Grains of Sand

Amber Penglass

Chapter Five

By some miracle, the remnants of Kenn's shop had been left relatively untouched by the time Shepard returned to it. Not like she had anywhere else to go, at the moment. The kiosk had been carted off, but of course it had been ruined by her cobbled-together overload during the Cerberus shoot-out, anyway. She wished luck to whoever had thought hauling the thing away worth their time. There was some signs of attempted tampering at the door's control panel, but nothing serious. The controls still accepted her entry codes, which was all she cared about.

The lights inside were busted, so she navigated by the light of her omnitool alone. Everything was pretty much where it had always been, almost as if nothing had happened. Shepard snorted into the dark room, and turned her attentions to the one thing that mattered; that bowl of damn whiskey.

It was still there. Of course. She stared at it, then sighed. She hadn't been tempted by any sort of mind-altering substance since...well, for a long time. Not like this.

Then again, she'd never before wondered if she was a clone of herself, either.

Shepard poured the whiskey back into the bottle, made sure the door was as secure as she could make it, grabbed a ration packet, and parked herself on the couch. She made herself choke down the 'food,' knowing she needed the calories no matter how her stomach roiled at the thought of consuming the block of tasteless nutrients. Especially given what she was intending for the contents of the bottle in her hand.

Over the next few hours, Shepard occupied herself with studying the outdated omnitool Kenn had left her. He'd done an admirable job of making it as efficient as it could be, but there were a few tricks she knew that he apparently didn't. Nothing said 'get creative' like being cut off, surrounded, low on ammo, and a serious hankering to make it home alive in time for the BBQ cook-off of the century. She'd picked up a few things.

By the time she was done, she'd managed to coax it to accept a few jerry-rigged military mods designed to utilize offensive programs -she might be able to aim her overloads, next time- and cleaned up a few background junk programs to improve overall processing. Pleased with herself, she lifted the bottle to take a self-congratulatory drink, then frowned at it when she realized it was empty. Completely. Not a drop left. Still frowning, Shepard set the bottle down and stood. Easily, smoothly, she walked across the room. One hand went to her hip, the other tapping out a staccato against her thigh.

A whole damn bottle, and she wasn't even a little tipsy. She could feel the alcohol in her system, a slight warmth to her extremities and a burn at the back of her throat, but other than that… Nothing. She'd always been able to hold her own when drinking, but this was something else. The stuff had been one step from rotgut, and a whole litre of it should have put her in a very pleasant place by now. She recalled Nalah's utter befuddlement at Shepard's ability to shrug off the supposedly sizeable dose of tranquilizer, and acknowledged that the woman might not have been wrong to wonder. Shepard had simply decided their equipment must have been off when measuring the dose in her bloodstream, since none of the Alliance-approved mods she'd ever accepted could have handled the quantities Nalah implied.

Shepard raised one arm, used her other hand to push her sleeve up, and in the light of her omnitool she examined the network of shallow, still-healing splits in her skin. They didn't hurt, and didn't seem deep enough to compromise the integrity of her flesh or muscles. They did, however, glow. If she looked closely enough, she could see faint spiderwebs of microfilaments embedded beneath those cracks. Each of the fissures were lined with layers of pale, newer skin, so Shepard guessed that eventually her limbs would be whole again. They had been shrinking each time she looked at them, if slower than she would have preferred.

Not for the first time, Shepard wondered what Cerberus had done to her. It was, however, the first time she'd wondered if what they'd done might end up being genuinely helpful. She'd survived a poisoning that had, according to Monty, killed all its other victims within moments, and she'd walked away with a headache. She'd shrugged off an overdose meant to kill her, and guzzled moonshine-masquerading-as-whiskey like it was water without getting so much as a buzz.

Could she even get drunk, anymore?

Now that was a horrifying thought.

Shepard went back to the couch, pulled down her sleeve as she shut off her omnitool, plunging the room into darkness. She tugged her knit cap off her head and ran her hands over her bare scalp. This changed things. Part of Shepard's whole ethos was knowing her own limits, down to the very last possible measurement. She had been pushed to her brink often enough, hard enough, she knew it like most people knew a lover. This new revelation, that apparently she was damn near immune to most forms of intoxication, moved that line, altered that brink. What else had changed? How far out had that line been moved?

