All Things Worth Keeping

by the-dandiest-of-lions

When Indigo Carter moved to the Citadel to study music at Auxua School of the Arts, she thought she knew what to expect. However, she certainly never imagined she'd be making the acquaintance of a failed hitman trying to ride out the tidal wave of his own past. Life is such a messy ordeal that when the Reapers come, they almost feel like a welcome cleaning service.

4. Mary Had A Little Limb - Cute

Chapter Four: Mary Had A Little Limb / Cute - Count Basie

Five paces left. Turn.

Five paces right. Turn.

Back and forth, rinse and repeat, ad infinitum, metronomically consistent and precise. As Indigo's focus lapsed for the millionth time in forty minutes, she wondered if her lecturer's constant pacing would eventually wear a hole in the stage.

Unconcerned with possible property damage, Professor Sokil continued to expound upon the development of turian Karintus-era music at his usual speed of 'space hamster who'd just chugged a litre of coffee.' His words trickled through Indigo's brain like sand through an hourglass, and she stared at the blinking cursor on her computer screen, trying to force her train of thought out of Tangent Station long enough to write some notes about the vocal music of the Valluvian priesthood.

Sokil turned and paced right. It would be kind of funny if he did wear a hole through the stage and just plummeted through, mid-sentence. How long would it take for such a hole to form, if it were possible? Like water erodes stone, professor erodes floor. The idea reminded Indigo of when she was a kid, wondering how many grains of sand formed a window, how many licks were in a lollipop, or how many hairs were on her head. She used to imagine counting them by plucking each strand out, one at a time, until she was bald; a perfectly normal thing for a young girl to picture herself doing. Her mother had been mortified when she told her about it, but then she'd laughed.

"Hmm," murmured her friend Cuilam, nodding to himself as something Sokil said clicked in his brain.

And that distracting habit didn't do much for Indigo's concentration, either.

Blah blah blah, said Sokil.

Hmm, hummed Cuilam. Nod, went his head.

I will rip your spine out and use it as a belt, Indigo thought.

She could summarise her knowledge of turian anatomy in two words—'tall' and 'spiky'—so she wasn't sure whether an elbow to the stomach or a punch to the face would be more effective at shutting Cuilam up. A third, more elaborate option consisted of stealing one of the mallets out of his bag and whacking him over the head. She'd always fancied a go at percussion.

Sighing, she scrolled through the academic database she'd opened up on her computer, the real cause of her vexation. The Illuminated Primacy remained frustratingly insular, so looking for substantial articles about hanar music was like trying to find a needle in a world where needles didn't exist. Cursing her choice of case study, she tabbed through a few extranet sites, each as vague as the last. Aside from the few essays and articles she'd dug up from the university's archive, academic sources remained scarce, with almost no sheet music available for purchase and only a few recordings on the public domain. She'd transcribed a couple of excerpts for a basic harmonic analysis and even read up on hanar biology to research how they produced sound, but any conclusions she drew about the cultural context of Kahje's music would be conjecture at best.

"Hmm," said Cuilam, right on cue.

The stomach, Indigo thought, shooting his profile a glare. If only the shooting part was more literal. Definitely the stomach.

"It seems our time is up," Sokil announced at precisely 1300, "so that's all for now." He busied himself at the podium, closing the lecture slides. "Before you all go on to bigger and better ventures, I remind you that your essays —" He glanced over his computer screen at the class, a sly salarian smile on his face as half of them froze, perhaps having hoped he'd forgotten about their assessments, and continued, "—are due in my inbox tomorrow at 1700 hours. Late submissions will suffer a penalty of ten percent per day, so I recommend you get them in on time if you intend to pass this course."

These parting words rang in Indigo's ears; a death knell that drowned out the restless post-lecture chatter of her classmates. Her essay currently sat at a mediocre 374 words, and the final word count had to be at least 2000. Why had she left it so late? She'd spent too much time distracted by her trombone practise and assignments for other classes, and now she was fucked. A nauseating anxiety tugged at her stomach and sent a chill through her limbs. She logged out of her computer and slid down in her seat, making a sound that would not be out of place in one of the ghoul-infested catacombs in Galaxy of Fantasy.

"What's with the zombie groan, Red Rum?"

Indigo rubbed her eyes and looked up at Dan, who sat on her other side with his feet up on his desk, brown eyes regarding her with amusement. "I'm just really hankering for brains." Maybe she could test out a new one.

"Rules Cuilam out, then."

"Hmm…" Cuilam turned and looked over the top of Indigo's head at Dan. "What? Did you say something to me?"

"Only the sweetest of nothings." Dan stretched his lanky arms and cracked his knuckles. "So, we on for band practise? Tules booked a studio for a few hours, and I want to run through a new piece."

Indigo sighed again and wriggled back upright in her seat so she could pack up. "Sure."

"Wow, Red, try not to explode with all that enthusiasm."

"Fuck off, Dan," Indigo grumbled, but resolved to kick her shitty mood in the teeth before the rain cloud above her head ruined anyone's parade. She caught up with Dan and Cuilam as they joined the slow-moving shuffle of students out of the lecture theatre.

Dan craned his neck, searching the crowded lobby. "Can you guys see Tula?"

Indigo spied a modestly-dressed asari outside the building, standing behind a pillar. As she watched, Tula poked her head around, searching the lobby through the glass doors while trying to keep hidden. "There she is," she said, pointing. "She looks like she's hiding."

Dan nodded, unperturbed by his girlfriend's strange behaviour as she sidled back out of sight. "I scared her in the bathroom this morning, made her smear her lipstick."

"A capital offence," Indigo said, nodding. "I would hang you for less."

"That checks out—you've quite the violent streak, Red Rum. She's probably trying to get me back. Quick, you guys go say hi normally, I'll sneak up on her."

Cuilam shook his head, watching Dan slip through the crowd. "I can't believe I used to have a crush on him. Having him as a boyfriend would be exhausting."

"Really? You fancied him?" Indigo asked, though she had an inkling before.

Cuilam nodded, unabashed. "Yeah. And then I got to know him."

Indigo laughed and opened the door for him, smiling despite having spent a good deal of her time mentally exhausting her curse word lexicon at his expense.

"He's still cute, though," said Cuilam as she followed him outside, "but don't tell him. It'll go to his head."

"Yeah, if that thing gets any bigger it might develop its own gravitational pull. That's how science works, right?" Indigo caught Tula's eye and waved. "Hey! How was your class?"

"Shh! Act natural. Where's Dan? I'm trying to—" Tula broke off with a thin shriek as Dan came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders. She turned around and whacked his chest. "Goddess, Dan, I hate you!"

Dan grinned and wrapped an arm around her, entwining their fingers. "No, you don't."

Despite Dan's eagerness to be what he called a "proper" band, and Tula's militant approach to organising regular rehearsals, they ended up detouring to the campus food court at his insistence. "Can't make magic on an empty stomach," he said as he paid for a box of oily-looking asari gumbo with rice.

"Here I thought we were just playing music," said Indigo, leading the way back outside. "Can I put Cuilam in a box and saw him in half?"

Cuilam stared at her. "Excuse me?"

