Compact offices hidden behind blue windows stacked endlessly above a central grove of bright, sunshine yellow trees in the atrium of Citadel Security's academy. From the very first day he was handed a badge, Selar had never been able to decide if the design of the place was meant to be calming or intimidating. But he suspected that it was a mixture of both. Every noise rose and bounced off the glass, traveling upward through shadows and perfectly motionless, perfectly shaped boxwood leaves.
And Selar sat at a desk in one of the lower offices, his legs aching and stiff while the atrium echoed next to him beyond the window. He puffed out a cloud of smoke with a toneless expression and tried not to think of where he was going to be in a few hours.
He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, looked down at it, then put it back in again. There was a pack of them tucked between his horns.
"That's great," Beran was saying, sitting at the other side of the desk with his legs propped up on it. "Real great. Go ahead and give yourself some sort of lizard breathing disease because your girl moved out, right?"
Selar took another experimental drag off the cigarette, carefully dropped the ash into an etched ivory seashell resting on the table. "I'm just trying it out," he said to Beran, watching the ash stutter with an orange glow. The embers made a soft, vague little crinkle of noise.
Beran said, "How is it?"
The ash cooled into a dull grey. Selar stubbed out the cigarette into the seashell and turned his attention back to the holo-console, typing again. "I don't really understand the appeal of it," he admitted. More smoke poured out of his mouth.
"Yeah, well. Give the pack here then," Beran said.
Selar continued typing with one hand and passed the bundle of cigarettes over with his other, now losing smoke from his nostrils. Beran tucked it into his cowl.
And through the useless nicotine veil rising into his eyes, a final report on Selar's console glowed darkly passive. There had been seventeen multipasses in Tayseri's quartermaster office, all registered to humans. But no one who had been apprehended over the matter still remained in a jail cell. On the contrary, the turian named Vantius had become an expert when it came to Council statutes thanks to Meiko's forceful lesson and had run off to the embassies with a few other suspects.
And the batarian ambassador, Jath'Amon, was petitioning to give them all diplomatic immunity as guests of the Hegemony.
The thought made Selar's stomach curdle. The human embassy, headed by Anita Goyle, was a storm of outrage and accusations now that the suspects were no longer in custody. It was one step away from openly accusing Citadel Security of colluding with batarian smugglers due to anti-human sentiment on the station. Worse, Selar was losing confidence that it was going to be wrong. The whole thing in Tayseri smelled worse than the cigarettes.
Beran sighed, looked up at the ceiling, and pulled his feet off the desk. He grabbed a holo-pad and got back to work. "This is why people go rogue," he muttered, "or turn into vigilantes in the Terminus systems."
Selar said, with a cough in his voice as he looked up from the orange screen, "I was thinking of taking up model ships."
Beran grated out a sharp laugh. He put down the pad again. "You've gotta be stressed beyond capacity to build a model ship, Vel. Are you ever going to tell me what Amalthea said to you?"
Selar shook his head, fingers clicking on the haptic keys. "It wasn't anything."
"It was something all right."
Selar frowned, his hands pausing on the haptic interface. The noise of the atrium pounded against the windows. "I think she was right about me," he said.
Beran snorted, clearly unmoved. "That's garbage and you know it. She said whatever she thought would hurt you the most." He tapped the holo-pad on the desk, his eyes very cold. "Look," he continued, "I know you're a dope for those vids and books you're always grabbing at, but real people aren't like that. It isn't always clean and nice at the end."
Selar blinked and said, without ire, "Are you trying to give me a pep talk again?"
"Yeah, I'm trying to give you a damn pep-"
"Are you really smoking cigarettes in a C-Sec office, Investigator?" T'Ven called out smoothly as she walked in.
Beran froze with the bundle of cigarettes still in his cowl. "Nah, Madam Sergeant," he said after a moment.
T'Ven looked up at the thin clouds of smoke gathered at the ceiling, looked down again with hard eyes and a perfectly calm expression on her pale blue face. The fabric of her uniform had the quality of commando leathers despite the standard issue design, and anyone who was bold enough to ask her if she actually had any in her closet ended up finding out exactly how proficiently she had earned them back on Thessia.
She crossed her arms, leaned over a little. "Don't lie to me, Berantus," she said softly. "You know how much I hate losing the people I love the most."
Beran's right mandible twitched a single time, then dropped into half of a resigned, brittle smile. To his credit, he tried to be good. "Tell me that again," he still began, "when you haven't had four salarian bondma-"
Selar raised the seashell filled with cigarette stubs immediately. "Apologies for my indiscretion, Madam Sergeant," he interrupted, before Beran was reduced to a wet blue smudge on the floor. Beran had never gotten over the pictures in T'Ven's office of her deceased bondmates. And he didn't understand how dangerous it was to joke about it.
