An update in the same year as the last one? Astonishing, I know! Thank you everyone for your continued support and patience, I really appreciate the response this fic has gotten! Slowly, slowly, more people are found, and a deadly plague hopefully cured a few years before canon (ghost data analyses abilities are very helpful!)


Omega was just as brightly colored and overwhelming as it had been the last time, though this time Jane wasn't single-mindedly intent on killing mercenaries. Instead of heading to Afterlife, where it seemed yet another human was trying to argue with the placid elkor bouncer, Jane, Liara, and Jacob headed in the direction of the poor decks, where they knew Mordin had set up his clinic.

"The end is nearing!" screamed a batarian in complicated robes as they passed him. "Humans, they bring the end, and the coming of darkness!"

"Ignore him," another, smaller batarian said. She seemed to be slumped against the wall, a strange expression on her face. "He's just angry about the plague."

Jane stopped. "The plague?"

The batarian snorted. "You must be new, space cowboy, the plague's the only thing anyone's been talking about on this dump, 'cept Archangel when they're not busy dying. Why do you think that whole quarter's been sealed off?" She gestured to the end of the hall, where an automatic door's lights flashed a warning read. Above, in temporary holo-letters, were the words "Quarantine: No Entry," and two humans in full-face helmets stood guard..

Liara stared at her, unimpressed. "Do you know how to get into the quarantine block or not?"

The batarian shrugged expansively. "Convince those assholes to let you in. You have guns, don't ya? They might let you in." She seemed to sober up momentarily. "I've got some stuff in there I can't get, thanks to the quarantine. Could you get it for me?" She held up a pad with information. "It's nothing much just-"

"Don't worry about it," Jane said. "If it's there, we'll get it."

Liara smiled at her, possibly nostalgic. Jane shrugged. She liked helping people. It broke up the monotony of point and shoot missions.

"Hey," she greeted the guards, pleased she towered over one of them. "Let us in."

The two guards looked at each other. "You sure?"

"Sure," Jane said. "We have business with Mordin."

One guard nodded. "Alright," he said. "Your funeral."

He waved the door open.

"Good luck."

The doors shut, and Jacob stopped. "Could that batarian be talking about the Reapers?" he asked. "The coming darkness and all that."

"Maybe," Jane said. She sighed. "Not the best way to alert people, though. Makes it sound like lunatic ravings and that's the last thing we need."

Jacob sighed. "At least you can treat a plague." He looked down at his omnitool. "You know where the clinic is?"

"Yep," Jane said. "This way." She pointed down one of the identical steel corridors. She couldn't imagine living here. It was completely different from her home ship, or even the wealthier quarters.

She missed her old map HUD-she found it more intuitive-but the proprietary Cerberus tech wasn't terrible. She'd just have to take a look at it with Nox later, make sure she could still use it if she defected.

"Humans are immune, huh," Jane mused, as they made their way carefully through the station. "That seems too convenient to be an accident."

"Sure is a good way to turn non-humans against us," Jacob said. "Hold on." He gestured for the two others to stop. "I hear something."

Jane stopped.

Nox, do you hear anything? she asked internally. She could hear what sounded like words, but she didn't understand what the voices were saying.

Yeah. Not human speech as I recognize it, though.

"Vorcha," Liara said.

"Great," Jacob said. "This'll go well."

Reaching for their weapons, they were prepared when the group of five vorcha turned the corner, twisted expressions on their faces.

"Humans?" one called in a language Jane could understand. "Humans, die!"

This is more familiar Nox thought, as Jane ducked to avoid the initial hail of gunfire. Pulling out her modified assault rifle, she charged the ammo block with her biotics as crackling electricity lept from Jacob's omnitool towards the closest pair of vorcha. The yellow tinge of their shields flickered and died, letting Jane and Liara's shots rip through them, taking them down.

With a flick of her wrist, Liara swept up the last three vorcha in a blue vortex, sending them flying.

"Right," Jacob said, surveying the corpses. "Are we still headed in the right direction?"

Jane, already checking the bodies for extra thermal clips, said, "I think so, yes." She grinned at Liara. "That was amazing."

"Thank you," Liara said. "Good aim on your overload as well, Jacob."

Jacob shrugged. "I didn't nap during my years in the Alliance. Glad those mods are working."

A few hallways later, they found another vorcha, this one clearly uninterested in anything other than coughing up her own lungs. "Don't... closer!" she croaked at Liara. "Sickness. Bad."

