A/N: In Norse mythology, the Well of Urd, or the Well of Destiny, is located beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree. The creature Mimir dwelt there, the wisest being in all the cosmos, because he drank of the waters of the well. The god Odin went to the well one day, in pursuit of wisdom like to Mimir's, but Mimir said Odin could not drink, unless he make a mighty sacrifice to do so.


XXXV

The Well of Urd: Mimir's Demand

There were three messages on Garrus's omni-tool the next morning. He swallowed when he saw them. He hadn't thought all of them would reply. He hadn't known if his mother would be able to. But there they were, blinking in a row. Sol. Mom. Dad.

Garrus lay back down on his cot slowly. Breathing in, he selected the message from his sister.

It was about what he would have expected from her. Terse and angry, with the same accusations she'd been sending him for months—as valid now as they had been all along and still changing nothing.

She was warmer toward the end: Thanks for the credits. Good to know you haven't forgotten us completely. Also, re vids: you're lying about something, G. I could have sworn you told me you weren't working for a zombie, and some version of her is in every single one. Still, the turian that I guess is supposed to be you shows up almost as much. How often do you go out with her? I know you probably feel tough, saving the galaxy with Commander Shepard. Don't let her get you killed. Maybe she can come back from the dead, but I don't want you pushing your luck, brother.

S

Garrus hesitated before tapping his father's message. Saying he and his father had a tendency to butt heads was putting it mildly. He hadn't known his father well growing up; Castis had lived apart from the family most of the time when he was young, working C-Sec on the Citadel and only returning to Palaven for short leaves. Still, Castis could have never been accused of neglecting his children. Auralie had communicated regularly with her husband—emails and video calls that had often taken on the qualities of military reports, and when Garrus had been young, lunches with dad had felt like inspections.

And I was never good enough. There had always been something more he was supposed to do, something to improve on, or a different way to look at things. As a child, Garrus had been terrified of his father. When he got older, he had just been annoyed. Things hadn't gotten really bad, though, until a few years after Garrus had entered his service to the Hierarchy, after basic and a couple years in the fleet. Garrus had been doing good work in the fleet, enough that his superiors had been looking at him for special tactics and reconnaissance. Castis had found out about it. He'd gotten in touch and made it clear he didn't want Garrus training for the Spectres. He'd suggested C-Sec as an alternative.

So Garrus had gone to C-Sec, and there he had gotten to know his father a lot better than he wanted. They didn't even work the same ward, but Castis always managed to involve himself in Garrus's business anyway. It wasn't enough for him to get lectured by his superiors; when he screwed up, his dad called too. It wasn't enough for him to just do his job, either; he had to be better than everyone else.

Under all the irritation, through all the frustration and miscommunications, Garrus knew his dad loved him; was proud of him, even. Or had been, anyway. But Castis Vakarian was like the worst hard-bitten, ball-busting son of a bitch turian CO that ever lived. He expected perfection, nothing less. When he'd left C-Sec for Shepard, the first time, and would have dropped out of service altogether if he had to in order to get Saren, Garrus thought his father would disown him, he was so angry. Of course, they had ended up saving the galaxy, so Garrus had been forgiven, but after that, he hadn't wanted forgiveness. Things had been strained between them ever since, and the last time Garrus had spoken to his father, he had thought that he was dying. His father had tried to talk him through it and told him to come home.

And I haven't talked to you since. Sorry, Dad.

Garrus opened the message.

I am writing to you from a salarian laboratory in downtown Cipritine, ran Castis's email, where your sister and I have been given rooms so we can stay close to your mother as she undergoes her treatments. For some reason, she has been invited to participate in a special study certain elements from Sur'Kesh are running on Corpalis Syndrome. The program is generally very exclusive. They accept perhaps fifteen cases per year galaxy-wide, none as advanced as your mother's so as to provide a more longitudinal study. I would be interested to hear someday how you formed contacts at such high levels in the circles of salarian bioresearch personnel. Not in C-Sec, certainly. Thank you.

Your mother is not improving, nor do the doctors think she will, but her deterioration has slowed, and with the new medication she is on, Solana believes her periods of lucidity are longer. She asks about you. Yesterday, your email made her day. She smiled for an hour and was able to tell the doctors three stories from your childhood before her memory lapsed again. Solana believes sometimes focusing on us helps your mother stay calm. Certainly her faculties and her anxiety become worse on days the doctors do not allow her to see us. It would do her good to see you, I think.

I do not understand why you cannot return to Palaven. Solana blames you for it, and I am sure you know there is limited time. However, you might wish to know that your actions do not to me indicate a lack of consideration for the three of us or for your duty. I gather that there has been a substantial change in your situation since last we spoke, both in your employment and in your outlook on life. There are common threads in vids that your sister has referred to me. One, along with your words, suggests you might be attending to a different kind of duty now, a duty the Citadel Council shrinks from due to its difficulty. The other I find almost impossible to believe—but it would explain much.

Take care of yourself, son. Be smart. Be safe. Following your own example, I won't send more over an unsecured channel, but whatever the facts are about what you are doing, I know it is probably dangerous. You never were one to take on the easy assignment. I look forward to when this one is over, however. I think we have several things to say to one another.

Castis Vakarian

The formal signature was just like Dad, Garrus thought. He shook his head and chuckled. Am I homesick for Dad's office on the Citadel? One of those dinners where he told me everything wrong with my life? He was. If he went back to the Citadel now, his father wouldn't be there, but on Palaven, his father was waiting.

We do have things to say to one another. Over the past couple years, Garrus hadn't come to agree with the strict limits Castis set on everything, but as things had gone south on Omega, and since, Garrus had started to understand why his father might have set such strict limits on him.

Did you always know about me, Dad, or could anyone have made the mistakes I did without your rules? Probably not. Not the same mistakes. But mistakes. Either way, you knew more than I gave you credit for.

I think you would know, if I told you everything, why I'm doing this now. "Do something right or don't do it at all"—that's what you always said. I've screwed that up so many times. But not this time, Dad. Not the one you wanted me to get right, probably. But that's the way it goes.

Garrus stared at his mother's message for a long time before he opened it. But, it turned out, he hadn't had to worry. There was no text, just two image files. Not even holos; flat photographic portraits.

