Seven: Benezia
It was past dark when Benezia emerged from the two conjoined shelters serving as a home to the wounded and ill of the camp.
She hugged herself tightly, eyes closed, breath fogging in the cold night air as she tilted her head up towards the cloudy, smoke-laden sky. It had rained earlier; the droplets were acid. She felt drained and hollow, as though a black well had swallowed up everything she had once been, leaving only shame and anguish and a terrible, leaden feeling of fatigue deep within her bones. An ache in her heart to match the pain in her head.
Rosi would die tonight. Benezia had seen enough of sickness and death in her lifetime, even within the bounds of the Republics, to know this to be true. Her friend of some four hundred years, killed by the monsters she herself had worked so hard to bring back into the galaxy. The universe would be a lesser place without her quick, dry wit and sometimes wild fancies. If Benezia could have gone in her stead, she would have.
In her fever and through her pain, Rosi had thought her a ghost. Benezia had felt it best not to correct her, even when her friend had raged at her for betraying them, or begged absolution for sending her to her death. Instead, she'd held her hand and sponged her forehead and offered what little comfort she could while Rosi's surviving students watched with barely concealed contempt and loathing. Aethyta's scowling presence had kept them at bay, though, until she could bear to sit no longer.
Saren's talons grasped her shoulders and he shook her viciously, opening old wounds and causing new.
"You fool! You idiot! I thought you understood how important this is!" he roared. She tried to twist away; this only served to anger him further. The backhanded blow caught her across the side of her face, drawing no blood but leaving her slightly staggered.
"I'm sorry!" she stammered, mind reeling from his anger and the blow. "I thought-"
"You thought? You THOUGHT!?"
Another blow, and then his hand was around her throat, crushingly tight, the tips of his talons digging into the sensitive folds at the back of her neck, lifting her clean off her feet. She froze, breath caught in her chest, not daring to move lest he do more damage there. Her wide eyes locked onto his wild ones.
He dropped her then, staggering backwards and turning away, his hand across his eyes, strangely hunched in on himself.
"Get out of my sight," he growled, not looking at her.
Part of her wanted no more than to flee entirely, to take her retinue and return to her home and do what she could to further their cause from there. Another part of her wanted to go to him, to soothe away the angry tremors that wracked his frame. But the rest of her counselled patience. To stay. To keep working. To regain his trust.
He was right, after all. She'd overstepped her bounds by interpreting his orders for herself rather than following them to the letter, and so she had failed him. She did not deserve to be in his presence. She would find a way rectify her mistake, pacify his anger, and then she could return to him. She must. She would be obedient. She would-
"Hey-"
She jerked away so violently from the touch that she stumbled and fell, hard, to her hands and knees. The shock of the impact rippled up through her body, jolting her back to some semblance of sense. She was on Thessia. Saren was dead. His ship destroyed. The hand upon her shoulder, the voice at her ear, Aethyta's.
Her head began to pound again. She gritted her teeth against it.
"Whoa whoa whoa - what just happened there?
When she opened her eyes again, Aethyta was kneeling before her, all concern.
"You alright?"Aethtya prompted when she didn't respond.
"Goddess, Aethtya, what do you think?" she snapped, finding her voice. She pushed herself up to her knees, one, damp, muddy hand covering her face, and breathed deeply, trying to calm her racing heart. Aethyta did not deserve such anger, she knew, but part of her, coming from the black pit, wanted to lash out and cause more pain. "I- I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I-"
"It's ok."
Benezia's hand fell to her neck. Goddess, she could still feel Saren's hands around her throat, his talons pricking her skin. But it was a memory. Just a memory.
She didn't realise that she'd said the words aloud until she heard Aethyta's 'ah' of understanding.
"Wanna tell me about it?"
"Not particularly."
"Benezia-"Aethyta's tone was gentle, but there was a note of warning in it all the same, and Benezia remembered Liara's words on the night she had been awakened. They did not trust her. They were right not to.
"Saren struck me," she said hearing the shudder in her own voice. "I had displeased him. He was… I… All I wanted was to return to his good graces."
