How they'd gotten separated, Shepard had no idea. All of a sudden there seemed to be bugs everywhere. She had Ashley and Liara with her, she had a vague idea where Kaidan was, but ever since that rumble that had shaken the structure, she hadn't been able to raise any of them.

She could only hope they were all right.

The three of them had problems of their own.

When they reached Matriarch stage, most asari had almost a thousand years under their belt. The weight and gravity of so much life gave them, in Shepard's opinion, a strange, almost awe inducing aura about them. Liara's mother had that in spades, which meant she should have been the one drawing Shepard's attention.

Not so. The Matriarch wasn't the only queen in the room. Shepard found her gaze wanting to be drawn back again and again to the beast contained within a long tube in the center of the room.

Now they knew where everyone was getting rachni from. Not just any rachni...a rachni queen. She was huge, at least twice as big as any of the warriors they had battled. Dimly, Shepard remembered that was par for the course with many insects...weren't there ones so big they could eat their mate alive while mating? She could almost feel the power of her presence vibrating against Benezia's. They'd mistakenly thought separating her from her children would allow them to gain control over them. Instead, they were bloodthirsty beasts. Saren certainly knew how to go about taking over a galaxy. The Thorian, the geth, and now a whole nest of rachni.

And they kept saying she was running a freak show.

But as the rachni queen was currently trapped and not a danger, Shepard kept her eye on the queen...trapped in a different way but still moving...walking down the steps toward them. Benezia's eyes held a blankness that chilled Shepard to the bone. It was one thing to hear Shiala speak of the hold Saren and his ship had on their minds, it was another to see exactly how complete that hold was. "I will not be moved by sympathy. No matter who you bring into this confrontation."

The way she said it, like Liara was nothing more than a tool to be used against her mother, hit Shepard a little too close to home, making her bristle. "She's here because she wants to be. Not because I asked her to be."

Benezia's gaze flicked to her daughter. "Indeed? What have you told her about me, Liara?"

"What could I say, Mother?" Liara's voice was superficially calm but Shepard could hear a tremor beneath it. "That you're insane? Evil? Should I explain how to kill you? What could I say?"

Shepard didn't dare take her eyes off Benezia to look at her. There was no hint of expression on her face, though she had to hear the distress in Liara's voice.

She was silent for a moment, and then she spoke quietly, "Have you faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have."

There was a tightness in Liara's chest, making it painful to breathe. Even up to the moment her mother had frozen them and called in her followers, she hadn't quite made herself believe her mother would do it.

Benezia had withdrawn to a protected spot, dark energy dancing over her skin, watching with that same horrid blankness in her eyes as the commando teams swarmed them. Combining a perfect mix of physical prowess and biotic skills, asari commandos were the elite of the elite among the asari were some of the most respected...and feared...warriors in the galaxy. She recognized many of the faces; most of the asari swarming them had been her mother's bodyguards for as long as Liara had been alive.

But...even more so than her mother, their eyes were blank and expressionless. Their movements were far from the smooth, confident steps of an asari commando. In fact, their movements were oddly clumsy, jerky, almost as if they were having trouble controlling their own limbs...which didn't make the weapons in their hands or the biotics they wielded any less deadly.

Something slammed into her as one commando lifted her gun and she found herself pinned beneath Shepard as the commander rolled them both to relative safety behind a set of stairs. Liara saw the bullet ping off her barriers and Shepard grunted. Furious with herself, Liara shook off the disbelief cloaking her and pushed herself to her feet, her biotics flaring. She heard Ashley yell something and saw Shepard leap forward to meet the commando who was closing in on them, her pistols flaring, clashing with the asari in a flare of gunfire and dark energy.

Liara lost track of time, fighting off exhaustion determinedly. She saw her mother throw Shepard into stasis again at least once. Rather ironic, considering how much the commander favored that tactic herself. She thought she heard her mother call out a couple of times more but she couldn't make out what she was saying. She was too focused on the battle, moving between Shepard and Ashley, countering the commandos' biotics with her own to give one of the human women a chance to take them down. By the time the last of the commandos fell, the three women almost seemed to move around and with each other in a complex dance, playing off each others' strengths and moving to protect each other automatically, a graceful effort that seemed to jar against the clumsy moves of the asari.

