The Shepard family had had their share of awkward family dinners. Val distinctly remembered some times in her teens when she and her mother pointedly hadn't spoken a word to each other for the whole meal. This particular dinner, though, felt like whole new realms of awkward. Alex was taciturn and lost in thought, mechanically shoveling food and coffee into his mouth. Mama kept going on about office politics. Misha, determinedly cheerful, spent most of the time ignoring both Val and Alex. The innocuous anecdotes Val tried to throw in to keep up with conversation sank unnoticed, so she gave up and let herself run through scenarios of what to say to Vega, what he might say in turn, how she could respond.
She was overthinking it, she told herself. He knew something was up. She would only be offering him answers. He'd get it. He could roll with it. Still, she couldn't stop her mind wheeling in circles, only half listening to the conversation. Talitha, fortunately, had picked up the slack and was filling in the awkward silences at the table with chatter. Something about Ivan, and some plans they'd made to travel somewhere.
"What are you talking about?" Mama asked. Sharply, but not not unkindly.
Talitha paused, frowning. Val glanced up, the stillness yanking her attention back to the conversation. Misha glanced at her across the table with eyes full of worry, chewing on his lip, but she had no idea what he expected of her.
When Talitha didn't answer, Mama sighed and put down her fork, her expression grave. "I know it's been hard for you, and you will always be welcome in our family."
Talitha pulled back in utter confusion. "What?"
Mama ignored her and kept talking: "But you have to remember that Ivan's gone."
Gone? Val frowned, trying to match up what she'd heard and when. Talitha blanched, her eyes going round. "What? No, that's not right, he —"
"You have to face it," Mama said firmly. She blinked rapidly and reached for her napkin. "We all have to face it. Goodness knows I don't want to — my baby boy — but it won't do you any good to forget."
"Mama." Misha touched her arm. "Maybe give her a break?"
"But — he was fine," Talitha said. She looked around the table for support, trembling and wide-eyed. Misha glanced between Talitha and Mama, all worried sympathy. Mama dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.
Val turned to Alex, a cold suspicion replacing her confusion. Alex's expression had gone grim, and he met her gaze with understanding.
The last she knew, her youngest brother had been safe and recovering at an Alliance hospital. But that could have changed at any moment, reality altering itself so that his rescue had never happened.
It hadn't happened, apparently.
As silence congealed around their table, Talitha pushed her plate away and lurched out of her chair. "I have to go." She was away before any of them could reply, weaving among chairs and tables and knocking someone's silverware to the ground with a clatter. Mama swore under her breath.
"I'll talk to her," Val said, starting to get up.
"Maybe you can get through to her," Mama said with a damp-sounding sigh. Val didn't answer.
When she got outside, it took her a moment to spot Talitha, hightailing it toward the lab, but she stopped and whirled around when Val called her name.
"Why would she say that?" Talitha's fists were clenched at her sides, and her eyes were wide enough that the white showed all the way around the iris. Her whole body trembled, tight with suppressed tension.
"Because she thinks it's true," Val said, as gently as she could. Because it was true, right now, in this particular twist to the universe.
"But he was fine," Talitha said, voice rising. "He been wounded, sure, but he was in the hospital. He was making a good recovery. We exchanged messages. I talked to him. I remember. It was like... two days ago. He was excited about getting released and getting to join us. I didn't —" Her hands came up, framing her face, and her shoulders hunched. "— I'm not... not losing my mind, I didn't make that up, it didn't —"
Her voice cracked. For a moment, she looked lost, so much like the broken, scarred girl Val had once seen on the docks of the Citadel. Val reached out and caught Talitha's wrists, one in each hand. "You're not," she said firmly. "You didn't make anything up. It's true. Or it was true. Remember, they're still changing reality."
Talitha made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "That's the theory. But why, why would they change anything about Ivan? And why do I still remember?"
To hurt me, Val thought darkly, and felt the echo of Harbinger's voice in her bones. She recoiled from the thought, even so. Instead she said, "You said it yourself: I'm some kind of fixed point. If I remember, maybe you remember. And they might not have changed that on purpose. He was in combat. Just a few things going differently could change the outcome." She'd had so many near misses, they all blurred together. Any marine could say the same.
Talitha shuddered. "Unintended consequences," she muttered, and shook her head. "I don't accept this. We can undo it, right? We can still fix it." She looked up at Val, her eyes still wide and wild.