The first was an old family portrait his mother had had made years ago, right before he had gone off to basic. Solana was still bareface, her expression artificial and wooden, in a dress that he remembered she'd hated. His own tattoos were still fresh, the blue so bright it looked bloody, and his face was swollen. He remembered how stiff the new uniform had been, but he had been excited to wear it, looking forward to going off and making his mark on the galaxy. Idiot. Auralie stood behind her two children, a hand on each of them. She was the only one smiling for the camera with any authenticity. Her amber eyes were warm and proud. She stood strong and tall. The last time he had seen her, all that had been gone. She hadn't been as bad as she was now—the clumsiness had just been starting to become problematic for her, the confusion just starting to scare her. And now if she was lucid for a couple of hours it was a victory.

She wasn't in the second photograph. Garrus guessed she had taken it, in one of those hours of lucidity. This photo was of Castis and Solana, and they hadn't known Auralie had taken it. They stood together, their backs to the camera, in front of a ceiling-to-floor plate glass window. They were pretty high up, in a skyscraper. A good bit of Cipritine was visible outside of the window. And Garrus's father had his arm around Solana's shoulders. His posture was loose enough that it was obvious he was taking comfort from his daughter as much as he was giving it to her. Solana's posture spoke absolute exhaustion. She rested her head on Castis's shoulder.

Garrus swallowed again. His hands shook as he shut off his omni-tool. Then he turned it back on again—and he saved both photos to his personal files.

It was 0645, Normandy time. I should probably get up. Head to breakfast. There's always work to do, and we could be making for that IFF today.

He didn't get up. Instead, he slouched down lower on his cot, closed his eyes, and missed his family. Just for a little while.


The day wore on, and for a few hours, Garrus thought they really were making for the Reaper IFF in the Hawking Eta cluster at last—the mission that would mark their first overtly offensive move against the Collectors. Joker was flying them across the galaxy, from relay to relay. The crew went about their daily tasks, but there was a hum of apprehension in the air. Everyone knew they were moving soon.

But when the Normandy stopped relay-jumping, astrogating the next jump, moving on to the next, they came out in the Nubian Expanse instead. Close to the Hawking Eta cluster—in the same neighborhood of the Terminus—but still hours away.

Garrus was expecting the knock on his door when it came. He wasn't expecting for it to be Jack.

She was kitted out for another ground mission, guns already hooked on her belt and the leather harness she wore over her shirt now, but she looked as uncomfortable as she always did above the engineering deck. Over the last few months, she'd stopped only coming to the crew deck during the night shifts, when everyone not on duty was sleeping. She'd eaten a few meals with some of the crew stationed down in engineering. Grunt and Tali. Daniels once. But she was still pretty cagey up here. She still preferred eating early or late, and he'd seen her leave the mess if there were too many other people. She'd only sought Garrus out the one time, after Horizon, though she'd throw a few routine insults his way any time she saw him.

Almost all of the hostility he'd felt from her those first few weeks was gone now. Still, if she was here now, it meant there was something special in the works. Garrus could guess the shape of it. Jack had taken what went down on Zorya a bit too personally, when Shepard had called Massani out for distraction from the mission. Everyone on the Normandy had their own loose end, their own bit of business to tie up before they could really commit to what was probably a suicide mission. Jack had had plenty of time to find whatever she needed in the files Shepard had given her access to when she had come onboard, and now she had something she wanted to take care of here in the Dakka system.

And judging from Jack's face right now and the fact that Shepard brought us here, we're not committing the murder any of us could have expected Jack would want us to commit. She wouldn't be this nervous about a murder.

Garrus ran through the possibilities in his head. Whatever they were here for, it was low-risk, or Shepard would have called out more of the squad. It was also incredibly personal, or Shepard would have tagged Garrus to come along herself. It wouldn't have been an issue. So: Shepard had insisted she and Jack have backup, but she'd left the choice of which backup to Jack, and Jack was here this afternoon because she wanted to be, because she had chosen to come to Garrus, and not because Shepard had.

Garrus extrapolated this in less than a second from the way Jack stood in the battery entry way; the unstable current flowing off her; and the quick, nervous heart rate. She needed something from him, and she thought he was about to tell her to go to hell.

"Going somewhere?" he said lightly. He didn't move to invite her into the battery. Everything in her body language said she didn't want to come in. In his space, she'd feel trapped. Twice as vulnerable as she already was just coming here.

He was unarmed. She has two guns and enough biotic power to go toe-to-toe with an asari matriarch, but she still feels small, doesn't she?

Whatever this is, it's big.

Jack shifted. "There's a Cerberus facility down on Pragia. Defunct. Empty. Shepard and I are going to blow it to hell. She says we need backup. Says I can pick the team. You're always with us anyway. I figure you might as well come this time."

Garrus hummed. "And we're good to bomb a Cerberus facility?" He kept his voice even, giving nothing away. "Even empty, there might be resources there our allies want to keep."

Jack's eyes blazed. "Too fucking bad." She turned away and walked a pace. "Anyway, I doubt it. The place is a waste. I wasted it myself. But I didn't have a bomb then. I want to finish the job. Shepard cleared the op."

Garrus tilted his head. "'Cerberus has been after me for years,'" he recalled. "This wouldn't be where it started, would it?"

"You want to know why I hate them? It's there," Jack confirmed. "All of it. All I know, all I am, started right down there. Maybe you'll learn something. You and Shepard both. All I'm asking is for someone to carry the bomb. You can't do that, I'll ask someone else."

She was on edge, wound as tight as he'd ever seen her, and more brittle than she'd been even on Purgatory in a burning ship. Garrus shrugged. "I'll help. My guess is Shepard would probably see it as a bonus if we do blow up anything Cerberus might still want in this facility."

That got a smile—one with a nasty edge to it, but then, that was usually the only kind of smile anyone could get from Jack. "She's not dumb. More of a goody two-shoes than I would have believed existed outside of fairy tales. But she knows what they are. Or some of it anyway."

She started to turn around, mission accomplished. He'd meet her in the shuttle bay to go down to Pragia when they were in orbit. But she held back, and Garrus waited. For a long time, she didn't say anything. "Thanks," she muttered finally.

Garrus didn't bother answering. Any trite, polite, and generic response he could make would set her off. You're welcome she wouldn't believe. No problem or It's nothing downplayed what this was to her. So he accepted her thanks, and waited two minutes before equipping his own guns and heading to the elevator.

