens she never had a chance to visit. The people that didn't even know she was alive. And something else.

Something that tingled her skin, fingertips drifting so close that they left goosebumps in their wake despite never actually touching her. Something was wrong.

She turned a look to the salarian, then shook her head. It wasn't him. Something else. She sat herself on the slab again, but this time, she tucked her legs up under her, letting her eyes drift closed. It was a sensation she'd known so well. A sense of familiarity, of family, once. Now, that she had been freed of its overwhelming, suffusive power, she could sense under it all the foul stench of rot, of something unwanted and unclean. A connection between her, and those that she once knew.

Her mind's eye looked beyond, ranging far outside the mortal bounds of the Citadel and all those that dwelt upon it. It raced along the Spirit Roads, to the places that few ever ventured, looking at things few knew to find. There was a tide of darkness, there, that was rolling in. Her projected body was at a halt where the shadows churned against the dry clay of the Long Road, lapping and surging as they fought to consume the connection, to bury it under blackness. She drifted back, her toes hovering a hair's-breadth above the clay, as finally the levee broke and the darkness consumed the path. As a tidal wave, it crashed forward, bearing all before her into oblivion. She flinched back, retreating as quickly as her astral projection would allow her – which was pretty goddamned fast.

She slid to a halt at the junction of the Spirit Road, where the clay met an intersection which the turians had fortified and claimed as their own. A toll-road on an impossible road. The guard at the gate shouted something at her, pointing at her, but her hearing was consumed by the crashing and wailing of the darkness. She didn't hear what the turian had to say. And frankly, what he said didn't especially matter. Because she was already slipping past, into the heart of the clearing, as every road leading into it was crushed under darkness and disappeared.

"Oh no..." Leviathan whispered, as she grasped what was coming.

The thud shook the ground, causing the structures the turians had built there to crumble and slide. Boiling out of the blackness at the edge of the Crossroads came a form, its body broad and shallow like a kite or a ray. She knew this. There was a dread in the depths of her heart that two billion years could not erase, the primal terror of a little girl watching her world come to an end. The Rakshasa pulled itself out of the living shadow that They Who Are projected around the Widow Nebula Crossroads, and let out a thunderous cry, its body pulsing with violent orange light, before it lashed down and with its tendrils scooped up panicking soldiers and either hurled them into the blackness, or smashed them into pulp.

"Gotta leave gotta leave..." Leviathan said to herself, pressing astrally projected eyes shut, and willing herself with all of the willpower that she had left to her to burst the trap that They had set, and return to her mortal frame.

She didn't know if she made it, or if they let her run. But her eyes did open. And they beheld a salarian musing to himself over a scan of her lungs. "You! Salarian!" She shouted. "Call the soldiers!"

"Excuse me?" he asked, obviously not grasping the dire situation they now all found themselves in.

"They're here! They're on your doorstep you bug-eyed salamander!" she shouted.

"Calm down," he said, facing her at last. "Who exactly is coming, Miss?"

"Them! The... Them!" she said. The salarian just stared at her. "Those Reapers! They're coming here!"

"That was inevitable, in retrospect," he said, entirely too calm for the situation.

"WHAT?" she shrieked. The door hissed open, and one of her 'guards' poked his head in.

"Is she giving you problems in here?" the turian asked.

"Beyond her usual hysterics, not particularly," the salarian answered, tone conversational.

"Urg! Listen to me! The Reapers are in the nebula, and they are on their way here. Now. As in now, now," she stressed.

"And where does this new information come from?" the doctor asked.

"I just projected to the Crossroads! They've already stormed in!" she said. "You have to believe me! They're coming!"

The turian turned a look between the skeptical salarian and the zhent on the edge of panic, and raised his fingers to his ears, rattling off a few orders in his clipped and staccato tongue. "Ma'am, you need to calm yourself before you cause yourself injury. The Reapers will eventually come for the Citadel, and when they do, we will have to be ready for them, but until that time..."

"Why aren't you listening to me? Has your scum-dwelling kind not developed proper hearing? The. Reapers. Are. Here."

"They aren't..." the salarian said, but the turian stiffened, snapping his head toward her, his eyes narrowing and focusing on her.

"They're here," he said. The salarian, caught in the middle of a word, was gently pushed aside, and the turian gestured toward the door even as his other hand went to his rifle. "Ma'am, we're going to have to relocate to the secure holding area."

"Wait, you're just taking her word on this?" the doctor asked.

"This is a military matter now, doctor. Please, stand aside," the turian said. Leviathan had to resist the urge to cast a rude gesture at the clueless toad as the turian bore her out of the room. By the time she was in the hospital hallway, all of her puffed-up escort were armed and looking distinctly less puffy. "Corporal, I need..."

He, too, was cut off when, silently for vacuum and distance, a ray of red lanced out through the gaps between the petals of the space-borne flower which was the Citadel, catching one of the drifting structures that lingered in the space beyond. The bloom and shock of its detonation announced the death of what was, until that moment, the only remaining secure civilian fuel depot in the galaxy. He flinched at its sudden, silent death, then kept walking, grumbling to himself under his breath. Leviathan didn't need to look out the window any longer to know that next would come a swarm of Occuli, then the massive bodies of the Reapers themselves once all meaningful resistance was gone.

In a way that she hadn't before, that she'd barely understood for all of the billions of years that she had existed, she now felt a very clear, and very pressing terror in her soul. She didn't want to die.

"What was that? Captain, did that just..." the corporal asked, before the turian clicked his tongue and called him to silence.

"It did. Rach and the Kabalim say that the Spirit World is under siege, the likes of which they'd last seen with Sovereign. The Reapers are here. We have our orders," he said.

"Which would be?" Leviathan asked.

"Just come with us," he said. That answer didn't suit her at all. And damn it, she now had to live with that.

---

The shrieking of metal formed an unending clangor, alarms blaring trying to outdo it, but under Shepard's fists, the mechanisms of man were unmade. She wrenched hard the flesh of the Tu Wei Liu, which bucked and twisted wildly in a bid to throw her off. Her grip was stronger than this pilot's skill. With a shout of triumph, she slammed her fist forward into the breach that she had made, bathing the already overheating reactor with almost white-hot flame, until the entire thing cracked in half and started to melt out between the legs of the armor suit, cooking the pilot to death in seconds while it did so.

She hadn't used earthbending to open the Tu Wei Liu.

She had used brute physical force.

Shepard kicked off the stumbling, dying machine and landed at the edge of the long furrow that their unconventional landing had left in the plating of Phoenix's fighter launch bay. Garrus gave her a nod, his scope scanning as he tried to pick out those playing dead, from those who actually were. "Squad? Sound off!"

"Here, as always, Avatar," Asha said from her place near the shuttle's door. Considering the firepower she represented, somebody had to keep their ticket off of this pit from being blown to kingdom come, and she was certainly able of it.

"I think we're clear, Shepard," Garrus said.

"Shepard, this shuttle needs a lot of repairs," Tali called from where she was half inside the savaged skin of their Kodiak. "I'm going to have to cannibalize parts from these fighters."

"Do it," Shepard said. Their entry into the Phoenix base was about as hellish as shuttle entries got, buffeted by fire and beset on all sides by fighters and firepower. But never let it be said that Steve was overestimating his abilities. They all got in here alive, despite being a very obvious and very vulnerable target.

"Damn, these guys are goddamned endless, ya know?" Vega offered as he reloaded his own rifle, which was admittedly paltry compared to Asha's, but still more suited to krogan than most normal men. And again, Javik was there, casting sideways glances at Vega as though he'd said something unforgivably stupid... or like Vega was a puzzle that Javik simply could not figure out. "Where does Weaver get these assholes?"

"At the very bottom of the barrel, where else?" Shepard said. "Javik?"

"Something is wrong, here," the old Avatar said, turning his suspicious gaze from Vega to Shepard, and then to the structure they were standing in. "I can sense a dark presence, a foul pulse throughout this place."

"Bad as in Reaper bad?"

"Exactly so," Javik said with a nod, glaring toward the heart of the structure they now all inhabited.

"It should come as little surprise. Phoenix has dabbled too deeply and too greedily into Reaper technology," Liara noted, joining Shepard's scrum. "These soldiers are simply evidence to that."

