After waking up in Med Bay, Hannah slept often but fitfully. The pain killers Dr. T'Oriza gave her took the edge off, but there was still an inexplicable hollowness that pressed down on her where she knew the pain was supposed to be.

Sana checked on Hannah every few hours and brought small meals. "I do not know what humans eat, but this should be safe," she explained the first time. "I ran an allergy test on you while you were still under stasis to be sure, and you seem to have very few, even to dextro proteins. Even so, your body may reject it, depending on how sensitive it is to foreign foods. This is kalara. It is considered bland by asari standards, but it is highly caloric and rich in levo proteins."

As it turned out, the sage-green, porridge-thick substance was bland by human standards too. Even so, waves of nausea crashed over Hannah shortly after she finished the meal. Sana had prepared a syringe full of something clear and quickly administered it to the IV port in Hannah's arm. The need to vomit soon passed, and she felt her muscles start to relax.

Breathing heavily and shivering from the chill of the perspiration that had begun to bead on her skin, Hannah laughed weakly. "Now I understand why Stripes didn't want any of my food on Shanxi."

Sana nodded. "Odessus is as hearty as a varren. She has next to no allergies of any kind, except for a handful of fruits that are native and common to Taetrus and one family of antibiotics. However, your food would have done nothing for her, except possible harm. While she might have been unaffected by asari rations, human food would have been too foreign. She probably judged that being stranded in the wild on a strange planet with an enemy combatant was not the optimal place to risk dehydration and incapacitation."

Hannah wanted to quibble over the enemy combatant remark, but she suddenly found it difficult to corral her thoughts into coherent sentences. There must've been something else in that medicine that took away the nausea.

Sana smiled sympathetically. "Rest, Hannah. The antihistamines should suppress the nausea while your body processes the nutrients."

Each meal after that was accompanied by another syringe full of antihistamines waiting at the ready in case Hannah reacted badly to the food. It only took a handful of times before the nausea ebbed on its own, and the aid was no longer needed. She was sure she'd never be able to eat kalara again without feeling at least a little sick, though.

#

She often dreamed of Michael. Sometimes they were back on the beach at White Rock, where they met. He'd come up to her, grinning like an idiot with his hands behind his back, offering to give her a dollar if she'd kiss him. She would roll her eyes playfully, but he was handsome and had strong shoulders and an ass you could bounce a quarter off of. She'd consider making a pun on "loon," but she would instead demand payment upfront. He'd tell her to close her eyes and hold out her hand. She would comply, but she'd hold her hand at shoulder level in case he turned out to be a creep after all. Then she'd feel something wet and sandy and moving in the palm of her hand, and she'd start laughing as she threw the sand dollar back into the ocean. She'd open her eyes to see him puckering his lips like a fish and fluttering his eyelashes. She'd laugh again and shake her head. She wouldn't kiss him that day, but she would kiss him that night.

Other sun-soaked dreams of Michael left her frustrated and damning the restraints at her wrists when she awoke.

Sometimes she'd dream about being in Rio de Janeiro again, but there was no Oceanic Flight Training for her or Interplanetary Combatives Training for Michael. Her dreams of Rio were more a series of sensations than events. The oppressive, humid heat. The loud streets and crushing traffic. The cool-but-not-cold, crystal-clear water. The bright, ethereal lights of the city that shimmered across the sea at night. The smell of fish and fried pork and cooked peanuts and a medley of sweet fruits wafting around her all at once. The alien movement of small arms and legs inside her. Waking from those dreams to the sterile, white-walled Med Bay was always jarring.

But her dreams were not always so pleasant. One that chased her—that nipped at her heels even during her hours of wakefulness—brought her back to that beach at White Rock.

Michael would be turned away from her, his silhouette stark against the dark, flashing thunderhead convecting beyond him, and he would be walking quickly along the shore. She chased and called after him, but her voice would always be whipped out to sea by the wind and pulled under by the pounding waves. He would never turn around. She would grow closer, but only incrementally, her feet always sinking farther into the sand. Why wouldn't he turn around?

