Benezia

"It is smaller than I had expected," she said with restrained curiosity, examining the creature through the thick layers of glass and plasteel and reactive shielding.

She had heard the stories, of course and seen the footage. She'd even seen flashes of the Great War through the eyes of her mother, who'd more than once threatened to take her unruly daughter to Suen and leave her there to be devoured. But Benezia had never thought to see one for herself. They were supposed to be extinct.

Rachni.

The word was practically a curse. But the creature, if what Saren said was true - and she knew that he would not lie to her - held the key to their salvation. She needed that key, whatever the cost.

The human female at her side wet her lips in a fashion that Benezia recognised as nervous, and tugged uncomfortably at the collar of her torn and blood-stained lab coat - a very asari gesture, to go with the high-necked cut of the coat. The arrival of the humans into the galactic arena was quickly altering virtually every aspect of life and society in some way, great or small; Benezia was reassured to see that the influence did not run one way.

The rest of the pitiful handful of survivors, some six more of various species and genders, stood behind the two of them at a respectful distance - that respect ensured by the troop of armed and armoured commandos watching them with unguarded suspicion. More of Benezia's entourage stood around the room, some at doors, some with guns trained on ventilation and access shafts, watching and listening for any possible movement. The laboratory complex was completely overrun; they'd slaughtered dozens of the creatures just to reach this place, and their geth allies still more.

"We, ah, we don't think she's fully grown yet," the human stumbled. "Give her a few years."

Benezia spared her a glance. The woman had provided her name - Doctor something or other - but she hadn't bothered to make a note of it. What was the name of a human, in the greater scheme of things? In a few short decades she'd be dead. She'd be dead even more quickly if Benezia did not get the information she needed from the captive beast. Indeed, the human was lucky to have survived this long with the rachni loose. Most of her colleagues had not been as fortunate.

Everything her own thoughts came back to her, the barest suggestion of a whisper. A name can mean everything. Her name is Doctor Gweneth Wouters. Remember it. She is old enough to have children of her own. Remember.

She shoved the thought back down inside herself before it could be heard, and turned her attention back to the rachni. It writhed awkwardly within the confines of the observation chamber, clumsy and hideous, but appeared strong enough or her purposes. And, of course, it had been breeding. Saren would be pleased when she brought him that news. Even if the queen and its offspring could not be controlled - and, from what she had seen and heard here, that seemed likely - they could prove a valuable asset: the ultimate shock troops, wild and unpredictable, alongside the disciplined but unimaginative geth. Better even than krogan. The krogan were a dying race, after all.

"They are supposed to be intelligent," she said, idly trailing her fingers across the outer wall of the containment chamber. "Have you been able to communicate with it?"

"She seems to understand a few words like 'food' and 'no', but if she's trying to talk to us, we're not hearing it. In all honesty, I think we're missing something fundamental. All of the records say that the ships they used in the wars had no communications equipment. It's always been theorised that-"

She let the exhausted human ramble on through her lengthy 'no' for a time, once again burying the internal voice when it whispered of another scientist prone to rambling, one near and dear to her heart. Eventually, though, she grew weary of the nervous chatter and held up her hand for silence.

"That is a 'no'. Very well." She turned around and surveyed the assembled survivor with passing interest, and then returned her full attention to the human woman at her side. "You have asari on staff here, I see. Has no one attempted a meld?"

"A... meld?" The doctor blinked at her in incomprehension, and Benezia felt a surge of irritation. "You mean... That's the touch-telepathy thing your people can do, right? I thought that was only for, well, you know…"

She made a vague gesture with her hand, her skin colouring changing in a way Benezia had learned to associate with embarrassment. Her irritation deepened. What an ignorant, prudish child! And yet, apparently, she had been a leader here. Foolish. Unworthy. No wonder the rachni's offspring were lose.

Someone behind her cleared their throat, and, when Benezia turned, she saw that the surviving asari had stepped forward. Benezia had not bothered to catch her name either, but the girl, at least, was one of her own kind, so she favoured the matron with a small smile.

"Speak, child."