She raised her head, stared into the darkness.

She needed to find out.

For the sake of common sense, she hadn't implemented her experiment until after plenty of time had passed for whatever was in her system to work its way out, just in case. If she had a credit for every one of her subordinates she'd bailed out of jail who'd told her 'but, Major, I didn't feel drunk' she'd be richer than God. She could only imagine the quantities of irony that would have been involved had it turned out her belief in her soberness had been a product of severe drunkenness.

So, she'd waited. Just was well- immunity to alcohol or not, she'd had a rough fourteen hours and some shut eye was in order. As a result, she managed to wait a full day before doing something stupid. Well, stupid by most people's standards. In her world, it was a run of the mill Tuesday.

The underbelly of Afterlife was as seedy as she remembered. Grimy walls, grimier floor, dim lighting, not-all-there dancers, patrons attempting to forget where they were. She made her way to the bar, sidestepping the handful of persons meandering rather than sitting, and slid into the stool that put her back to an empty corner and afforded her the best view of the entrances. When the human bartender on duty jerked his head at her, she ordered the cheapest beer they had on tap, and waited.

She didn't have to wait long. Forvan showed up less than an hour after she had, sidling into her peripheral vision as she pretended to be engrossed in a news channel she had up on her omnitool. She signaled for a second beer, and paid only enough attention to the news feed to occasionally tab to a new article. The entirety of her focus was on the batarian bartender. He shooed his human coworker away, the latter seeming more than happy to vacate the premises. Words and gestures were exchanged, all with the air of much practice, though lacking not a bit of the heat for the repetitions. Forvan didn't even try to hide his disdain for humans. How had he gotten away with the poisonings so far? How many had there been?

There were a few ways to find out. She decided on the least bloody, for the time being, and programmed in a set of search parameters into the news feed, actually paying attention to it now. The hits that came back were staggering. She refined the parameters, and from then on it was a manual search. The number of mysterious deaths and murders by poisoning in the vicinity of the bar were too many to believed, were she anywhere else but Omega. Only intuition told her which ones were Forvan's work. Thankfully, she knew her intuition to be pretty damn good. They were all young, no family, known to be drinkers and thrill seekers, people whose deaths by overindulgence would not be too closely looked at. They were also mostly female, all found either in the bar by another patron, dead where they sat, or in alleys practically at the bar's doorstep. And, without exception, all were human. There were at least twelve of them in the past six months alone, that Shepard would stake her reputation on.

One of them had been pregnant.

"Son of a bitch," she murmured into her beer, shooting Forvan a glance. She'd made sure to order this second one before he took over the bar just to be safe, and was now glad of the extra layer of protection it offered; the batarian didn't bother asking her, in the bartender language of nods and eye contact, if she wanted anything. She wasn't sure she'd be able to keep her intent from her eyes, and then the game would be over before it had begun.

An hour or so later, and Shepard was beginning to wonder if the other half of her plan might have to wait for another day. Then, he showed.

The turian in red made his way to the bar, caught Forvan's attention to order, then spotted her. He straightened, grinned at her, and once he had his drink in hand he sauntered -she hadn't known turians could saunter- around the arched bar to slide onto the stool beside hers.

"Look who's here," he said, keeping his voice low and subvocals lower. "Thought I'd scared you off for good. Glad to see I was wrong." He let his hand brush her forearm when he set his drink down beside hers. Doubts in her ability to read turians aside, that she understood just fine.

She dismissed her omnitool interface, picked up her beer, and twisted in her stool to face him. He was older, from what she could tell, his grey plates weathered and scarred here and there. His markings were spiderweb fine lines of white, symmetrical as they all were, and framed green eyes brighter than she usually saw in turians. He wasn't a bad looking sample of his species, at all. His red suit was quality, if not particularly expensive, and for a miracle he didn't reek like half the other patrons. All in all, she'd dealt with worse, in her line of work. Far worse.

"Beer isn't really doing it for me," she said, keeping her voice low and not too suggestive.

His mandibles flared in a wide, comprehending grin. "What the lady desires, the lady gets," he said, and signalled Forvan. This was going to be easier than she'd hoped. The batarian came up to them, and took the turian's order -something with brandy- and then Shepard watched as Forvan poured the drink. She saw the whole process, him picking up the glass from a tray, grabbing a bottle, pouring in the spirits, the mixer, a few cubes of ice, then sliding it towards her.

