Selar walked up the stairs of the skyscraper, its shape and occupants ignored by the Ward outside of their nameless contribution to the crowds and the skyline, like so many other buildings and people on the Citadel. It was a worn and dusty place where people made do with what they had and what they could get. Beran lived on the third floor.

And when Selar reached the door of the apartment, a keeper working a few yards away glanced curiously at him. The keepers did more work at the edges of the Wards, but Selar didn't know why. Despite its seemingly helpless pair of arms, this one had still been able to access the wiring in the walls for maintenance. It clicked to itself, almost thoughtfully, as it picked through circuits.

Selar ignored it in favor of the door, which was triple-plated just as Grau had said.

Using his C-Sec omni-tool, the one he had secretly kept, Selar synced his credentials to the door's interface. He sucked in stale air and dust motes as the lock connected to C-Sec's emergency system. It flashed red for what felt like an eternity, beeped, and then finally lit bright green. He was still in the system, thanks to T'Ven, and the door slid open with a whisper.

And Selar exhaled in relief. He knew he would have gotten stuck in the ducts. "Thank you, Madam Sergeant," he said quietly, because that was what you said to T'Ven even when she wasn't around to hear it.

"Thank you," a voice echoed.

Selar looked up from the lock and the keeper hissed once, then a second time. A pair of mercenaries had pushed it aside in the narrow hallway as they approached. Selar recognized the asari who had spoken immediately. She had been feeding bread to the mulwiches earlier on the Presidium. Now, a turian was with her.

They were both wearing the basic light armor that mercenary companies provided to their new employees. That didn't alarm Selar as much as the turian's face. He looked shockingly like Beran. This turian's face was bare, however, and that was an important difference. Beran's markings were worn and forgotten most of the time, but he was still loyal to the Hierarchy and their civil codes of conduct. This turian had no such ideals.

Selar kept his omni-tool open. He said to the asari, as unpleasantly as he could, "You're a long way from the ring, sweetie-heart."

She tilted her head and studied his dark blue suit, looked up at him and said, "So are you."

Cold steel pressed against the back of his neck before he had the chance to light his omni-blade. A salarian voice behind him said, "Don't try anything."

Selar ignored that and swung around immediately, shoving the pistol aside as he grabbed the salarian, but the other two piled onto him, fighting him to the ground. The mercenaries dragged Selar into Beran's apartment, where he was thrown into a chair at the rickety old dining table. The asari took the pistol, firmly pointed it against the base of his horns while the turian tied his hands - with actual rope, Selar noted with disbelief - then his omni-tool was taken and his pockets were emptied. The contents were dumped on the table.

"You came here to look for something," the turian said, finishing the knot. "What was it?"

"Just something to sell," Selar lied evenly and tonelessly.

"There's nothing in here worth more than a bottle of ryncol and you know it," the turian grated out, in a startling imitation of Beran's serrated sub-harmonics.

Selar stared at him. He said, less evenly, "You're not as good at that as you think."

"Good enough to get rid of the guy," the turian muttered, dropping Selar's bound hands.

Selar studied him with a hard expression. So this was the turian from the hospital's security vid who had killed Opel. And this must be Meiko's false escort, he thought, the one who had appeared while Selar was in the academy's basement.

At the table, the salarian tossed the keycard and the implant aside. He peered down at the prayers written on Selar's small seashell with disgust, picked it up and held it in the light. "This guy's one of those Enkindler cultists, isn't he?" He glanced derisively at Selar. "Prothean ruins are just old tech, you idiot. Magic isn't real."

The asari laughed faintly, passed the pistol from one hand to the other. "Don't you believe a wheel reincarnates you as someone else when you die? How is that not magic?"

The salarian threw her an exasperated look. "It's science. It's about energy."

"Uh-huh."

Her pistol was heavily modified, much like the weapons C-Sec had been running into in the foundations. A picture, once in confusing pieces, began to cement itself together in Selar's mind.

And he tested the bindings on his wrists, keeping his hands mostly still in his lap while he gauged his chances. Three would be too many with a gun involved. As he looked around for anything he could use to escape, the turian went to Beran's kitchenette, rooting around the cabinets until he found a box of dextro-edition Blast-O cereal. Without hesitation, he dumped it out on the counter and pulled something out of the pile. When he handed it to the salarian, Selar could see that it was an omni-tool wristlet that was sealed in a clear bag to protect it. Beran was probably using its memory drive to store files.

Beran had been right: someone was listening when Selar questioned him in the basement. "Who hired you to follow me?" Selar asked them. "It's someone working at the academy who's pulling your strings, isn't it?"