"Lady, we did talk about trying a meld amongst ourselves, me and Doctor T'Hova," she said, keeping her eyes respectfully low though her voice caught at the name of her colleague, "but we weren't sure it would work. No one has ever gotten close enough to a queen to touch its mind before, and every attempt to meld with the workers or soldiers failed. They're so... alien."

Benezia saw the unspoken implication all too clearly: it could be dangerous. Some thought that rachni had a kind of hive mind, shared across all individuals of a colony, residing in its queen. No asari had ever touched a mind like that. It might be incomprehensible or impossible to unlink from, or even prove to be so overwhelming as to reduce the unprepared mind to a quivering, non-sentient mess, like a Prothean Beacon might. The girl's decision against melding was as sensible as it was cowardly; she was on the younger side of matronhood, and would not have the required training, discipline and mental fortitude to make an attempt with any real chance of success. She was too young to know the intricacies of her mind as Benezia knew her own.

I know my own mind the voice whispered again. This is not it. This is not me. I must remember myself.

She squashed the voice as brutally as she could, hoping that it would not stir again. The time was not yet right. But soon she must. Soon, or never.

"I quite understand," she told the girl. "The dangers are great. It is not your place to make the first attempt. It should be someone who is older and experienced in such things."

Benezia didn't wait for any acknowledgement form her, but turned back to the human woman.

"I will need to be able to touch the creature to initiate the meld. Restrain it. Do not use gas or any other substances that might alter its mental state."

The human woman blinked at her and tugged at the collar of her coat again.

"Without gas? We'd have to go into the chamber and physically tie her down! Matriarch, with all due respect, you can't honestly expect me to risk my staff with that, not after all we've been through. You promised to help us-"

Benezia felt the anger that always seemed to be close to the surface of late boil up inside of her, abruptly flashing over into rage. Who was this child that thought to question her? Her! How dare she! The human would risk her staff, even risk her own life if Benezia so desired it. It was the proper order of things. And if the miserable worm would not serve, then there was little point to her continued existence.

She pinned the scientist in a stasis field with the curt flick her wrist. From there it was only the barest of efforts to manoeuvre the mass effect field up and around so that the hapless human hung suspended mid-air, her back pressed up hard against the containment chamber. Behind her, behind the glass, the queen surged and writhed, throwing itself up against the chamber's walls. The doctor flinched with each impact, the colouring of her face changing yet again, this time to a pale shade that indicated fear.

"I think you will find that I can," Benezia said, her tone dripping with pleasant malice, "and do."

She slowly increased the pressure exerted by the field until the glass began to creak. The human's protests turned to whimpers, and then to pained gasps as she struggled to breathe as the field, the glass slowly crushed the life from her. Behind her, Benezia heard murmurs of discontent rising, and the smack as someone was struck with a rifle butt. In the chamber, the rachni's thrashing grew ever more frenzied, the creature banging up against the walls of her cage again and again, harder and harder, until they fairly shook with each blow.

And then the human went limp, suddenly and completely, and Benezia noted, with disgust, that she'd fouled herself too. When she released the field, the scientist slid down the wall like a rag doll, crumpling bonelessly onto her knees, her head impacting the floor with a solid crack.

She rounded on the group behind her, her anger only slightly abated. The ragged band of survivors regarded her with a mixture of defiance and fear, the relief at their 'rescue' all but gone.

"Restrain it," she told them. "I will not repeat myself again. And clear this filth away."

The memory stayed with Benezia long after she had woken from the dream that recalled it. That memory, and the memory of what had come shortly after. The queen had fought against the intrusion into her mind, but she had been young, undisciplined, afraid and completely unaccustomed to such intimate contact with other, alien minds. Benezia had been none of those things. And she had not been gentle.

The recollection of how the queen's mind had shrank and fled from her touch had made her feel ill. But it was the memory of how she'd gloated, triumphant, even as she'd ripped the necessary knowledge out of the young creature's mind, that had seen her bent over the small galley's equally tiny sink for over an hour that night, shaking, sweating, body roiling with nausea. To hurt another so, and one so young, and to revel in the doing of it; it was an anathema to everything Benezia had ever thought about herself.

