Tayseri's last C-Sec precinct was located at the very edge of the Ward, where the skyscrapers began to blur and wash away in the haze of the Widow system like it was a coastal tide. And there were no yellow trees or glass atriums in the building where Madam Sergeant T'Ven ran shifts with Captain Lariad's signature. Only the dust from the recycling systems creeping in and staff shortages. Citadel Security's budget was stretched thin enough that it didn't often reach the edges of the station.

T'Ven sat at her desk with her legs gracefully crossed, surrounded by shadows that trembled against the bulkheads. She was drinking from a clear water glass. Selar could hear the ice cubes tinkling softly whenever she put it down.

"The operation in Tayseri will continue," a voice from Meiko's OSD was saying. It was clouded with anger. "We don't have enough time left to argue about this. If you wanted out you should have said something earlier."

Selar leaned against a shadow on the bulkhead. He'd returned to the Ward as soon as he bought Meiko a teapot made of something sturdier than porcelain. And the conversation on her OSD was cryptic and vague, like fragments of a conversation you caught walking by an alley. He'd heard it already, so his attention drifted to a corner shelf where T'Ven kept holo-photos of her bondmates.

There were four, all of them salarians. They each had one picture except for the first guy. His name had been Chier and he had two pictures.

And T'Ven was smiling with Chier like the world must have been good to her back then. Better than the present, anyway. T'Ven didn't smile much in the present. Her mouth was severe while she listened to Meiko's OSD play its recording. She had already heard it once, like Selar, and she wasn't the type of person who entertained the notion of audial redundancy.

"You're going to get all of us executed, Abronak," another batarian voice on the OSD hissed. "He's going to find out where all those credits went."

"His credits are going to be worthless soon. It won't matter how we lost them."

"It still matters who you bartered with!"

"It doesn't! I'll barter with the devil itself if it comes to it. We must move them all as quickly as we can."

"What about the turian?"

"The imbecile cowering behind Jath's skirts? Send him with the rest, for all I care."

The condensation from T'Ven's water glass sparkled and bled onto the table. The OSD's recording fell silent again with a flick of her finger against a haptic. There was more to it, but it didn't matter. Captain Lariad was snoring out the soft wheeze of an old man in the chair across from her, and she had been repeating the audio for his benefit. He was settled deep into the seat, dozing like he considered himself to be retired long ago.

"Do you have any insight, Captain?" she said loudly.

He opened four eyes, one right after the other, and stared at her. "Should I, my dear?" he rasped out through pointed teeth. He kept his hands folded over his stomach. "The caste members living on the Presidium spend more credits in one year than you or I make in a lifetime. Remaining that wealthy isn't possible without getting their hands dirty, so nothing about the conversation is noteworthy except for the location involved and the fact that it was recorded." Two of his eyes moved over to Selar. "Where did you acquire this, Constable?"

Selar shook his head a little. "If it's not noteworthy, it doesn't matter."

"I don't enjoy it when subordinates avoid my questions."

Selar said, "My apologies, Captain. I found it on a tree branch."

Lariad said, amused, "Not all of those plants are real, I'll have you know. I used to believe they were when I was young and impressionable. But then I tripped and fell right through a bush and into the lake. The ring lost its luster after that."

T'Ven looked like she was already done with the conversation. But she asked, "Can you tell us anything about the batarians who were speaking?"

"Of course not," he murmured, tired again. "And I couldn't help you even if I wanted to."

"I'm getting the feeling that you don't want to," Beran said, from outside the office.

T'Ven looked up as he walked in. "Where have you been? I called for you an hour ago."

"Checking on the jelly at the hospital, that's all," Beran said. He glanced at Selar, looked away again.

Lariad was unperturbed by Beran's comment. "You're from the middle Ward, Investigator. You don't understand anything about what happens up there on the ring or down here." He stood up, smiled with his lips pressed together. "And what happens down here," he continued, "is that things resolve themselves if you let them. That's been my motto for thirty years and it's never failed me. This OSD is useless."