She kept a frown off her face with a will- unless the toxin was in the ice, the brandy, or the mixer, she hadn't seen him add anything. She took a sip, eyeing the turian over the rim of the glass, let the drink roll across her tongue. He'd splurged on some of the better stuff. The guy had hopes, it seemed. She made an appreciative noise as she set the glass down, smiling at him.

The drink was definitely poisoned, she could tell after a few moments. A tingling unrelated the the booze spread across her tongue, mild and harmless in such a small quantity and with her apparently boosted immune system, but still there.

Something toxic only to humans, she guessed. No risk of anyone ever catching him putting something in a drink; it's already in one of the ingredients.

So much for being easier than she'd hoped.

Or, maybe not.

While the turian in red -Ogrinn, he offered- talked about his business on Omega, prompted by her inquiry, Shepard pondered her options. For the first time in her career, she genuinely had no one to answer to. Oh, sure, there had been plenty of times as an N operative and especially as a Spectre where the higher ups hadn't wanted to know how she got the job done, but she'd still known in the back of her mind when she should report to someone, what the rules were, the laws. Even if she ignored them, they were there.

Now...they weren't.

She didn't have to prove Forvan was poisoning people. She could deal with him, without even needing to file a report with the Council justifying why she'd opted to handle it herself rather than bring him to Council justice. She never had to bring anyone in, but they still expected an explanation when she didn't, same with the Alliance brass that would have never admitted to knowing about some of the more shadowed ops she'd been on.

No Council.

No Alliance.

Just Shepard, and a murderer.

Ogrinn, at her prompting, continued to talk about his business exploits, something to do with things getting busier since his primary partner had been caught and 'taken out' by some 'barefaced turian vigilante, calls himself Archangel.' While he droned on, Shepard watched Forvan answer the summons of a pair of human men, the both of them clearly already drunk. Audible even to her, they congratulated themselves on a recent deal. Red sand was mentioned. She was less outraged than she might have been when she saw Forvan push two shots towards them, the same brandy she'd been served. Well, that told her where the poison was.

The two humans knocked the drinks back, then the batarian raised his own glass -of something else, obviously- and raised his voice in a toast.

"To the victims of Bekke!" He shouted, and around the bar various other patrons -mostly batarian- raised their own glasses in halfhearted enthusiasm. Shepard watched Forvan watch the two humans stumble out of the bar, watched the spread of sick satisfaction on his face.

"Does he always shout something about victims, when he serves humans?" Shepard asked abruptly, cutting off Ogrinn's tale of something unimportant.

Ogrinn scowled at the interruption, but hid it quickly when she looked at him. "Usually. Sometimes it's Torfan, sometimes Bekke, sometimes Zak'kon. Supposedly he had some brothers on Bekke, some pro-human group wiped out the whole colony barehanded and with ancient torture devices in liberal use, to hear him tell it."

"Hm," was all she said. It didn't make things better, but at least now she knew. She liked knowing. It helped her remember that almost no one, no matter how heinous the crime, was the evil villain in their own head. They always had a reason, a justification, that made them the unsung hero.

"You know," Ogrinn said, and the change in the pitch of his voice drew her attention back to him. "I have a ship, a nice ship. And a mate. But I only brought one with me." His hand was on her arm, sliding up. Some distant part of her made the comparison that, were he human, his hand would have been on her thigh. She gave him a thin smile, then jerked her head past him, at Forvan. He was standing only a few stools down from them, well within earshot.

"Did you know he's poisoning his human patrons?" She asked.

Ogrinn blinked at her, and his hand went still. Behind him, Forvan froze. The batarian looked at her, sneering.

"Ridiculous," the bartender snarled.

Shepard used two fingers to, without moving any other part of herself, shove her barely touched drink across the slick bar. It came to a spinning stop near him.

"Prove it," she said, and her patient grin was not a kind one.

"I don't have to put up with this. Get out of my bar!" The batarian was reaching for something beneath the counter.

Without preamble, Ogrinn pulled out a well cared for SMG from beneath his coat and laid it on the counter, not taking his hand from it. With his other hand, he lifted his glass and took a casual sip.