She looked a frightful mess by the time her stomach had settled again, but couldn't bring herself to care about the fact. Aethyta looked a frightful mess too, with a black eye and the nose Benezia had re-broken having swollen up to twice its normal size, but she couldn't bring herself to care about that either. She did feel bad, for a time, for waking her yet again, and then for waking Liara too when she had appeared, stiff and sleepy, but then had come anger: anger at the pair of them for being unwilling to just leave her alone, anger at herself for letting them see her this way in the first place, anger at the Justicar for not doing her duty and, above all else, anger at the Goddess-damned human Spectre for not having been a better shot and putting an end to it, there and then, on Noveria.

With such thoughts circling around her head, and Aethyta's rebuffed attempts to pull details of her dreams from her, it was little wonder that sleep did not come again that night. Instead, she lay in the darkness with her eyes closed, one hand on her chest, feeling the new scar through the thin fabric of the beige overshirt she'd taken to wearing as sleeping attire. She'd never had such a scar before. Perhaps because she'd only been shot only once before, and had immediately received the best medical attention money and a very contrite city militia could buy or harangue. Now, she had four. One in her side, with a matching exit wound in the small of her back. One in her stomach, alongside her navel, still tender to the touch. One in her chest, over her right breast. A little bit lower, a little further to the right and the bullet that had made it might have struck her heart instead of her lung.

Aethyta had always had scars. They came and went as the years passed and as Aethyta took this job or got into that fight. Sometimes they were from gunshots. Sometimes, from knives or fists. Benezia had learned them all, tracing them with her fingers, brushing them with her lips, listening to the story behind each one, sometimes horrified and cringing, sometimes smiling indulgently, even laughing along with a lover who was waxing nostalgic. Once, when they'd first met, Aethyta had borne a perfect, slender circle around her left wrist, where her hand had been taken off by a monofilament wire and later reattached. Benezia had covered that scar with a bonding bracelet, patterned purple and blue on burnished bronze, with drops of onyx. The colours of life.

Their daughter had scars now, too. Scars and worse.

She would never be whole again.

When morning finally came, it heralded another cool, grey day with little to recommend it. Benezia might well have simply stayed abed had Liara not guilted her from it. She'd eaten breakfast too, for similar reasons, though she had little enough appetite, the two of them sitting down by the river, well away from the rest of the camp and its noise. She'd let Liara talk, listening with barely half an ear while she watched the brown water and the oddments floating in it pass by. Litter and other waste. Trees. A half-submerged skycar. Bloated, rotting bodies. It would be so very easy, she could see, to rise from her seat and walk out to join them. The waters would close in over her head and carry her out into the sea from which they all came.

What a strange thing it was, to accept death, to accept that you deserved death, only to be denied it.

Breakfast done and discarded, Liara's hand lightly touched her arm. Benezia glanced down at it - her good hand, her whole hand - and then followed the arm up to the face of its owner, who watched her with concern.

"What are you thinking about?" Liara asked gently.

"Little enough."

The answer did not please her daughter. A frown marred the good side of her face, echoed imperfectly by the bad. It was still difficult to look upon her and see ruin where there had once been beauty, guardedness where there had once been innocence.

"Last night-"

"A memory," she said shortly, and turned to look back out over the river. "Nothing more."

"A memory? Of what?"

Benezia thought of Doctor Wouters, and remembered the sound her head had made as it struck the floor. She thought of the rachni queen, and the savage satisfaction of plundering her mind, of taking and taking and taking. She remembered the research team, the fear in their eyes and their pleas for mercy as her retinue had executed them, one by one, their usefulness past. Liara's anguished words, calling her insane, evil, just before Benezia had attacked her with intent to kill.

Had the capacity for such cruelty always been within her? Had Saren, had the Reaper simply awakened it? She had once believed that she'd known her own self as well as any asari could and far better than most; now she was no longer sure.

"Ruin," she said, and it was suddenly too much to look out upon the river, devastation where there had once been beauty. Devastation she had worked to bring about.