Selar didn't agree; the batarians were obviously up to something. But there was no arguing with the Captain to reconsider when he came to a conclusion.

And Beran gave Lariad a hard stare, his eyes colder than the ice in T'Ven's glass. He didn't accuse with words but his expression said everything about it. He was real sore about something, but it wasn't just the Captain's indifference to the audio. He glanced around at everyone like they were conspiring against him.

"Thank you, Captain," T'Ven said softly.

It was a dismissal, one Lariad was happy to take. He strolled out into the main area of the precinct where he stopped at the first desk jockey he found and started a conversation. The hapless jockey's eyes glazed over, almost obediently, and Selar could see Lariad beginning to pick his teeth as he spoke. He wondered if he'd ever see that again. If the Hegemony seceded a different face would fill the empty space Lariad inhabited. Someone else would wear his uniform.

And there would be a different signature on the same paperwork.

T'Ven motioned to Beran and he closed the door. "Well, that was pointless," she said. She laced her fingers together on the table. "So the batarian embassy is doing business in Tayseri." She spoke like it was a personal insult. "Why?"

"Dumping merchandise before their markets collapse, probably," Beran said. "The Council's gonna make sure they lose their trade agreements and it's going to be an ugly split all the way down. They're stuck with the business they can drum up in the Terminus systems after that."

"It would explain the stranger things we've encountered," Selar agreed. "They'll need to get rid of everything they can't take back to their system. And if they're moving merchandise through the foundations there's room for people to be included. They're probably shipping them off to Camala with implants in their skulls."

T'Ven nodded. "So their main problem," she said, "is getting everything on and off the Citadel without being noticed by C-Sec. There isn't any evidence that they're using the docking bay on the keel. They might have been before, but the port's on good behavior after the incident with customs."

"So we spooked them into hiding?" Beran asked. When T'Ven nodded he swore and said, "Great. That's just real great. We'll be lucky to find anything now."

T'Ven asked Selar, "Did you find out who they're doing business with?"

Selar shook his head. "It might be one of the sand groups. They'd know about navigating the relays and they have connections to the black markets in the foundations."

"Maybe," Beran muttered, unconvinced. He scowled. "T'Ven, why didn't you know about any of this?"

She tilted her head. "Do you think I'm clairvoyant?"

"I just think you know about anything big that goes on down here," he said. "You've been around for a while."

"Are you calling me old?"

"Don't take it personally."

She didn't, even smiled a little, but Selar got the feeling that she was humoring Beran more than anything, like a cat letting a mouse take a few optimistic steps before it was punished for thinking it was going anywhere. And Selar did what he usually did when someone started to get cheeky with T'Ven, which was to hope he was out of the blast radius. He thought about Meiko staring up at him in her doorway with her black hair and her eyelashes. He thought about the trees floating like a dream behind her.

Mostly, he thought he was an idiot. He had one of her Presidium keycards in his left pocket and the weight of it was very slight against his hip.

"After so many years you start to see the same things over and over," T'Ven was saying to Beran. "The same people with the same faces and problems. The ugliness repeats itself and it disappoints me. But I've never seen anything like what's happening with the batarians. This is new and I'm still catching up."

Beran thought about that, moved his gaze around the office. He wasn't satisfied by her answer. He gestured to her pictures and he said, "You ever meet your lizards again? Seems like they were all hundreds of years ago."

Selar blinked at that. Genuine surprise slipped over T'Ven's eyes before they frosted over. "You've called me old twice now," she said.

"Like I said, don't take it personally." Beran ignored any sense of self-preservation and tapped his talons on the desk. "You ever meld with them or was it just a platonic feel-good thing?"

