Lillith looked up at the towering building in front of her, then down at the glass front doors. The building towered over the street, the sun shining off the windows. The upper floors rippled with rainbow colors, looking like the sun on an oil spill. There was no line. She had hoped, when she had left Clara in the capable hands of the school, that when she finally reached the Alliance offices that there would be a line. She wasn't sure if that desire stemmed from wanting to be able to walk away or not. If the line would have been an excuse to not sign up. To go back to the emptiness that she had so carefully constructed around her for the last two years. Or if it had been a hope that if there were others that they wouldn't notice the skinny girl who was sore out of place in this large Earth city. Or if she had simply hoped that if there was a line, there would be other recruits, and if there were other recruits then she might have been able to find out what awaited her on the other side of those doors.

Whatever her wishes, though, there was no line. She could see the banner on the other side of the windows. It proclaimed, in blood-red letters, that you could 'Join the Alliance' and 'See the Stars, and Make a Difference'. There were pictures of generic soldiers, smiling out from under the helmets of heavy armor, the visors up to show their faces. She remembered the way a bullet had torn through Jack, and thought maybe the soldiers in the pictures would be better off putting their visors down. It might offer a modicum of protection. She rubbed her hands on the thighs of her jeans. She was afraid that her palms were sweating, but they were dry. She realized, that though she knew she should be nervous - that this was the biggest thing to happen in her life since it had ended two years before - she wasn't. This was going to happen, and whatever they said, whatever occurred on the other side of the doors, it was not like things could get worse.

She squared her shoulders and, keeping her chin high, walked through the entrance. The door slid open, chiming brightly.

"Good afternoon!" a too perky voice chirped as the door slid closed behind her. "Welcome to the Alliance! How can I help you?"

Lillith looked around for the source of the voice, and saw a dark-haired woman behind a small desk just inside the doors. She wore almost no make up which made it difficult for Lillith to put an age on her. It was hard for her to put ages on people here on earth in general. On Mindoir, a woman with skin that smooth couldn't have been more than a teenager, but here Lillith had met women in their thirties that still looked so strangely young. The sun aged a person, she knew, but she hadn't been aware that it aged them so much.

"I'm here to enlist," she said, fighting the urge to stick her hands in her pockets and make herself a smaller target. It was a habit she'd picked up over the last couple years, and she was determined to lose it. There was nothing out there that she had to fear, nothing worse than what had already happened to her. She was going to be a soldier, and soldiers were never afraid.

"That's wonderful!" She pulled a datapad from a stack of them on the corner of the desk and handed it to her. "Just a few quick questions, then you'll meet with the recruitment officer, and then the medical. Have you shown biotic potential?"

"Um, no?" Lillith glanced down at the screen of the datapad and then moved away before the woman could speak again.

The questions were fairly straightforward, and multiple choice. She started to answer them randomly, the way she had her tests at school, but stopped herself. She actually wanted to succeed at this, and she settled down to answer them correctly. She breezed through them, they were personality questions not an english test, and returned datapad to the woman. She got an overly large smile in return and was told someone would be out to speak with her shortly.

Retaking a seat by the window, she took in the room closely. It was larger than most buildings on Mindoir, and cleaner than most as well. Mud and dirt and the smell of the farms permeated every inch of life of on the colony. It worked itself into the fibers of a persons clothes, coated the floors and the walls. It hung heavy in every inch of air from one side of town to the other. She'd only been gone for two weeks, but already she missed it. Not the woman she was living with. Not the people who weren't the people she'd grown up with. Not the memories of her family dying. But the planet. The quiet sounds of the farm that she hadn't tended in two years. The animals had been sold, she knew, the farm burnt to the ground. Maybe that would have been worth going back for. She missed the fact that the colony had picked themselves up and gone back to tending sick cows and herding sheep. They were a robust bunch. She was the only one that hadn't been able to let go. To pick herself up. She didn't deserve to live there anymore. A door opened on the far side of the room and a man she recognized stepped out.