Shepard had the ordnance ready for him in the shuttle bay. "How'd you clear it with Cerberus to requisition one of these?" He asked her, looking through the green canvas bag to make sure everything was disconnected and the explosives couldn't be activated by accident.

"We've got some leverage," Shepard answered. "Cerberus needs us to take out the Collectors and they know it." She gave a small smile. "Anyway, it isn't a bad idea to test the equipment we'll be using to take out the Collector base."

Garrus hummed. Of course, she was right. In fact, he bet Lawson had requisitioned two or more bombs—not nuclear, but capable of destroying a military base or space station—to begin with. She would have wanted materiel to test with and for backup, in case something malfunctioned or there was more than one Collector base past the Relay to destroy. "So, are we training someone else for this, or did Jack just decide I'm blowing up the Collector base?" he asked drily. It wouldn't make sense to have one demolitionist on a practice run and another on the Collector base.

Shepard quirked a brow at him and said nothing. Garrus nodded. Shepard had guessed Jack would come to him. It was just a matter of familiarity. Easier to ask the guy who's always there a favor.

It wasn't like there were too many people trained in demolitions on Shepard's ground team. The professor, probably. Massani. Maybe Taylor. Lawson—but that would be a stretch. Maybe he should have guessed Shepard would want him on the bomb in the Collector base, but it made him itch, thinking about it. He was competent enough with demolitions tech, but he generally preferred standing guard over the person arming the big bomb instead.

Alenko on the sand on Virmire, sweating and overheated, with a bullet in the leg and a fluctuating barrier, sabotaging the control panel and fusing the wires so even the geth couldn't deactivate the bomb, with incoming troopers and krogan on three sides and his guards already down in the dirt. Shepard had decided that Kaidan's objective was more critical to the success of the mission than Williams's. They'd gone back for him instead of evacuating Williams from the tower, but everyone that had been on the SR-1 during that tour knew that it could have been Kaidan that day—especially Kaidan.

Then again, it wasn't like many of them were likely to get out of the Collector base anyway, no matter who was more exposed for a couple minutes arming the bomb. And it wasn't like he couldn't trust Shepard to watch his back. That, she can do. And she wouldn't let anyone else do it either, not when the mission would depend on that bomb going off.

All the wires in the bomber bag were disconnected, in a separate pocket entirely from the primary device. Garrus closed the gag and slung it across his body and over his back. He adjusted his guns, making sure he could still detach them in a hurry, and followed Shepard to where she and Jack were already waiting by the shuttle.

The tension was thick enough to cut with a combat knife as Niels flew them down to the world Jack wanted to visit, Pragia. Heavy clouds swirled over the planet, obscuring the surface. As soon as the Kodiak passed through them, it was raining—a hard, steady, soaking rain. It was night on the side of the planet Jack wanted to visit. Niels whistled and turned on the shuttle shields and headlights to navigate.

"Nice place, Commander. Atmospheric."

"Shut up, moron," Jack mumbled. She stared out the display. Her left thigh bounced up and down. Nervous energy. Biotics crackled over her skin from time to time, like solar flares.

The shuttle beams fell on a dilapidated concrete structure, cracked and molding, settled below in the middle of a wet jungle landscape. "I forgot how much I hate this place," Jack said in an undertone, passionately. She pointed out toward the top of the building. "See the landing pad? Has to be on the roof, or the vegetation would overgrow it in a few hours."

EDI broke in then. "Shepard, I'm picking up thermal signals everywhere, except at your landing zone."

Jack blinked. The knee stopped moving up and down. "Something's distorting the sensors," she said.

Garrus tilted his head. "This was a secret Cerberus facility?"

Jack understood what he was getting at. She relaxed. Just a bit. "Yeah. They build their equipment to last," she agreed. "Assholes." She looked across at Shepard. "It was a mistake coming back here, Shepard," she said. Garrus had seen Jack nervous and out of her element before. Now she seemed afraid.

What happened to her here?

Shepard's gaze was level. "Get a hold of yourself," she said evenly. "It'll be okay."

Jack raised her chin and threw back her shoulders. "I'm fine!" she retorted. "Okay. Let's get on the ground."

"Watch it down there," Niels advised, settling on the landing pad and opening the door. "The jamming signal might not be left over from Cerberus."

It had occurred to all of them, but Garrus nodded up at Niels anyway. He stepped out into the rain after Shepard and Jack. He took a breath, and enough water for a decent drink fell into his mouth. The rain was thick; heavy and unrelenting. It wasn't cold rain but warm, humid and suffocating. Visibility was poor. Garrus spat and grimaced. Up ahead, he saw water falling off Jack and Shepard's noses. Shepard looked as disgusted as he was, but Jack was angry. "Let's just get in there and plant the bomb in my cell. I want to watch this place burn."

She led them down steps set in the roof to an unlocked door. It opened, and the three of them stepped inside out of the rain. There were leaks in the roof, and the floor was damp and mildewed, but at least they were out of the worst of the weather.

Garrus took off his visor and shook it to clear the water off. He took a look around. Emergency lighting flickered overhead, illuminating a room even more depressing than the scene outside. The floor was cracked and broken gray tile. The walls were naked concrete. And scattered over the floor were large, empty cargo containers. Garrus's mandibles tightened. He'd seen containers like these before.

Jack regarded the room, the clear evidence of people that had been trafficked here, without any noticeable change in her expression. "I never saw this room," she remarked. "But they brought new kids in these containers. They were messed up and starving, but alive. Usually."

Garrus took a breath. Swallowed. "This is . . . unbelievable." He'd known, before, that Jack had a story—probably an ugly one. He had no idea it was anything like this. His first impulse was to start taking vid on his visor, record the evidence. But there was no law out here, no one to report what had happened here to. And they'd come here to destroy the evidence.

They can put you through hells like you've never seen, Jack had told him her first night on the Normandy, talking about Cerberus. Garrus had seen Cerberus lure units into thresher maw attacks, torture captured soldiers for years on end to explore that trauma. He had seen them isolate rachni and parts of Feros's thorian to study, use an entire colony to experiment with geth husks. He hadn't believed her. Watching Jack dismiss starving, kidnapped children, packed in freight containers without sufficient air or water like he knew they had to have been, like that hadn't even been close to the worst thing that had happened here, he was starting to rethink that.