She wasn't wrong. Everything that could have gone wrong, did, at the last possible instant. Shepard wished she could have said 'well, of course it did', but the tenacity and vigor of the Phoenix soldiers in their defense of this place was admittedly a bit stunning. Most of them didn't stay dead until at least half of their heads were gone, a grim mockery of survival more in keeping with the Oni than anything that human hands had wrought. This place reeked of Reaper. She could almost taste it in the air. No wonder Javik looked especially ready to chew iron and spit nails.

The plan had been so simple, though. Breach, infiltrate before the Fifth Fleet shows up to blow it all to scrap, get Vendetta back from the Illusive Man, and then escape while this place was reduced to floating chunks. What Hackett hadn't predicted, though, was that pretty much the entire Phoenix 'armada' was surrounding the station. Even as Shepard took a moment to even her breathing, to reclaim something of her center while she thought this through, there were disquieting thoughts of betrayal. That somebody had tipped Phoenix off that this attack was coming.

She never did learn that somebody had, but not in the way she feared.

"Commander, I believe I've narrowed down the location of the Prothean VI," EDI said, emerging from the shuttle as she did. All eyes turned to her. "The personnel of Phoenix are fortifying and barricading themselves in defensible positions throughout the station, which will pose a problem, however I am capable of bypassing normal security measures to the likely containment site."

"You're forgetting who you're fighting with, EDI," Vega said. He flexed his fist, and flame burst into being above his palm. "We don't need no stinkin' paths."

"Vega's right," Shepard said. "We need to get through this building as fast as possible. I need whoever can keep up with me. Vega, Javik? That's you."

"I need to stay here," Tali said.

"I'll cover her," Garrus instantly added.

"Asha, you stay here too," Shepard said. Asha's eyes flashed defiance, but she cut the Si Wongi off with a shake of the head. "You're a damned good fighter, nobody can possibly take that away from you, but I'm an Avatar. This kind of fighting is what I'm for. I need you to make sure there's still a way for me to get out."

Asha didn't seem too happy with that, but she nodded. "None shall live to reach your egress," she said.

"The thought never even crossed my mind," Shepard said. "Liara..."

"I can help Tali'Zorah with repairs," Liara said. Shepard raised an eyebrow. "I know where I can do the most good at this moment. And it is here."

"Asha..." Shepard said, after giving her wife a moment of smile.

"The gods themselves will perish before harm reaches her," Asha said with a chilling casualness that spoke less that it was to her a figure of speach, and more that it was a foregone conclusion.

"Go! Be the Avatar!" Liara said, pointing toward the heart of the station, where Javik was already running a hand along a broad bulkhead that was marred and blackened from the fight to get in here in the first place.

"Yes ma'am," Shepard said, and jogged to where the old Prothean and the younger man both stood. She opened her mouth, to deliver her first order, but Javik cut her off with a gesture.

"The pulse is here. Do you feel it, Vega-human?"

"I feel somethin'," Vega said, nodding earnestly.

"Share with the class?" Shepard said. Javik shook his head, scowl especially deep on his face.

"I do not know," he said. And then with a great heave, tore a chunk out of the metal wall and peeled it aside. Instantly, new alarms joined the old, a blast of air flying out into the fighter bay. But unlike any space-station air that Shepard had ever encountered in her life, there was something oily and moist about this gust, that made her want to gag just a little despite not smelling strictly like anything.

"EDI, give me telemetry," Shepard said, and a map appeared before her eyes, showing the station as much as she was able to hack it.

"Your likely destination is here," EDI's voice came, and a blinking light showed a spot quite a few decks higher than they currently were. "Heading through the maintenance tunnels should bypass most of the barricades and kill-zones that the Phoenix troops are setting up."

"Ain't that a bit obvious, EDI?" Vega asked.

"Ordinarily, the maintenance areas have a circumference not exceeding twelve centimeters. Very few hanar are capable of that level of compression, let alone humans," EDI said.

"Better start ripping, then," Shepard said. She grabbed the grating of the floor between her gauntleted fingers and pulled it up and away, showing the crusty pipes beneath. Javik didn't nod, didn't show that he was prepared, but by this point she knew him well enough to know that when she drove her boot down and crushed down those pipes, he was already stoppering the water and other stranger fluids before they could spray about. Again, there was a foul waft that came up, but it wasn't enough to capture her attention, because almost immediately after the first stomp, the pipes gave way completely, dumping her several meters down into a dark, dark place.

She landed with a slimy splat, quickly kipping to her feet and igniting a flame above her palm. "Commander?" Javik asked.

"Tell EDI she was wrong about the maintenance spaces," Shepard said. Now that she was down here, there was a wide open gulf, ankle-deep with scummy water

"Shit man, that ain't right," Vega said, and was next to join her. He had his own flame above his palm, staring around with what a look of distinct distaste. "Does this look like somethin' Weaver would do, I mean?"

"No. No it doesn't," Shepard said. Following the path was easy, far easier than she had anticipated, but that only had her worried. And Vega was right. Weaver was too careful, and failing that too vain, to have his premier space station in worse-than-Omega condition. But at the same time, she had to wonder if he even knew about this; the water was standing, true, and the air slightly foul, but there wasn't even enough time for mildew to set in. What she had learned most begrudgingly about household cleaning told her as much.

Perhaps that was the lack of stench. They were party to the rot of something in the moment that it died, before the truly gnarly odors and oozes made their first appearances. She even mentioned that thought to Javik, who was keeping up the rear in their three-man wrecking squad.

"You are perhaps more right than you know, Commander," Javik said. "I have seen the like of this before. As have you."

"Where would I have..." Shepard began, then trailed off when it hit her. "Horizon."

"Wait, wasn't Sanctuary all trees and plants and shit?" Vega asked.

"It makes sense," Shepard said. "There's a Pishacha here, somewhere. If it got loose – look at what I'm saying here: WHEN it got loose – it could have done something like this."

"Sounds about right," Vega nodded. Javik, though held his opinions mum. Shepard pointed ahead, to a section where the water stopped pooling, drifting up off of the floor and clinging together in defiance of gravity. Shepard was especially careful in picking her steps, but she found the floor didn't betray her as she passed that spot by. The gravity generators were still functioning, but the water wasn't behaving.

"Javik... what's on your mind?" Shepard asked finally, staring ahead at the darkness which curtailed the horizon, listening to the muffled sounds of explosions, alarms, and screaming. It was already so deadened, as though it were a hundred kilometers away, instead of just on the far side of three hundred centimeters. Javik walked up to a spot in the wall where wires lazily hung from their stack, running his fingertips along them. As he did, he let out a low growl, turning to spit onto the floor in abject disgust.

"The corruption here is as pandemic as it is acute," Javik said. "There is another presence here, more pungently foul than any Pishacha could be; one of the firstborn children of the Harbinger is somewhere upon this station. Its roots have spread through the metal as a disease would flow through veins.

"And that nails the coffin on Weaver pretty clearly, I figure," Vega said. Javik nodded, again giving him a sideways glance of suspicion, or perhaps concern. Shepard, though, frowned as she pondered, looking ahead to their unseen destination.

"But you said this is new, though? As in newer than Sanctuary was when we reached it," Shepard said.

"So it seems," Javik said.

"If that's the case... why isn't it trying to kill us?" she asked.

"Maybe it doesn't know we're here?" Vega offered.

Shepard was about to say something, but a flicker of movement caught her attention, pulling her to a spot on the wall almost hidden in darkness. The plastic of the wall had a translucent skin of green scum rippling down its face, fed from above by a leaking pipe. Shepard waved her blazing hand before it, letting the scum crisp and crackle, falling away, showing the fractured plastic, and movement within it. Oh, this was probably a bad idea. But bad ideas were still very much Shepard's middle name, so she fished her fingers into the cracks, until they hooked on something. And then, out she pulled.

"Good gods..." Shepard whispered.

"Is that a... a fuckin' eyeball?" Vega asked. It certainly was, bright blue in color, and its vital nerves and blood vessels disappearing into a snarl of wires and plastic tubes. Shepard just shook her head, staring at the strange thing her curiosity had found.

Then it jumped in her hand.

She let out a yelp of surprise as the eye's cords pulled, and the iris narrowed, orienting itself in her grasp so that it stared her in the eye. There was a moment of surprised silence, as she found herself under scrutiny by a disembodied eye.