The rachni queen herself, observing from her prison, would speak of the notes that flowed between them to be the only music with color she had seen the entire time she had been there.

Finally, there was only Benezia facing off with three wounded and exhausted women, surrounded by the bodies of her followers. The matriarch herself seemed to be swaying on her feet, though what had exhausted her so, Liara could not have said. She drew herself up and looked her mother in the eye, trying not to show how badly her limbs were trembling. She wasn't a match for her mother's biotics even at her best and she wasn't anywhere near that at the moment, but they had come this far, she wouldn't fail Shepard...and her other companions...now.

"This is not over..." Benezia's voice was oddly hoarse. "Saren is unstoppable. My mind is filled with his light. Everything is clear."

"I don't think that light is coming from him. And you know something, Matriarch? I don't think you do either," Shepard said tiredly. She was standing at Liara's side, her pistols out and pointed at Benezia.

Something flickered across her mother's face. Just for an instant. She turned away. "I will not...betray him. You will-" her voice broke, "you-"

A shudder passed through her entire body. Ashley stirred, bringing her rifle up, but Shepard laid a hand on her shoulder, her eyes narrowed at Benezia's back.

Liara took a hesitant step forward. "Mother...?"

Benezia turned toward them abruptly, her eyes wide, looking like herself for the first time. It made tears sting Liara's eyes, her throat going tight. Benezia took a step toward them, her hands raised beseechingly. "You must listen. Saren still whispers in my mind. I can fight his compulsions. Briefly. But the indoctrination is strong." She paused, swaying, her face twisting into an expression so tortured, Liara had to stop herself from running to her.

"How...?" Shepard whispered it, her voice a mixture of suspicion and a strange sort of hope. "How are you able to break free?"

Benezia lifted her head, looking at them with eyes full of weariness and despair. "I sealed a part of my mind away from the indoctrination. Saving it for a moment when I could destroy him. It won't...last long..." Her face twisted again and she looked away, squeezing her eyes shut. "Trapped in my own mind...beating upon the glass as my hands tortured and murdered..." She straightened, making herself look back at them. "People are not themselves around Saren. You come to idolize him. Worship him. You would do anything for him. But the key...the key is Sovereign. His flagship. Its power is extraordinary."

Shepard stepped forward. "Where did it come from, Matriarch? Do you know?"

"No. The geth did not build it. Its technology is far more advanced than any known species."

"The Reapers..."

Benezia shivered, closing her eyes again. "The longer you stay aboard, the more Saren's will seems correct. You sit at his feet and smile as his words pour into your ears."

And what, Liara wondered, was the make of the monster that was pouring words in to Saren's? This high priest of the creatures the geth built shrines to?

"It's subtle at first," Benezia continued, "I thought I was strong enough to resist. Instead, I became a willing tool, eager to serve." Her expression twisted again. Watching her fight it was the most terrible thing Liara had ever seen. Benezia's speech picked up speed, like she was trying to finish what she needed to say. "He sent me here to find the location of the Mu Relay. Its position was lost thousands of years ago. The rachni inhabited that region of the galaxy. They were the ones that discovered it. They can share memories across generations. Queens inherit the knowledge of their mothers." She glanced back at the entrapped queen. "I took the location of the relay from her mind. I was not gentle." Her voice was laced with regret, her hands closing into fists.

"You can still make it right..." Shepard's voice was quiet. "Give me the information, madame..."

"I was not myself..." Benezia was still looking down at her hands. "But...I should have been stronger." She took a deep breath and turned, picking something up from the table behind her, then moving toward Shepard. "I transcribed the location to an OSD. Take it. Please." Her voice was starting to become strained.

"Mother..." Liara moved toward her slowly. "Knowing that relay's coordinates is not enough. Where did he plan to go from there?"