She rose, turned and strode back into the camp, having no destination in mind other than away. If Liara followed, she was quickly lost behind Benezia as she ducked and weaved through the makeshift streets and alleyways, pushing past those who blocked her way, ignoring their protests and odd looks. It wasn't until she reached the far wall of the compound that she stopped, startled to discover how her quickly heart was racing, fast enough to burst, how badly her hands trembled until she braced them against the rough block of concrete. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, trying to catch her breath, slow her heart, calm her body.

"Matriarch?" a tentative voice behind her said. "Matriarch Benezia?"

She took a deep breath in through her nose and let it out slowly through her mouth, trying with little success for more mastery of herself. Only then did she straighten and turn to face the intruder: the Justicar's daughter, the ardat-yakshi. The matron bore little resemblance to her striking mother, save for something about the chin and cheekbones, and the subdued colour of her markings. She'd traded her monastery robes for work clothes, similar to Benezia's own but in green and black rather than grey. On her right cheek she bore the livid triangular tattoo of red, green and white that marked her as a carrier of the lethal variant of the disorder. An ugly and unfortunate imposition, but a necessary one. Melds could not be permitted with one such as she on any level, no matter how shallow.

"I am she," she said. "How may I assist you?"

"My name is Falere," the matron said and smiled hesitantly - whether unsure of herself or unsure of Benezia, Benezia couldn't say.

Sudden shame washed through her, hot on the heels of that thought. How much of yesterday's confrontation had the girl witnessed? And how many others had seen it, see what was left of her beg a Justicar for mercy? She had lost control of herself and been manhandled away, like a child in a fit of temper. A strange tightness seized her chest, and for a moment she found it hard to breathe. How many had seen her? How many had heard of it since.

"Doctor T'Soni - your daughter," Falere continued, heedless of Benezia's thoughts, "said last night that you could help me get things started. Working on the farms and gardens back home was never my strongest point, but I think I know enough for us to manage for now, and Doctor T'Soni says you have a knack for plants."

Liara had not been wrong, last night, when she'd said that Benezia had loved to garden. It was the one hobby that had stuck with her throughout her entire life and travels. She'd always derived a quiet satisfaction from the first, sweet flowering of spring, or from seeing the seed she had planted and tended grow into a sapling, and then into a tall, strong tree. Even thinking of it now unbound the weight from her chest, let her shoulders un-tense so she could breathe.

She'd planted a tree for Liara, just before she'd been born, a towering, slender cinsiri, blue-leafed and biotically charged, that sat at the heart of her favourite garden in their Armali home. It was an old custom of her family, with an old superstition attached to it. Cinsiri lived roughly as long as asari themselves did; their ancient, animistic forebears had believed that such a tree and the one it was planted for were linked, the asari drawing strength from it for as long as both lived. Benezia written at length about the history and symbolism of it, once, and how the belief had later evolved into the tradition found in many Kysa and Oebera mountain tribes of using wood from the tree almost exclusively for funeral pyres.

Her gardens, the tree, were like as not dead now, along with the person who'd planted them. Her writings were dust on the wind.

"I do not know if that would be wise," Benezia managed eventually.

"I've lived at the monastery since I was little more than a child," Falere said, scowling, and there was repressed anger behind her words, "and I've been eligible to return here to visit for two hundred years. In another hundred, I might have been able to return permanently. I can assure you that I'm in complete control of myself."

"Forgive me child - that is not what I meant. I-" Benezia began, and sighed, pressing a hand to her head and the ever-present ache in her temples. "I am a tired, broken thing. I fear I would be of little use to you."

The anger in the matron's expression faded, to be replaced by understanding and something dangerously close to pity.

"Some help is better than none," she said evenly. "At least you could show me where everything is. I brought seed and spores and some tools along with us from home, but we'll need more than that. Especially if we're going to grow anything in this weather. I think we'll need greenhouses."

A flash of white and blue behind and to the left of the other asari caught Benezia's eye. When she turned her head to focus upon it, she spotted her own daughter, watching them from the shadowed alley between two sets of stacked shipping containers. Falere, puzzled, turned to follow her gaze, but as she did so, Liara stepped further back into the shadows and vanished from sight.

"I suppose I can do that, at least," Benezia agreed quietly, turning her attention back to Falere, and Falere's to her. "Follow me."