She gave him a sweet smile. "I love and treasure you, friend."

"That's a tempting proposal, but two Cuilams would probably break the universe," Dan said, popping the lid on the container of food and loading up his fork.

"I think I can take that as a compliment," Cuilam mused, frowning.

"You know we're not really supposed to eat in the practise rooms, Dan," Tula reminded him.

"We're not in the practise rooms right now, Einstein."

"I just don't want you getting us banned from… well, everything."

Dan responded by shovelling in such a large forkful that Indigo wondered if he could unhinge his jaw like a snake. "Mmm! I know turians get a rep as meat-lovers," he said, the words garbled by calamari, "but asari really know how to cook seafood."

"I prefer the human way, actually," said Tula. "My father is Japanese, and he cooks a lot of fish. I've been trying some of his recipes, but it's not the same."

"Well, you can't cook for shit," Dan chimed in.

She rolled her eyes. "The pasta thing was one time, Dan."

"One unforgettable time. I really enjoyed carving through that block of spaghetti with a steak knife. It was like eating a flavourless brick."

"You're a flavourless brick," Tula muttered, and stole a piece of his calamari.

"Thanks, babe. Speaking of seafood, there's a great sushi place out near the Silversun Strip. The whole floor's a fishtank; it's dope."

Indigo frowned. "That seems structurally unsound, but sure." She looked at Tula. "I didn't know your father's a human. You must be—" Pretty young, she was going to say, but Dan nudged her in the ribs. "Ouch. What?"

"You tread upon the thinnest of ice, my friend," Dan warned in a low voice. "She's sensitive about her age."

"I am not," Tula protested, glaring with icy blue eyes. "I'm older than all of you, at least."

Dan grinned. "Yep, okay, you're not sensitive at all. Want me to call you Matriarch? Not gonna lie, I have a bit of a thing for older women."

"Oh, shut up. And asari aren't women!"

"Turians don't eat a lot of fish," said Cuilam, as if the conversation had never segued away from food. Indigo wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been thinking about fish for that whole time. "We aren't a sea-loving people. Comes with the tendency for drowning."

"And Ryuusei is not authentic at all," Tula continued on, quick to get back on what Dan liked to call the No-Stop Tram to Rant City. "They have a maître'd for Goddess' sake. And croissants."

Dan shrugged. "Yeah, well, authenticity is relative in space. We're in a melting pot of galactic capitalism. Everyone's mixing flavours, eating vat-meat risotto and space-cow steak with elasa-based sauce. That gelato place on Tarusk Parade tops their pistachio with crickets." He shuddered.

"They're called selibekni," said Indigo, happy she could sound at least a little cultured. "They go well with coffee."

They entered the music building, named after asari Matriarch Tellista, instrument maker, anthropologist, and follower of the famed Matriarch Dilinaga. When she wasn't holed up in her dorm or hopping from ward to ward, Indigo spent most of her time in this building, practising or attending lectures. Her lecturer in Council Race History had talked about asari Matriarchs' search for "ultimate knowledge" following the asari's first strides into interstellar colonisation. Headed by Dilinaga, a small group of Matriarchs struck out into the black, seeking enlightenment to further develop asari culture. Tellista intrigued Indigo—one of the few to resurface from that secretive exploration, she devoted her time to music and art, making quiet contributions rather than sweeping Thessia with grandiose political movements. Indigo had never been one for the spotlight, either.

She and her friends wandered down the corridor, headed for the lift that would take them up to the larger rehearsal studios. Students milled around studying, talking, and eating, instruments both human and alien muffled from behind the closed doors of practise rooms. Indigo found her locker and scanned her student I.D. chit to open it, grimacing at the unflattering holo she'd have to live with for the next four years. The pianist in the practise room beside her stumbled while playing the first movement of Beethoven's Tempest sonata, bashed the keys in a discordant jumble of frustration, and yelled, "FUCK!" loud enough to carry through the corridor. Indigo stifled a sympathetic laugh and grabbed her instrument, closing her locker behind her as she set off down the corridor after her friends. After a breath, the music started up again.

"Proudly: I finished my essay last night," Dan announced, impersonating the monotone bass of an elcor. "Informative: the elcor beshka ensemble typically performs twice a solar year, when Dekunna's hemispheres reach spring, and they revel in honour of the sweetened winds, or whatever." Having inhaled his lunch, Dan dumped his empty food container in a nearby bin.

"'Or whatever?'" Tula echoed, eyeing her boyfriend with a mixture of exasperation and amusement. He poked his tongue out at her.

"Elcor don't seem like the revelling type," Cuilam remarked, brow plates lowered in thought. "They're so slow."

"Every species celebrates things," Indigo pointed out. "Hanar spend thirteen days doing poetry competitions to celebrate the Enkindler's gift of speech."

"Sounds dead boring," said Dan. "What's hanar poetry even like, anyway?" He looked at Tula, who eyed him a little apprehensively, and began to recite to her. "'Shall this one draw a comparison between the other and an axial rotation of the planet during the hottest seasonal period?'"

"So romantic." Tula pretended to swoon, long eyelashes fluttering, and Dan caught her.

"You wrote about the jellies for your essay, right, Red?"

"Don't call them that," said Indigo, smiling at his butchering of Shakespeare, "and yes. Well, I am. Writing, I mean. I haven't finished." The lift finally arrived and they all piled inside. The Tellista building's lifts were notoriously sluggish, but it seemed to Indigo like that was a Citadel-wide problem.

Dan elbowed Cuilam in the side. "I had this nerd waking me at all hours, asking me about Puccini. I hate opera."

"You did Puccini?" Indigo asked Cuilam.

He raised a brow plate. "Is that so surprising?"

"I just expected, like, taiko drumming or something."

"I like opera." Cuilam scratched at a mandible. "What? I can't have depth?"

"Not if you want my respect in your taste, no," said Dan. "Still think you should have done Mingus, Tules. Or Coltrane. You need more jazz in your life."

"And you need more Haydn," Tula replied.

Indigo grinned and opened her mouth, only to gasp as Dan poked her in the ribs. "Ow! Hey!"

"Say anything about seekin' and I'll make sure you're right in Cuilam's sights during the concert," he told her.

"My time has come!" Cuilam's mandibles flared in what Indigo guessed to be a shit-eating smirk as he looked down at her. "Hope you're good at ducking."

Indigo feigned offence with a scoff. "Better than you are at aiming," she retorted, cocking a brow. "What ever happened to 'quick and painless?'"

Cuilam raised his chin, baring his neck in a turian show of smugness. "I'm branching out."

"Out you branch, then!" Indigo mirrored his posture and beckoned him with both hands. "Hit me with your best shot!" She narrowed her eyes at him. "I'm throwing down the gauntlet, Verallicus."

"I don't even know what that means, but it's settled," said Cuilam, his flanged voice hard as steel despite the humour in his amber eyes. "You, me, Tchaikovsky, and sixteen cannons."

"Really?" Indigo's smirk became a grin. "You don't want to just meet out the back of a Fishdog Food Shack and have it out the old-fashioned way? Turian-human fisticuffs?" She waved her fists in front of her.