"I have my breather mask," Liara said, but the vorcha still looked unhappy.

"Tell... doctor... where I am..." the vorcha continued. Her eyes shut.

"She's not dead," Jacob said. "She's just very sick."

"I'm marking this spot on my map," Jane said. "Let's keep going." She would have suggested they carry her, but that would only put her in danger if they encountered another attack.

They were lucky. The next time they encountered people who wanted to kill them was by the clinic, which Jane only recognized from the marking on her map. Any identifying marks in the real world had been removed, and several armed humans milled around outside.

"Get out," one of them said, his voice distorted by his helmet. "We're dealing with this."

"Who're you?" Jane asked.

"Blue Sun," he said. "You really don't want to fuck with us. We're getting rid of this disease at its source." He gestured with his gun at the clinic.

"That is not the source," Liara said.

The human snarled. "What are you going to do, brain drain me until I agree with you?" He took a step closer to Liara. "This is clearly a way to make everyone hate humans, and that freak in there has to be responsible."

Before he could do anything else, Jane lifted him up in a biotic hold, noticing some swirls of purple energy in the normally pure blue halo. "You're doing a good job of that yourself, asshole," she said. "Get out of my way, or-"

"You'll make me?" He tried to laugh, but fell silent as Jane choked him to unconsciousness.

"Yeah," Jane said. "Anyone else want to try me?" She clapped her hands together. "I'm out of practice, but I bet with a little help from my friends here, I can slam you all against that wall over there so hard you don't remember why you were bothering me in the first place."

The self-declared Blue Suns fled. One fired a few token shots at the trio, and had his gun turned into a mangled lump of metal by Jacob for his troubles.

Jane exhaled. Before she could say anything, a tinny voice crackled out from the other side of the door.

"You have removed them all, yes? They are no longer trying to break into the clinic?"

The voice had the clipped, rapid patter of a salarian's mouthparts speaking a human language.

"Yes," Jane said. "Let us in."

"A moment."

The door strained open, the green unlock symbol barely visible.

On the other side stood a salarian in a medical uniform. Jane wasn't sure what tired looked like on a salarian, but she assumed he was a good example. "Hello!" he greeted. "I am Mordin. This is my clinic. What are you doing here?"

"We need your help," Jane said.

He blinked at Jane. "People here need my help. I can give it, here; with you, much less certain. This plague is disastrous. Quarantine abandons people. Despicable." He shook his head. "I cannot go with you, if that is what you are asking."

Jacob narrowed his eyes. "None of us mentioned anything about you coming with us," he said.

Mordin laughed. It was a strange sound. "Two humans, dressed like Cerberus. One is Jane Shepard, dead hero. Appears, back from the dead, the same time as a new plague sweeps through the poor of Omega that does not hurt humans. Curious. Suspicious, even."

For a moment, Jane let herself wonder whether Cerberus would do something like that. She quickly shook her head. It only brought suspicion on humans, and not in a way that could be spun usefully later. "We need your help with the Collectors." She understood the difficulty-and hopefully there was a way to fix the plague quickly, even if she didn't need the doctor in front of her-but even the name should give him a sense of the scope.

Mordin's eyes went even wider. "Well," he said. "I had not considered them."

"Excuse me?" Jacob asked.

"As culprits. The collectors. Masters of genetic engineering. Possible source for the plague. No idea why of course, but they are frequently mysterious." He fidgeted with his whole body as he spoke. No wonder salarians died so young. This one seemed at perpetual risk of burning through himself. He tilted his head. "Would gladly help you deal with them, in that case. Only-" he spread his hands. "I cannot abandon them. I am working on a cure. No idea how long I would need. One week? Two week? Two years? Uncertain. I cannot abandon them."

Jane could not read his emotions from his face, but his voice was clear enough. He wasn't budging.

"I have a solution, I think," Nox told Jane internally. "Or at least a way of speeding things up." She imagined it buzzing nervously around her head, reforming and reforming its shell. "I would have to show myself to him."

She nodded, and opened her hand.

"We can help," she said. "I think. Specifically, this little guy can."

Jacob took the revelation that Jane now carried around a small, alien artifact better than she'd expected or hoped, all things considered. Mordin was more fascinated than anything else, an almost hungry expression on his face before he waved his hand with a comment about being a geneticist, not a mechanic.