Before she could reach him, a pack of three dogs would come galloping out of the black, foaming, roiling sea with their sights set on Michael. She would call out to him again, but he still wouldn't hear her. She would reach for her sidearm but find her holster empty. No matter how many times she dreamed this dream, no matter what she did, no matter how fast she ran or how many rocks she threw, the dogs would chase him down and sink their teeth into him, dragging him to the ground and tearing into his flesh. He would never even try to fight them off as his blood soaked into the wet sand and washed into the sea with the advancing tide.

Then Hannah would feel a small hand slip into hers, and she'd look down to see Alli watching as her father was torn apart. The tears would roll, fast and thick, down her cheeks, and she'd begin to wail. The dogs would look up in unison at the sound of her cries. Michael's blood still matting and dripping from their muzzles, they would bare their teeth and sink low to the ground, ignoring their fresh kill and padding slowly and deliberately toward Hannah and Alli.

In one fluid movement, Hannah would lift her daughter into her arms, turn on her heels, and start to run the way she'd come. The dogs bounded ever closer, growling and snapping their long jaws. Their hot breath would begin to cloud around her in a thick miasma, and her legs would grow leaden. The black dogs would froth at the mouth and snap their long teeth at her. Then the lead dog would lunge, and she would wake up yelling and nearly falling from her bed, save for the restraints that kept her there.

Stripes had been there once when she woke up from yet another iteration of that dream, but she'd had the decency not to ask about it. It may have seemed like a small kindness, but Hannah couldn't express her relief that she didn't have to try to explain it. Eventually, she drifted back to sleep. Dreamless, this time.

#

"Good news, Lieutenant Commander." Dr. T'Oriza smiled as she pressed her fingers into Hannah's ribs, testing for sensitivity. "I should be able to discharge you in another forty hours or so."

"Will they move me to the brig, then?" Hannah asked.

Sana nodded. "It is likely. I would not let that prospect trouble you. The major will see to it that you are treated well and respectfully. Not that you would have been mistreated without her intervention. Punishment for abusing a compliant prisoner of war is swift and severe in the Hierarchy."

Hannah would've said the same of the Alliance when she was still a fresh recruit. Having been on the inside for some time now, however, she'd observed shades of gray in the way the military worked. It wasn't corruption, not exactly. Not always, anyway. It was more like social capital: the more you had, the more freedom from oversight you could enjoy. She wondered if the turian military was the true meritocracy Sana and Stripes seemed to think it was, or if there might be a certain amount of selective observation they were encouraged to entertain.

"Have you ever been a soldier, Doc?" she asked.

She shook her head once, the corner of her mouth pulling down into a tight frown. "I had two older sisters who ran off to be mercenaries almost before their fringes finished drying. They got themselves killed fairly immediately, and it almost destroyed my mother. I was only forty when that happened, and the experience left me somewhat reluctant to follow in their footsteps." She smirked. "I spent my maiden years learning how to fix people instead of how to kill them. I am not entirely without experience, though. I ran a clinic on a mining asteroid in the Terminus Systems for one hundred and eight years." She paused and sighed. "Then . . . management changed. It all worked fine, at first. We gave each other a wide berth for a while. I lasted another eighteen years, but we did not agree on a lot of issues. We parted amicably enough, though. We even owe each other a favor or two still."

Hannah blinked. "Forty years old? One hundred and twenty-six years? How old are you, exactly?"

Sana chuckled. "I will be four hundred and thirty-six this year. Adjusting for when we are not off getting ourselves killed in merc bands like my dearly departed sisters, my people live an average of a millennium, the longest lifespan of any known race in Council space. The krogan come in a close second, though." She looked thoughtful for a moment. "Maybe they would live longer too if they did not join so many merc bands."

"So what's a civilian doctor like you doing on a warship like this?"