"Spirits, have some class, Red!"

"Oh, Cuil, not you too!" Indigo groaned, even though she kind of liked the nickname Dan had given her. "I'm already named after one colour. Okay, fine, show-down at Reyanommond." She fixed Cuilam with a hard, challenging smile.

"Ten credits on the shortstack," Dan whispered to Tula.

"Just try not to blow it up," Tula advised Indigo, ignoring Dan. "It's a new auditorium, after all." She pressed her palm against the holo-lock, unlocking the studio. Indigo pulled a face at the breath-warm air inside, the room as stuffy as a skycar parked too long in the sun.

"Ah, fuck, the aircon's broken again," Dan groaned, reading the notice on the wall. "Welcome to Tayseri Ward, where no-one has their shit together."

"Turians like the heat," Cuilam informed them as he made a beeline for the drumkit in the corner. "Just remember to stay hydrated."

"Thanks, Mom."

"It's not that bad," said Tula, already seated at the piano. "At least the lights work."

"It'll be a dark day when they don't," said Indigo. They all ignored her, and she supposed she deserved that. After divesting herself of her trombone case and her bag, she went over to the windows and pushed the button to untint them, allowing strips of light to filter through the shutters. Faulty air-con or no, the Tellista practise rooms were a definite step up from the carpeted hovels she'd spent hours locked away in at her high school; big and well-lit, with good acoustics and baby grand pianos. Her gaze lingered on the familiar shapes of Tayseri's skyline, following the congested pedways, the bridges and catwalks criss-crossing between buildings, scaffolding jutting into the sky like broken teeth. Despite the construction and the crowds, the noise and the chaos, Indigo couldn't deny the feeling of home that bloomed in her chest at the sight. She had a place here; an Indigo-shaped spot in the universe in which to grow.

Dan pulled her from her thoughts by thrusting a page of sheet music into her face. "Here you go. When we're all set up and everyone's here, we'll get started."

"That is indeed how rehearsals happen," said Indigo. Dan flipped her off. Smirking, she went over to get her instrument out.

"What are we working on?" Cuilam asked, taking his own sheet music without looking at it. "More Brubeck?"

"Nope. A Daniel Cho original. It's still in draft stage, so I thought we could bounce some ideas around. It's a swing tune, nice and fast. Red, I noticed your rhythm gets a bit sloppy sometimes, so I really need you to work on that."

Indigo frowned, halfway through oiling her trombone slide. "My rhythm's fine."

"Your jazz rhythm. It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing."

"I have swing," she argued. "I'm a bloody playground. There's even a slide," she added, holding it up.

"Very nice. All I'm saying is, classical musicians sometimes find it hard to—what? Tules?"

Tula eyed him, frowning. "Daniel, where is your instrument?"

Dan groaned. "I knew I'd forgotten something. Hang tight."

Cuilam chuffed and shook his head. "How could he forget it?" he asked, which Indigo thought was a bit rich coming from him. "It's bigger than he is."

"We went out grocery shopping the other day and he forgot his shoes," said Tula.

Indigo shrugged, attaching the slide of her trombone to the bell. "I once left my cello in a concert hall. I was on the train home when I realised I didn't have it with me. Nearly had a heart attack."

"You play cello?" Tula asked, looking her up and down as if expecting to see some kind of physical evidence.

"It was my first instrument, besides piano. I stopped when I was fourteen. Sometimes I think about getting back into it, but cellos are expensive."

"I get my viola strings and rosin from a shop on Kithoi Ward," said Tula. "They aren't cheap, but maybe they know somewhere to get secondhand instruments."

"Maybe," Indigo mused, thinking of her dwindling savings account. "I have enough on my plate as it is without distracting myself even more."

There was a knock at the door. Indigo opened it and jumped when the young woman on the other side greeted her by shouting in her face.

"Guess who got into C-Sec Academy?"

"Jesus Christ!" Indigo yelped.

"Close, but not quite," Abeda said, grinning. She gestured to her colourful headscarf. "Also, note the hijab? A slight religious discrepancy there."

"Can it by any chance be you who got into C-Sec Academy?" yelled Dan from behind Abeda, making both her and Indigo jump.

"Yes, it can!" Abeda shouted.

"Congratulations, but stop yelling!" someone shouted from the next room. It sounded like Sellis, the salarian percussionist from the Tayseri Philharmonic. "Some of us are trying to practise!"

"We'll keep it down, Sel!" Abeda called back. She stepped inside and dumped a sports bag on the floor, followed by her tenor sax case, notable for its various stickers and holos that Indigo enjoyed examining. "Sorry I'm late, by the way," she added, turning to address Indigo and Tula. "I was—"

"At the gyyyym!" Dan crowed from behind her. He came in with his double bass, the door shutting closed behind him. "At this rate you'll win an arm wrestle with a krogan."

"That's pretty much the plan. I can only stay for an hour, I'm afraid; I have to be back for a vidcall with my family, and I just came from rehearsal with the C-Sec Band. My brother's just made N3, so we're catching up to celebrate. My parents are on Benning, so it's been hard trying to line up a good time for a group vidcall."

"That's nice," said Indigo, ignoring the recurring pang of homesickness. She'd been terrible at keeping in touch with her own family. "That you're calling, I mean, not that it's been hard to do so. N3 is some Alliance thing, right?"

"Interplanetary Combat Training. He's stationed on Rio."

"Ah, I remember now, like what's-her-name." Indigo paused and clicked her fingers, frowning as her mind drew a complete blank. "Shepard."

"Ah, yes," said Dan, adopting a wistful tone. "Who can forget the famous exploits of humanity's first Council Spectre, the Hero of Eden Prime, Commander What's-Her-Name?"

"Oh, piss off!" Laughing, Indigo whacked him on the arm.

"Commander of the S.S.V. Thingy!" Abeda proclaimed. "The ship that led the defence against the rogue Spectre What's-His-Face and his army of thingamabobs!"

Indigo shook her head. "You guys are such dicks. I still like Schrödinger's Dogs. For us, I mean, as a name."

"What about Little Bo Bebop?" Abeda suggested. "Speaking of Shepard, and shepherds."

"Is this another sheep thing?" Cuilam asked. "Like that song we played when we all swapped instruments, and Indi spent far too long laughing at my attempt to play trombone. 'Mary Had A Little Limb?'"

"I still don't know how you made a sound out of that," Dan said to Cuilam, pointing to Indigo's trombone. "How did you make an embouchure? Wedge some putty on the gaps between your…" He gestured around his face. "Mouth bits? I don't know the word!" he insisted, while Indigo and Tula laughed.

"I have my ways." Cuilam drew himself up to his full seven foot height, mouth bits held tight to his face in the very picture of dignity. "No putty required."

"Also, Mary had a little lamb," Indigo added, unable to resist the opportunity. "The midwife was amazed." A self-satisfied smirk at a pun well-delivered spread across her face as Abeda high-fived her and Dan groaned like he'd caught her hankering for brains. Her triumph was short-lived, as he grabbed her arm and began herding her out the door.

"Okay, that settles it, we're rehearsing without you," he said, wrestling her trombone out of her other hand and setting it on the floor.