"Prove the lady wrong, Forvan," he said.

All around them, the bar had gone quiet. Nothing but the heavy music occupied the air; drawing a weapon in a bar frequented by murderers and thieves tended to garner undivided attention like nothing else. Subtly, Shepard made sure her own sidearm was loose in its holster and ready to be used. Forvan looked around, panic beginning to set into his eyes. He withdrew his hand from beneath the counter, leaving whatever weapon was hidden where it was.

"You can't do this," he hissed at Shepard.

"I'm not doing anything," she replied easily. "Not reporting you to Aria, not letting these fine customers conduct their own investigation, not taking you out back myself to see if you even remember the faces of all those you've poisoned. I'm just sitting here, inviting you to enjoy a drink with me, and waylay my fears in the process."

She gestured to the drink, and Ogrinn's adjusted his grip on his Shuriken, ungloved talons clacking lightly on the grip.

Forvan swallowed visibly, then lifted the glass.

"For Bekke," he said, quietly and to himself, and drank it all.

Whatever was in the brandy worked quicker on batarians than humans, apparently. As he began to choke and wheeze, Shepard watched dispassionately and thought he must have kept a separate bottle, unmarked, for his fellow batarians.

The bartender slumped to the ground behind the bar, gave a wet burble, then was still.

Ogrinn gave an somewhat human sounding snort, and re-holstered his weapon as everyone else in the bar went back to their business. To her, he said, "He got what he deserved."

"If only everyone did," she murmured. She waited for the feared exhilaration of having been responsible for so monumental a shift in the universe as a life snuffed out at her behest. When she'd begun to wonder where her limits were, if they'd moved or been altered, the first thing she'd worried about hadn't been how much alcohol it would take to get her drunk, or how many bullets she could take, or how quickly she'd bleed out.

She'd wondered about this.

About how she'd feel about taking a life.

Blissfully, confusingly, the thrill of power did not come. All she felt was mild satisfaction from having accomplished what she set out to do, and the faint regret that someone, anyone, felt driven to such extremes. She could live with that. She reached for her beer, chugged it down, and slid off the stool.

"Hey," said Ogrinn, his hand catching her arm as she passed. "What about what I said, about only bringing one thing to Omega?"

She raised an eyebrow. "I assume you meant you'd brought your mate with you. You should probably get back to her."

She shook her arm free of his grasp, and left the bar.

She was followed.

Not by Ogrinn, thankfully. She didn't feel bad about leading him on, but she also acknowledged he'd have a right to feel somewhat irked, cheating or no. Didn't mean she'd let him press the issue. No, it was a human that was following her. Male, dark skinned, and damn if he wasn't advertising his clean-cut military boy affiliation, grubby civvies or no, with every straight-backed step he took.

Shepard slowed her pace, wanting to see what he'd do. She doubted he'd be a very good tail, since he was already failing at blending in. She wasn't entirely surprised when instead of falling back to match her new speed, he kept coming. He didn't slow until he was walking beside her.

"Commander Shepard," he greeted, and whatever she'd been expecting, that hadn't been it. Yeah, she'd guessed he might be Cerberus, but coming out and saying her name? Gutsy, she'd give him that.

"You have me at a disadvantage," she said, glancing discreetly to see if anyone else had exhibited what she'd only felt, the sensation of having ice water dumped down her spine. No one seemed to have heard.

"I've got you at a few, actually," he said, almost sounding apologetic. "I know where you're staying, what you just did, that you have no friends, no resources, and that you're itching for answers."

"Got a crystal ball on you somewhere?" She asked. She kept her tone even, part of her wanting to ditch him and another part of her wanting to see how this played out. He wasn't shooting at her, hadn't tried to hide his presence, and was being downright polite, for a terrorist affiliate. She continued, "That's a cold reading if I ever heard one. Not hard to figure out where I'm staying, someone on Omega has always 'just done something,' people here rarely have friends or resources or they wouldn't likely be on Omega, and everyone is always itching for answers to something. Try again."

He gave a low, warm chuckle. "You know, they warned me about you, but the reality is something else."

"Going to have to spell that one out for me," she told him.

Instead, he said, "Name's Jacob Taylor, ma'am. I'm just looking for a few minutes of your time, to explain things."