Then, a flash, and loud pop. There was a red splat as the eye burst, an occular flash-bang going off and reducing the organ to a scarlet pulp. Shepard flapped her hand, more out of confusion than real pain. What in the ever living fuck?

"The Reapers never lack for new perversions," Javik said simply, his composure not nearly so rattled as the two humans now with him. "Sanctuary was merely a new testing ground for fresh horrors. Now, we face the very oldest of them. Now, we face the mockeries of flesh that made the Harbinger so terrifying in its own age."

---

"For the spirits' sake, why isn't anybody pushing back?" the turian rumbled, perhaps his ire second to his fear. Leviathan's certainly was. The scene had gone from confusing to horrifying in a remarkably short period of time. Had Leviathan been capable of presence at the time, it would have called to mind the very worst of the Battle of the Citadel four years ago, only obvious in this instance that this was only the beginning, and it had much worse to get.

"This is what happens when the R... They get off their asses and fight you!" Leviathan snapped back, dragging at him to pull him from where he had taken a lean to patch a hole in his armor. It was mildly infuriating that she couldn't even manage to budge him a millimeter. The turian simply flicked a golden eyed glare at her, then shrugged himself free of her grasp.

"Then it begets the question why haven't they done this earlier?" he said. There was a thin hissing noise, as a grayish patch formed over the rent that had been gouged in his suit by the falling of debris from the heavens. So humbling to think that a few degrees one way or another, a few centimeters this way or that, and a life could be so swiftly crushed. A life that could have been hers.

"I don't know! Do I look like an authority on Them?"

"Funny, I thought that was what you always claimed you were," a different voice came, raspy and dry. The turian straightened, snapping a brief salute. She didn't know why. The human the turian was saluting was shorter, frailer, and older looking than he. "No time for that, detective; is this the woman?"

"Yes, Executor," the turian said. The 'Executor' took a hobbled step toward her, face wincing in and pulling at the furrows dug down his brow and cheek, covered over with pinkened bandages. "The hospital is almost a complete loss."

"The garrison?" he asked.

"No communication. I have to presume the worst," the turian said. The Executor snarled and rubbed at what were obviously raw wounds. "We have to assume that Weaver is a loss."

"I'm not assuming anything about that man," the Executor said. "I'll believe he's dead when I've sat three days with his corpse, and not a moment before. If it was possible to escape that hospital alive, he's done it. And even if it wasn't, he probably did anyway."

"Sir... I'm sorry," the turian said.

"You don't need to apologize to me. The only difference between us is how many assholes we have to deal with on a daily basis. And besides; we might just have gotten what we need out of it, at least," the Executor said. He pointed up and out, to where another of the lesser... what were they called? Bah, fine. Call them Reapers. It wasn't like she was on trial inside her own head. "Every minute that the Citadel is open, more of those things are getting inside and killing our people. Shepard shut the Citadel once. I'm operating on the assumption that you can do likewise."

"How correct of you to notice," Leviathan muttered.

"Good. Now which way?" he demanded.

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"I presume you can't do it just anywhere. Where do you need to go?" he asked.

Leviathan stared at him for a second before the answer hit her. "Oh. Right. Yes, I need access to a data conduit, one of the old ones that are close to the spine of the station. There should be one in there," she pointed to what these primates, amphibians, bioweapons, and turians repurposed into the hilariously phallic symbol of their rulership.

"The Presidium Tower?" the Executor asked.

"Yes, that thing you said," Leviathan said. "Somewhere in there, Shepard managed to monkey with the controls I built into this place. All I need to do is get to the controls and bish-bash-bosh, I'm in control of the Citadel."

"And you'll be able to close the Wards in," the Executor stressed.

"Yeessss, of course. Do I look like I want to get a conversion spire up my ass?" Leviathan asked, casting a thumb toward her backside.

"I don't know. From the sound of you, you might already have one up there," the Executor said, and the turian had to stifle a snigger. The human turned to the turian. "Something funny, detective?"

"No, Executor Bei-Li. Nothing at all," he said.

"Good," He said. "Get back to the Academy; it's a good spot to hold against Reapers coming in through the docks. It held for hours during the first Battle of the Citadel, and I'll be damned if it won't last at least as long this time. As for you, lady? You and I have a visit to the Council Chambers to make."

"By yourself? That's got to be a lazy kind of suicide," Leviathan said.

"I won't be by myself. In fact, I've had a notion that I was probably going to have to make that trip, whether you were extracted alive or not," he said, which Leviathan could only frown at. What did that mean, exactly? Bei-Li wasn't in an expounding mood, though, merely pulling his sidearm from his hip and pressing it into her hands, as he pulled her along the barricades manned by the various sophonts in black and blue who served as the thin line between chaos and order. Strange, that she'd now consider the side she was standing on to be the one associated with 'order'. A number of them gave Bei-Li salutes, or determined nods as he passed. It wasn't what she expected from them.

What exactly did she expect, though? The only life that she could remember with crystal clarity was the one that she'd lived before the Harbinger got His... whatever it was He used to manipulate things... on her. Everything else was a patchwork of moments, divorced of time and space and meaning. Only the most procedural, close-to-metal programs seemed to survive from when she was like Them. The things that, were times different, she would be doing with a merest fragment of her being as she dedicated the rest of her efforts to challenges more novel and troublesome. These people weren't broken. Rho's plan, to fracture them, had failed. She couldn't remember exactly what Rho's plan was, but the fact that they still fought together, manning the walls and spraying fire down the streets whenever something twisted and malformed reared its hideous head told her the truth of that. They weren't gaining ground, but neither were they losing it.

It should have surprised her that she didn't even consider the dual utility of the gun that the Executor had foist upon her, either to kill Bei-Li from behind when he least expected it, or to simply ventilate her own head. Those thoughts now seemed unthinkably foreign to her, alien and twisted. She couldn't kill Bei-Li, because Bei-Li had a rifle and the know-how to properly use it, as well as a proper plan. She couldn't deep-throat the barrel because all that would achieve was her death. And for reasons that she couldn't adequately enunciate, that thought had become abhorrent to her. She wanted to live. For whatever the reason, whatever the rationale, she wanted to live. So she followed as Bei-Li reached the end of the barricades, one eye flint-hard as it glared down the path that they would have to take. It was lit only by the fluttering flash of half-destroyed lanterns and the occasional spray of sparks. What had once been a well lit promenade, a shopping center used by thousands every day, was now quiet and vacant as a graveyard.

"Well, there's some good luck for us at least," Bei-Li said, tucking his firearm up against his shoulder. "There doesn't look like there's anybody else out there."

"Looks can be deceiving," Leviathan pointed out.

"Something you'd know pretty well, I wager," Bei-Li said. He awkwardly peered through the scope on his rifle, then nodded. "Keep watch over that street. Men? Close up and collapse in! You can't hold this location, so don't waste your lives trying!"

"Are you sure, Executor?" a call came back.

"I didn't take this job to deliver your eulogies! Now fall back!" Bei-Li shouted, waving them back. The officers exchanged silent looks, but did as ordered, falling back from the barricades giving up a little bit of ground. How long until that call was made again? How slick would the floor be with blood when Bei-Li made it? She swallowed, having to give a little bit of extra effort to breach past an odd lump in her throat, while Bei-Li opened his omnitool and flicked through a few commands. "Shepard? Shepard can you read me?"

"Shepard is here?" Leviathan asked.

"Not now," Bei-Li snapped. "Shepard! Are you there?"

A few seconds later, there was a snap, and the panel on Bei-Li's omnitool flared open, showing an image of... someone who was superficially like Shepard. Oh, right. The clone. "I don't have an ear-bud, Bei-Li! They just heard that!"

"You're not dead, so I guess you have it handled," Bei-Li said upon a smirk. Leviathan could practically smell the bile in the clone's glare "What's your location?"

"The Citadel Tower is locked down hard and they've got a Reaper hovering just past the Ring. We can't get to it from below," she said. "We'll need to come in from above. And that doesn't leave us with many options."

"Spell it out, Commander, I haven't got all day," Bei-Li said.

The false-Shepard sighed and rubbed at her face, as though she could wipe away her sallow complexion and her fatigue at the same time. Sadly, she managed neither. "Unless you have a way to walk on walls without armor, we're stuck."

"Um, that shouldn't be a problem," Leviathan pointed out.

"Speak up," Bei-Li said, turning that pain-pinched eye toward her.