"Hey! Dan—"

"See ya, Red Rum!" Dan's shit-eating grin was the last thing she saw before he shut the door and locked it.

Torn between laughing and yelling, Indigo pounded the door with her fist. "Let me in! Dan, you're a such an arsehole." She grimaced at the unmistakable elephant-fart sounds of a non-trombonist attempting to play the trombone. "Oh, my God, Daniel, stop defiling my precious child, you goddamn musical sociopath!" She knocked louder, over the muffled tones of Dan butchering Three Blind Mice. "And breathe from the diaphragm! You need air support for a good tone!"

"Thanks, Red!" The godawful honking continued, louder this time, and Indigo made a face at the door. How had Cuilam managed to sound more like an actual brass player with no lips? Truly, one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

Sellis came out of the next room, percussion mallets in hand. "What is going on?" he snapped, glaring at Indigo.

"Sorry, Sellis," Indigo said, "Dan's just being a bloody—"

"Hey, Sel, if you don't mind, we're rehearsing," Dan admonished him as he opened the door. Indigo darted back inside with an apologetic glance at the confused salarian and gently extricated her instrument from Dan's grasp. "Try to keep it down, would you?"

---

If you have a two-thousand-word essay to write, you need at least a metric fuckton of coffee. With this thought in mind, Indigo decided to head down to the local markets, a fifteen minutes' walk away from campus along the always-busy main street of Tarusk Parade, a wide boulevard that ran through the centre of the Auxua District. Sure, it was fifteen minutes she could be using to write her essay, and sure, it wasn't like she couldn't just head up to the library and grab something on the way... and sure, okay, maybe the coffee was just an excuse to procrastinate for a bit. But hey, a lecture and a rehearsal back-to-back tended to melt one's brain, and the key to an unmelted brain was a walk and some freshly-filtered air. Plus, with a good dose of caffeine, her essay would practically write itself, and then she'd pass Introduction to Xenomusicology with a HD and her moving halfway across the galaxy and leaving everything she'd ever known wouldn't just be an exercise in hypotheticals, it would be worth it. And the burden of proof depended on this cup of coffee, this cappuccino of destiny, the beverage of self-betterment and academic excellence. Still, it was with a stab of guilt that Indigo glanced back the way she'd come, eyeing the Auxua library as if it would start admonishing her like a strict parent.

Ahead lay the Lamiea District, Tayseri's mid-ward industrial sector, where the majority of the poorer residents lived in hastily-assembled prefabs under the looming shadows of the warehouses and factories. Dilinaga had the worst of it, though. Indigo knew she was lucky living where she was—while she was a small fish in a very big pond, she hadn't been forgotten and left to fend for herself like the less fortunate on the station. A lot of people moved to the Citadel after the destruction, altruism and the promise of credits leading them into the heart of the damage to repair it. Indigo saw tired faces and slumped shoulders at transit stations, construction workers scraping by on minimum wage, working their fingers and talons to the bone in the name of restoring the Council's pretty picture of civilisation.

She wove her way through the crowd, slipping into empty spaces with unobtrusive ease. You had to walk quickly to get anywhere in the wards, and Indigo was now used to navigating the crush of pedestrians and ground vehicles on the Citadel's busy streets. A short arcade led to the markets, the neon-lit walls plastered with scrolling ads for the newest bio-amps and omni-tools. As she emerged into the market square, Indigo began to hear music, live music, and quickened her pace, pulled to it like a physical force.

Metallic percussion, drums, and plucked strings… it sounded like traditional dance music of some kind, though the instruments and melody were unfamiliar. She moved through the throng of shoppers and found the musicians: a group of elcor sitting on woven mats, presumably the beshka ensemble Dan chose as his case study. Working in perfect tandem, they threaded together lines upon lines of rhythm and harmony with an assortment of steel drums, bells, hammered metal keys, and lyre-like instruments. She wouldn't lie, it was odd seeing such delicate instruments played by a species so physically imposing and graceless-looking, but the elcors' notoriously slow movements did nothing to impede the pace of the intricate rhythms. Metal was such a harsh material, but it could produce such a pure sound, and Indigo could see how the music evoked the sweetened winds of spring and changing seasons—swirling melodies cycling around and around, interlocking lines in a flowing river of syncopated rhythms and shifting tonalities.

Listening to the beshka ensemble play, it hit her in that moment how grateful she was for music. Every culture engineered sound to create beauty, twelve notes arranged and rearranged into melodies and harmonies that members of every single lifeform could appreciate. Just twelve notes that reminded her she was not alone, that she might be all right. Even with the occasional jabs of lingering homesickness and the looming stress of a sub-optimal grade, she was exactly where she wanted to be.

Newly inspired to write her essay, Indigo continued on through the market square. The coffee stall she favoured stood alongside a few tables and chairs bordered off by a few planter boxes overflowing with bright Thessian demael flowers. A wave of nostalgia caught at her heart at the sight of them; her mother used to import seeds from Armarli during her brief gardening phase when she'd tried to turn her black thumbs green. They never grew right, despite the botanist's guarantee that they were genetically modified to grow under hotter climates than Thessia, and Esther finally gave up after Indigo's cat Loki dug the entire bed up during one of his weird mood swings.

The owners of the coffee stall knew Indigo from her many previous visits, so she just smiled and nodded when the salarian at the counter rattled off her regular order almost as fast as Professor Sokil. After paying, she wandered back over to the flowers and began to pace back and forth as she waited, thinking about her parents. They'd both probably be at work right now. Her Mum still emailed her sometimes, and her Dad, bless him, sent holos of the cats. Maybe she should try to organise a vidcall like Abeda was having with her family.

A familiar voice yanked Indigo from her thoughts and she glanced over to see Kolyat Krios standing near the coffee stall, busy with a comm. call on his omni-tool. "Lieutenant," he greeted, watching the interface. He sounded tired, the raspy burr of his voice soft and resigned.

"Hey, rookie," a female voice responded. "Did you make the pickup? Did our snitch turn up?"

"No. He's not here."

"How long you been waiting?"

"Just over an hour."

"Damn it. He's probably turned tail and run off, the slippery little veknir. I thought this might happen." A sigh, tinny over the comm. "Look, have your break now—get some lunch or something—and come on back to the precinct within the hour. We'll pick this up later."

Kolyat closed his omni-tool and folded his arms, shifting his weight to one hip. Indigo honestly wasn't surprised to see him—they bumped into each other a lot, and he'd become a familiar part of Citadel life by now—but she'd never seen him on Tayseri Ward before.

They'd met twice since Couchgate and the Great Translator Incident, and apparently those cataclysmic events were enough for them to graduate from fleeting glances and polite nods to having actual conversations. The first time, they'd ended up at yet another Zakera transit hub. She'd just been let through into the Customs scanning corridor when the door on the other end slid open and Kolyat walked through.

"Ah, the two-person scan," the turian on the scanner said after they'd fumbled through some awkward hellos, a smirk lifting his slate-grey mandibles. "Expensive stuff, Krios. This'll come out of your wage, you know."