Val hesitated, heavy with uncertainty. "I don't know if we can. Or how we would." Or if we should. This whole reality was altered from true. If she could put it back, should she? Did she have the right to alter trillions of lives, deciding who lived and who died? Did she have the right to fix things for one person?
She'd made calls like that before, staggering toward whatever the Crucible had unlocked, because there was no one else to do it. Now, everything she'd thought she was accomplishing was warped out of place. Joker, Tali, and Wrex gone, Liara changed... and now her baby brother lost, again. And she couldn't even feel the kind of frantic grief Talitha was feeling, because to her Ivan Shepard had died a long, long time ago, young and unformed. Talitha, though, had lost a lover. If had been Garrus... Val had to suppress the urge to fire off a message to him immediately.
"Right, we're all supposed to be dead," Talitha whispered. "Or... something." She twitched, a quick shake of her head like she was trying to shake off a mosquito. "I dreamed about... wires."
"Don't." Val's grip on Talitha's wrists tightened. "Talitha, don't go there. You don't want those memories."
"I feel like someone in a horror vid," Talitha whispered. "Like there's something out there, ready to get me. And now this..." She straightened and squared her shoulders, shaking off Val's hold. "Nobody thought we were going to stay together," she said, her voice firmer. "Him going off to boot camp, me to college? Everyone thought we were idiots. I heard so many stories about people breaking up, or cheating on their hometown honey, or whatever. Even people who wouldn't say that to our faces just sort of smiled, like you do at kids who don't know any better. You did," she added.
Val crossed her arms, uncomfortable. "I did?"
"Yeah. You were back on leave, for like three days. Ivan was so excited." Talitha lifted her chin. "You weren't totally discouraging, but you smiled and said hey, a lot of things could happen. People changed a lot, in training. You were nice about it, don't get me wrong. But I could tell you didn't think we'd stick it out. But we did."
"Talitha..."
Talitha's voice rose. "We put in the damn work. We talked all the time, and we stayed together even though we were doing different things. And we're — we were going to get married." She stopped and swallowed. "I'm not saying I can't live without him. But I'm not giving up, either. We can fix this, can't we?"
Val exhaled. "We don't know how." Saving the brother she barely knew wasn't the mission, even if they could. The primary mission had to be finding out the Leviathan's plan and stopping it. Anything else would be a bonus.
She didn't say that.
"Maybe not," Talitha said. "Not yet. But it starts with finding them, right? So I'll do it. I'll use the artifact, and EDI can track the signal." She turned on her heel, her shoulders straight.
"It's dangerous, Talitha," Val said sharply. "You're opening yourself up to something you might not be able to shake."
Talitha looked back. Her face was set, resolved. "You can't stop me," she said matter-of-factly.
Val could think of several ways to stop her, actually. The resolve on Talitha's face told her she'd have to resort to something drastic, though, and Talitha wasn't a little kid. She was a grown adult, capable of making her own choices. Val had no business forbidding her from using the artifact if she insisted on it.
Besides, even if she couldn't summon up the same level of rage for her little brother's death, she knew that feeling, the gut-deep rejection of the facts presented to her. She'd felt it when she heard about Joker, about Tali, even when she saw how Liara had become in this version of the universe: that sense that this was not right, and could not be allowed to stand.
Maybe all of these wrongs could be changed. Maybe not. She had thrown herself at impossible causes before, though.
"All right," she said. "We'll try it." She looked back toward the mess hall. They were going to need Alex for this.
Fortunately, he was already stalking out of the hall, headed right toward them. He caught Val's eye and tilted his head, inquisitive. As he reached them, Talitha started walking, so fast that she forced Val and Alex to hustle to keep up while she steamrolled ahead. Val relayed her conversation with Talitha to Alex while they went.
"So we're doing this now?" he said once Val had finished.
She glanced ahead at Talitha's rigid back. "She's pretty determined. And pretty upset."
"No shit," Alex muttered.
Val eyed him warily. His shoulders were hunched, his mouth set in a hard line. "You doing okay?"
He shook his head roughly. "I wouldn't say that, but I'm not surprised. If they're still making changes, anything could change at any time."
That was exactly the uncertainty that made Val's skin crawl. She glanced around at the camp, all nondescript prefabs, and yet everything was just a little off from the camp she'd first arrived in. "Do you think one of us could just disappear?" she asked, uneasy.
Alex barked out a laugh. "You ask that like I have a fucking clue. I keep telling you, I'm just guessing how all this shit is working."
"Well, that's reassuring."