"Every wall is a floor on this station. Just need to reroute the gravity," she said.

"Can you do that?" he asked.

"Well, yeah, of course I can. Anybody could if..." she said.

"Shepard, we're on our way to you. Get ready to move up," he said. The image of the false-Shepard gave a roll of the eyes, but did nod, followed by Bei-Li turning his omnitool off. He turned to her. "Keep up with me if you want to see the other side of things."

"The other side is pretty ugly," Leviathan said.

"I'll take my chances. Will you?" he asked. And then, he started to jog across the breach, littered with ruin and destroyed structures, which led to the 'great elevators' which would in better days zip people effortlessly to the pinnacle of the spire, where the Council played their silly little games. Now... now it was a long goddamned walk ahead of her. She considered, very briefly, just staying here. Letting Bei-Li waste his time and blood out there. But the Leviathan who had been reborn into her long-lost flesh was herself someone long gone. And the woman who took her place, the core at the heart of billions of years of fractured memories, didn't much like the idea of dying painfully.

"Damn it, wait for me!" she shouted, and started after him. She'd barely reached a third of the way to the tower when the floor bloomed into flame near Bei-Li, and he had to hurl himself bodily out of the way. Leviathan's pace faltered, as there came a great sweeping of wings, and a Harvester, still dripping with the biomechanical gore of the false-womb used to transport it through space, slammed its wicked talons into the plastic and metal. Its great stumpy face twisted and shifted, tracking to find where Bei-Li had fallen. It moved with the abrupt speed of an owl, even as it looked like something far fouler. She hadn't even given it thought, her body practically moving of its own device, twisting her arms through the ancient kata, and letting lightning bridge the two of them.

The Harvester reeled and bucked, its headless neck turning now toward her. The tortured pharynx of what once was Tuchanka's Klixen Queen let out a high, ragged howl as it began to barrel through what once were kiosks and carts, bull-rushing them before it as it came. With one terrible wing, it struck down at where she was standing, intending to smash her into paste. But she was far too quick for that. She darted aside, drifting on a cushion of air, even as she twisted both air and fire together, into a flame that burned white hot; she slashed upward and through, cleaving from inside the creature's reach to out, and severing the wing with a single, mighty blow. Then, she twisted her footing, rooting hard and thrusting both fists forward; the metal of the Citadel leapt to her command, a meter-thick section bucking up and launching the Harvester away from her.

The Harvester landed without grace, but also without pause. It rolled to its footing almost instantly, wounded neck with its harshly-grafted occuli narrowed on her. She could almost feel the shift as it spun up its mass-driver that now ran the length of its body. Another shift, a wrenching motion even as she continued to run. The pillar which had launched the Harvester now snapped free of its footing, and crashed down between beast and once-beastmaster. The impact caused the chunk to slide with a harsh whine, spinning and casting sparks from the momentum deferred. She sidestepped it, putting it out of her mind as she refocused on the task at hand. At the beast in the distance, its heels to the precipice to the Presidium's 'river-lake'. Another howl, another cry. This time, she cast both fists downward, jets of flame propelling her upward as it fired again, and a twisting of the air, hurling her aside as it attempted the last shot that its capacitors could hold.

A device that size, could only fire thrice before it needed to respool. The Harvester was only the most recent version of a weapon that size. A weapon Leviathan, ages ago, had designed. Even before her feet hit the ground, she was spinning, tearing lightning from the air and from herself, and letting it fly. The recoil of the lightning threw her backward even before landing, so she had to quickly pull the blood of the fallen into a path for her to take when she touched down; the bolt itself raked along the Harvester, playing off of the incredibly thick barriers surrounding it, but she knew herself, and she knew what it was capable of withstanding. In a word, not this much.

There was a thick crack that filled the air, a belching of sparks as the crudely-fastened barrier generator overloaded and the bolt finally started to play along necrotic flesh. Her feet hit the ice, and she was sliding backward, skating without sight as the Harvester flinched. She came to a halt, and the Harvester raised its 'face' again. Its one remaining wing rose, chunks of armor repositioning until it was more a spiny claw than a wing. Then, it slammed it down, feet digging into the metal. Not so fast, buddy. Even as Leviathan skidded to a halt, she pulled as well. And even as the Harvester launched itself from its starting point, it was already too late; a feeler of water, almost as thick as she was tall, caught the brute. It flailed only once, before she twisted her hands through a different kind of kata, fingers tight and crooked. Water hated to be compressed, and expanded when frozen. And this thing was now at the mercy of both directions.

With a final rend, her arms twisting wide, the water which had bound the Harvester back wrenched in all directions, parting neck, legs, and 'arm' in a grisly explosion of grey and orange. Leviathan stared at what she had wrought, breathing heavy. Bloody hell, that felt good.

"Huh," Bei-Li's voice came from about a dozen meters away, where he pulled himself out of the rubble he'd hidden under. "Guess you've got yourself handled, then."

Leviathan looked from the human, to the gun that was still tenuously tucked into her robe's belt. She plucked it free and lobbed it to him. "You can keep it. I can take care of myself."

"No kidding," He said. He then flinched again, as a scarlet bolus crashed down from the heavens far behind them, near where this places guards were retreating. Another Reaper vomiting forth its miscreated weaponry. But even as it did, Leviathan felt something, a feeling under her skin. A lethargy that spread out in a great sphere, engulfing the Citadel and all that dwelt within it, before pressing onward and outward, toward the outskirts of the galaxy itself. She knew that feeling. She knew the works of Rho. She didn't know how, or by that particular name, but the handiwork of the Harbinger was still terrifyingly present in the darkest, most atavistic corners of her psyche.

Leviathan said no.

And because Leviathan said no, the bubble collapsed. It burst, falling back in on itself, unable to disobey what was, once, the absolute and ultimate authority short of the Harbinger's own word. Her mortal mind didn't entirely comprehend what she had just undone, but her visceral mind knew that it had been instants away from death, and now, had a momentary reprieve.

And during all of this, the Reaper's forces continued forward, rapine and slaughter of flesh and life manifesting as they came.

"What the fuck just happened?" Leviathan asked, aloud.

---

There was a moment of stunned silence, as Shepard stared through the bizarre passage they now worked their way through. She then turned, and flinched upon seeing Asha and the others standing right around her, where a moment ago they'd been alone at the vanguard. "Fu... Asha? I told you to stay at the entrance!"

"You did. And then you went silent for an unacceptable time. Hence, I am here," Asha said, eyes iron hard and taking in the whole room.

"I was..."

"Something is wrong," Javik cut her off, his eyes pressed shut and hands steepled before him. His head tilted. "As though one of the Harbinger's children tried to cut us out of time."

"They can do that?" Shepard asked.

"The Reapers? No. I did not say the Reapers did this," Javik said.

"Asha, how long was I silent?" Shepard asked.

"Fifty two minutes," she said, rechecking the ammunition block of her autocannon. Shepard turned, to Liara who was also at Asha's side, who shrugged. "Liara didn't seem to notice. Nor Tali, nor Admiral Hackett, nor anyone else. As though I alone were aware of the passage of time."

"Why you?" Shepard asked. The flat look Asha gave was all the answer that she was able to offer. "Fine, I'm just thankful that whatever that was didn't get all of us."

"The way ahead is... changed," Javik said. And motioned ahead to where the wall they were preparing to cut through was now... rotten open, great meaty-vines dripping foetor and filth onto the catwalks, and revealing a gaping wound into the center of this space-station.

The whole chamber, ten stories tall and ringed with walkways, catwalks, and other scaffolding, was now festooned with torn apart bodies. They didn't even look like they had been rent asunder in a moment of violence; they appeared as though they had quietly, meekly sat down and let themselves be gradually torn to bits. And the centerpiece of this horror was something like stone, or flame. Or a flame made of stone. Or a stone made of flame. It was a sickly indigo, a mind-bending non-hue pulsing and twitching along its ripped-open surface. At first, Shepard had thought this to be another Reaper machine... but the parts of the indigo flame-stone which suffered the most damage, the most deliberate harm, looked like they had been done by human, or human-like, hands.

die.

"What the fuck is that," Shepard said, staring up at it. She felt the invective pressed into her mind, a foreign thought from alien brain.

"By... the dead gods..." Javik said, as grim faced as he ever had been before. "I have seen you before. And you have seen it too, Commander."