"If you can give me a sample of the plague, I can scan it and tell you what it's made of," Nox said. "It's one of the things I'm good at."

"Who made you?" Mordin asked. "Of course, yes. I would be delighted at the help. Knowing what it is means I can then counteract it. The cure is the easy part, comparatively, to cracking the code."

"That's a long story," Nox said. It didn't seem terribly interested in explaining a universe's worth of backstory in that moment. "I can tell if you ask again on the Normandy."

Mordin laughed again. "Of course," he said. "Using my own curiosity to bargain. Clever. Even with the sequence it will take some time."

"How long?" That was Jacob.

Their mission was urgent in a long term sense, but rushing the salarian wasn't going to bring any of the dead or missing humans back. Taking him away from his clinic too early would just kill more people, and Jane didn't want that on her conscience.

"A week at most, I hope," he said. "Wish I could work faster. Always wish I could work faster. But I can only move so fast by myself, with so few resources. I am sorry." He seemed genuinely contrite.

"There's a vorcha woman sick out in the open," Jane said, remembering her suddenly. "She's too sick to come to the clinic, is there any way you can-?"

"Easy. One of the krogen will get her." At the three blank looks cast in his direction, he added. "Promised to help with genophage. Can't do anything major to whole species, can help individuals. Can help undo little pieces of damage. Loyal to the clinic, if not me."

"Thank you," Jane said. "I'll show you where she is." She smiled at Mordin, trying to reassure him. "It's alright you can't come here immediately. We have something else to do on Omega that will fill some time."

"Do you know anything about a man called Archangel?" Liara asked the question Jane was about to. Jane smiled. Even cooped up in the quarantine area, Mordin must know something from the people who passed through.

Mordin nodded. "Yes," he said. "Not just an individual, an organization. Ideals are good. Execution, more problematic. Vigilante justice. Even going up against Aria." He shook his head vehemently. "Not a good idea. Amazing he has survived this long." He turned back to his console. "Last I heard, they operate out of one of their supporters' apartments. Just ask around. Pretend you're helping to take him out. They'll answer."

The last time Jane had shown her face on Omega, she'd made quite the impression, killing a large number of Blue Sun and drawing the ire of that mercenary group as a whole. The chances of her successfully infiltrating them were slim.

"I can keep an eye out," Nox said. Its shell split and split again. "I have ways of looking around a place this hyperconnected without being noticed, especially since no one here would know how to look at me."

Jane nodded. "Thanks," she said. "Anything you need while we're still on this side of the quarantine?" she asked.

Mordin shook his head. "Nothing until I'm done. I will let you know."

Jane looked back at Jacob and Liara. Liara was looking with some interest at Mordin's console, which was flickering with scientific readouts far beyond Jane's rudimentary study on the subject. Jacob, meanwhile, was staring at not with newly developed distaste, but with raw fascination.

"We have one more thing before we leave quarantine and decontaminate our... everything," Jane said. "That lady's apartment. We should get her things."

She reached out her hand, letting Nox flicker back into her body. Her two other companions nodded. "Lead the way," Jacob said.

Jane grinned. "Happy to." It was nice, this trust he was already showing in her. It reminded her of her early days with the old crew. Maybe that wasn't completely lost, despite what had happened to her.

The batarian woman's apartment was locked, and the key she'd uploaded to Jane's omnitool wasn't working.

"I see the problem," Jacob said, after a cursory examination. "The quarantine order overrides any personal keys. None of these doors can be opened through normal means except by lifting the quarantine."

"That's going to starve people in their homes!" Jane said. "That's horrible."

Liara nodded grimly. "They've chosen to starve the plague instead of risk feeding the people. That plus the depredations of the left behind mercenaries, and they're waiting for this place to die. It's a good thing Mordin's here, or they would be doomed."

"I can't imagine the Collectors bothering to do something like this," Jacob said.

"That's why we look at whoever's commanding them," Jane said. She pressed a closed fist against the still-locked door, trying to resist the urge to use her strange new abilities to blow the door in. "Make sure anyone who might give a shit about disappearing humans is angry instead. They're playing mind games, but for what? The Reapers could just come through and destroy everything, they don't need to play with us like this." She thumped her fist against the metal.

"Wait," she said. "How much omnigel do you have on you?" she asked Jacob. She only had enough for healing purposes, but she remembered how, with some advice from Tali, she'd been able to use it to break into locked doors before. Maybe there was some way to use her abilities, or at least Nox, to do something similar to this door, and open it without breaking the quarantine.