Or maybe he did, and he just didn't care.
T'Ven drew and exhaled a long breath through her nose, uncrossed her arms and settled her hands on her hips. She gave Selar a look that could have withered a garden world. "You know that hanar you were talking to," she said after exactly ten seconds had passed, "the merchant on the dock? Someone knifed it with one of those new omni-blades we've been seeing."
Selar set the seashell down, stared at the ash dusted over the etchings. "Did it survive the attack?"
"It managed to get away, but it's in the intensive unit down at the hospital." T'Ven's gaze moved back to Beran. "I want you to get down there," she added. "Check in with the captain before you go."
Beran cocked his head to the side. "Just me?"
"Just you."
Beran stood up, pausing reluctantly between T'Ven and Selar for a moment. Selar merely tilted his horns forward, didn't argue or say anything. And Beran began to watch them both as if they were plotting against him. "You think about what I told you," he eventually said. He left in a gust of cleaner air pouring in from the doorway.
T'Ven watched him go, shook her head when the door clicked shut. She said, "He thinks I'm going to try to kill you."
"You reassigned me to the Presidium," Selar said, as if that wasn't much better. He closed the holo-console and leaned back in his chair.
"I see you've had time to read the summons while you were stinking up the offices," she said, glancing at him. "Technically, Captain Lariad reassigned you. You should remember that."
Selar didn't respond. Everyone knew that T'Ven ran the precinct in lower Tayseri, more out of necessity than any lust for power. Captain Lariad was an ancient batarian man who spent his days telling stories at the various outposts and picking his teeth. Selar hardly ever saw him.
T'Ven asked, "Did you tell Berantus yet?"
Selar raised a brow, looked up at her. "Of course I didn't tell him," he said. "I'm never going to live it down. Everyone's going to be laughing about it at my retirement party twenty years from now."
And Selar hoped that she didn't see the exasperation in his eyes, knew that she probably did. The line of his mouth, already thin with a frown, grew dour. But T'Ven had a short temper for arguing and insubordination, even shorter than her temper for everything else, and she demanded obedience from her employees at all times. He knew better than to challenge the reassignment to the ring.
Just as important, he had really stunk up that office.
He still didn't like it. It was unheard of to send a senior constable from a lower Ward back to the ring. Selar let out a slow, reluctant exhale, coughed a little as he thought about it. Rookies worked up on the Presidium learning the ropes until they were cleared for duty in the Wards. And nothing ever happened up there other than a bureaucrat complaining that his Mount Milgnon wasn't cold enough in its solid gold ice bucket.
Selar asked, "Do I have enough goodwill left to ask you for a reason?"
T'Ven glanced up again at the smoke still lingering on the ceiling. "Barely," she said as she seated herself across from him. She crossed her legs, grabbed Beran's abandoned holo-pad and stylus, and began writing something.
She didn't say anything further.
"Why, Madam Sergeant?" Selar asked politely.
"We offered the Alliance diplomats an escort between the Presidium's apartments and the embassies as a sign of goodwill," she explained, "but Meiko Ogawa is refusing to allow anyone from C-Sec who isn't you or Beran anywhere near her." She sighed as she thought about it. "And after what happened," she added, "I'm not that eager to argue with her about it. Ambassador Goyle is insisting she needs an escort."
"Ah," was all that Selar said.
Neither of them said anything else for a while. Selar stayed very still as the clouds drifted above him, watched the window while T'Ven wrote on her pad with a soft scratching noise. He thought about escorting a diplomat to cafes that smelled like freshly pulled espresso shots and embassies full of expensive suits, with their endless hearings and negotiations, and he drowned the urge to get up and board a starship headed straight for the galactic core.
Even worse, he thought about that smile in the rear view mirror, and his rule about never mixing personal feelings with his professional life. It was a simple rule that he had never broken. It was an easy one to keep when he was working knee-deep in violent crime and emergency calls, and far away from anyone who called him cute like Meiko Ogawa of Tiptree had.
And so Selar said, to his own peril, "Get someone else."
T'Ven stopped writing, blinked as if she hadn't quite heard him properly. She looked up and gave him a heavy stare. Selar held it grimly, leaning back further in the gwaskin leather chair that squeaked in the silence between them.
The noise of the atrium pounded at the window again.
T'Ven's eyes narrowed. "If you have such a problem with an assignment like this," she said, "then maybe you should have accepted the promotion to Special Response that the Executor tried to give you last year. I need Berantus on the contraband investigation."