And these were the people they were working with to stop the Collectors. "Shepard—"

Something in Shepard's expression stopped him. She tapped her radio, eyes bleak, and Garrus nodded. EDI's listening.

Cerberus had been paying him for months now, and Garrus had had his doubts from the start. But he also had never felt as trapped as he knew Shepard had. She didn't hear the way Taylor talked about her; she didn't see the way Chambers looked at her. Both of them like she was more of a spirit than a woman, some force of nature. The two of them were Cerberus like no one else in the crew, but Shepard had had them almost since Garrus had joined up. It had taken longer with Lawson. A lot longer. But Garrus had known from day one that Miranda was only ever as effective as Shepard let her be—and that Miranda knew it too. Even aside from that, though, Shepard was winning her over too. Lawson was grateful to Shepard for her own sake now, admired her for her own sake. She wanted Shepard's trust—for her own sake—not just because the Illusive Man wanted her to earn it. Over the past few weeks, Garrus thought the two of them had been working on one another, both tired of the shutout, each trying to persuade the other to cooperate with more than just clenched teeth—Miranda trying to get Shepard to commit to Cerberus and not just the mission against the Collectors; Shepard trying to get Miranda to see what Cerberus really was, that the corruption was more than just one bad cell. And I know who I'd bet on to win that fight. Shepard had always had more power on the Normandy than she had thought.

But looking around the room, feeling how helpless they were to do anything about what had happened here, Garrus could see Shepard's side of it. He could understand Tali a little better. He definitely had a new perspective on Jack, and considering this had been her experience of Cerberus, he had a new respect for the guts she'd shown staying on as long as she had and working with them as much as she had.

They couldn't speak openly about what had happened here, couldn't talk about what they might do about it after they were done with the Collectors. If we get done with the Collectors. EDI filtered everything they said, and any of it might get back to the Illusive Man. Garrus's fists clenched beside him, and he looked away from the empty containers. He could see the children that would have been inside them all too clearly. After all these years, they were still stained and discolored with things he didn't want to think about. Some things you didn't forget. Cerberus had condoned it. And Jack had lived it.

Garrus and Shepard, silent, followed Jack through a corridor, down a few steps and into another room. There was a staticky terminal near the floor here, the kind that had once probably hosted a VI to record and share information through the facility. Garrus used his omni-tool to strengthen the signal. It was ten or fifteen years old now; old tech, and the hardest part was finding a program that could still interface. Eventually, he got in. There wasn't a lot of data left, just part of an old log. A man in a Cerberus uniform appeared on the holodisplay. The audio was fuzzy, but easy enough to understand. "The Illusive Man requested operation logs again. He's getting suspicious. When we get results, he won't care what we did. But if he knew . . ."

The recording froze. Garrus paced away from the terminal, angrier than before now. "It sounds like this facility went rogue." It was almost worse now. Everyone who had worked here was probably dead now, but there had been some comfort in holding the Illusive Man and Cerberus responsible for the kids that had filled those containers—dead and alive. For the way Jack hid below the engineering deck like a beaten dog and her wary eyes whenever she had to talk to anyone else. The way she snaps at Mordin when he talks about surgical enhancements that wouldn't make any of the rest of us flinch.

But if the scientists here hid their operations from the Illusive Man, even if we brought this to the Council or confronted the Illusive Man about what happened here, Cerberus would just deny it.

I hope blowing this place up is good enough for Jack; I would want more than that.

Jack snorted. "It didn't say what they were hiding from the Illusive Man," she told him. This won't be enough for her either. It couldn't be. But it will be a start anyway.

Jack led them around another corner. Garrus saw boxes of processed eezo lying around. So. They brought the kids here—kidnapped or bought or otherwise trafficked—to what? Experiment with biotics?

It would make sense. Jack was the strongest human biotic he'd ever seen, with more endurance and power than even L2s could manage without their brains boiling in their skulls. Jack had been a Cerberus experiment, he realized. It made everything fit. The history with and hatred for Cerberus. The familiarity with drugs she had shown on Illium—but she didn't use; they used them on her. The surgical scars. The lack of any surname or any official documentation anywhere—and he'd looked, right after Purgatory.

He tried to imagine a childhood like that—an experimental subject for an organization without boundaries or conscience, in a facility doing things even beyond what the organization would normally condone. Knowing the facility trafficked kids just like you and didn't care if some of them died.

The next room was bigger. It looked like it had been the main generator room once, but the massive transformers in the room were dead, rusty and mildewed. The ceiling was open here in several places. The cement floor was cracked. A few ferns were growing through it, but in the center of the room, a giant tree had grown up, breaking up a walkway overhead. It was as thick as Garrus and at least one of the others put together and stretched through the ceiling. Six meters high at least. On another world, it might have taken a tree like that a couple of centuries to grow so big, and it would have grown around the walkway. Here, it had grown fast enough to push the metal aside instead. Jack hadn't been exaggerating about the growth rate of the vegetation here.

Jack looked up at the tree. It was impossible to guess what she was thinking. "I remember escaping through this room," she said. "I saw sunlight through the cracks in the ceiling. Only a half-dead guard between me and freedom. He was begging for his life."

Garrus didn't bother asking what she had done. Neither did Shepard.

At first, there was no sound but the rain on the floor and on the leaves of the plants, coming through the leaks in the ceiling. Then, though, there was an unmistakable baying sound. Reaching past the bomber bag, Garrus drew his assault rifle, but Shepard's Locust rang out first.

The first varren skidded on the wet, broken floor, its bark cut off to a whimper. Face savaged and chest bloody from a hail of bullets, it left an ugly red smear behind as it slid to a halt. Jack got the second varren, tossing it up into the air for her shotgun. Garrus and Shepard took the third out together, but Garrus got the fourth himself, his shots all hitting in a tight spread in the varren's head, taking it out quickly and cleanly.

Shepard walked over to the corpses and nudged one bloody varren with the toe of her boot. "Varren aren't native, are they?" She glanced at Jack. "Did the guards here have any varren they left behind?"

Garrus saw a blue light behind Jack's dark eyes. She shook her head, her mouth a thin, hard line.

The conclusion was obvious. "So. We're not the only ones to come here. The question is, are the scavengers still home or not?"

No one answered, and they all kept their weapons out as they moved forward.