Kolyat turned, presumably to give the turian one of those impressively unimpressed looks. "Just let me through, Haron. You've held me up three times today. Or have you forgotten?"

"Due process, kid."

"For civilians, not uniformed officers on duty."

"Not just civilians, Krios. All must suffer the slow-moving grid, from Spectres to civilians to whiny drell. Plus, I just like to see your gills puff up."

"They're not gills, and they don't puff up."

"All right, keep your scales on."

"You are very unprofessional for a C-Sec officer," Indigo remarked before she could stop herself. She clapped a hand to her mouth, but Haron only looked amused as he continued the scan.

"Krios has a unique ability to bring out the worst in me. Sorry for the inconvenience, miss," he added, glancing up at Indigo.

"He means being stuck with him," Kolyat said.

Indigo was half-sure he was joking. "It's okay," she'd replied, linking her hands behind her back. She leaned around Kolyat to catch Haron's eye, giving him a conspiratorial smirk. "I like seeing his gills puff up, too," she half-whispered, and the turian laughed.

After a brief goodbye, they'd parted ways, as they always did, and part of her would wonder what it would be like to get to know him better.

She would find out a week later on her way to meet Shay and Kaia at Shin Akiba, when they ended up on the same tram. After a hesitant greeting, Indigo had sat down beside him. He was on his way to a foot patrol shift, and a flicker of amusement passed over his face when she told him she was meeting her couch-moving friends there.

"You're never going to let me live the floating thing down, are you?" she asked when she caught him smirking.

"Perfect memory," Kolyat teased. "Besides, you can't live it down in mid-air."

They spent the twenty-minutes tram ride completing the puzzles on that day's Citadel Newsnet extranet page—he'd been reading the news, and she suggested doing the crossword, which proved an exercise in testing the capabilities of their translators. After muddling through most of the cryptic crossword and moving on to the sudoku, they ended up walking through half of Shin Akiba together before Indigo left to meet with Shay and Kaia and he continued on to work. He was easier to talk to when there wasn't anything weird or annoying happening.

Maybe it was because he was young—around her age, she guessed—or due to the odd way they kept meeting, but she always thought of him as Kolyat first and cop second. She'd only seen him with other C-Sec officers a few times. The sight always threw her a little; a reminder her that yes, the sarcastic drell with the unexpectedly cute smile was an Actual Cop and she probably shouldn't be bothering him. Still, she felt like she'd scratched the surface of him, and she couldn't help but want to scratch a little deeper.

She stepped into his periphery and waved when she caught his eye. "Hey, Kolyat."

He startled, black eyes widening in confusion while pale eyelids blinked. The four eyelid thing—that was something odd to get used to. "What the hell? What are you doing here?"

Yes, his eyelids and his bloody weird attitude. Two things to get used to. Indigo fixed him with a frank stare, eyebrows climbing to her hairline. "Nice to see you, too," she said, her tone just shy of snapping. He hadn't sounded antagonistic, just surprised, but part of her liked butting heads with people if they had an attitude. 'Pugnacious child,' her mum had once called her when she was a kid, with that affectionate kind of frustrated tone parents excelled in. Indigo remembered feeling extremely offended and spending ages trying to figure out what exactly was pug-like about her.

Kolyat scratched at one dark-scaled cheek frill, his frown softening with contrition. "I just—I wasn't expecting to see you here."

"Nor I you," Indigo countered. "I live here. Did I never tell you?"

Kolyat glanced her over from head to toe and back again with that almost uncomfortably sharp gaze, like he'd missed some physical indicator of her place of residence and was annoyed he hadn't realised. "No."

"Oh." Indigo frowned at her own absent-mindedness, then shrugged to shake off the discomfort at being scrutinised. "Well, I like to preserve an air of mystery. So, the table turns, and I ask the same question of you: what are you doing here?"

"Standing. Looking. Breathing."

Someone was feeling extra sarcastic today. Indigo huffed without any real venom, folding her arms to mirror his posture. "I'm surprised you can manage all three at once," she retorted lightly, taking the sting from her words with a playful smile. "Is that how you landed your job at C-Sec?"

"They only take the best." Kolyat echoed her smile with a small one of his own and rubbed the curved bridge of his nose before letting his hand drop back to his side. "I'm actually here for work."

"I gathered that. The uniform's a dead giveaway." Indigo leaned back against the planter box, stretching out her legs.

"You should join Investigations," Kolyat suggested, deadpan. "They need more detectives."

"I'll be sure to pencil it in for when my romantic future as a starving musician ultimately crumbles. Is that where you work? Investigations?"

He looked uncomfortable for a moment. "Sort of."

"Very vague, very mysterious. So, what intriguing C-Sec business brings a Zakera officer to my neck of the woods?"

Kolyat narrowed his eyes, his brow plates pinching into a frown. His face moved in such odd ways, but Indigo knew she probably looked just as strange to him. "Your what? "

"It's a human idiom," Indigo told him, smiling. "It means my neighbourhood, or vicinity, or what have you."

"Your idioms are so strange. Like 'elbow grease.'" Kolyat wrinkled his scaled nose, the expression oddly cute. "That's a disgusting phrase."

Indigo pictured some murky substance shooting out of a hitherto-undiscovered orifice in the human elbow and had to admit she could see his point. "Anyway, so you had to meet someone? A contact?"

He eyed her. "How do you know that?"

"I kind of overheard you talking to your lieutenant," Indigo admitted.

Kolyat nodded, like he'd expected as much. "Of course you did."

"What was the pickup you had to make? Something scandalous or illegal?" Tayseri was well-known for its crime rates. Poverty and rumoured gang activity hid beneath the surface of the Citadel's epicentre of the arts. She knew she should probably feel nervous about whatever was going on here, but the news articles she read every day about Tayseri's problems just made her want to keep her head down and focus on her studies... and what a job she was doing of that. " I assume the contact was the delivery guy. And you're here alone? I thought you'd have a partner or something."

Kolyat gave her a look. "You do realise C-Sec business is classified, right?"

"Then lie to me." He blinked, and she smiled. "I'll eat it up. Was it red sand? Tainted eezo? A blacklisted Fornax issue featuring a scandalous salarian dalatrass and a roguish krogan pirate?"

Kolyat raised a scaly brow. "That's quite the unlikely pairing."

"Well, nothing else has worked to tackle that particular race conflict."

He eyed her with mock suspicion. "Didn't think you'd be so interested in illegal goods."

Indigo shrugged. "Just looking for a bit of excitement."

His mouth twitched. "I'll let you know if I find anything."

"You know, on second thought, maybe don't. I'd rather not be implicated in the spread of politically-fraught titillation."

"Long black!" the salarian barista shouted.

"That's mine." Kolyat gestured towards the pick-up counter, swiping one of the flowers as he did so. Indigo reached out and held the stem between thumb and forefinger to stop it wobbling, her eyes on the tall sweep of Kolyat's back as he went over to get his coffee. He really was quite nicely-shaped, broad-shouldered with a slim waist and strong limbs, a runner's physique all bound up in uniform and that stiff-looking leather coat. He glanced over his shoulder at her, and she looked away, hoping he couldn't see the blush on her face from the counter.