"Be quiet," the asari said.

Selar glared at her modded pistol. "The attacks in the foundations aren't random, are they? You've been orchestrating them using your C-Sec contact. That's why there's no trail or evidence for us to follow. There's no black market or contraband involved, just you doing their dirty work with weapons from the rim."

The asari didn't answer at first, but her faint look of satisfaction was unmistakable. "You were always on our list to sweep up, sweetie-heart," she finally said. "If you were smart, you would have stayed locked up where we put you."

"Why are you attacking people down here?"

She didn't bother responding. And his expression grew dour as the salarian removed the omni-tool from its sugar-dusted bag and started it up.

Just as Grau had said, Beran's apartment hadn't been searched. C-Sec hadn't even bothered to come in for the sake of the frame-up. Now, Selar had rolled out the red carpet by leading the mercenaries straight to what must be Beran's investigation files. They could extract anything useful and then simply delete the memory drive.

While the salarian worked, the turian mercenary picked through each corner and hidden nook in the small, one-bedroom apartment. Wearing Beran's face, he tore photos of Beran's wife and daughter off the wall, dumped the contents of every closet and cabinet, then finally began tipping over furniture and tearing open anything that might hold a secret compartment.

Watching it all, Selar had to admit that the guy was thorough. The salarian was probably thorough, too, but it wouldn't be easy to access an omni-tool that belonged to someone as paranoid as Beran. He was going to be working on the encryption for a while. And the asari waited with the pistol pointed.

But Selar wasn't dead yet, which either meant they were inexperienced or still needed something from him.

That something revealed itself soon enough. "Passcode," the salarian called out when the omni finally lit up with a login screen.

The asari glanced questioningly at Selar, who said, "Hell if I know."

"We don't have time for you to be coy," she told him. "I can do a meld to confirm the passcode, but if you don't like the idea we'll have to use a more archaic approach. You tell me the code. You lose a piece of yourself here and there every time it doesn't work." She added with a tilt of the pistol, "We'll send you to the recycling vats in pieces if we have to."

Selar looked at her steadily and said, "I don't know it. Tearing my horns off won't make much of a difference."

The salarian said, "It might."

Selar glanced at him. "People in pain will say whatever you want to hear to make the pain stop. Their confessions are useless for anything except manipulating other targets. Is this your first day?"

"Of course not."

"Then you should already know that there are more effective ways to extract information," Selar continued with a frown. "You look like you've got the strength of a paste noodle so you're better off using strategies that won't put you on the wrong end of a fist or a sidearm if things go south."

The salarian glared. "Hey, cloaca. I'm not the one tied up here like a chump."

The asari laughed, probably had enough experience to take the exchange lightly, but the salarian's horns were burning up. Selar couldn't find any satisfaction in it. The real threat had already been made by dumping Beran in the basement and pretending to be Meiko's new escort on the ring. Once they were done with Selar, they could go right back to finishing off the people he cared about.

"Just rip the code out of his head with a meld," the turian demanded suddenly, running his hand along a groove in the wall. "We don't have time for this."

"He's C-Sec," the asari pointed out. "They're trained against it. Besides, I don't exactly trust Seket here to hold him down while I do it."

The salarian made a rude gesture at her and went back to work. He wasn't getting beyond the login screen. And from what Selar could make out, it wasn't like any omni-tool screen he had ever seen before.

"He's just bigger than the other lizards, that's all," the turian said. He wiped the grime and dust off his arms. Beran wouldn't be winning any awards for housekeeping. "There's a krogan downstairs and I don't feel like getting friendly with him if this guy's a screamer. Get the passcode out of him and let's get out of here."

"You don't run things," the asari replied. But she said to the salarian, "Go watch the stairs."

The salarian gave her an uneasy look but set the omni-tool down and headed out the door. Selar heard him go, counted the fading steps in the hallway.

Twenty-four steps.

The asari sighed, tossed the pistol to the turian. She retrieved a cord from her belt, looped it, and pulled it tight against Selar's neck before he even realized what she was doing.

The asari didn't hesitate; she was going to cut off the blood supply to his brain until she could force a meld. Neither did Selar; he twined his foot around her leg and immediately heaved himself sideways, chair and all, throwing them both against the old table. It wasn't a calculated move, but it was probably his only chance, and the table collapsed when they both fell into it with a crash. The chair broke. The omni-tool and the implant and the seashell all scattered across the floor.

The cord loosened. Just a little, not enough.