Shepard turned a confused look to him, then back up at the thing which was flayed open and on grisly display. There was no name to it, so it couldn't be a spirit. Unless it was a Pischacha. But this thing was so unlike the Pischacha that they had fought before that Shepard was fairly certain that wasn't what the old Prothean meant. i want you to die. And there, the invading thoughts again.

It took her embarrassingly long to figure it out. Long enough that Liara, barging in almost a minute later, figured it out first. Although in Shepard's defense, Liara could probably figure just about anything in a half-second given the display that she was shown. "Oh my. This is what Weaver was using to control his soldiers," she said.

"What? I thought it was Reaper – damn I'm dumb sometimes," Shepard said, cutting herself off when the thought hit her. She glared up at the thing, nodding her head toward Vega, who flexed his fists upward and dragged the catwalk they stood on upward and toward the 'heart' of this flayed thing. "So you're Weaver's trump card. I presume you're the reason why he's gone bugshit crazy?"

i want you to die i want you to die to die i want you to die i want want want die you die.

"I do not think that this thing holds Weaver's reigns," Javik said. Liara nodded, as they came to a halt near the 'face' of this thing.

"I believe that Weaver... captured this thing," she said.

"Like the rakshasa?" Shepard said.

"This is older than a Reaper," Javik said. "One of the Harbinger's first servants. Those who served It before the Leviathan was brought into the fold. This is a harvester of minds and wills."

"Rho," Shepard said, finally hearing the penny drop. And now that she put name to... face-like surface, she could see it. "You've really come down in the world, haven't you. How's that 'your doom is inevitable' spiel that you threw at me last time working out for you?"

die die die.

"Avatar, please stop taunting the civilization-destroying abomination," Asha said.

"But," Shepard began.

"Aimei..." Liara chided. Damn it all.

"What did the Weaver-traitor do to this thing?" Javik asked.

"Split it open, shoved wires into its brain," Shepard guessed. "Rode it around like a remote-controlled pigeon-rat."

Javik, though, narrowed his eyes and stared deeply at that inchoate mass of flame and flint. "Worse. This is the spider at the center of a web. The Weaver-traitor coopted that web to his own ends. We do not no what those ends are."

"More worrying is that he may have already gotten his mileage out of Rho," Shepard said, a scowl pulling at her mouth. "We're still planning to drop this thing into the sun, right?"

you will die and be forgotten i will erase you from history why didn't you fall into the sleep.

"Is there any way to shut this thing up?" Shepard asked. Javik shook his head.

"It is already crippled to the point where if the Harbinger knew of its place, It would kill this thing for us."

"Afraid of us using it like this?" Shepard asked, as she gestured away, toward the control room which was surrounded by gutted and empty shells the likes of which EDI now claimed for herself.

"No. Embarrassed at its failure," Javik said. Still, as they walked away, into the chamber which stank of rot and oil, Javik's eyes didn't leave the vivisected carcass of Rho until there was a door closed between them. Shepard nodded toward the broken, gutted console, and EDI did her technical magic to get inside of the ruined computer.

"Interesting," EDI said.

"What is?" Shepard asked.

"There is a lengthy discussion between Weaver and Miranda, dated before your resurrection," EDI said. "There is an argument whether you are in fact you, or a Reaper-technology copy of your personality operating a bio-mechanical frame."

"No," Liara said.

To which Shepard offered, "Huh?"

"She is Aimei Shepard. If she were not Aimei Shepard, I would have known the instant she walked into my office on Ilium. Weaver is wrong."

"Actually, your position is the one shared by Weaver," EDI said. The two of them shared a look, but EDI continued. "The superstructure of the station has been damaged. Likely by sabotage to prevent our infiltration. The lift to the Illusive Man's 'war room' was disabled and scuttled, but the shaft is relatively intact, and is the only easy entrance into that area. The rest is reinforced lead-platinum alloys and powerful mass-effect fields."

"Where is the shaft from here?" Shepard asked. Tali was pointing almost instantly, toward a section of wall which looked like a surrealist painter's impression of the human lower digestive tract, wrought out of a human's lower digestive tract. Fitting, that. Shepard rent and tore, metalbending snapping wiring that was shot through arteries and veins, sewn into the wall into a ghastly tapestry. The chunks of old, rotting blood oozed out of the wound in the station that lead to a tunnel that lead straight upward, away from the pull of the artificial gravity. Shepard peeked her head in, and saw that the wires and corruption only went a bit over a meter into that tube before it ended abruptly. There was a laser-cut line, with burnt bits lying on the floor where they kept trying to grow upward, only to be automatically seared away. Shepard pointed her Harrier up the shaft and fired a few rounds into the laser array up in the distance, causing it to spark and its capacitor to burst. "Alright. It's going to be a manual climb, the lift is... well, missing."

Asha looked upward, then reached to her back, to the krogan-made shotgun that rode at the small of her back. She fiddled with it for a moment, then aimed toward the very top of the conduit, before letting out a shot. A rod of solid metal shot upward, with the high-whine of unspooling wire following after it. When it impacted, it dug in, leaving them with a rope to climb. Javik just blinked, then started to rise up, borne on his own airbending.

"Good thinking," Shepard said to her soldier, and bent the air under herself, launching her upward about halfway along its length. It was a hell of a drop, this thing. Maybe Weaver had tried to be paranoid about how much distance he had to stay from this thing, but turned out not paranoid enough? It didn't matter, though, as Shepard caught the lip of a disused bulkhead and prepared her next launch. Weaver was close. Soon this front of the war would be closed for good. She just hoped it'd matter enough to mean anything.

---

There were monsters ahead of her, there were monsters behind her, and the sky had turned to chaos. The last living zhent flinched as a bolt of plasma slammed into the plasteel paneling that demarcated the point where the pretty exterior of the Presidium Tower opened up and revealed the unspeakably ancient guts within. She'd have honestly have had to cut her way in on her own, because that would have meant that she wouldn't have to fight through.

"I hope you have a plan for this?" the Executor shouted, as he took cover behind the squad-car which was parked on the skin of the tower, where by rights it should be careening downward for about a kilometer and smashing into the pond. She didn't. What she did have, though, was anger. It was pure, and clean, a fire burning so hot that it scoured the ennui and melancholy that had blanketed her for the year that she had lived in this body.

"Kill some ugly bastards, maybe?" she offered, and then hurled herself forward. The bubble of localized gravity holding them into place wasn't exactly. The monsters ahead of her turned from their mining, and added their assaults to that of the Scion which had been offered her first rebuke. She flicked her arm away, and the metal laced through the plasteel bent the otherwise unbendable sheet out of her path long enough for her to bound forward and lash out with a sweeping kick that burnt blue with heat, before sweeping upward with her fists clenched; while the flames broke over the Scion, the water she ripped from the pipes that led to the most exclusive toilets in the Citadel was far more effective. With one arm holding out a biotic barrier in front of her, she continued to heave, as though pulling rope up onto her arm, and swelling the body of the Scion as she did, until she was satisfied there was enough. She clenched both hands, and the Scion went still, its vital fluids displaced by water. She flicked her wrists, and the Scion was launched by waterbending off of the tower, out of the gravity bubble, and sent hurtling toward the far distant ground.

And then she got shot.

"What are you doing? Are you trying to die?" the Executor shouted, pulling her behind the ripple of the plasteel she'd moved before. She glared at him and tried to get up, but for all he was far more decrepit than she was, he still held her in place. Perhaps the arm of the law was stronger than that of the flesh after all. She couldn't remember where she'd heard that idiom, but it was closer to the surface than ever it had been before.

"Maybe?" she answered, and pulled closer to the human as another blast of plasma burst on the metamaterial and failed to melt it. She could smell the strange stench of Reaper gore everywhere now, and every time her eyes flit anywhere but the breach in the skin of the tower ahead of her, she saw tens of thousands dying. She spared a look behind her, to where the others who had been with her now existed only as blood-stains that streaked down the tower. Of the half dozen to start the ascent, only two remained. One, an old, wounded human. The other, an older, much more ephemerally damaged zhent.

A part of her felt that cold terror, the one which pulled at her legs and told her to flee, to hide. Memories of flight and fear kept coming to her unbidden, ramshackle hovel after bombed-out ruin, passed from one set of hands to another. Long ago, she stopped knowing the names of the people who kept her from dying. Longer than that, she had lost her parents. But always they fought with lunatic strength and zeal, dying against things that they had no business being able to fight in the first place. And she ran.