Sana smiled and tapped Hannah's nose. "You mean other than bringing you back to full health?" Her smile faded and she seemed to turn toward her thoughts again. "Odessus is . . . family. Extended. She sent me a message almost as soon as their long-distance communication systems were functioning again. I came immediately, of course, but my ship is small and it still took forty-two hours to rendezvous with this ship from the Citadel. Meanwhile, you were in stasis. The stasis was effective for slowing the internal bleeding and your body's metabolic processes, including the spread of the infection, but I needed to get you healing properly. There were a lot of risks involved. I chose to work within the stasis field instead of administering general anesthesia because I do not yet know precisely how to switch off the human central nervous system without doing so permanently. Thank the goddess you were already unconscious, but I still needed to work quickly. It was all guesswork—especially since trauma surgery is not my specialty, despite what every generation of Ravakas seems to believe—but it looks like it all worked out for the better. I cannot think of another time when Odessus looked quite as distressed as when I came aboard to attend to you."

A dozen questions tumbled through Hannah's mind, but she could only ask one. "Can turians look distressed?"

Sana's smile returned, broad and genuine. "You will come to understand them better while you are here, I have no doubt. You seem to be responding to Odessus already."

At that moment, the door to Med Bay swished open and Stripes stepped through it.

"Speak of the devil," Hannah said, smirking.

Stripes paused and her mandibles dipped. "I'm not certain what I would say about the . . . devil? Bad Spirit?"

Hannah waved her hand dismissively. At least, she tried to. Her arm didn't get too far before it reached the limit of its lead. "Never mind. It's just an expression. Well, half of one, anyway. Means we were talking about you. Sana was regaling me on how you got her to come here."

Stripes took a seat next to Hannah's bed and sighed. "Our medical officers probably had the skill to help you, but we didn't have the levo-based medical supplies you needed. Proper requisition channels, even ones reserved for emergencies, would have taken too long." She flared her mandibles and nodded toward the doctor. "And I knew Sana here wouldn't pass up the opportunity to be the first asari to tinker on a new spacefaring race. How's that paper coming, by the way?"

Sana huffed. "My first responsibility is to help those in need, Major. If I did not come, the lieutenant commander would likely have expired waiting for the Hierarchy to respond." She paused before continuing. "Another thousand words should do it. The University of Serrice Journal of Xenobiology has already accepted it on abstract."

The major's mandibles flared again. It's like a smile, Hannah thought. An amused one, I think.

"If I'd done something like that," Hannah said thoughtfully, "Captain Tran would've given me the dressing down of my life. An independent contractor on a military vessel? During a conflict? And without official clearance? I'd be surprised if he didn't kick my ass back to Basic."

Sana glanced at Stripes, then returned her attention to Hannah. "It looks like I am finished here, Lieutenant Commander. I will be back later with some supper for you. It is lavalla tonight."

Once they were alone, Hannah turned back to Stripes. "Off duty for the day?"

"Something like that."

"Ah. So they're kicking your ass back to Basic, then?"

Stripes waved a hand. "Paid administrative leave. It's more about the principle. Colonel Octavus isn't too keen on a subordinate using protocol to force his hand, but he and I seemed to have different definitions for due diligence."

Hannah thought about that. She didn't know turian military protocols, but she was starting to make some inferences. "Is that why you said I was a POW? So they'd be obligated to help me?"

Stripes nodded. "When Sana hailed the ship, offering her services, he was required to let her aboard. He did try to put up as much red tape as he could, though. In the end, I suggested that the recording of his conversation with Sana would be less than flattering if the Council ever decided to put him under review for treatment of POWs."

Hannah blinked and couldn't think of what to say. "It sounds like you went to a lot of trouble on my account."

Stripes started to shrug then seemed to change her mind and rolled her shoulders instead. "Not really. I just made a call. Sana did the work."

"But you didn't have to make that call," Hannah insisted. "And you put yourself at risk, at least professionally, to make it. You could've just left me on Shanxi when your people found us."

She stiffened and brought her mandibles in tight, holding her head a little higher. Indignant maybe?

"A Ravaka pays her debts. Always. Not many people have the chance to return the favor to the person who saved them." Her shoulders and mandibles seemed to relax, and her expression softened. "And about that. I've been trying to figure it out."