She stopped walking, faced him, hands going to her hips. Good looking males after a 'few minutes of her time' seemed to be the agenda of the day. He was calm, collected, with a square jaw, pronounced trapezius and broad shoulders that spoke of a strict work-out regime, brown eyes that never left her face for long while he kept an eye on their surroundings. His posture was relaxed, but ready. From what she could see of his skin, he bore his share of hard earned scars, and the sidearm at his hip was expertly maintained and modded. Enough so that she felt a spike of envy, in fact. In another life, in another set of circumstances, she'd have moved mountains to recruit him.

"Well, well," she said, and crossed her arms as she regarded him. "Seems your Ms. Lawson took me literally when I said I'd need more sweet talking, what with all the bullets that came first."

"That was...highly regrettable, ma'am," he said, wincing. "Wilson was one of the agents in charge of your...rehabilitation. We think he was the one who allowed you to wake too soon, and possibly facilitated your escape. We think he'd planned on being here when you arrived, and...well, we don't know what he planned afterwards. He was also the one who paid the agent who shot you with an overdose of the tranquilizer. He'd be one of the few people who'd know it would take at least that much to knock you out."

Shepard eyed the man, not blinking. He held her gaze, and she swore that if they hadn't been standing in the middle of one of the worst hives of scum and villainy known to the universe, he'd have fallen into parade rest at her scrutiny. Whatever he was now, he'd been Alliance, she'd stake every last credit she had left on it.

Was he lying? Was he...editing? Or did he believe what he was telling her? She could buy that he did, but that didn't much matter if he'd been lied to, first.

She let out a soft sigh, uncrossed her arms and rubbed at her forehead.

"That's a nice story, Mr. Taylor," she said. "But frankly, I call bullshit. That doesn't explain why I was in Cerberus custody in the first place, or why one of your own would go rogue." She held up a hand, forestalling his attempt to respond. "I'm sure you've got explanations for every angle, every loophole. It comes down to this; you're Cerberus. I'm Alliance, and a Council Spectre. Whatever...cloning or restructuring or rehabilitation that took place, that much remains true. From there, you can guess what my answer will be when you inevitably ask me to go with you. I'll not waste any more time, mine or yours."

When she turned to walk away, he didn't follow. At least, not in body. With his voice, however, he brought her to a halt.

"You were dead, Shepard. Meat and tubes when I first saw you, laid out on the table like a freezer burned varren roast." He came up behind her, just close enough that he could lower his voice. "Miranda brought you back. Cerberus brought you back. Don't you at least owe us enough to hear us out?"

She flexed one hand, cracking the knuckles on each finger as she turned her head, slightly, formulating her response.

"Look up an Admiral Kahoku," she replied, her voice emulating a breeze across a frozen tundra. "Ask him what he thinks I should do. Better yet, ask his men. You can find them all in the Shanxi Alliance Cemetery."

This time, when she walked away, he didn't follow her with so much as a whisper.

By the time Shepard made her way back to Kenn's apartment, she knew she wouldn't be able to stay there. Whatever else Taylor had said that amounted to horseshit, his reminder that they knew where she was, was sobering. She shouldn't have even stayed there as long as she had, locked doors or no. She'd contemplated why they hadn't just hacked the locks -easily within their capabilities- knocked her out, and taken her away.

The answer was a chillingly simple one; they thought they didn't need to. Clearly, they wanted her cooperation. Whatever politics had gone down before, that was their current angle. In addition, they obviously thought they had time on their side. She was trapped on Omega and they knew her goal of getting off the station would force her to show herself eventually. Cerberus could be patient.

She could not.

It took her a few hours, but Shepard managed to dig deep enough into Kenn's old omnitool subroutines to find what she was looking for. Remnants of communications that someone had tried to delete. The messages themselves were long gone, of course, but the VI that had encoded them and sent them off had left traces, digital breadcrumbs she could follow. She wasn't able to hack all the way to the source, she had neither the skill nor the equipment, but she got far enough. She found and hacked a 'waiting room' of sorts in the source's communication que, and that's where she left her message.

Archangel-

If you want to do some more damage to Cerberus, I could use your help.

-Red

The Mass Effect wiki is my friend. More Garrus in the next chapter, and from then on out he'll be in pretty much all chapters.