Selar would last longer than other races without air, but he only had about a minute before she cut off the blood supply to his brain and he passed out completely. And the asari was on him again, straddling his stomach while her cord tightened like a noose. Whatever she wanted, she would get while he was unconscious. And she'd kill him once she realized he didn't know the passcode.

Blood pounded uselessly in his head as he struggled with her on the floor. He felt the turian grab his legs, holding them down. The world dulled to gray-green at its edges and the meld threatened beyond, like an ice-pick digging behind his eyes.

Thrashing sideways, he grabbed onto what he hoped was a broken piece of the chair or his omni-tool on the floor. But it was neither; Selar's tied hands wrapped around the implant. He stabbed blindly upward, as hard as he could, piercing the sharp edge into what he hoped was the asari's neck or something vital like an artery. From the shriek that erupted through the gray fog, he hadn't missed.

The cord slackened completely.

The shriek lengthened into a scream that didn't stop, just grew higher pitched. Selar sucked air into his lungs, pushed her off through the rush of oxygen racing back into his brain and dove forward. The turian grabbed the pistol but Selar swung his tied fists as hard as he could. The turian fell back with a screech and the gun went off uselessly, blasting an energy slug at the ceiling.

Before the turian could get his bearings, Selar grabbed the guy's head and slammed it against the floor, hard enough to knock him out. And then he pounded it down again, and again, until he heard the plates crack with a wet crunch.

Five steps left, he thought. The countdown had begun when the asari started screaming.

There wasn't enough time to find his omni-tool and free his wrists with the blade. So Selar grabbed the pistol, shot the salarian through his chest just as the guy darted back into the apartment. And the salarian stared, wide-eyed with shock, before he fell to the ground with a thump.

Selar took a breath, ripping the cord off his neck in the fresh silence of the room. It landed like a dead snake in a pool of blue blood.

He knew he needed to get his hands free. But as he set aside the pistol and groped around the floor for his omni, his fingers smeared chalky marks on the floor. There was powder all over his palms, and it was also floating atop the turian's blood like an oil slick.

Unsettled, Selar turned the turian's body over and peered down at the broken face. Each plate was dusted with stage make-up, painting Beran's likeness over the turian's own. In the dim shadows of the Ward it was difficult to see the illusion for what it was. But Beran was already framed up, so why keep the disguise?

Selar frowned and rubbed his thumb over a painted mandible.

There wasn't enough time to think it over. Steps echoed outside in the hallway once again, this time heavy and brisk. But it wasn't Grau who appeared in the doorway grumbling about the mess. Instead, it was Commissioner Rehokan, who crossed the threshold wearing a long tan coat with the sleeves rolled up. The end of his cigarette was an angry spot of red.

"You would think," Rehokan grunted out, passing by the bodies with disgust, "that three would have been plenty. Not enough eyes between them, if you ask me."

Selar inwardly berated himself for not cutting his hands free yet. He said, "I'd be dead if they were paying more attention, Commissioner." He took a chance and added, "I hope you didn't pay them much."

It paid off as Rehokan tossed the cigarette. "I would have picked a different group if I had been given the choice."

Selar didn't have time to feel betrayed. He dove for the pistol.

Rehokan had expected that, kicking it aside with ease and then lunging. And the Commissioner was barrel-chested, all muscle and brute force. Selar was no match for him up close, not with his hands tied. Rehokan had him back down in an instant. Selar landed hard against a pile of magazines.

Rehokan cracked a fist and took the pistol. He sifted through the mess that used to be the table.

Selar coughed up blood and dust as he tried to sit up. "Why even get me out of the basement if you were just going to come after me like this?"

"You're about as smart as the damn mercs," Rehokan muttered. He picked up Beran's omni-tool. "The frame against you was weak so I helped get you out and waited to see where you would go." He tilted his head to the left, bluntly added, "I knew you'd do your Madam's bidding instead of running. And now here you are like a loyal varren, just like I thought you'd be."

Selar watched Rehokan with hard eyes. "I'm here because I'm trying to help my partner."

"We both know who holds your leash," Rehokan replied gruffly, looking at him with all four eyes suddenly. "It isn't the old turian."

Selar clenched his jaw, didn't respond to that. He'd made a dire mistake and he was about to pay for it. He'd been too relieved to get out of the frame-up and too distracted by Tesik to question the situation like he should have. It would be easy for Rehokan to finish off Selar in a place like this, far away from prying eyes.

Worse, Rehokan had Beran's omni-tool and whatever was on it. Selar almost laughed even though nothing was funny. He'd done the Commissioner one last favor, it seemed.

Rehokan tucked the omni-tool into a fold in his sleeve.

Selar said, "You've been helping this area for years. Why go after C-Sec employees down here all of a sudden?"