Benezia shook her head, moving back away from them. "Saren would not tell me his destination. But you must find out quickly. I transmitted the coordinates to him before you arrived." She shuddered suddenly, her steps turning into stumbles. "You have to stop...me. I can't...His teeth are at my ear. Fingers on my spine...you should..." She let out a despairing cry.

This time, Shepard had to restrain Liara. She couldn't hold herself back. "Mother! I...don't leave! Fight him!"

She looked back and spoke, her voice shaking. "You've always made me proud, Liara."

All expression fled from her face, that chilling blankness filling her eyes once again. She raised her hands, dark energy dancing over her body. "Die."

Ashley swore and simply opened fire as Shepard flung out the hand with her omni tool, discharging some kind of pulse that didn't do any real damage to Benezia, but it distracted her. Liara swallowed and forced her biotics up, striking out at her mother, the three way attack taking down the already weakened matriarch. It was almost insultingly easy to bring her to ground.

Benezia fell to her knees, blood staining her dress and dripping through the vents on the floor. "I cannot go on. You will have to stop him, Shepard."

Shepard looked at Liara, and then back at her. "Just hold on...we can..."

Benezia shook her head. "He's still in my mind. I'm not entirely myself. I never will be again."

"Mother..." Liara dropped to her knees beside her, ignoring Ashley's hiss to get back.

Benezia touched her cheek gently, her fingers leaving a smear of blood. "Goodnight, Little Wing. I will see you again with the dawn."

Liara caught her as she collapsed. Benezia's eyelids fluttered once. "No light? They always said there would be a..."

And then Matriarch Benezia, one of Thessia's brightest lights, went still and heavy in her daughter's arms. Liara cradled her close, weeping softly, her tears dropping from her face and onto her mother's as the light...and life...fled from it.

Shepard nudged Ashley back gently, giving Liara a few moments of privacy...well, as much as they could, anyway. The commander turned to regard the containment tube and the queen trapped within it. She knew little about the rachni other than they were big, fucking creepy bugs and the reason the salarians had uplifted the krogan was so they could fight them. The Krogan Monument had been erected in honor of them for it.

She hadn't considered them to be anything more than animals. Certainly she'd never gotten the impression from anyone else that they were. But between the notes made here and what Benezia had said...

Ashley yelped suddenly and Shepard spun to see one of the dead commandos lurching toward them. Ash fired but the bullets that peppered the asari didn't seem to faze her. She was, Shepard realized slowly, still dead. No longer a living puppet dancing to Saren's tune, she'd become an actual one...

But who was pulling the strings?

Shepard slowly turned to look at the rachni queen again. The dead asari tottered up beside the tube and turned to face them. She spoke in a low, halting voice, a strange echo vibrating underneath it. "This one. Serves as our voice. We cannot sing. Not in these low spaces. Your musics are colorless. Your way of communicating...strange. Flat. It does not color the air. When we speak, one moves all."

Shepard blinked slowly. "Who...who am I speaking to, here?"

"We are the mother. We sing for those left behind. The children you thought silenced."

'Huh?' Bewildered, Shepard edged past the dead asari and looked at the queen.

"We are rachni." Shepard thought she heard a note of sorrow in the voice beneath the asari's. "The children we birthed were stolen from us before they could learn to sing. Lost to silence. They sought to turn our children into beasts of war. Claws with no songs of their own. Our elders are comfortable with silence. Children know only fear if no one sings to them. Fear has shattered their minds."

They'd gathered that much from the scientists they'd come across earlier. "How are you speaking through her?" Fascinated, Shepard pressed a hand to the glass.

"Our kind speak through the touchings of thought. We pluck the strings, and the other understands. She is weak to urging. She has colors we have no names for. But she is ending. Her music is bittersweet. It is beautiful."

On one level, Shepard had no bloody idea what the queen was talking about. She couldn't have explained why those words struck a chord in her, down deep on a purely instinctive level.