She took another deep breath, closed her eyes again and tried to force the memory and the way it made her skin crawl from her mind. She needed to focus on the here and the now. The earth under her. The sky above. The smell of rain and ash. The breath in her lungs, the energy of her body, the beating of her heart. Slow. Still. Calm.
Aethyta's 'hmm' as she stood back up was considered, but she said nothing other than: "Need a hand?"
She was trembling again, she realised.
"Please."
Aethyta helped her gently to her feet and stepped back, watching her, still concerned. Benezia shivered, not just from the wind as it picked up, and hugged herself again.
"'should probably get some warmer clothes. Shouldn't be this cold, this time of year."
"No. It should not."
Aethyta wet her lips, and glanced back at the medical block.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about Rosi."
"You never liked her," she remembered. She and Aethyta had always had wildly different social circles with little overlap.
"I never liked most of your friends," Aethyta shrugged. "And the feeling was mutual from what I could tell. But she deserves another couple hundred years of being a sardonic pain in the ass."
"She does," Benezia agreed. "More so than I."
"Hey, none of that," her former bondmate began, only to stop abruptly as an inasari scream echoed across the compound. "Aw, shit."
"What was that?"
"Banshee," Aethyta supplied the unfamiliar word, unlimbering her shotgun as the scream rose again, joined by a second. "Tacka-Yakshi. What happens when the Reapers process an asari."
It took a moment for Benezia to work out the translation and remember the associated myth. When she did, she shuddered anew. The ancient tribes of the Iaonna Plains had believed that the unmourned dead came back to life as a curse upon the living, a vengeful demon who stole, not life itself, but the things oflife. It was the soul-taker. The mind-stealer. The thief of dreams.
"Goddess protect us."
By then Aethyta was running in the direction of the noise; she trailed after on unsteady feet, buffeted occasionally by people fleeing in the opposite direction. There was shouting ahead and more of those horrible screams, answered by the measured crack of sniper fire. She forced herself to pick up the pace, and reached the wall just as Aethyta finished scrambling up the ladder to the battlement. Benezia hesitated for a moment, then followed. Weak as she was and with such difficulty concentrating as she had, she would have little to offer in any battle, but she felt, at least, that she should seewhat the monsters had turned her people into.
There were six asari atop the crude battlement when she reached it, including Aethyta and Liara. She recognised two of the commandos as Aurelia and Griete, their escort of earlier; the other two, also in the leathers, were strangers to her. None of them paid her any mind beyond an initial glance. It was at once a relief and a new source of discomfort that there seemed to be no expectation that she contribute to the discussion.
"This happens every night?" Liara was saying as she stared down a spotter's scope. Benezia followed her gaze out into the darkness. There were half a dozen glowing blue shapes moving out there among the ruined buildings beyond the killing zone, and another five upon it. Periodically, one of them would vanish behind some unseen obstacle, or surge forward in a series of blindly-fast hops that she eventually recognised as biotic charges. Less frequently, one of them would wink out entirely, evidently felled.
"Yes, Lady. Doctor. Sometimes it's more," Aurelia said, lining up and taking another shot. "Sometimes it's less."
"Had one of them get into the compound three nights ago," one of the unknown commandos, a matron with turquoise crest banding, added in a matter-of-fact tone. "Killed five people before we could put it down. Nasty business."
"We won't let that happen again," Liara said firmly, passing the scope to Aethyta without taking her eye from the scene before her. Her hand came down to rest upon the pistol at her hip. "Do they come during the day?"
"Not in such numbers. Lone wanders, mainly. Sometimes we run into them while scouting and try to lead them away. They're hard to shake. Harder to kill."
"I wonder what's drawing 'em here now then?" Aethyta mused. Out in the darkness, another glowing shape fell with a scream of rage. "The light? The noise?"
"We wondered about that. Dora wanted to set up an outpost up river with some floodlights and sound system to see if it'd draw them off, but we don't have the resources."