On the other side of the room, the space opened up. There were short, portable concrete walls set up in a rough, broken semicircle—scarring and old blood ground into the floor. This place had been wrecked in the years since Jack had left here, but the set up was still clear. Shepard's jaw set.

"This looks like an arena." It wasn't a question.

"That's right," Jack confirmed. "They used to stage fights here. Pit me against the other kids." She looked up at Shepard and grinned mirthlessly. "I loved it," she said, and her tone was a challenge. "Only time I was out of my cell."

She knew how Shepard would react to that, Garrus saw. Jack walked around without a shirt on and didn't bat an eye. She wore her past, the people she'd killed, and the places she'd been on her skin. She shoved the ugliest parts of herself out at the rest of the galaxy, daring them to be offended, hoping they would be offended. Because if you walk around naked, it doesn't hurt for people to see it. So you're not really naked anymore.

Now, though, Jack had brought them here, and she was naked again. All her scars exposed and bleeding for him and Shepard to see. So Garrus held still, making use of years of drilling in military discipline to give nothing away, and if behind it he was furious that these bastards had fought children like dogs in this cold, lifeless concrete room, well. Jack already knew he was. She didn't have to see it too. It would just put her right back there, years ago, in a new and worse way.

Shepard walked around the broken circle, quiet. "Did other children die in these fights?" she asked finally.

Jack shrugged. Garrus read it as a probably. "I was a kid, filled with drugs," Jack told them. "I got shocked when I hesitated. Narcotics flooded my veins when I attacked."

Shepard paused and looked back at Jack. "They actually rewarded you for attacking?"

Jack stood taller. Her eyes glittered, and there was a sick, twisted expression he had seen before on her face. Now, though, there was a bitter, self-aware edge to it. I don't know if that's better or worse. "I still get warm feelings during a fight."

The people at this facility hadn't just messed with Jack's body, her biotics. They had messed with her mind. Were they trying to condition a psychopathic killer, or did they just need a practical trial of the subjects' biotic combat abilities? They were children!

Shepard summed it all up, succinctly. "What the hell was wrong with those people?"

Now Jack's eyes dropped. She shrugged again, turned away. "I don't know. Doesn't matter now."

Shepard was still trying to make sense of it, gazing back at the broken arena. "What were they studying?"

Jack took three paces away. "Hell if I know. Maybe that's how they got their kicks. I never understood anything that happened here."

Shepard followed her. "How often did they do this?"

Jack turned around to face her, arms across her chest. "I was in a cell my whole life," she said flatly. "Sometimes they took me out, filled me with drugs, other stuff. Time gets funny in a cell."

Garrus could see that every question Shepard asked, every expression of disgust and horror she let show on her face made Jack feel like more of a freak and a victim. She's done some bad things, maybe a lot of bad things, and she's responsible for what she's done. But she was a kid, and she didn't deserve this. Still, she survived, and she is who she is. Better to let her live with it than force her to go through everything again knowing it was even worse than she remembered.

"There's no more here, Shepard," Garrus said quietly.

Shepard looked back at him. She didn't want to move on. What had happened here was wrong, in a deep, ugly way, and Shepard couldn't stand that it had happened in the first place, let alone that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it now. All this had happened years ago. There wasn't anyone they could arrest or hold accountable, even with Shepard's Spectre authority. The Illusive Man would deny or disavow anything they proved here, and Pragia fell outside Council jurisdiction anyway. Cerberus had probably planned it that way.

He saw Shepard make a face and swallow. Then she nodded. "Let's get moving."

"Hell yes," Jack muttered, walking away again.

As Garrus followed them, he couldn't help wonder what Shepard would do if one day they found out that some of the sick bastards that had worked here had survived Jack's escape. It was possible, if unlikely. Would Shepard think they were worth killing? With the crimes that had happened here unaccountable to any planetary or intersystem authority, years ago and forgotten by everyone but Jack, no legal recourse, would Shepard act like she had on Illium, facing down Nassana Dantius? If they took Jack with them, and someday they wound up face to face with one of the people who had signed off for crates full of starving and dead children bought and stolen from other worlds, who had drugged Jack and made her fight and injure other children, possibly fatally, would Shepard let Jack or Thane or anybody shoot them in the head? Or would it be like other times, when she let the guilty party go, to law enforcement that would slap them with some token charge, where they would be out after a fine or a few months' detainment? Could she do that with the scientists that had worked here?

Masochistic and stupid, he knew, to wonder. Pointless too. Everyone here had died. Even if they hadn't, the crew of the Normandy SR-2 was out of time to execute even Shepard's warped ideas of justice against anybody that wasn't the Collectors. In the long run, it didn't matter whether Jack got closure here or not. Only that she could work with the rest of them, commit everything she had to the mission. Only that Garrus and Shepard test out the bomb model before they went to blow up the Collectors.

In the next hallway, there was another dying terminal, another broken log. Jack paced up and down, but she let Shepard stop, reactivate the terminal, recover the data. A panicked man talked on the radio to a superior: "Security officer Zemki, Teltin facility. The subjects are out of their cells. They're tearing the place apart! Subject Zero is going to get loose. I need permission to terminate! I repeat: permission to terminate."

The recording played the answer: "All subjects besides Zero are expendable! Keep Jack alive!"

"Understood," the security officer had replied over the recording. "I'll begin the—"

It would have played more, but this time, Jack shut off the recording. "That's not right!" she told Shepard. She was pale, angry now. "I broke out when my guards disappeared. I started that riot!"

She was shaking. It can't have been an accident, Garrus understood. If you only got out because the other kids here started something, then you owe them something. If they would have killed every one of those kids before they killed you, you're not the victim you thought you were. Not in the same way, anyway. It was almost the opposite side of the problem she had had by the arena, needing to remember the fights against the other kids as something she had enjoyed. Where the other kids were concerned, Jack needed to believe they had been her enemies. She probably killed a lot of them, getting out, and she needs to feel she was right, that it was something she had to do. As hard as they tried, they didn't turn her into a psychopath here—not quite. But that's worse. She can't disassociate.

Shepard was gentle. "Things might have happened that you didn't see."

Jack's biotics flashed blue around her. "The other kids attacked me. The guards attacked me. The automated systems attacked me," she said through her teeth. "That doesn't leave lots of room for interpretation."