Selar nodded, looked out the window again. He wasn't going to push his luck twice.
"The other reason I'm accommodating Miss Ogawa," T'Ven continued, writing again, "is because the batarians are threatening to close their embassy and secede if those negotiations fall through."
Selar blinked at that, turned to her again and leaned forward in the chair. No race had ever voluntarily closed an embassy before in the history of Council space. "That's absurd," he said. "They already have Camala and half the Verge. Why would they secede now?"
"I don't know." T'Ven set the holo-pad in her lap and continued, "I've never seen anything like it. And I don't want a rookie with something to prove getting in over their head while we try to figure out what's going on between the secession and our problems down here."
He narrowed his eyes a little. "You think the embassy's threat to secede is related to the contraband and abductions?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I do. So go up there for me and don't make a scene about it. Just put on a nice show for the Alliance and see if you can find any connections. You've been on the beat long enough to know exactly what you and everyone else should be doing up there. "
And then she handed him the holo-pad and the stylus.
Selar immediately signed it, scratching his entire name along the bottom in two lines. "Thank you, Madam Sergeant," he said to her as he did so, because that was what you said to T'Ven even when she wrote you up for smoking and sent you to the ring.
T'Ven stood up, huffing a little when she took the pad back. But before she left the office Selar remembered something and asked, "Did forensics figure out what zocalo means?"
She ran her hand over her crest, hesitated in the doorway. "Not yet," she admitted to him. " And it garbles my translator every time someone tries to say it. Does that happen to you?"
"I thought it was a problem with the hanar's speech patterns at first," he said. "Drell have a similar issue."
She nodded, turned away. "It's probably a batarian word. You know how it is."
Selar was unsettled by the implication as she left. The Hegemony was notoriously rigid with its own citizens and enforced a caste system that required an excess of credits to stay within its upper echelons. Only the higher castes were allowed to work on the Citadel, and the linguistic glossaries that the Hegemony provided to the Council each year were openly censored.
And if zocalo was indeed a batarian word or phrase of some sort, it would be difficult to find someone on the station willing to divulge what it meant. The batarians working in C-Sec would feign ignorance for the sake of their own safety and continued presence on the station.
No one would help them, not willingly.
Worse, Selar had already repeated the word with Beran on the docks to an excess of people. They had revealed their hand right away. He stayed at the desk for a while, mulled over it before leaving. When he stood up to leave he did so very carefully, and the chair didn't make any sound at all.
Later he stepped into an empty elevator in the atrium, wearing a flat expression on his face as he waited for the door to close. He had taken a shower until he no longer reeked of smoke, wore a fresh jacket and uniform. There were papers tucked under his arm for the C-Sec outpost in the embassies detailing that he would be working there until further notice.
And it would be morning when Selar arrived on the Presidium. It would be afternoon and then night in a way he didn't usually experience in the multi-colored twilight of the Wards. But it was just an illusion. Like most things on the Citadel, the atmosphere on the ring was conjured up by old tech no one quite understood.
The elevator door slid closed with a hiss of air, then started upward. Through the clear door Selar could still see the sweeping crowd of C-Sec officers that were going about their business in blue and black uniforms. Unlike Tayseri's keel docking bays, the academy was never calm. There were too many officers and never enough, all churning about beneath the trees. The time of day meant very little in such a place.
And among them all, there was an asari in the crowd who was waiting at the requisitions desk. She was wearing a yellow pinstripe dress that matched the trees and she stood in complete silence, graceful even when motionless. A turian in blue plainclothes was heading toward her, pushing past every officer and civilian between them.
The metal of the elevator shaft dropped over everything just as he reached her.
Selar blinked, remained otherwise completely still.
The elevator vibrated beneath his toes. Only ten galactic minutes away, buried within the Presidium's bulkheads, an ocean of sunshine faker than a pop song was waiting for him. It would pour itself over clean, glittering silver lines of open architecture, serene in every way. And Meiko Ogawa of Tiptree would be there somewhere with her rose-colored dress that matched her smile, and with her little shoes that clicked when she walked.
Selar let out a long exhale as he thought about it.
A swear fell from his mouth, repeated itself again. He read the papers once more, moved them under his other arm, and casted about in his mind for anything else to think about. But it was difficult to picture anything else except for the silhouette of Amalthea lingering in the doorway, and the deep silence of the apartment at his back while he had tried to convince her to stay. He could remember it perfectly over flavorless, tinny elevator music.
You don't feel a thing, Vel, she had said to him very softly. Her subharmonics had been mournful as they drifted with the with the dust in the brighter lights of the hallway. You use women like other guys use hallex.
And you're not in love with me or anybody else.