"C-Sec employees," Rehokan echoed, as if that was laughable. His quartet of eyes were unyielding in the shadows. "Only T'Ven's contacts have been targeted in the foundations. She's crossed a powerful group of people and even I won't take her side against them."

Selar said, "The embassy."

Rehokan's top two eyes narrowed. "What do you know about it?"

"Nothing useful," Selar answered. He was trying to get the cord around his wrists loosened, but it was tight enough to cut into his skin. A few feet away, the salarian mercenary was laying face down in a pool of green blood. The asari was slumped against the wall with the silver implant sticking out of her crest like an antenna. She didn't look euphoric, not like T'elis had in the morgue. Instead, she had seen the gates of hell open at the end, with her mouth twisted into a startled, foaming grimace.

Rehokan grunted out, "You're lying."

Selar looked away from the asari. "Am I? I know they're offering immunity to a slaver so they were probably making credits at the docks. I know they've been using you and your stiffs here to attack people." He added, "And I know I'm going to introduce myself to them if I get out of this. That's not real useful right now."

Rehokan bared his teeth. He picked up the seashell from the floor, scowled at it. "The embassy isn't making credits down here," he spit out. He threw the shell, watched it clatter across the floor. "Their accounts are empty thanks to T'Ven and they're in a bigger mess than they're willing to admit."

Selar pushed himself up into a sitting position with a grimace. "Thanks to T'Ven?"

"Out of the loop, varren?"

"I don't get paid enough to keep up on the scuttlebutt, Commissioner."

Rehokan snorted faintly, but didn't elaborate further. Instead, he said, "I warned them about this place, but anyone below their caste only exists to serve their whims. And unlike everyone else on this boat, I actually want to go back home to Kar'Shan. I'm damn well going to once I'm done running their errands."

"You conspired to murder C-Sec employees and dropped a frame on Tesik's desk. They're not letting you go anywhere." Selar's voice hardened. "They're going to kill you when they're done. You're a loose end."

Rehokan wasn't swayed by the argument, but his anger dimmed and his shoulders lost their tight posture. "Maybe they will," he admitted. "It's what any of us down here would do, isn't it? But you and I are both on leashes in this place, make no mistake." He checked the heat sink on the pistol, seemed pleased with it. "And we both know T'Ven won't save a varren twice, not even a useful one."

Selar said, "She wouldn't still be running a place like this if she was soft, Commissioner."

Rehokan acknowledged that with a nod. He said, "If you could leave this place, would you? Or do you enjoy being chained to this crumbling excuse for a Ward district?"

Selar didn't answer right away. He hadn't expected the question. And then he said, "Everyone would leave lower Tayseri if they could. Even me."

Rehokan's face was expressionless as he pointed the pistol. "Then I'm doing you a favor."

Selar was already off the floor. The first shot grazed his shoulder. He was able to land a hit on Rehokan's side despite his hands being tied, but Rehokan slammed a fist onto Selar's already painful ribs, another against his stomach. Then another. The blows kept coming until Selar was on the floor again. Rehokan roared.

Selar knew he was done for, felt the next flash and bang of the pistol more than he heard or saw it.

Every muscle in his body tensed. But as the sound faded away Selar could still see, could still move even though every inch of his body felt like he'd been run over by a freighter. And Rehokan was laying in the dust and blood next to him, very still and very heavy with his rolled-up coat sleeves askew.

They stared at each other. Rehokan's eyes were empty.

And Selar lay there, breathing hard.

He was in too much pain to be shocked. But Rehokan had been right: T'Ven would never save anyone twice. And in the doorway a hooded figure was holding a gun, and the gun was trembling like a tree leaf in a cold breeze. He knew who it was immediately, listened with disbelief to the heels of her little shoes clicking as she walked in and froze at the sight of Rehokan's shattered skull. She made a distressed noise that sounded soft and frightened.

"That was a good shot, Ogawa," Selar managed to cough out. It must have sounded like garbled dry heaving through her translator.

"Constable Selar," Meiko said, looking up from the mess with wide eyes. She stepped around the body and pulled the hood of her coat down. She knelt and began working at the cord on his wrists. "Constable," she said again, cutting it with her omni-tool, "I was so afraid that I might hit you by mistake." She reached out, almost touching his bleeding shoulder.

"That wasn't you," Selar told her, rubbing his wrists. "Can you help me up? Beran has some supplies in his bathroom."