"You...you are not in harmony with those who hoped to control us."

"No..."

"What will you sing? Will you release us? Are we to fade away once more?"

"There's acid tanks rigged up to that tube, Commander," Ashley said quietly. "They wouldn't have rigged that up if they weren't afraid of the consequences of setting it loose."

Five minutes ago, the decision would have been easy. She had thought the rachni were animals, beasts, like varren and thresher maws. She could have debated the ethics of killing any living being back and forth for hours but in the end, if a dog went rabid, you put it down. But the creature was speaking in a voice that echoed through her on more than one level. Shepard heard sorrow and anger both as she spoke of her lost children.

The asari the queen was using looked at her blankly and the queen herself was still. Like she was drawing herself up and preparing to face oblivion. "You have the power to free us, or return our people to the silence of memory."

Simple and matter-of-fact, accepting that her fate...and the fate of her race...was completely out of her control. There would be no pleading from this queen.

"Let her go."

Shepard turned at the sound of that quiet voice to find Liara standing beside Ashley. She'd laid her mother out and closed her eyes. She lifted her gaze to Shepard's. "They made a mistake. They let the krogan go too far. This is a chance for us to atone. Shepard...she's done nothing to us..." Where the rachni queen did not plead, Liara did. "Let her go."

"Shepard, they attacked the galaxy! I want my sisters safe from things like this, not set them up in the future for more of it," Ashley said angrily.

There was that. Torn, Shepard turned back to the queen, her brow furrowed, trying to sort through the thoughts tumbling through her head. She was trying to look at this objectively, rationally, but so much of what the queen was saying, the echo of loneliness in her voice, was throwing her emotions off balance. She kept thinking what it would be like to be born alone in a world where everyone was against you and forced to watch your children taken and enslaved. But she also thought of Wrex and how his ancestors had to have fought the rachni to keep them from taking over. And wondered how in the hell the fate of an entire race had suddenly ended up in her hands when she had trouble guiding herself through her own life. "Are you a survivor of the wars?"

"We do not know. We were only an egg, hearing Mother cry in our dreams." Something came into the queen's voice, an edginess. "A tone from space hushed one voice after another. It forced the singers to resonate with its own sour yellow note."

Shepard froze, suddenly unable to breathe. She heard Liara gasp softly behind her. "A tone from space?"

"Then we awoke in this place. The last echo of those who came out of the Singing Planet. The sky is silent."

Shepard leaned forward, peering through the glass. "Tell me...if I let you loose, would you attack the other races again?"

"No!" The queen's voice was fierce...and fearful. "We- I do not know what happened in the war. We only heard discordance. Songs the color of oily shadows."

And she knew. She felt it.

That shape against a burning circle that haunted her dreams and appeared on paper beneath her pencil, over and over. The deep, instinctive loathing that filled her now whenever she thought of it.

Oily shadows...a note sour and yellow...a sense of wrongness that was like a smear across her brain...

Reaper.

Shepard had to take a step back. The queen was speaking again. "We would seek a hidden place to teach our children harmony. If they understand, perhaps we would return."

Even as she looked down and closed her eyes, Shepard knew she couldn't send acid into that tube. Couldn't kill this strange, wondrous creature who had knocked her feet out from under her without trying. Couldn't condemn her race to extinction. She could not do it. "Yes..."

"Commander..." Ash didn't sound quite as angry. In fact, her voice was rather small, as if she was aware there was stuff going on here she didn't understand. She looked from Shepard to Liara and fell silent.

The queen stirred, and then spoke hesitantly: "You...will give us a chance to compose anew?"

"Yes."

Liara laid a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it gently. The queen turned in the tube as best she could, looking at Shepard. "We will remember. We will sing of your forgiveness to our children."

Shepard nodded and moved to the console, studying it. After a moment, she figured out the command that would allow her to open the tube. It rose above them, a door sliding open in its side.

The queen sent them a final glance. The asari she had taken over collapsed in a boneless heap to the floor.

The queen disappeared out into Noveria's wilds.