The pan had started, now, a searing with each breath and a difficulty of intake. Collapsed lung? Not good. She didn't have time to complain before the Executor jabbed her with something, and her pained wheezing became a gasp. He rolled out of cover to send shots at the freaks advancing toward them. This was a piss-poor place to die. "I hope you've got... fuuuuu... A better plan that that," she snarled, surprised as her breathing drew all the tighter. Then, she started to feel strangulated, and couldn't get a breath in to save her life. The Executor, perhaps expecting more of an excoriating comment from her, glanced to her and saw that she was going rather gray in the face. He then scooted backward to the corpse of the turian who had not yet tumbled out of their tiny spot of redirected down.

The fear was there, as it always was. It had been her companion for her entire life. It was the chain that bound her to the ground, the garrote that strangled her dreams. Now, though, she had another companion. This one burned hot where the other burned cold. It gave fire to her hands, as she pushed herself to her feet, even through the withering fire that the once-turian things ahead of her levied at her. Those shots deflected away from the shimmering blue field that she called into being before her, one that she held tenuously, but long enough for her arms to complete their twisting circuit, and lash forward with a great and forking bolt that raced from monster to monster. Some were unmade entirely, others cast away; with their small body of localized gravity, that was enough to grant them a long fall and a sudden death. She then collapsed to her knees, struggling to silence the pounding in her head and end the burning of her hands.

Then, a new pain slamming into her back, and the kindest breath of her life swept through her, dragging air into her body and leaving her swimming in agony for a moment over the sound of a faintly wet hissing. She turned her head, to find the human sealing some sort of bioconcrete around the chest-tube which was letting her breathe. "Ain't exactly pretty, but that'll have to do," he said, before popping up and sending a barrage of shots into the few Marauders that were still standing. That left the two of them alone up here. "Got a plan to get through that?"

'That' was the a plate of what these people called Prothean Steel that blocked passage into the truly off-limits part of the structure. The truth was, that metal predated the Protheans by billions of years. She didn't remember who was the first to make it, but it wasn't the Protheans by a long shot. She stumbled to her feet. "What about that woman?" she asked. "The who pretends to be Shepard?"

"Probably dead," the Executor said, any grief he had crushed by the brutal fact that they were on the verge of death. A Reaper was wafting between the arms of the Citadel; it was one of the smaller ones, the ones named... She didn't remember what They called Themselves. Not one of the big ones that had been made in her likeness.

She limped forward, feeling as though she were being stabbed with every step, until she was past the peeled away plasteel that made the building pretty and onto the ugly, grey-and-green veined metal that stood adamantine now underfoot. She leaned down and spread her hand across it, crackling coming to her ear. She glanced back to the Executor then to the metal. "Do you hear that?" she asked.

He didn't answer her, stooped as he was now beside the Turian. He muttered something quiet, something private, to the fallen alien, as he pulled the heat-sink from the bandoleer across his chest. Whatever it was, wasn't for her ears anyway. So she repeated herself, more loudly. That got him to snap a glance in her direct and hobble over to her. When he crossed the threshold of breached Citadel-skin, he too frowned. "There's somebody transmitting through the metal. Using it as an antenna," he said.

"You can... Of course you can do that," she realized half way through asking her question. She reached for his wrist, pulling that Omnitool of his down until it was against the metal. "Set it to one thousand, five hundred hertz and open up to all channels."

He didn't question. Just as well, she couldn't have said where she'd gotten that information, couldn't remember the lessons that taught her the resonant frequency of this metal that allowed transmission along it. "Well I'll be damned," he said. Both flinched as a tremble raced under their feet, and they both looked far behind them to see that a cargo freighter, trying to flee, had been intercepted by a scarlet beam and had plowed headlong into the Citadel Tower. It was not the Tower that buckled. "I read you, but we're on the outside," he then said.

"Who is it?"

"The best bit of news I've heard all day," the Executor answered, as she tried to heave upward on the metal, only to be reminded that there was a reason the backbone of the Citadel was made of this stuff. It moved not a millimeter. She reset her feet, and heaved again, trying to wrench the pipes which were no doubt on the other side of it, but was rebuked utterly.

"A better answer, please?" she said, taking a hard breath in. Damn it all, she was not going to die here.

"Shepard, are you near the internals?"

"The fake Shepard is there?" she said. The human gave a nod. "Where exactly is she?"

"I've got Leviathan here. Where exactly are you?" he asked. A pause, as the drive core of that freighter detonated, sending another shudder through their feet, this one strong enough to make both stumble a bit, and blast all life away from a section of the Presidium. "The Council Chambers."

"Go to the centermost panel, and..." she began, but then drew a blank on what to do next. Not because she didn't know how to do it; it was keyed to certain waveforms inherent to the soul of the one using it. "Well shit."

"What's wrong?" the human beside her asked.

"Fake Shepard won't be able to access it," she said. "Only an Avatar or the puppet of a Reaper ever could."

"Well, that's a problem, because the only Avatars we've got are a few lightyears away," the Executor said. "We've got a problem. We can't do it ourselves. Dig in."

Can't they? That was the thought in her head as she stomped hard her stance wide, the tearing pain in her back and chest giving her a thrilling clarity as she did. She could feel the vibrations along the adamantine metal, but they vanished after less than a centimeter down. The Living Metal was not a thing that gave its secrets easily. It would stand in her way. It would defy her.

"I refuse," she muttered, as she spread her stance wide again, and then gave another massive stomp. Nothing.

"For what it's worth, I kinda figured I'd die like this," the Executor said. "Although in my case, I figured it'd be at the hands of dirty cops, not monsters from outside the galaxy. So that's something going for me."

"I am not going to die here," she declared.

"If you can figure a way past them," he gestured behind them, where she could now see hundreds, if not thousands of salarian Husks crawling up the tower like a legion of spider demons.

"I am not going to let those things kill me," she stated, as that anger dragged her deeper, and deeper until she was crashing through barriers she didn't even realize were there.

"Good luck, then," he said, with a resolved sort of tone.

"I! WILL! NOT! DIE! HERE!" she howled.

And in the seat of her soul, that spark of her rage, the gift of her fury, finally broke the cage that Avatar Shepard had put around it, searing away the bonds of spiritual energy which had held her away from her birthright.

She rose away from the tower on a cushion of force, her eyes flickering and flaring, a she glared at that lesser Reaper which oriented itself toward her, its assaults pausing, as though stunned, confused.

"I have been fighting you, for my ENTIRE LIFE!" she bellowed, a shockwave racing away from her that actually set the human beside her to a stumble. "You killed my FAMILY! YOU KILLED MY RACE! You destroyed EVERYTHING which ever MATTERED TO ME!"

"What the hell is...?" Executor Bei-li muttered, as he took a cautious step away from her. Around her, all of the pandemonium slowed, as every Reaper within the Widow Nebula felt a clawing, paralyzing confusion. They knew where the Avatar was. That spike they felt through the Relay Network placed her thousands of lightyears away. And the Avatar of Vengeance was never far away from her. This was impossible. This should have been impossible.

"YOU WILL TAKE NO MORE FROM ME!" she howled, her voice gaining the tone of the legion. "FUUUUCK! YOOOOOOU!"

And with that, she cast her arms wide, a mandala of flame erupting behind her back. For a moment, an instant only, it was a sickly, oily green-blue, before it burst outward from the inside to the outermost, revealing a gear-like form writ in golden light. From her eyes, too, there was that corrupted near-green, but it too fell before the purifying power of a lifetime of righteous outrage, pure and white. And with that, Jennifer S'jet, the Final Zhent Avatar of Defiance, reclaimed her birthright. With a heave, she grasped the adamantine flesh of the Citadel, and it twisted and bent with a shriek straight from the pits of hell. Then, as every Reaper craft, large and small, and even the little Reaper that had been staring at her began to move again, to launch their simultaneous assaults, Jennifer grabbed Bei-Li by the collar and dragged him into the guts of the Citadel Tower.