"A lot," Jacob said. "It's easy to store, useful for repairs-I was the tech guy for my last cell, it became a habit."

"Thanks," Jane said.

Her omnitool crackled blue as she worked at the door, and Nox appeared over the machine. "I can help," it said.

"I appreciate it," she said, "but I think I'm done."

The door hissed open, like an airlock breaking its seal.

The personal objects turned out to be physical, paper books, and physical, printed photographs. They looked worn, like they'd been carried often from place to place.

"It's a good thing we stopped," Jane said, thinking of the people she wished she'd taken more photos of. "Wouldn't want her to go too much longer without this."

The woman grabbed her things and scurried away without so much of a thank you, leaving Jane, Jacob and Liara standing by themselves near the quarantine door. The preaching batarian had also left, leaving his pulpit behind.

They had a week to wait around, but since they were already on Omega, it would be a good idea to start the hunt for Archangel now. Sure, they'd gotten into a few firefights while in the Quarantine district, but nothing too exhausting. And Jane could still get exhausted. Her body was still a body, only there was something to bring it back if it ever failed.

He was already making a name for himself, so-

"Sorry if this goes south!" Jane said, and strode over to the guards in front of the locked off doors before Jacob or Liara could say anything. "I'm looking for Archangel, you know where to find him?"

The men guarding the quarantine door at each other, and one snickered. "No need," he said. "He'll make himself known if you do anything against that code of his. Just wait around, he'll come bother someone and then you'll see him."

"You don't know where his hideout is?" Jane asked. It was a long shot, but they didn't seem the type to start shooting at someone who'd survived inside the part of the station crawling with the desperate and the depraved.

"Lady, if anyone knew where his hideout was, he'd be a corpse and his killer a hero. You trying to take him out?"

Jane thought for a moment. "Yes," she said, lying with a smile on her face. "You say he swoops in to rescue people in trouble?" she asked.

"Yeah. He's got a gang with him, which helps, but it's getting ridiculous Makes shaking people down even more exhausting, y'know?"

"Good to know," Jane said, and punched him in the helmet.

He fell over.

"Now that's cool," she said. The guard's companion fled before she could say anything to him.

Liara made a sound of exasperated fondness. "Punching is not always the solution," she said.

"Yep," Jane said. "I keep you around for those times!" She cupped her mouth with her hands. "Oh, Archangel, I am causing problems! I would like you to stop me from causing problems." It was unlikely he had access to the station cameras, but an erratic woman making lots of noise would spread, especially given she was still wearing something that looked like N7 armor. She strode over to the abandoned soapbox, picked it up, and chucked it at the nearest wall. It bounced satisfyingly.

"I will give anyone who beats me in a fist fight three thousand credits," she shouted, using her helmet mic to amplify her voice. "Guaranteed." Nox was chuckling nervously in her head.

"Have you lost your mind?" Jacob demanded.

"Absolutely not," Jane said. "I'm just awful at subterfuge."

A shifty looking turian took her up on the offer first. He landed his first punch to her side, but she grabbed his fist on the rebound and chucked him across the room, his body crackling with blue and purple light. Next, a human with a gun. The gun melted, and the human joined the turian. Then, a weirdly small krogan (Wrex would be so embarrassed for him), a batarian, another human, and another turian, all in quick succession.

Finally, Jane felt something small and painful hit her head, but not penetrate her shield. "Ow," she said. "That's not a punch, I don't owe you the creds."

"You're causing problems," the male turian said. He was fully armored. "Are you going to stop?"

"Are you Archangel?" Jane asked. "If not, I can kick your ass, too."

"What's it to you?" he asked. He had a voice changer on, she was certain of it.

"I need your help," she said, simply.

"And this mess?" He gestured to the unconscious bodies scattered around her.

"I wanted to get your attention. This was easier than tracking you down."

"What would I be helping you with?" His voice was recognizable, Jane thought, under the modulation. Part of her wanted to be right, another wrong. If she was right... well at least she would have another member of her old crew back.

Jane wondered if he recognized her.

I'm going to be dramatic, she told Nox internally.

As though you weren't already, it replied with a laugh.

"Figuring out how to stop the people that killed me, of course," Jane said, and pulled off her helmet.

"Jane," Garrus Vakarian croaked, and took one involuntary step forward. "You're... you're alive."


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