Stripes paused there, seeming to consider what to say next. When she didn't offer more information, Hannah shrugged and held up her hands. "Trying to figure out what?"

She sighed. "Why did you help me?"

"Oh," Hannah said. She thought about what had gone through her mind in that moment. It really hadn't been something she'd considered much at all. "I guess, well. I don't know how it is with turians, but with humans, pilots are a bit . . . special. Maybe different is a better word. Eccentric even. There aren't many of us, relatively speaking, so we look out for each other when we can. You put up a hell of a fight, so it didn't seem right for you to go like that—on the ground, trapped in your bird. Besides, it's not like we were fighting just then. We may have to kill each other in the air, but that's just work. On the ground, we're people and people should help each other."

Hannah wasn't sure what sort of example she was setting for humanity—maybe she was making her whole species look weak. Given the chance to do it over, however, she was sure she would do the same thing again.

Stripes nodded, then shook her head. "But after you helped me, you thought I might kill you. As soon as I'd engaged my tactical cloak, I watched you arm yourself. Then you couldn't sleep until I took a seat at the fire with you. It seems like it might've been easier for you if you'd left me behind to asphyxiate."

Hannah chuckled. "I may be a doe-eyed soldier who helps hostiles, but I'm not stupid. And besides, if I'd let you die back there, I wouldn't be here now, would I?"

Stripes shook her head. "There's no way you could've known it would play out like this."

"I guess not, but this is how it played out. As long as I'm still alive, I'm happy. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth." That one was on purpose. She watched and waited to see what "confused" looked like on a turian face—dipping mandibles and eyes shifting to the left. She smirked and explained, "Means not to question it when good things happen. Maybe not the best fit for every situation, but no idiom is." She paused again, thinking again on what Stripes had said about repaying debt. "You know, technically, you'd already paid your 'debt' when you kept me from falling down that ravine. You could've left me on Shanxi with a clean ledger."

Stripes grinned and shook her head. "We'll call it habit, then."

Hannah huffed. "I guess that means I have to pull your dumb, impulsive ass out of the fire one more time before we can call it square. So, by noon tomorrow, basically." She grew sober as she pulled herself together to ask the more pressing question on her mind. "You haven't heard . . . the Alliance hasn't—"

Stripes shook her head. "No news. I don't think Octavus has tried to reach out to them."

Hannah nodded and closed her eyes. She let out a long breath. "I try not to think about him. It's easier when I don't think about him. This Schrodinger's husband business is almost more than I can stand."

Her mandible's dipped. "What's a Schrodinger's husband?"

Hannah chuckled weakly. "Long story short, it means he's both alive and dead until I can observe him in one state or the other. Schrodinger was the name of the person who articulated the concept of quantum superposition for humans, so I guess you'd have to be human to get the reference. Damn, I can't even be clever here."

She glanced at her night table, to where her tablet sat switched off. She hadn't listened to Alli's heartbeat since Stripes had first given the tablet back to her. With every thump, she could smell her hair, could hear her squealing laugh, could feel the warmth of her as she snuggled against Hannah after her evening bath just before bedtime. It had been nearly two month since she'd seen her last, and thoughts of Allistair were as heavy to carry as thoughts of Michael.

Stripes followed her gaze and flicked her mandibles. Her arm glowed orange as she said, "I think I've learned just about everything there is to know about your family, whether I wanted to or not." She pulled in her mandibles and looked at her sideways in a way that looked mockingly reproachful. "How would you like to hear about some of my family? My brother and his bondmate just had their first child. They decided to be old-fashioned and not use the vats."

When Hannah looked over, Stripes wore that amused grin once again, and there was the image of what looked like an exceptionally small turian with its arms and legs fringed in fine, pale green down hovering above the major's wrist.

She smiled and inched her way closer to the the major to get a better look. Stripes might not have been able to bring her back to Michael and Alli just that moment, but she could offer a distraction. As she progressed through the images and told family stories with an unexpected flare, Hannah could feel her shoulders ease down and her posture soften, and soon, she even found herself laughing again.