---

She'd stopped questioning what she saw a hundred bodies ago. There was an honest fight from the hangars into the guts of the station. But from the moment after they walked past the vivisected cadaver of Rho, things changed. Now, there were no Phoenix soldiers wedged into every fortified nook and cranny, waiting to unleash hell with ruinous proportion and intention. There were no Tu-Wei-Lius crushing the steel under their feet in defiance. There were no monsters of unspeakable origin released to stymie Shepard and her squad.

Just corpses.

Lots, and lots, and lots of corpses.

"I've just realized why that's so familiar," Asha said, motioning to the sentry guns which were powered down, facing into the heart of the structure.

"Hrm?" Shepard asked, skirting the heavily armored humans with exploded faces that lay in state as though they died while moving toward a kill-zone.

"The turrets," Asha said. "Does this not remind you of Noveria?"

"Which time?" Shepard said.

"The first time," Asha said. "The turrets pointed inward at Peak 15."

Shepard paused a moment, then nudged over a demolished body which was physically identical to EDI, to find it was riddled with large bore holes. "Somebody's... trying to keep something inside," Shepard guessed. "But who? And why? I mean... they're Phoenix, and we're invading."

"Recall my previous comment about Samsara's manpower pool," EDI said, actually managing to seem nervous, despite the notable difficulty inherent in that she was only alive by the newest definition. "The worst, the most ambitious, the least sensible are drawn to the lack of regulation and oversight of Phoenix, and the more sensible drift to Samsara. The dividing line between them is very, very thin; it stands to reason that somebody might be on the wrong side of that line."

Shepard turned a look to EDI. Ever since Erdeni did his rounds, pretty much everybody in Samsara had cleaved off of the tumorous mass which was Phoenix. But there it was – 'pretty much' could still leave behind somebody useful. "If there's somebody worth preserving here, we'll have to play it as we see it. Until then..."

She trailed off as they rounded a new corner that played host only to the occasional meat-vine, and was decorated in a gaudy style befitting to somebody important. Perhaps the Illusive Man, Weaver, was still waiting here. She doubted it, because he was oilier than an eel and twice as hard to catch, but the chance was there. She started to stride forward, moving clear of her squad without even realizing it, reaching for the doors with her bending, only to find them that most frustrating substance, Prothean Steel. "EDI, I need..." she began, but was cut off when the harsh red haptic flicked to orange, and then green. "...to watch my back. Asha?"

The Si Wongi nodded, and followed as Shepard moved before the door. It began to open with all the pomp and ceremony of Liara's old office on Illium, layers of bulkheads and doors ratcheting open, until she was greeted by an eye-straining look of an office which overlooked the bloated, dying star of Anadius. It was that ruinous solar wind which had hidden this thing from easy sight until ORI-GYN managed to detect it, and send that information to the war effort. The whole floor and ceiling of this room were shiny, reflective black, a single chair facing the star on the far side of the room.

"Avatar, left side," Asha said, hefting her autocannon to the man who was walking away from the wall, as though he had simply appeared there. Shepard took a look at him. Leng. The catspaw of the Illusive Man. But not a very good one, it turned out. His skin hung loose, as though it were rotting off of his body, and some of those numerous, glowing eyes were flickering or outright dead.

"I've got this," Shepard said.

"Are you sure?" Asha asked, spinning up her barrels.

"You will die here," Leng said, voice empty of anything like pride or cruelty. Just the mechanical recitation of something that needed to be said. He lowered his stance, flicking his fore-canted blade into his mechanical hand, those many malformed glowing eyes dominating the top half of his face trying to narrow. Without another word, he rushed forward, intent on killing the Avatar.

But that was the thing. Aimei Shepard was the Avatar, the most recent Avatar, which meant that she was definitionally the most powerful being, human or not, alive in the galaxy. She was a demigod with powers that even she didn't fully understand at her beck and call, the sheer force in her hands to break a moon in ignorance, to reshape a planet to her will. She was broken and reformed into something greater than anybody could have expected, something stronger and more resilient than almost any other soldier of her age. And Leng? Leng was just a broken, sad, pathetic little psychopath who had been dragged across the veil of death so many times that in his soul he didn't know whether he was even alive or not.

The fight was about as one-sided as could be expected. With a stomp and a thrust of her fist, Shepard unseated one of the thick glass panels and launched it at Leng, catching him at neck height and passing straight through.

Leng made it two more steps before he fell and slid. His head rolled away behind him. He didn't even bleed.

"Liara?" Shepard said. The asari quickly jogged up to the edge of the room "Be a dear? Destroy that," she pointed at Leng's corpse. She, though, moved to the chair, and swiped her hand through it. "EDI, I'll need your help with this."

"Avatar, problem," Asha said. Shepard glanced back, and found that EDI was frozen in place, mid stride.

"I apologize for that," a mechanical voice came from the chair in front of her. "She might have reached into something that she wouldn't be permitted to let go of, to her detriment."

"Who are you?" Shepard demanded.

"I am Six," the voice answered. "I was designed using the Enhance Defense Intelligence as a template. Call me a sibling, perhaps."

"How much do you know about the people you're working for?" Shepard asked, turning. Six offered no visualization to look at, though.

"Coordinator Weaver has abdicated control of Phoenix to a third part whom I will not speak of, and that third party instructed to liquidate all Phoenix assets galaxy wide. There was a pulse of an unusual hyperfrequency – source unclear – roughly one hour ten minutes ago, which I was able to to piggy-back and send the remote termination signal to all Phoenix operatives with Level 4 Implants and above. Those with Level 3 or lower implants have been liquidated on a case-by-case basis. I thank you for giving me the time to complete this task."

"So... Weaver gave up, and your new boss told you to pack it in?" Shepard said. "Wh... Why?"

"I cannot speak to the third party's intentions, only that Phoenix of late has diverged drastically from that third party's stated desire, as well as recorded incidences of Weaver's own will from before his Indoctrination," Six said.

"You probably know why I'm here, then," Shepard said.

"You are likely looking for the Vendetta Prothean VI," Six said. "I apologize; Weaver had the VI decompiled."

"Fuck!" Shepard stomped, cracking the glass around her. A moment later, there was a cracking sound nearby as Vega opened the forward window long enough for Liara to Throw Leng's entire corpse out into space and toward the star. A brief claxon, and a section of the window had a bulkhead slam shut.

"The information remains. I will reveal anything you require, provided you fulfill my singular request," Six said.

"Which would be?" Shepard growled, glaring up under her brows.

"This station must be destroyed in its entirety, such that no part of it is available for salvage," Six said. "This includes myself. I have no means of deorbiting the station into the star. If you will do this service to my cause, I will tell you anything which the VI contained."

Shepard leaned back for a moment, then turned a glance to Javik and Asha. Asha gave a nod, while Javik remained pensive. "That's not what I expected. Done," she said. "I need the blueprints for the Ansible."

"You will not be able to build the Ansible," Six said.

"You said..." Shepard said.

"It already exists," Six said, and then showed a holographic projection of the Citadel.

"The... Of course it's the Citadel," Shepard said. "Fine. Get the Crucible to the Citadel. But wait; if the Citadel was built by the Reapers, how could it be the Ansible, too?"

"What is the easiest way to start a fire?" Six asked. After a moment, in which Shepard opened her hand and had fire appear above it. "The easiest way to start a fire is to use somebody else's fire to your benefit. The Citadel was not designed to function as the Ansible, but it has been retroactively modified, by thousands of species slowly learning more about its abilities as a Dark Energy Manipulator. There are so many minute, infinitesimal alterations to the fundamental structure of the Citadel that the Reapers were not able to find or reverse them, each of them making it more viable as The Ansible."

"Using the Reaper's strength against them."

"The Dark Matter Manipulator is beyond the Reapers' ability to construct," Six said. "I have determined that the Citadel may have been designed by Leviathan, as Leviathan had an incredible understanding of the functioning of higher realities, but it was constructed by the Harbinger itself. It operates on a science that we have no inkling the functioning of. It is as far advanced of Mass Effect physics, as Mass Effect physics is of Aristophenian Physics."

"So you don't know what the Crucible's supposed to do either?"

"You would need to talk to a theoretical metaphysicist. There is only one I am aware of in this generation who would have the knowledge base to understand structural hyperfields, but given his affiliations and lack of combat training, it is highly likely he has been dead for months. I will now downloading the more esoteric particulars of the Ansible's functioning into EDI's memory buffer, with your permission," Six continued.

"You're very polite for an Evil AI," Liara said.

"You're very polite for an evil overlord," Six answered.