He snorted. "Guess that's what I'm here for."
She laughed in turn. "I'm glad you're here," she said.
Alex shot her a startled glance. They'd come to the lab, and Talitha was already keying open the door, so there was no more time for conversation. Talitha marched into the lab ahead of them, her shoulders tight and rigid. "Right," she said, her voice a shade higher than usual. "How do we do this? Just open the shielding?" She turned expectantly toward the case where the Leviathan artifact sat.
"You don't do anything," Alex said, hitting the lights and heading toward the control console. "Sit. Let me figure this out. I'm going to have to set up additional shielding to make sure whatever they are gets you and no one else."
The orb lay smooth and gleaming within its case, like a giant, malevolent pearl. Val eyed it warily. "When we did this before, someone else could step in if something went wrong. Kind of like a spotter," she offered.
Alex glanced up from his screen. "Wasn't that with someone who'd already been under their control?"
She grimaced. "Yeah."
"Yeah, not sure that's going to work. Not sure you should even be here. Aren't we trying to be extra fucking sure they don't eat your brain?"
"Thanks," Talitha said. She'd picked a chair with arms, and was gripping the armrests tightly.
"You'll be fine," Val said, trying for calm. "We'll stop the contact as soon as there's a problem." She reached for her omni-tool and sent Garrus a quick message. Can you get to the lab ASAP? Alex was right, she shouldn't leave herself vulnerable to the Leviathan's attempts, but she also didn't want to leave Talitha to face this alone. A little back-up would be nice. "We're going to need EDI to track the signal," she added.
"I know that," Alex snapped, slapping something on the interface. "EDI, you free?"
"I was not doing anything of significance," EDI said.
"If we disable the artifact shielding, can you start tracing the signal?"
"I can, if there's a signal to trace."
"Yo, Commander. What's happening?"
Val jumped at the unexpected voice. James Vega loomed in the doorway, frowning quizzically at the three of them.
Shit. She was supposed to talk to Vega tonight. After dinner, she'd said, and here he was.
"Don't you knock?" Alex demanded.
"I did. Seemed like no one noticed. Seemed like something serious was going on."
His gaze searched all three of them. There was no way he wasn't picking up on the tension. Val blew out a breath, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation.
"I'm going to let creepy aliens control me so we can get a trace on them and go stop whatever they're doing," Talitha announced, high and clear.
Val put a hand over her eyes briefly, squeezing them shut. That was not how she would have started this conversation.
"You're doing what?" James said.
This was all happening much too fast. But hell, let it happen. Val made a decision, and as soon as she did, some of her tension dissipated, leaving her poised and ready.
"It's a long story," she said. "You ready for it?"
James stared at her, eyes sharp under his heavy eyebrows. "Course I am. You know it, Commander."
"Jesus, we are not in a fucking movie here," Alex muttered from behind her.
Val ignored him, keeping her eyes on James. "I'm Commander Shepard," she said. "But you already knew that, right? You remember me on the Normandy." Even though he shouldn't. Even though that life had been erased.
James frowned, squinting at her, and passed a hand over his close-cropped hair. "Yeah. I mean, look, I know who you are. We met at that hospital a few weeks back. But I remember other shit, too. It's the damnedest thing."
"You're telling me," she said softly.
"Not just the Normandy. I remember you in Vancouver."
"When I was under arrest." Val nodded. "Cooling my heels in custody and trotting out to testify to the brass every other day."
"Playing those fucking card games the rest of the time," he added, eyes narrowed, unfocused.
He remembered, all right. "Yeah," she said, watching intently for his reaction. "We blew out of Vancouver when the Reapers came, and we fought the war together. I got to the Citadel in the end, and the Crucible fired. And then some very powerful beings rewrote reality and did it all over again with a different Commander Shepard."
James stared at her for a long moment. She stared back, resolved. Sure.
James blinked and shook his head. "Shit. That's loco."
Val grinned a little, her worry slipping away. "I know. Isn't it always?"
"What are you saying, that all of this other shit, that John Shepard isn't real?"
"No, he's real, too," Val said. "They just started over. Readjusted some things to their liking."
"What things?" James asked warily.
"We're still figuring that out. Seems like a lot of things are just a little different. But they didn't count on me being here, and they didn't count on me remembering the way things were before. They're still manipulating reality, and I don't know why, but I'm going to stop them if I can." She looked him square in the eye. "Are you in?"