Kolyat came back, sipping his coffee with the relieved expression of someone getting a much-needed caffeine fix. "So, you study at the local university. Auxua."

Indigo nodded. "I'm doing a Bachelor of Music, majoring in classical trombone."

"That's your instrument?" he asked, gesturing to the trombone case beside her.

"Yeah, I've been playing for about five years or so." Indigo wondered if he'd ever heard one before. Maybe she could invite him to the Tayseri Philharmonc concert she'd be featured in—that was coming up soon.

"What kind of music do you play?"

"Well, I'm more of a classical musician," Indigo said, pleased by his interest, "but I'm in a jazz band with a few friends from school, and I like playing everything. But I've been in orchestras and sung in choirs since I was a kid." She eyed Kolyat for a moment, thinking. "Hey, by the way, you're a drell, right?"

One of the first things Sokil had said to his Introduction to Xenomusicology class was that there were no such things as stupid questions, but Indigo thought he'd make an exception for that one.

Kolyat seemed to agree, judging by the look on his face. "Well spotted."

Indigo tucked a shorter lock of hair her plaits had failed to restrain behind one ear. "That was a rhetorical question," she pressed on, "designed to preclude a statement, which is… you lived on Kahje."

"I did." His tone was guarded, leaving Indigo feeling like he'd closed a door in her face.

"Do you know anything about hanar music?"

"Not really. Why?" Maybe the door was ajar.

"I'm writing a paper for school," she explained. "It's for my Introduction to Xenomusicology class. We have to choose a species and genre for a case study, and I chose hanar vocal music."

Kolyat nodded. He had this way of looking at her when she talked—head tilted slightly due to their height difference, one brow ridge raised a little, dark eyes focussed on her. "Why ask me? Because I'm a drell?"

"No, because of your award-winning career as a hanar musicologist. God, C-Sec makes 'em dumb sometimes," she joked. "Please? You'll have your very own entry in my list of references. 'Krios, K. Personal talk.' Or however you reference casual conversations."

Kolyat stepped closer to the planter box Indigo was leaning against and flicked at the leaf of a flower with a gloved finger. "A footnote reference in an undergraduate's essay. Just what I've always wanted."

"I actually use in-text citations rather than footnotes, but I'm here to make your dreams come true," she said, bumping his arm with her elbow. His inner eyelids fluttered at the gesture, and she smiled. "So, do you have any insights to share?"

"Nothing spectacular. They sing a lot." He looked across the market square, his gaze far away as a memory took him once more.

"I'm a little bit past that," Indigo reminded him once his eyes refocussed on hers, the pale irises discerning as always. The urge to ask about his mnemonic episodes tempted her, but she resisted her nosiness. Maybe it was just his Resting Surly Face, but it hadn't seemed like a happy one.

"That's all I know. I don't like it much." Kolyat gave the flower another flick as if to stop it from bursting into a rendition of a hanar canticle to the Enkindlers and took another mouthful of coffee.

"So, they sing a lot, and you don't like it." She nodded, pretending to mull over these nuggets of knowledge. "You'd make a terrible musicologist," she added, grinning at him.

He looked at her with affronted eyes, putting his free hand to his chest, but a smirk played at the corners of his mouth. "Ouch. You wound me, Indigo."

Something about the way her name sounded in his cat's-tongue-raspy voice made Indigo blush a little. "Just saying you shouldn't give up your day job," she said, hoping he didn't notice the warmth in her face.

He chuffed. "Is this teasing helpful for your essay, or am I conveniently here, serving as a pop quiz on all Things Drell?"

"I didn't bring you here," Indigo argued. "Unless you think I have something to do with whatever you were supposed to pick up."

"I have sometimes wondered what you get up to. You seem to turn up an awful lot. Especially when I'm on duty. It's almost suspicious."

"Yeah, you got me, I'm a dangerous criminal with an dark agenda. It's all part of my ploy to write a really good essay."

"I thought so. You could always go to the Shrine of the Enkindlers," he suggested after a pause. "It's on Zakera."

"What, and get spiritual enlightenment or something?"

"If you like. But there might be some information there that could help."

"Thanks, I'll keep that in mind." She might have time to go there tomorrow. "So you did want that reference after all. I knew it."

"Large cappuccino, cream, three sugars!" the salarian barista shouted.

Kolyat looked at Indigo like she'd ordered a steaming cup of varren shit topped with pyjak guts. "Were you planning on having any coffee with your cream and sugar?"

"Leave your coffee purism at the door and let me get diabetes in peace, thank you very much," she said as she went over to retrieve her sweet, sweet liquid metaphor. She looked over her shoulder once she got to the counter and saw him watching her, just as she had him.

The coffee was just how she liked it: strong enough to stand a spoon in, enough sugar to give her diabetes with one sip, and an entire cow's worth of cream. At least, she hoped it came from a cow—no amount of self-goading would make her adventurous enough to brave McSorley's Cloaca Margarine. "Made from free-range organic varren!" boasted the packaging at the local supermarket, but nothing would persuade her to ingest something with the word 'cloaca' on the package.

"So, you came here for school," Kolyat said once she rejoined him. "A new start."

Huh. It seemed like he was as curious about her as she was about him. That made her feel a little better about this current distraction. "Well… yeah." Indigo paused, a wry expression twisting her face. "Sounds a bit lame if you put it like that."

"I don't think so. How did you get in if you didn't finish high school?"

Indigo shrugged. "I audition well. I'm surprised I got in at all, to be honest, but I was actually accepted to a few other universities. But I'm glad I came here. Something about this glorified hunk of metal filled with melty bugs appealed to me." She couldn't help but wonder where she'd be if she'd taken another offer. Maybe Beckenstein—Milgrom Academy had offered her a place—or even Illium. The Ross School of Art on Demeter had been tempting, but she'd been hesitant to go somewhere full of humans. What was the point of going somewhere different if it wasn't different? "I guess I also wanted to get out, you know… be part of the galaxy." She shrugged and took another gulp of coffee. "What about you? What made you decide to leave Kahje?"

"Similar goals."

"It's a big galaxy," Indigo said, trying to hide her disappointment when he didn't elaborate. "It's nice to see some of it."

"Indeed." His face had that closed-off look again.

She wasn't satisfied with his answer, but that was a selfish way of looking at their conversation and besides, she didn't want to prod him further. Just because he was a minority with an infuriatingly brief way with words didn't mean he was some kind of walking mystery; he was a person. Plus, it wasn't like she hadn't been evasive, herself. He'd left for much the same reason as she: to learn, to explore. He certainly struck her as the restless type, if rather self-contained. Maybe he sought a reinvention of the self, much like she did.

Now that she'd completed her cappuccino fetch quest, she knew she should go back to campus and start working on her essay... She checked the time. It wasn't too late, and she didn't have classes tomorrow. She looked up at Kolyat. "How long do you have before you need to head back to Zakera?"

"Within the hour. Why?"

"Well, I was thinking we could go sit somewhere, if you'd like," she suggested. "Stop your assault on these poor flowers."

He glanced behind her. "You've been squashing them with your bag this whole time."