"We do now, and it's certainly worth a try," Liara agreed absently. "Also, there are some sentry turrets in the freighter we can set up around the perimeter. But, in truth, I am more interested in why they're not attacking each other. The ones on Earth went mad when the Reapers fell and started attacking everything in sight, without discrimination. I was told the same was true on Palaven."
"Troop composition, maybe?" Aethtya suggested. "I'm not seeing any husks or marauders, and that's mainly what you got on Earth. Palaven too."
"Perhaps."
"Anyway, save the speculation for tomorrow," Aethyta said, lowering the scope finally and turning back to the commandos, none of whom looked up from their work. "Unless you've got another couple of sniper rifles hidden in that armour of yours, we're not going to be able to stop them all before they reach the wall."
"We set up some deadfalls and other traps they've still got to get through, but we ran out of proximity mines four days ago, so you might be right," Griete said, popping her red-hot thermal clip and slamming in a new one in a single, smooth motion. As she did so, another series of bone-chilling screams rose from the glowing creatures, and the commando shuddered. "Goddess, I hate those things."
"Don't hate them," Liara said evenly. "They didn't have any say in what they became. Pity them, and grant them the mercy of a swift end."
Liara had not looked at her once throughout the entire conversation, and now ducked her head to confer further with one of the unnamed commandos. Aethyta, though, did.
"You shouldn't be up here," Aethyta said, almost gently. Benezia could not say how she appeared to her former bondmate, tired and muddied and heartsick as she was. "Go back to the freighter. Get your head down. The kid and I will handle this."
She shook her head, trying not to wince at the renewed throbbing in her temples the motion generated.
"No. I would see what I have wrought."
"Benezia-"
"Aethyta, let me see. Please"
"It ain't pretty," Aethyta warned her with a frown, but handed over the scope anyway.
"I was not expecting it to be," she replied.
It wasn't, but she forced herself to not look away. This was the end she had worked towards, given flesh and form. If she and Saren had been certain that the price of pride in the face of Sovereign's kind was death, then they had ignored the cost of surrender: ruin.
The creatures had been asari, once, in the same way that the things on New Eden had been human before Saren's arrival. That much was evident. But, like those humans, these had become twisted, diseased caricatures of asari. Heavy-breasted, swollen-bellied and dead-eyed, their grey, cracking skin was drawn tight over distorted bone and cartilage and corded muscle, studded with tubes and lights, wounds from around which black ichor oozed and crusted.
And yet...
And yet there was a strange kind of beauty to them. She could see more and more of it, the longer she looked. They crackled with power, even at this distance, biotic barriers shrugging off volley after volley of fire. The underlying structures of the asari body were laid bare for all to see, delicate and deceptively strong. And there was life, there, in those bodies, where there otherwise might have been only death. Surely continued existence was preferable to utter oblivion?
The creature she watched threw back its head and screamed, a wordless cry of unimaginable torment that the others quickly took up. Her head resonated with the noise of it, her vision starting to swim.
These were not her thoughts. Goddess! This was not her voice. Death would be preferable to the twilight existence of such things, neither dead nor alive, and she suddenly knew why they were drawn to the camp: it was the light. They sought release, relief in the arms of the Goddess. Athame taught that they would all go peacefully into the light, peacefully, when the time came.
The scope clattered away as she pressed both hands to her temples, her legs buckling beneath her as she fell to her knees for the second time in that evening. For the second time that evening, too, Aethyta was suddenly kneeling before her.
"Shit, Nezzie, this is not the time," Aethyta said. She started to reach out to touch her, then stopped, drawing her hands carefully back, palms up. "I told you to go back. You're not ready for this."
The pressure inside Benezia's head was building again, sharply, inexorably, until she thought she might explode from it. Stars danced before her eyes, her teeth ground together, jaw clenched. Through it, though, she managed to reach out, grabbing a fistful of Aethyta's jacket with one hand.
"Kill them," she managed to whisper as their eyes met. "Quickly. Give them peace."
And then, to her relief, the small mercy and blackness of sleep reached out and claimed her once again.