Selar's eyelids dropped in surprise and he forgot about the keycard for the moment. When an asari melded with someone they became the same person for a while, sharing thoughts and memories. Sometimes it was sex and sometimes it wasn't. Either way, it wasn't something you ever asked your boss about if you wanted to stay employed.

T'Ven's eyes darkened. "Is this an intimate conversation, Investigator? I've been meaning to ask how your wife and daughter are doing. I hear they've been very happy since the move."

"Yeah, they're better now that they're not living with a drunk like me," Beran said. He swung his mandible out. "Now answer my question."

The door blasted open with a biotic shimmer and a slam that sounded like a thunderclap. "Get out before I actually get angry with you," she said to him. She glanced at Selar. "Both of you. Come back when you know where the embassy has moved their business."

Beran snapped his mandible inward. "Of course."

And Selar let out a long exhale. He nodded at T'Ven before he left because you always acknowledged T'Ven even when she hit your partner upside the head with something ugly like his divorce, but she didn't respond. She was staring at her water while she slipped her fingers against the glass.

Chier was watching her from the shelf, smiling in the orange picture where he was an old man.

Selar followed Beran down into the main floor of the precinct, where employees were running around and losing their minds over whatever seemed urgent that day. A red krogan was waiting at a desk while a nervous salarian asked him what his visit to the Citadel was about in a trembling, pathetic voice. And a volus in a miniature C-Sec uniform was shuffling around with impressive importance to his steps while a pair of asari officers glared at Beran, whispering to each other.

An elcor, a real big one named Borri with a blue carpet on his back, said to Selar, "Humorously, the rookie has returned to us."

The batarian constable next to Borri looked up from his paperwork, smirked, and tilted his head to the right. "They teach you to fire your gun yet?"

Selar waved him off. "I'm still trying to figure out this omni-thing they slapped on me."

Borri swayed from side to side and slammed his fist on the ground. Selar felt the metal beneath his feet shudder in response. "With sarcastic glee, perhaps when you are less green we will show you how to use the emergency lights on a patrol car. "

Selar almost smiled and said, "Yeah, yeah, that's real nice. We'd have to order an extra-wide model to even fit you inside a patrol car."

"Proudly, you are correct, rookie."

Selar knew he wouldn't be living that nickname down anytime soon, not after the stint on the ring. He glanced at Beran, waiting for a smart comment, but Beran kept his hard expression intact. Selar had expected to be ribbed mercilessly by his partner, but he hadn't said a thing about it. He always had something to say about things like that.

"What's gotten into you?" Selar asked him.

"I'm just getting real tired of this place, that's all," Beran answered, grousing with a subharmonic noise. "There's something going on and it doesn't have anything to do with batarians in fancy suits. Come on. I need to show you something at the hospital."

"Did Opel finally have something to say?"

"The jelly doesn't know a damn thing about anything," Beran muttered. "It's something else."

Beran led him straight to the hospital a few blocks away on Rigel street. As they walked down the steps toward the morgue Beran asked, "Did you see T'elis after she was mauled in that sand bust?"

T'elis had been the reason they were sent to investigate the docking bay. "I looked over the report about it," Selar said. "It sounded ugly."

Beran let out a dry laugh that didn't suit the topic. "Yeah, real violent stuff," he said. "A nathak's about as friendly as a yahg and its claws are twice as sharp." He pushed the door to the morgue open, ignored an orderly who squawked in protest at them. "After T'elis was ripped to shreds we were sent to figure things out. We're the good guys and all that crap, right? At least until you pranced off to the ring."

Selar said, watching the orderly run off, "You think I like sitting around up there with my thumb between my horns?"

Beran replied, "I think you don't mind the scenery, if you get my drift."

Selar frowned, adjusted his jacket collar.

The air in the morgue was cold and stale and it reeked of chemical preservatives. Instruments were stacked up on silver racks, and a quarian in his suit lay dead on a table. A salarian autopsy tech was working methodically at peeling the suit off, didn't look up or notice anything around him. He had a long face with longer wrinkles running down the sides of his neck.