"Oh, no!" Indigo straightened up and turned to examine the damage. Not too bad, but she held her bag to her front just the same. "Sorry, flowers."

"I'm actually going in there." Kolyat gestured towards one of the many shops crammed into the ground floor of a nearby building. Indigo followed his gaze to the holographic banner scrolling above the entrance. Alisella's Art Supplies , she read, and studied his angular profile with interest.

It wasn't exactly an invitation, but Indigo asked anyway. "Mind if I join you?"

He looked at her for a moment as if trying to figure her out. "Why?"

"Why?" She shrugged. "I just… I don't know. I'm procrastinating. I can go away, if you want."

"I don't care," Kolyat muttered. Indigo frowned at him, and he blinked, obviously rethinking his phrasing. "I meant, do what you like." He scratched the ridge above his frill. "It won't be very interesting."

"You don't know that. I'm easily amused."

"I shouldn't enable your bad studying habits."

"You're not an enabler, you're a convenient bystander."

Kolyat chuffed. "How flattering."'

"So…" She tapped her fingers against the side of her coffee cup. "You don't mind me sticking around?"

"I don't mind," he said, and paused to finish his drink. "Stop asking."

Not the warmest response, but the sentiment seemed genuine enough. If he wanted her to leave, she was sure he'd say so.

The dry, woody smell of paper and clay greeted them as they stepped inside. Paintings lined the walls, displayed in an uneven attempt at a grid, canvasses of different sizes vying for room amidst shelves of brushes, paper, boards, paints, pencils, and sketchbooks. An asari—Alisella, presumably—sat behind the counter, scrolling through a datapad. She glanced up and blanched for a moment when she saw Kolyat in his uniform. "Is there a problem, Officer?"

"I'm here as a customer," Kolyat said, just above a mumble. One hand came up to tug at his jacket so it covered more of his badge, a seemingly unconscious gesture that made Indigo smile to herself.

Alisella blinked at Kolyat, then gave him the affable customer-service smile that Indigo had never been able to master in her brief stint as a barista. "Oh! Well, good. Let me know if you need anything. Feel free to browse our wares, or have a look at the kiosk over here." She pointed to the console on the counter.

Kolyat nodded, his gaze taking in shelves of paint, canvases, and various craft supplies. He kept glancing at the door, so Indigo said, "Hey, look, paint!" and scooted off down an aisle.

"What a surprise," Kolyat muttered from behind her. A moment later, Indigo heard his footsteps following her down to the acrylic paints.

Now that he'd agreed to her company, he seemed not to know what to do with it, which was kind of endearing. She didn't really know why she liked him so much, if she was honest. He was attractive, sure, and definitely an oddball, but he was an interesting person, obviously very smart, and she liked his dry sense of humour. And there was something about him—a drive, a force, a gravity to him. A momentum. Despite his weird attitude problems, he seemed like a good egg... and there was a phrase that might get lost in translation. Did drell hatch from eggs? Maybe she could ask him... but not now.

"I like how there's 'marine blue,' and then there's 'ultra marine blue,'" she said once he came up beside her, browsing the array of colours. She looked at him, having to turn a little—he was standing rather close. He smelled like coffee and leather. "Like they made the marine blue and thought, 'Hey, this could be more mariney. Let's make it marine-ier.'"

Kolyat reached past her to examine a palette of example swatches. "Nothing you say makes any sense."

"Perhaps, or am I but a pigment of your imagination?"

He answered that joke by giving her a look before turning and walking away, further down the aisle to the assorted paintbrushes. Indigo spent a moment inwardly applauding herself for a really quite serendipitous pun—did her very name not lend itself to such?—then followed him.

They wandered through the shop in comfortable silence, browsing the wares. Many of the paintings on the walls were by Alisella herself, ranging from still life to abstracts to landscapes. Procrastination or no, Indigo liked being around Kolyat, watching as he picked out different art supplies—sticks of charcoal, texture paste, something called alcohol ink. He was quick, not lingering or dawdling, and she got the impression he already knew what he wanted. Maybe he felt weird about doing this on duty. Art was obviously a very personal thing for him, and she felt privileged to be here, though it meant she was definitely procrastinating.

"Do you have any holos of your art?" she asked Kolyat. She expected him to say no, remembering the jumpy way he'd closed the door after she'd glimpsed his work from outside his apartment.

"Why would I?"

"To show people."

He shot her a sideways look. "'People' meaning you."

"Maybe. You don't want people seeing what you make?" Indigo trusted her assumptions most of the time, but she liked to know if and why she was right.

His guarded look turned into a sharp glare. "Why the hell do you care?"

"Fuck, okay, I'm just asking."

"You're always asking. It's annoying," Kolyat snapped, and her chest started feeling tight.

"Okay, I'll fuck off, then," she retorted, her face warm with anger and embarrassment, trying to keep her voice level so as not to betray her hurt. "Have a terribly mediocre day, and maybe stub your toe on a chair or something."

"Don't... I didn't mean to be..." He trailed off, looking down and scuffing a booted heel against the the floor in an oddly boyish gesture of restlessness, and she saw how much younger he looked when he wasn't so damn intense. Indigo waited, her mouth pressed into an impatient line. "Sorry. It's been a long day."

"I get that."

"And it feels stupid, sometimes. Trying to do this." He waved a hand, gesturing around the shop, and huffed out a deep sigh, the broad line of his shoulders slumping. Indigo's own posture relaxed in response as her anger waned. He rarely looked so lost, the sharp focus in his gaze replaced with self-doubt and uncertainty. "I don't often tell people."

"It's not stupid at all," Indigo told him, meaning it, and his expression softened when he met her eyes. "You don't have to be an arse about it, though," she added, and he chuffed.

"I'm an ass about everything," Kolyat muttered.

"Okay, you're an arse in perpetuity," Indigo teased, trying to lighten the mood with a smile. "An artistic perpetuarse."

"Are you sure you didn't break your own translator in the lift and blame it on the elcor?" Kolyat asked, lifting a scaly brow ridge and cocking his head. "It feels like you're trying to break mine."

"What a rude insinuation. I happen to be very tood at galking." Despite her claim, they fell into another silence. After a few minutes spent examining the art on the walls, Indigo opened her omni-tool and looked up the Shrine of the Enkindlers. "It's weird to think about the Protheans," she mused, closing the interface after bookmarking the extranet page. "This whole different galaxy before us, with only echoes remaining. Makes you wonder what else is out there. Do you think they really meddled with evolution?"

Weighing a pack of oil paints in his hand, Kolyat blinked at her rambling, but took it in stride. "Probably."

"Scary."

"Not really. We are what we are, regardless."

"Well, you've grown up around hanar, right? They revere the Enkindler's holy meddling."

"I don't think the they view it as meddling."

"It's still creepy to think about, though. We're the lab rats of a dead species, living out preconceived genetic destinies with only remnants of our Prothean overlords remaining."

Kolyat's expression reminded Indigo of how her mother would look at her while listening to her teenaged God-questioning rants. "That's one way of looking at it."

"Well, yeah, I mean, we've evolved in certain ways because we were designed for it. And how far does it go back? Were the Protheans engineered? Who came first? Did the chicken design its own egg?"