Garrus sighed. "By the time you got out, you were just another angry, desperate biotic kid in the chaos. I'll bet the other kids weren't thinking any clearer than you were. No time for anyone to check their targets or program discriminatory parameters into whatever defenses were here. Probably didn't matter what whoever was in charge said. You did what you had to. And they tried to do the same thing."

It didn't help. Jack glared at him, eyes flashing. Then she turned on her heel. "Whatever. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that we leave this place in flames. Let's go."

She trudged away, through another door. She stopped then, and Garrus almost ran into her. He smelled it before he saw it; the hall was darker here. Decaying, rancid meat and coagulating blood. He looked down and saw a dead varren on the top of a short staircase. It was cold, but the pool of blood around it was still wet. No insects had made their way inside the facility and found the corpse.

Jack was tense. "The people who brought the varren are still here. That's a fresh kill. This place is supposed to be empty."

Shepard signaled for them to go more quietly, and Garrus fell back so the three of them were moving in formation and he and Shepard were on Jack's flanks. They kept moving into the facility, past what must have been offices and quarters for the scientists that had worked here. The emergency lights flickered, weak and sickly-looking. Water spattered on concrete and metal. And somewhere, someone was still here.

They found them in the next room they came to. Jack opened a door. A vorcha screamed a challenge, and a flamethrower roared. Jack had up her barrier in a second. Shepard winked out beside Garrus, and he flipped on his thermal imaging to track her at the same time that he dived to the ground and up behind the first cover available—a solid, medical table. An autopsy table.

Behind the attacking vorcha, Garrus saw drawers, refrigerator units. Morgue.

As far as places to fight go, I can't decide if that's horrible or funny.

The vorcha were organized—guns and armor that he recognized. Blood Pack. They'd brought the varren. Killed one. And now they were trying to take out people they saw as competing scavengers on this job.

Garrus logged positions. There were three to his right and up ahead, near the end of the room. One more in front of him. Two flamethrowers. The rest with assault rifles. Close quarters. This is going to get ugly.

Bullets pinged off the metal exam table in front of him. Then the vorcha attacking him started to melt. The skin peeling back over his skull as Jack tore the atoms that made him up apart. He screamed in rage and agony, but he wasn't dying. His cells were already adapting to the attack, strengthening, arranging in different ways. Garrus shot him. Once. Twice. Three times. He fell.

Jack took cover behind some empty boxes—caskets—across from Garrus. At least I hope they're empty. Shepard's Widow cracked out, and the tank on a flamethrower at the end of the room exploded, engulfing two vorcha in the resulting inferno. Shepard followed it up with an incendiary, spreading the blaze to the remaining vorcha.

But at the same time, a glass wall that had sealed off more refrigerator units shattered. Three more vorcha opened fire. Garrus ducked. Jack cursed. Bullets flew in wide arcs, left to right. Inefficient and imprecise, but wickedly effective. Garrus was pinned down. Jack too.

Through his visor, Garrus could see Shepard, staying low, under the spread of the gunfire. He saw her silhouette plant a hand on the sill of the broken window, vault up onto the higher step, behind one of the vorcha firing. Line up a shot.

She fired, and at that moment, Garrus yelled, "Now!" As the two surviving vorcha turned, snarling, to address the new threat, Garrus and Jack stepped out from cover and put them down.

When they came back together in the center of the room, Jack was bleeding. Shepard glanced sharply at her. "Are you wounded?"

Jack rolled her eyes. "It's nothing. The glass, not a fucking bullet." She examined the bleeding slice down her forearm with disgust. "I got sloppy. Didn't account for the slower trajectory with my barriers. I won't screw up again." She stalked away. Garrus wanted to point out that armor might help stop projectiles, but somehow, he didn't think Jack would take a review of her dress code well just now.

Anyway, she couldn't show off the ink if she started actually dressing for combat.

"Why the hell did they need a morgue?" Jack muttered, almost to herself, looking at the stacked coffins and body bags, the autopsy tables, and the refrigeration units. "This was a small facility."

Garrus looked at her. By now, he had a good idea of what had happened here. Jack wasn't just a Cerberus experiment from this facility, she was the Cerberus experiment from this facility, the culmination of every atrocity that had been committed here in the name of research. But she was still in denial. "I'm saying some sick son of a bitch killed a lot of kids with these 'experiments'," he answered her, even though he knew she hadn't been expecting an answer. "And then checked his work."

His plates itched as Jack's biotics flared. "Bullshit!" she snapped, eyes crackling blue. "I had the worst of it, and I made it out alive."

Shepard was there then, in between the two of them. She didn't say anything. Just looked at Jack. Jack's biotics subsided, and she turned away. "Feels so strange to be back here," she muttered. "I feel like—I'm pissed off. I'm a dangerous bitch, but then I'm a little girl again! Shit. It's complicated. Let's just go plant that bomb."

She hoisted her shotgun in her arms and walked to the exit. Her combat boots crunched over the glass. "Was that almost an apology?" Garrus asked in an undertone.

"An excuse," Shepard corrected in the same, quiet voice. "But she wanted it to do the same thing."

Garrus hummed and fell into line behind Jack again. He felt like he should be honored by Jack's halfhearted attempt to smooth things over—she was under a lot of strain here—but instead, for some reason, he was annoyed. When they had first met, Jack would have just as soon kicked him in the teeth as looked at him. She wasn't different now because the two of them had gotten so close on the tour. Shepard's changing her. Trying to save her like she tries to save everyone.

I know I'm an arrogant bastard, but I don't try to change people like you do, Shepard. I think I know who's right and wrong. I punish them or let them go, and maybe Dad's right, you're right, and outside of any written law, I have no right to do that. Maybe when I see justice gets done, no matter what, because somebody has to do it, I stop being just. Fine.

But when I'm out there, deciding who's right and wrong, I don't try to make people live up to my idea of right. That was what Shepard's dismissal of Jack's excuse was. She did have a point—don't lie, don't hide, and don't make excuses. Only cowards don't take responsibility for their actions. Courage is owning what you do, good or bad, and when you're wrong, admitting it. But it's not Shepard's job to get Jack to live that way.

I don't make choices for people, Shepard. I don't push like you do, force them to head the way I think they should, deliberately put them in situations that encourage it. I don't get in their heads until they doubt everything they believe and everything they are, and everything looks different. I'm an arrogant bastard. But not as arrogant as you are.

Garrus stopped himself, angry. This isn't about you, and it's not about Shepard. Keep the focus on Jack, on the bomb, and on whatever Blood Pack is still hanging around.