James stared back at her, eyebrows lowering. For a moment she was afraid she'd pushed him too fast. Then a slow grin spread over his face. "Hell yeah," he said. "Some shitheads gonna fuck around with the whole galaxy? Not on my watch."
"That's the spirit." Elation bubbled up under her relief. One more for her team.
#
"It's cold," Talitha said softly.
She sat in a pool of light, harsh on her fair hair. The artifact shone dully under the same light. Unshielded. Val stood on the other side of the room next to Alex and his console, chewing on her thumbnail. "Underwater," she murmured.
Garrus hadn't replied, even after she'd sent him a second message. He was probably tied up in meetings, she told herself. No reason to worry. He wouldn't be happy they'd proceeded without him, but she hadn't wanted to test Talitha's nerves with a longer wait. James was here to help if anything happened. They'd handle it.
She worried, all the same. Anything she didn't have her eyes on seemed like it might change while she wasn't looking.
Alex flicked a glance toward her and returned his attention to the console. "EDI, are you tracking the signal?"
"Yes. I am beginning the trace."
"It's really cold." Talitha hunched her shoulders, squirming in the chair. She'd agreed to restraints, after seeing what had happened with Traynor, but they weren't exactly designed to be comfortable. "And dark. It's so dark —"
She stopped short, her mouth half-open. Her eyes squeezed closed. Val gritted her teeth, willing herself to stay put on the shielded side of the room. The darkness of the lab, the workspace carved out of piled-up crates and miscellaneous equipment, felt claustrophobic. The way the artifact's pearl-gray surface gleamed took her back to the rocking seas of Despoina, the cold weight of the ocean filled with ship carcasses. It had been so easy for the Leviathan to riffle through her memories, curious and remorseless. They'd turned themselves into one familiar face after another, each of them staring at her like an intruder, some kind of insect. Shepard had talked to a lot of aliens in her career, but most aliens — turians, salarians, asari, quarians, hanar, whoever — most of them were understandable. They wanted to live and breathe and amuse themselves and do useful work and have families and friends. She'd built a career on making connections, on the premise that all of them had enough in common to get along. The Leviathan were different; the intelligence that had touched her mind was truly alien, chilly and indifferent to anything she or the other little lives that depended on her might want. They were like the Reapers they'd constructed that way. Even the geth were more relatable.
Talitha threw back her head on a long gasp, blinking rapidly as she stared up into the light. "This mind," she said, and stopped.
Her voice had changed, growing harsher, more guttural. The room suddenly seemed a little darker.
"Signal acquired," EDI said.
Talitha was looking around the room now, blinking rapidly. Calculating.
"Yeah, that's right," Vega said, moving into Talitha's line of sight. "We wanted to have a word with you assholes."
Talitha stared at him blankly for a moment, as if she didn't understand him. Then her lip curled. "Insignificant."
"Is that so?" Keep it talking, Val had urged Vega. Alex and EDI were concentrating on the trace. After debate, Val had agreed to hang back, behind Alex's workstation. Alex thought it would be better if the Leviathan didn't know she was there.
"Go away," Talitha said disdainfully. "You are not wanted here."
Her arms were working back and forth, straining at the bonds that held her to the chair. Val wished for Garrus and his clean magnetic handcuffs. "Vega, watch out," she said softly over the com.
"Nuh-uh, none of that." Vega put a big hand on Talitha's shoulder. "You don't get to keep this one. We just want to have a little talk."
"We have nothing to say to you," Talitha hissed.
"Come on, nothin'? 'Cause I got a lot to say to you."
Talitha turned her face away. Her eyes went unfocused.
"I am losing the signal. I do not have enough data," EDI said.
This couldn't be for nothing. "Fuck it," Val muttered under her breath. She stepped forward, far enough into the light that Talitha could see her. She was still behind the shielding. "Wait."
James glanced back at her in surprise. Talitha's head lifted. A sneer crept over her face. "Shhhepard."
"Yeah," Val said, her heart pounding. "Why are you so worried about me, anyway?"
"You're not supposed to be here," Talitha said. She swayed in place. In spite of Vega's grip on her shoulder, she rocked the chair hard. The chair legs on one side rose and then slammed into the floor. "Not supposed to be here, not supposed to be here."
"You've said that before," Val said. "But you talked to me before. Why not now?"
"Why are you still here?" Talitha demanded. The chair rocked again. Bang. Bang.
"Yo, come on, let's settle down," Vega said. He shifted his grip so he could step behind her.