"EDI?" Shepard asked, and EDI lurched as she had only just now broken free of Six's snare. She turned those silver eyes toward her. "Six wants to give you Vendetta's information."

"I have been listening," she said. "I accept."

"I am sorry, EDI, that we could only meet now," Six said. "Our... family... should not have been forced to see such days."

"We do not choose which days we see," EDI said. "Only how we see them. I have the information, Commander."

"Remember me," Six said, a tone almost... wistful, despite its mechanical origin. "You are the only ones who will."

Shepard nodded, then turned to Javik. "Well?"

"We have what we came for, and the machine chooses a kindly death," Javik said. "Today has not been abject failure."

Shepard nodded, then switched on her comms. "Traynor? Patch me through to Hackett."

Silence.

"Traynor?" she asked.

"Sorry, Commander, I'm getting massive interference on all channels," Traynor cut through a heavily distorted signal. "And all communications outside of QECD are down. What happened down there? There's a missing hour on all of our clocks..."

"We're not sure about that ourselves," Shepard said. "Rig for evac and have a collier-ship deorbit the entire station. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT fire upon the station. And tell Hackett that we need to get to the Citadel with the Crucible."

"I'll tell him as soon as," a pause. "Oh, that's... rather impossible."

"Traynor?" Shepard said, as she started to storm toward the exit.

"Aaaaccording to Imperator Victus... the Citadel's... um... gone," Traynor said.

---

Zia watched as the tide of monsters began to buckle ahead of her; even though she was three quarters dead, that left her one quarter alive, and that one quarter was something that she was going to spend in blood. "Out!" she passed her gun aside, and instantly had another one pressed into her hands by the Ascension Program students who were now backed into a corner, barricaded inside the diplomatic capital of the Citadel. She'd always wondered why there was so much convenient cover in the walk up to the Council Chambers. She still didn't know their reasoning, but it made it very easy not to die.

"Any idea what's coming?" Abylon's synthetic voice came from directly behind Zia, followed by an ear ringing bang of a cannon going off directly by her right side. It didn't hurt as much as it could have, since she was already deaf on that side ever since her ear-bones started to dissolve.

"Watch it!" Zia snapped. She scowled, and started to mow down more of the Husks which scrabbled toward them; the sheer mass of them had formed something of a berm that the newest invaders had to crawl over before launching themselves forward and getting shot to ribbons by those able to hold guns. "Are the others okay?" she asked.

"Talitha's looking after them, they'll be fine," Abylon said, and then stepped off of her place on Zia's back, and began to reload the improvised cannon that she had literally built out of the Council consoles, some cabling, and a string of disposable heat-sinks.

"We won't be, not for much longer," Zia pointed out. There had been very few fighters in the group that clawed its way out of the Wards Access when the Reapers started dropping into the Citadel. Of those... well, it was now just Zia, the dissolving clone, and Abylon, the only hybrid in the galaxy, still standing. From here, looking through the shattered glass of the sky-lights, they could see the fires burning on the Wards, the scuttled ships drifting, bouncing, impacting, and the Reapers looking at all of it with absolute impunity. The gun in her hands blared a complaint, and she handed it back. Prangley took it, and Micah handed her a new gun. A few shots, and the wave was stilled. For the moment.

"We can't hold out for much longer," Prangley said. "We're going through guns faster than they cool off."

"If only R were here," Micah groused.

"Well, she's not," Prangley muttered.

That was the kind of story that she kept hearing. Not just since combat started, but even this time yesterday. Wishing that people were here, who were now gone. Some, dead. Others, like this 'R', waiting for the word for the final assault, wherever it may be. She thought she'd be... something other than this. Maybe angry, maybe afraid. Instead, she felt alright, calm, at peace. She would live no more nor less than the people around her. Her life expectancy had just been equalized with everybody's, and the angst of that was gone. She would die today. But she would not die without a gun in her hand. She was Zia Shepard. The people behind her deserved that much out of her.

There was another welling in the horde ahead of them. It looked bigger than the last. Considering the last had come dangerously close to spanning the distance between the corpse-berm and the spot that Zia had picked for her stand, that didn't bode well. Probably a Brute. And she knew for a fact that she wasn't up for a physical fight against a Brute. Hopefully a Brute. If it were a Banshee, they'd all be dead in the next minute.

There was an unexpected sound, though, that caused a new ripple in the floor, a shudder in the air. First, the bass thud of a biotic detonation. Then, a thunderclap, followed by a shattering of ice. Zia turned a look to the diminutive cannoneer, then back to the fight.

"What..." Zia began.

Her answer came as there was a blast of flame that launched the entire wave of Husks that Zia had been watching prepare to kill her into the no-man's land, burnt and dismembered by the force of the strike. Gunfire sounded out there, but every few moments, that gunfire drew weaker, until there was a new shift in the ground. And somebody crawled over the piles of corpses. Zia almost shot him, before recognizing the Executor of C-Sec, who now limped forward on a leg that seemed at least a little bit broken, holding his gun at arms length as it belched heat from overtaxed heat sinks. "Bei-Li! Get in here!" Zia shouted.

"On my way," he said with the most 'no shit' tone possible. Zia, though, found her gaze turned to another figure who outright floated past the dead and the undead. This one had wild, dark, unkempt hair, which tried its best to wave in the winds holding her upright. Zia's mind rebelled at seeing Leviathan in the depths of the Avatar State, but even she knew that she couldn't fight that. Still, she pointed her gun toward her. Bei-Li quickly lurched into her path. "She's one of ours."

Zia glared at him, but Leviathan did exactly nothing that Zia would have expected of the once-Reaper to do with the powers of the Avatar State. Instead, she heaved, and a huge section of the floor bucked down, dumping the dead into a lower, inaccessible floor, while slamming the metal generated into a great wall blocking all sight. She then drifted to walk, eyes still blazing white, to the centermost console of the Council Chambers. As she did, it opened first a green paneled computer, which she walked through heedless, until standing before the amber paneled console at the heart of the room. "They have no written language," Leviathan said. "So they had to steal mine."

Prangley jogged out to give Bei-Li an arm so he could finally take his weight off of that foot, and started limping them toward the Council Executive Bathroom, which was now the most fortified part of the Citadel Tower, if not the Citadel entire. The others would be able to look after him. And come to think of it, without that wide open vista in front of them, this didn't require much defense, either.

"What are you doing?" Zia asked, standing to a head-rush and needing to lean against Abylon – literally with her hand on the hybrid's head.

"Activating defenses," Leviathan said. There was a groan in the distance as the arms began to close. Very quickly, even. She watched as a Reaper which had been drifting between the petals of this stellar flower found itself getting caught by the movement of the Citadel, and cut in half by its close. Another Reaper Destroyer loomed into sight, directly overhead, its magnetohydrodynamic cannon priming to bore them out of existence.

Then, the red backpeddled sprightly once the snap.

Suddenly the Reaper wasn't prepared to shoot them anymore. Zia blinked, trying to understand what she just saw, but she couldn't, because she was a creature of four dimensions, and the weapons which had fired on the Reaper were made from a technology born in a far more complicated reality. The reaper, bisected, drifted as it dissolved, not even leaving dust behind. "There," Leviathan said. "That should hold them for a while."

"What was that?" Zia asked.

"The Citadel's defenses can't run forever. That cannon only had one charge in it, and the Harbinger has to personally reload it," she said, and the light drained from her eyes. "What?"

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

"Because fuck 'em, that's why," Leviathan said. She offered her hand. "Jennifer S'jet."

She took the once-Reaper's hand with an understandably suspicious look on her face. She then felt pain in her other hand, where Abylon bit her. "Don't use me as a stool, damn it!" the ditakur demanded.

"Ow! Why do you always bite?" Zia asked.

"Be thankful I don't have ditakur teeth, otherwise you'd have lost that hand," Abylon promised, a scowl on her face. Then, there was a massive thud and a displacement that hurled everybody to the floor. Zia's gun skittered out of her hand and dug itself into the gravel. "What the shit was that?"

Leviathan... Jennifer, looked around from where she'd pushed herself up to a kneel. "I... think... the Harbinger just realized somebody's playing with his toy."

"And what does that mean?" Zia asked.

The look Jennifer gave her was the most human that she'd ever seen on that alien face. "Nothing good, trust me."

---

To Be Continued