Damn, he'd needed those two days Lawson had offered him. Should have taken them when I had the chance.

The facility went down and down, further into a hill in the jungle. Jack led them into a long, dark hallway. Institutional. Two stories deep. Garrus only just made out cells on either side of both floors when the vorcha stood up from behind the railing of a bridge that crossed over the top level.

Garrus reacted at the same time Jack did. Her biotics ignited, and he fired. Red blood showered down black in the dim corridor, spattering on the tile floor beneath the bridge, and Garrus's target slumped over the side of the balcony. Jack's target floated off the bridge, screaming, helpless to fire his assault gun in the grip of the energy field Jack squeezed around him. Calmly, unhurried, Shepard raised her Locust, aimed, and fired a three-shot pulse. The vorcha stopped screaming, and Jack let him fall, so the blood didn't fall over the entire length of the corridor.

The hallway they were in went down to the ground floor, and as Jack led Garrus and Shepard down it, Garrus activated the lamp on his rifle. The emergency lighting was down in this part of the facility—or it had never been installed. There were no skylights or windows here, nothing to break up the blackness in the corridor—just the cells on either side.

Garrus felt cold. He shone his lamp into one cell, then another. They were identical—tiny prisons. The ceilings inside loomed too low for comfort—Garrus wasn't sure he would be able to stand up in one—but into each cell was crammed a metal-frame, institutional bunk bed. There were no sheets on the mattresses, though the beds were positioned as they had to have been the day Jack had escaped, some pushed over to barricade a door or flipped for cover. There were old, dark bloodstains and bullet holes on and around some of the mattresses and denting the bed frames.

The open floor in each cell wasn't big enough for one child, let alone two. There was a single toilet and a single sink in each cell. No privacy curtains. No showers, and no communal shower anywhere to be seen. No closets, no games. Just cold, dark, empty cells like in a prison. And a prison any decent government would shut down.

"They kept children here?" The fury came through under his voice without his quite intending it. The light from Garrus's lamp caught Shepard's eyes, flashing toward him. She was starting to hear it, now, when he lost control, learning to read subharmonics like he had had to learn to read human faces, back in the day. He didn't know how much she understood, yet, but right now, anything was too much. He glanced at Jack, and so did Shepard.

Something flickered across Shepard's face, and she didn't answer him. Neither did Jack, and Garrus didn't say anything else as they passed through the children's dormitory, into a sort of indoor courtyard or exercise area.

There was a skylight here. More leaks in the ceiling. More plants, breaking up the stifling darkness of the dormitory corridor, but Jack didn't pay attention to any of that. Her gaze was riveted on the metallic back wall of the room. Her mouth was open, her expression stricken.

"This—it's a two-way mirror?" she whispered. She walked across the room and laid her hand on the reflective wall. Garrus looked in and saw three warped, tarnished reflections. The reflections were only vaguely recognizable as two humans and a turian. The distorted, discolored surface of the mirror and the weak, gray light filtered through the skylight and the cracks in the ceiling left Shepard's features as blurred as Garrus's and Jack's elaborate tattoos swirls of meaningless color.

"My cell is on the other side," Jack told them both, her voice small, and for once, sounding very young. "I could see all the other kids out here. I screamed at them for hours, and they always ignored me."

Garrus and Shepard both looked at her again and chose to say nothing. It was a purposely cruel design, again meant to put Jack at odds with the other children in the facility, to make sure she wanted to fight them.

Jack looked shattered. She'd never seen this. She had never realized the other children hadn't deliberately ignored her. She turned away mechanically, and walked, more slowly, to the left, through the next door.

They had been through the transformer room, the offices, the dormitories. This next room had clearly been where the doctors had operated. There were two stations, separated by a dirty glass divider. Medical chairs, with restraints, standing stark under what had probably once been two groups of bright lights. Tables of surgical tools still stood by the chairs. Dead consoles that would have held the medical readings.

Jack flinched away from the chairs. She shrank in on herself, fingers tightening on the stock of her shotgun. "I must have come through here when I broke out, but I don't remember it," she said quietly. "This is a bad place."

Shepard stepped up to stand beside Jack, supporting her. She nodded at a flickering floor terminal on one side. Like the others they had seen earlier, this one still had some life in it. A data log maybe. Shepard gestured for Garrus to see what he could find.

He had the log playing in a moment. "Entry 1054 Teltin Facility," a scientist reported in a flat, dispassionate voice. "The latest iteration of PergNim went poorly. Subjects One, Four, and Six died. No biotic change among the survivors. We lowered core temperatures of surviving subjects, but no biotically beneficial reactions occurred. As a side effect, all subjects died, so we'll not try that on Zero. I hope our supply of biotic potential subjects holds up. We are going through them fast."

The log went dark, and the terminal flickered and died, any energy it had left to run exhausted. And Jack exploded. She threw her hands up. "This is bullshit! They weren't experimenting on the other children for my safety!"

"You can't help what they did to others," Shepard said calmly.

Jack looked down at her boots. She was shaking. "You don't get it, Shepard," she said. "I survived this place because I was tougher than the rest. That's who I am."

"So tough this out," Shepard suggested. "Sometimes the hardest thing to face is the truth."

Jack frowned but didn't say anything. She didn't move either, and so Shepard took the lead now, walking over to the other side, where there was another terminal and another log.

This time, the scientist who came up on the holo was like the soldier who had asked for permission to terminate the subjects. "It's all fallen to pieces," he spoke into the camera. His voice was high. Panicked. "The subjects are rampaging, and Zero is loose. We're shutting Teltin down. What a disaster! We'll infiltrate and piggyback onto the Alliance's Ascension program. Hopefully, that will give—what? Zero, wait!" His holographic body fell out of frame in a staticky crash of blood and biotics.

Jack turned to Shepard, desperate. "Shepard, they started up somewhere else!"

Shepard shook her head. "Ascension is an Alliance program," she told Jack. "It's a school for biotic kids. They don't torture children there." There was still a grim light in the back of her eyes. Maybe there weren't any kids being tortured at Ascension, but if any of the other scientists had left here to go there, the Alliance's biotic school had Cerberus infiltrators—people who had trafficked and tortured children. Garrus guessed Anderson would be getting an encrypted warning right after they got back to the Normandy. Probably Admiral Hackett too, and anyone else she still knows.