"That makes no sense."

"Yeah, I got a bit scrambled there. I'm just yolking around."

He gave a put-upon sigh, but she caught the wry curl of the his mouth, accentuated by the line of darker scales following the full curve of his bottom lip. "Do you always think about this stuff?"

"Eggs, puns, or the implications of engineered evolution on the destiny of the galaxy as we know it?"

"The last one."

"No. Mostly I think about how humans have such stupid names for fruit. Like 'orange.' And 'blueberry.' So literal."

He chuffed. "Literalism would be an improvement for Kahje. The hanar are poetic to the point of tedium, and find the longest ways to say the shortest sentences. Even something as simple as the word for 'stone'— eshtalynden —translates to 'bone of the world upon which the ocean flows.'"

"That's nice, though. Pretty."

"It's not pretty when you have to sit through a half-hour sermon in praise of the Encompassing every week."

"I can see how that would get old." Indigo smiled at his disgruntled expression, imagining a younger Kolyat grumping his way through the routine of prayer. Having been raised a church-going Catholic, she could relate. Still, she remembered the way he'd recited his prayer to Arashu, the shoe goddess who wasn't a sneeze. She wondered how devout he was, and how religion had shaped his life. It certainly had hers, or rather the lack thereof. "It's actually been a while since I've studied," she found herself admitting after a moment.

"But you're young, aren't you?"

"I'm nineteen, almost twenty. But I left school when I was seventeen. High school dropout."

That surprised Kolyat, and he studied her anew. "What happened?"

"Um. Lots of things." Indigo didn't look at Kolyat, but she could feel his eyes on her. She picked at her nail polish, already regretting opening up this particular can of worms. "Er, my granddad died." Even nearly two years after he'd passed, thinking of him still hurt. "And, I mean, everyone's grandparents die, so it's not like it's anything out of the ordinary, but he and I were really close."

"How did he die?"

Indigo had expected the question, but it still took effort for her to finally look up at him. A familiar stab of grief needled her heart, nausea roiling in her stomach once more as unsettling memories of hospital visits and emotional conversations swept through her thoughts. "Brain cancer," she told him. "It was pretty horrible." She thought about saying more, but kept quiet. Her eyes felt hot and she closed them for a moment, banishing the unshed tears. Kolyat didn't need to see her fall apart. Grief had weighed upon her whole family, shared and all-consuming, the bleak inevitability of knowing her grandfather was losing more of himself as time went on. His memory, his co-ordination, his personality, all savaged by the tumour, that dark rotten thing pushing on his brain.

God, she missed him sometimes. She wondered what he'd think of her friends, of her move. At seventy-two, he should have had more time. He'd never visit her on the Citadel, never see her graduate… nearly two years, but sometimes it still felt fresh, and a mere thought could take her right back to that hospital room. A strange emotion, grief; different for everyone, dealt with in many ways, but a constant throughout the universe. Everyone loved, and everyone lost, and everyone grieved. And if you could, you remembered.

She looked up to see Kolyat still watching her, looking more openly thoughtful that she'd ever seen him. Something in his expression felt like a mirror of her past, the directness of his gaze like he could read her thoughts, a hesitant similarity that ran deeper than compassion or pity, and she knew he'd known grief as well, that bone-deep kind that still cut, years after. She pressed her lips together, feeling her lip gloss rub a little, and frowned at her chipped nail polish.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment, glancing away.

Indigo frowned at how raw the whole situation still felt, but she managed a small, tight smile when he met her gaze. "So am I." She took a breath and made the worms wriggle back into the can. "So, yeah, some dicey things happened—I failed nearly all the exams I turned up to, and didn't show up to the others, and I basically decided it was fruitless trying to stitch together the tattered remains of my secondary education, so I just left." It had been a hard decision, but one she'd stood by, despite her parents' disapproval and her own reservations.

After a few more minutes, Kolyat took his purchases to the counter, where Allisella rung them up and charged him 150 credits. He paid without blinking, an unwelcome reminder that she needed to start looking for a job. Beta-testing for Galaxy of Fantasy hadn't paid much, and it was a one-off gig she'd volunteered for. She could start teaching music again, or busking. The Citadel had strict regulations about busking and street performance, but getting a license would be worth it. She didn't fancy working retail or hospitality again, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Indigo drained her coffee and followed Kolyat out to the front of the shop, lingering by the entrance. "Well, my moral support had better mean I get free tickets to your gallery show."

A quick, genuine smile flitted across Kolyat's lips. It was a good look on him, lighting up his whole face, and Indigo couldn't help but grin back at him. "I'll see what I can do. Good luck with your essay."

"Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot about that bloody thing. All right, well, I should probably vamoose," said Indigo. "It was nice to see you again."

"And you," he replied, sounding sincere.

The lights went out with a pop and a descending hum of electronics powering down, throwing the shop into darkness.

In the few seconds of what the fuck that followed, the inappropriate-pun part of Indigo's brain took control of her and she said the first thing that came to mind: "A blackout. How de-lightful."

Kolyat stared at her. She blinked back at him. She could only just see the glint of his pupil in the black.

"Damn it, I bet it's the bloody power grids again," Alisella grumbled, startling Indigo as she strode from the shadows. "The technicians were supposed to fix them weeks ago... I'm so sick of this. Let me find the switch." She bent over and stuck her head between two shelves, patting the wall.

Indigo glanced back up at Kolyat, who hadn't moved but to look out the window, shoulders tense, jaw tight. The hand that wasn't holding a bag of art supplies inched towards her arm like he meant to grip her shoulder.

"What—" Indigo began.

"Shh. Can you hear that?" Kolyat whispered, scanning the market square with narrowed eyes. He swallowed, staring back at her. He didn't have an Adam's apple, but the wine-red pleats of skin at his throat rippled ever so slightly with the motion

"Hear what?" Even as she said it, she heard weird cracking noises, and distant rumbling; like thunder, only it couldn't be… Another three, louder, Indigo flinched. In her periphery, Alisella stood and stepped closer. "Is that—"

The thunderous sound of a multi-part series of explosions slammed into Indigo's head like a battering ram against her eardrums. She gasped, heart leaping into her throat, eyes glued to the thick plume of grey smoke she could see out the window.

Alisella straightened up with a start, banging her head on the shelf with such force that the items on top rattled like chattering teeth. "Ow! Goddess fucking—what the hell was that?" Rubbing the top of her head, she turned and glared at Indigo and Kolyat as if they'd caused the blasts.

Indigo managed to speak, though her breath seemed frozen in her lungs. "Something… it was something… something happened." ' Something happened.' Step aside, Sherlock Holmes, drawled the part of her brain not paralysed by shock. Her pulse climbed, loud in her ears over the cacophony of wailing skycar alarms and shouting voices from outside. How could this be happening? Was it the geth again?

"Get back behind the counter," Kolyat rasped, but Indigo barely heard him, staring out the window. In a daze, she looked at him; a looming feeling of dread creeping over her. "Indigo! Get down!" He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him, his grip tight enough to bruise. As another blast sounded—louder, closer—she hoped he wouldn't let go.