In the bathroom, Beran kept bottles of omni-gel and some medical supplies for dextro and levo. Selar used everything he could, poured the gel on his neck and his wrists and his shoulder until he reeked of antiseptic. He was going to be in a world of pain again when it wore off, but it would keep him on his feet for a few more hours. He smoothed a bandage over his shoulder while the shower nearby dripped water.

He placed a hand on each side of the sink basin, took stock of his condition. His left side burned with pain, but he didn't double over. His shoulder ached, but no major blood vessels had been torn. Both horns were intact. And, as he considered the things Rehokan had said, one comment interested him the most.

Their accounts are empty.

That explained the conversation on the OSD, Selar thought. They were broke and skimming credits from their Ambassador. But what had they bought, and what had caused them to retaliate against T'Ven? How much was she keeping from him?

Meiko watched him from the doorway. "I followed you," she was explaining, clutching the doorframe. "I... I lost you for a while. I'm sorry."

He glanced over his shoulder at her. "If you'd found me any earlier we'd both be dead right now," he said. She wasn't supposed to be down here at all, but he was glad she was. He wasn't going to get on her case about it. "Thank you for coming after me," he said, letting go of the sink and turning to her. "You've got good timing."

She said quietly, "I suppose we're even now," and pulled the coat tighter around herself, clutching her waist. She glanced back to the main room. "Can I confess something to you?"

She looked like she was about to be sick. Selar said, "If you need to."

"I thought it would be easier to kill someone," she said, her mouth twisting faintly. "I'm glad you're all right, but I didn't realize how awful it would be."

So much for her life of violent justice against slavers like Vantius, Selar thought. Her face was turning an unexpected shade of green. But at least she felt something about it. He told her that she had done well and he told her that she would be all right. He also told her that he was glad to see her, and then he took her to Beran's bedroom.

She sat down on the bed, hugging herself too tightly and gazing out the window. He left her there, safe for now, for his own sake as well as hers.

Selar returned to the main room and searched the bodies, knowing he didn't have much time. He found a small tattoo on the salarian's back depicting the Blue Suns logo. It was a new company, one rumored to be working out in the Traverse. They'd probably taken the job to establish a presence on the Citadel. It would explain why C-Sec hadn't seen the weapons before.

He took their gear and Rehokan's identification, obscuring any evidence that he and Meiko had been there. No one paid much attention to dead mercenaries, there were simply too many of them. And when he was done he knelt and dragged his hand through green blood, then blue, then ochre yellow.

The keeper was still in the hallway and Selar went out to it. He flicked the liquid right onto its face.

It hissed at him, just as it had with the asari. Paying a keeper any attention was a gamble; if it perceived a threat it would defensively melt into a puddle and somewhere, deep in the Citadel's foundations, another would appear to replace it. But this one didn't melt, just moved its mandibles.

Selar kept his hand out as he walked it back into the apartment. It grew agitated at the scene and the new readings on its little device. He washed his hands in the kitchenette.

Meiko peeked out from Beran's bedroom. Her expression was uneasy. "What's it going to do?"

Selar said over his shoulder, "Nothing pleasant."

Keepers picked up trash and anything that looked like trash, bodies included. They put everything into the recycling vats where it was separated into useful molecules like water or dissolved into the dust that clouded the star system where the Citadel floated. They moved furniture when no one was looking and maintained systems no one quite understood. And evidence was useless if they came upon it first. It was a matter of intense frustration for C-Sec to find their crime scenes neatly cleaned up.

But it was useful, sometimes. Selar's circle in the enclaves of Shalta had taught him that.

And a second keeper filed into the apartment, whispering to the first. Then a third followed, and a fourth. Selar scanned the dead asari with his omni-tool while they dragged the salarian feet-first beyond a panel in the wall, pushing the body into a duct.

As he watched the omni, a map of haphazard lightning strikes built itself on the screen. Selar swore under his breath, then ran it again to make sure. When a keeper came for the body, Selar pushed it away. The brain scan looked nothing like what had happened to T'elis.

It was Meiko that finally beckoned him back to reality. She placed her hands on the crook of his arm.

Selar looked at her, his hand already raised to push the keeper away again, then his expression softened. He pulled her hood up over her head and tucked her hair inside so no one would notice her as they left the building.

But no one opened their doors or looked outside to see what had happened. Judging from the low snore of a sleeping krogan in the management office, no one had called Grau for help. Tayseri's edge wasn't as dangerous as the Terminus systems near the rim, but when people were one misfortune away from being evicted into the misery of the foundations they couldn't afford to stick their necks out or poke their horns into other people's business.

And as the pair disappeared into the crowd of the Ward, Selar wondered what was on Beran's mysterious omni-tool, and why its login screen had been written in thessian script.