Jack shifted. She looked sideways at Garrus. "A lot of this . . . isn't the way I remember it."

"You were a kid," Garrus said. "On drugs, purposely kept in an environment that gave you a warped idea of your situation, in the middle of a crisis."

Jack shook her head, refusing to accept his excuse for her now. "I was dumb," she growled. "I keep my eyes open now, and I always shoot first." She pointed toward the next room. "We're getting close to my cell. The place I came from. Let's keep going."

Garrus wondered where Jack had actually come from. Had she been trafficked here like the others or brought earlier? Was she actually the kid of some twisted Cerberus scientist? Who had her parents been? Had they sold her or been killed? If you didn't grow up Subject Zero, Jack, who would you have been? He tried to imagine it, but everything he associated with Jack, from the hostility to the reckless bravery, was probably the result of this place—of years of trauma and abuse, of being hunted, unable to trust anyone. As horrible as it was, this hellhole was Jack's parent.

Destroying it could be a kind of baptism for her, maybe. Symbolically at least. Maybe it was what she needed to be a different person, separate from what Cerberus had made her.

But the rest of the Blood Pack scavengers were waiting in the next room—what had probably once been an observational center and data bank for the Teltin scientists. None of them fired, though, and Garrus did a quick head count. Ten. Two varren, five vorcha, three krogan, in a pretty open space, though the old cubicles in the room would offer some cover.

One of the krogan had a silver hood over his hump instead of the standard red one. He raised his hand to his ear and spoke into a radio. "Hey, Aresh," he growled. "It's Kureck." He was quiet a moment. Nobody fired. "Yeah. The intruders are here. You want them dead? We have to talk creds. You promised us lots of salvage, but this place is a waste." He was silent another moment, and Garrus wondered if the gang would just leave without a fight. But then Kureck raised his other hand, signaling the other two krogan and the vorcha. Suddenly, all the Blood Pack guns were on them. "Fine. We'll put 'em down. Then I'm coming in there, and we're gonna talk salvage."

He dropped his hand and faced them down. "What are you doing here?" Shepard called, trying to talk him back down.

But this guy was a professional. Not too personally involved in killing them, really, but now he had his orders. "First, we're going to kill you," he said. "Then, we'll see."

"Keep moving," Shepard shouted. "Don't get pinned down!"

"No shit!" Jack yelled back. Her barrier blazed around her, and she vaulted over a cubicle wall, shooting a charging varren. It yelped as its vorcha handler roared. Garrus went the other way, toward another cubicle, controlling his lines so the krogan in the back of the room couldn't shoot at him without hitting their own people. He heard an exploding flamethrower fuel tank, smelled burning flesh and bone.

"Concentrate fire, idiots!" Kureck yelled. "Take them out one at a time!"

Inside the cubicle, safe for another second and a half, maybe, Garrus had time enough to shoot one of the vorcha. One less in between him and the krogan. Overhead, the second varren floated in a nimbus of dark energy, steaming guts spilling out of a shotgun hole in its side, red tongue lolling out of its mouth under sightless eyes.

"AAARGGHH!" A krogan roared. Shepard's Locust chirped out to Garrus's right. Garrus sent out an electric pulse in the direction of the roaring, taking out the krogan's shields. He heard the roar change tone and register, becoming pained and guttural before stopping.

Two more vorcha were circling around, trying to corner him. Garrus seized the stinking, dirty thing around torso and throat, pulling its body to him and firing up into the jaw. He held the corpse in front of him, shielding him a few extra seconds as he moved back across the room, toward Jack's position, firing at the second vorcha all the way.

Jack backed him up. The second vorcha fell, and Garrus let the corpse of the first one fall. Garrus stood back to back with Jack, facing off with the last vorcha, Kureck, and his last krogan soldier. Shepard stood on the other side of the room, near the vorcha. His jaw had gone slack, and he was trying to back away now, thrusting his pistol in front of him.

"No," he snarled. "No good. No—"

He fired. So did Shepard. The last vorcha went down, several of his long, needle-like teeth knocked back into his mouth in the spread of Shepard's fire.

Kureck's krogan fixated on her, eyes narrowing in rage. He screamed a wordless challenge and charged. Shepard just vanished, and through his visor, Garrus saw her simply step aside, flanking the krogan to move into position to attack Kureck, still stationed in the rear of the room.

In a violent thrust downward with the palm of her hand, Jack sent a shockwave barreling toward the krogan charging at the place where Shepard had been. "I can't see," he yelled at Kureck. Then he fell, knocked off his feet by Jack's attack. Garrus fired with Jack. It took them a few shots each to take him down, but they did it before he could come at them.

"Right," Kureck grit out. "Who the hell are you people?" He lit up violet—he was biotic. But Jack's barrier flared to cover Garrus for a moment, thrusting his attack to the side. Garrus and Jack split up, moving in different directions. Garrus moved toward the right flank. Jack went up the center, charging straight at him, wreathed in blue and warping the air half a meter all around her, and Kureck forgot all about Garrus and Shepard.

There Shepard was, in perfect position on Kureck's other flank, her Locust exchanged for her heavy pistol. Her tactical cloak timed out. Kureck realized what had happened right before they hit him. He was dead before Jack got there, caught in the crossfire Garrus had set up with Shepard.

Jack's biotics dissipated, and she glared at them both. "I was right there," she complained. "I don't know why I go anywhere with you. My mission, and you couldn't let me have the bad guy. Typical."

"He's not the bad guy," Shepard said, looking down at the remains of Kureck's head. "He was in charge of the bad guy's scavenger team." She looked back up and around at the wrecked, empty facility. "Why would they come here?" she wondered aloud. "How would they even know about it?"

Jack shrugged. "Don't know. But there's no good reason to come here. The only room left is my old cell. Whoever Aresh is, he's in there." She turned her gun over in her hand. "I want to plant the bomb there anyway. Might as well do it on his corpse."

With that, she turned around and started toward the only closed door left in the place. Garrus and Shepard looked at one another, and followed.


A/N: Have a chapter. A nice, big, thick one. Oddly, I had almost the entirety of the following chapter written before this one. I still have to finalize its beginning, but you'll get it very shortly. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten nearly as much written on the chapters after that. Bear with me. We'll get it done!

Leave a review if you've got something to say,

LMS