And when Beran reached the back wall full of stacked cabinet cases he pulled one out without fanfare. It was a dull black square labeled forty-two in orange digital light. It slid open with a cloud of blue vapor and came to a stop with a jolt that shook the body inside. Selar's mouth went a little dry as he stared down at it.

The dead asari lying in the cabinet case was a dark shade of purple and she had her hands folded over her stomach. Her toes and crest and fingers were all turning black from the cold storage. It was Constable T'elis, or used to be. But there wasn't a scratch on her.

Selar was too surprised to have anything smart to say about it. He said, "That doesn't match C-Sec's report at all."

"Yeah, she's in good condition other than how damn dead she is," Beran agreed darkly. "A nathak wasn't anywhere near this stiff."

Selar blinked once as he peered down at T'elis, who just stared up at the morgue's circular ceiling lights without a care. The view didn't exactly matter when you were dead, he supposed. Staring at stars or fluorescent lights was all the same. T'elis was sleeping the big sleep. But there was something about the expression still etched onto her face that was more unsettling than the lack of injuries. Selar had never seen his coworker look like that when she was alive. T'elis had been a harried, nervous person who didn't like other people. Everything had stressed her out.

"Her face looks euphoric," Selar said quietly.

Beran's mandible clicked. "Her brain looks like a bowl of nutrient paste from the vats. You should see the thing."

Selar glanced over at him. "You're kidding."

"Nope."

"That's one of your conspiracy theories," Selar said. "I remember you talking about it."

"It's my favorite conspiracy theory," Beran corrected. "An asari sex killer who burns their partner up when they meld. Fries their brain right out of their head."

"You actually think that's what happened to her?"

"You're damn right I do."

Selar opened his mouth to say something to that, closed it again because Beran's conspiracy theories weren't always wrong or born of fantasy. He hooked his thumbs into his pockets and considered the possibility for a long time. The morgue was so quiet that he could almost hear the mechanical hum of the Citadel's interior, right below the sound of the coroner cutting at the quarian's suit and breathing harshly through his nostrils.

And T'elis' eyes were clouded and yellow in death, but she looked like she had seen the face of a deity before she died. She had an upward slant to her lips and her muscles were relaxed like she hadn't struggled at all.

Selar opened his omni-tool, set it to a biological scan. Beran didn't move, didn't say anything else about it. When it was done T'elis' brain looked like an insubstantial cloud of black steam on the screen.

"That doesn't happen," Selar said, frowning down at his omni. A chill slipped down his spine as he thought about it. "Even if it did, why would someone lie about it?"

"You tell me," Beran said. "All I know is that someone covered this up real nice by blaming it on the case we were assigned to. I looked into it and her death report was written by a drell in vice who's hiding from an avalanche of quasar debts he racked up in Kithoi. You know him?"

Selar nodded. The drell's name was Denive. "So you think we were sent out as window dressing? We look busy and someone else looks clean?"

"Maybe. The big question is who," Beran said. "I thought maybe it was T'Ven or Lariad, but it's not exactly a secret that people come to lower Tayseri when they're on the outs. And the more I look into it, the more I'm starting to think this entire precinct is stuffed with people who wouldn't mind sweeping something like this under the rug."

It wasn't news. Everyone in C-Sec knew that the edge of the Ward was full of employees who had a good reason to stay down there. They made a deal and they put up with the hours and the dust, hidden away at the Citadel's end.

Selar put his hand on the cabinet and gently slid it back into place until the orange number lit up again. The euphoric yellow eyes disappeared into the darkness and he had the distinct urge to wash his hands for a few hours. T'elis' expression had made him feel as if he was witnessing a private moment, one that lingered far beyond her death.

Beran added, "You're included on that list of people, Vel."

Selar frowned at the flickering forty-two. He said, "I wouldn't be in on something like this. You know that."