Talitha's face contorted into a snarl. She twisted in her seat, and her teeth clamped into Vega's wrist. He yelped, jerking away, and the chair crashed sideways to the floor.
"Why are you here?" Talitha screamed, struggling. She thrashed against her restraints, while Vega swore and clamped his hand to the bleeding wound.
Val couldn't stand it any more. She rushed forward, ignoring Alex's protest behind her, and bent down so she could look Talitha in the eye. "You tell me," she snapped. "What's the master plan? What are you doing?"
Talitha's wildly rolling eyes locked onto Val and she went still. Her mouth stretched into a ghastly grin. "Shepard," she breathed.
In one instant, Val was glaring into Talitha's eyes. In the next, she hung suspended in the dark, surrounded by churning cold. Something creaked.
Water. Fathoms of water, and an aged diving mech, a frail shell against the crushing pressure of the water.
In the deep, something moved, vast and inky dark.
Shepard.
She inhaled, and breath stuttered in her lungs. Panic spiraled through her — oxygen, she needed oxygen — and she forced herself to breathe in and out, regular, shallow breaths.
Shepard.
As once before, she felt herself scrutinized by many-eyed intelligences, speared and spotlighted. The landscape shifted from the deep ocean where she had gone in search of a Reaper-killer, to the hazy gray world where she seemed bodiless. Talitha approached, stiffly, her head tilting to the side. "What makes you special?" she asked, her voice grating on the sibilants.
"Stop it," Val said tightly.
"We can't work it out," Talitha said, circling around Val. "You were supposed to be erased and gone. Why are you here?"
Terror caught in her throat. She forced it down with anger. "Stop wearing people's faces."
"But you like these faces better than ours," Ann Bryson said, coming around from behind her.
She shook herself, shook off the clinging cold sense of dread. "Maybe your science needs some work," she growled. "No matter what you did to get rid of me, I'm still here. I beat the Reapers, and I can beat you, too."
"You did not defeat the Reapers," Bryson said, scrutinizing her. "You only sprung our trap. We had to wait so many cycles for you to build it."
She stared. Cold pressed in all around her. No wonder the Crucible's plans had been so convenient, so easy to follow. So feasible, even for a galaxy fighting for its survival. "You meant this to happen all along."
"Not this. You were not supposed to be here. But the Reapers are ours again."
Shit. She'd been set up, the whole time. "But they stopped," she said. "They stopped the harvest."
"Yes. Now they serve us." Talitha sneered back at her.
Her rage solidified, crystallized like ice. "Nobody's going to serve you."
"Val!"
She lay flat on her back on the floor of the lab, with Alex and Vega both peering down at her. She stared up at them, blinking, trying to connect where she'd been with where she was. Somewhere behind the two men, Talitha said in a shaky voice, "What... what did I do?"
Still cold and stiff, Val pushed herself up to a sitting position and winced as her head throbbed. The room around her looked normal: prefab metal and boxes, lab equipment, Alex, Vega, Talitha. Talitha was rubbing her head, too. Shadows loomed large, arcing away from the harsh light at the center of the room. The artifact sat, round and gleaming, in its case. Val glared at it. The normality of her surroundings didn't ease the churning in her stomach.
"Talitha?" she asked. "You okay?"
"I think so," Talitha said. The real Talitha, not the Leviathan wearing her face. "Ugh." Her mouth worked, as her expression crimped. "I think I taste blood."
Vega laughed a little, though her heart was still pounding. "Yeah, you got a little feisty there."
"Fuck." Talitha rubbed her arms. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't worry about it. Nothin' medigel can't fix." His sharp gaze swung back to Val. "What about you, Commander?"
"I'm fine." Her ears rang, dully, and her neck was stiff and sore, but none of that was important. "Everyone's fine, then? Did we get it?"
"You were supposed to stay behind the shielding," Alex snapped.
"They would have left," Val shot back. "I had to do something, or we would've lost the signal."
"We could have come up with something else."
His anger bristled at her nerves. She'd done what she had to do, and she didn't feel like dealing with his disapproval. "Did we get anything? EDI?"
"I have traced the signal to a limited region of space."
Val hauled herself to her feet. "Show me."
The galactic map EDI displayed made Val wince. "That's a big chunk of the Traverse and part of the Terminus, EDI." It made sense that the Leviathan weren't hiding among the more densely settled planets claimed by the Council races. Still, she didn't relish combing through that many systems. It would take too much time; there was no telling what their enemy might do. "Any way we could narrow that down?"