"I know you turn down promotions that would require a transfer out of here, just like the rest of them," Beran said. "And I know you're from upper Shalta, you've told me yourself. So start talking. I can't get anything out of anyone else that I've talked to."

"Is this why the asari employees all look like they want to strangle you?"

"There are some things you just can't ask politely."

Selar was glad he hadn't been present for their reactions. "There isn't an asari sex killer secretly working for C-Sec," he said. It sounded crazy to even say it out loud. "T'Ven wouldn't stand for something like that and if she did Lariad would find out and immediately use it as leverage against her. He isn't as passive as he looks. The other asari employees are here over small stuff like debt or possession charges."

Beran asked, "Are you sure Lariad and T'Ven aren't both in on it for someone higher up?"

"I don't know," Selar said honestly. "I doubt either of them would be asking us to keep working on the contraband case if they were. It'd be under the rug."

Beran looked him up and down. His eyes were sharp and lacked friendliness. He was interrogating a suspect now, not asking his partner of two years. "What drove you down here, Vel? I couldn't find a thing about it."

Selar looked away from the wall with so many numbers. "It was complicated. It doesn't matter down here."

"The xenophilia is weird for a lizard but it isn't illegal," Beran continued, crossing his arms. "You're not running from the casinos and you're not drowning in hallex or sand." His subharmonics dropped real low, in a way that was usually reserved for suspects he didn't like. "I know you're a quiet sort of guy, but you're going to need to start being completely honest with me if you think you're getting out of here without a problem."

Selar had seen Beran bluff too many times to be cowed by it. He said, "You're talking like you're going to put me in a cabinet next to T'elis. Save the act for someone who believes it."

"Are you being blackmailed to keep quiet about this? Paid off?"

"No, of course not."

"Then keep talking."

"Only if you ask me a different question," Selar said. There was a toneless, empty note to his voice that he didn't like much, but he was starting to get sore about the accusation. "Look, I hate the way the air feels down here. We're going back upstairs."

"Like hell we are."

"We're going back upstairs," Selar said again. "Things aren't always above water around here, but that has more to do with the budget than anything else. You've been around long enough to know that."

"I know there's a dead asari in that cabinet that shouldn't be there."

Selar shook his head a little. "We won't find out what happened to her if we sit around arguing about it."

Selar turned his omni on to make a call and moved to head upstairs again. Beran let out a subharmonic noise of frustration and grabbed Selar by his jacket, ripping the fabric, and dragged him back until he was against the wall. One of the cabinet handles jammed hard into his back and the impact sent a jolt of pain through his ribs.

The autopsy tech stopped working, looked up. His scalpel hovered uncertainly above the quarian, reflecting the light. He didn't move except for his chest beneath his white lab coat, rising and falling steadily.

Selar sucked in a breath and ignored the pain.

"You want to know what matters down here?" Beran grated out. "I've been getting tailed ever since you left. Someone's got it out for me, and I want to know who it is."

Selar narrowed his eyes. He said, "Why didn't you send me a message about it?"

"I didn't want anyone intercepting it, or you sending it off to them. You know there was a goddamn bug in my apartment?" Beran shoved him against the wall again. "You're the only person who comes by, Vel. You want to tell me how the hell it got there?"

"If you put me down," Selar said through his teeth as pain blasted through him again, "we'll figure it out."

"Like hell I'll put you down," Beran said. "They pay you a lot to step aside while they come after me?"

There was a cart next to Selar, one of the metal racks with disinfectants scattered around. He grabbed it when Beran slammed him against the wall again. Sometimes a guy boiled over and you had to calm him down. Sometimes it was your partner.

But before he could knock him over the head with it, before Beran even realized what was about to happen and before Selar had a firm grip on the cart, the door to the morgue burst open. The orderly came in, followed by four C-Sec employees with their rifles pointed at the both of them.

Upstairs, Opel was dead.