She didn't know his name, but she knew his face. She had been thinking about him just a few months before, when she'd made the decision to come here. The big ears, and the slow smile. The laughing, childlike eyes. The way he was always messing with his hair, but could never get it neat. He had picked her up from the blood soaked ground. He had promised to look for Clara. He had found her. She remembered that he had called her brave. She remembered his hands, picking her up, and being so careful about where he touched her. Reassuring her that he was only there to help.

"Well well well," he said, "Look what the cat dragged in." He smiled at her, and she found herself smiling back. "You clean up well, Ms. Shepard," he laughed, and motioned for her to follow him down a long carpeted hallway.

"It's nice not being covered in blood," she whispered.

He turned, eyes laughing, until he saw she was serious. "Ah, kid, you're too young to think like that. Where's that baby sister of yours anyway?" he asked, leading her into a small office and motioning for her to take a chair. There weren't any personal photos here. The walls were covered with more recruitment posters, the desk bare but for a single terminal and a small stack of datapads.

Lillith thought of her sister. The promises that she would write, that she would tell her of all the adventures she was having. Thought of the way her eyes lit up as she took in the work of artistic masters that lined the walls of her new school. Thought of the way that everything bad that had ever happened to her baby sister was because of her. This was a chance to break that bond, clean. A chance to let her sister live without the shadow of her own failures.

She couldn't do it. Clara was the only reason she continued to breathe.

"She got accepted into a large art school...somewhere. I didn't do very well in Earth geography in school."

He laughed, "No, but I suppose you didn't really need it. That's wonderful, about her getting into school." He tapped a few buttons and she saw her school transcripts pop up on his terminal screen. "You outstripped everyone in computer science and engineering though. Play with computers a lot growing up?"

"It isn't difficult to outstrip your peers when you're graduating class has only three people in it," she said, and again he was surprised to find she was being serious, not self-depreciating, "but we didn't even have a computer growing up. My m- my mother does- didn't like them. I just, I have knack, that's what my teachers said...before, everything. And my, um, my dad and- my dad-," she swallowed, hard, and all emotion left her voice, "My dad and I used to work on the equipment around the farm." She looked at him, her eyes empty; she felt better when she was empty.

He tapped a few more buttons, flipped through pages of other reports. She wondered if her psych reports were in there. That was her only fear, that something in there would prevent the Alliance from taking her. That they would turn her down because of what had happened. She hadn't been talking to the psychologists like she was supposed to. She didn't have anything against them, not really, but she wasn't sure how talking about things she already knew would help anything. "How would you feel about officer training?" he asked finally.

"I...I didn't want...I don't think I'd be very good at it." The idea to come here had been born from the last thing Clara had said to her before everything had gone wrong. That she would rather join the Alliance than marry a boy. Well, Lillith would rather join the Alliance than remain in the cesspool of memory that was her home.

He reached under his desk and handed her a omni-tool. She didn't have one of her own, but she knew what they were. Growing up, the mayor had been the only person she knew with an omni-tool. Most of the people on Mindoir had moved out there, in the years before the first contact war, to get away from what they saw as the slow creep of technology. Though they ate up new advances in farm equipment eagerly enough. "Do you have one?" he asked. She shook her head. "Think you can figure it out?"

She inspected it closely, then slipped it on her wrist. A second later there was a glowing orb sitting across the room. "No hostiles detected," it beeped, then disappeared. She gasped, and smiled, the first real genuine smile that had crossed her features in two years.

"That...wow," she gasped, and fiddled with it a bit longer, sounding very much like the child she had been two years earlier. The man across from her leaned back in his chair and watched her. A moment later the orb reappeared.

"No hostiles detected. Please command," it said this time. The soldier jumped.

"How did you do that?"

"It seemed silly that it would simply disappear when there wasn't something in the immediate area. And the cool down rate before another could be dispatched means if you walked into an ambush it would be useless. I'm sorry. I can change it back." The orb disappeared as she slipped the omni-tool off her wrist and handed it back to him. "Do only officers get those?"

"No. But there aren't may enlisted engineers. Seems a waste for all the schooling."

"I barely graduated high school."

"Ms. Shepard, that program is over two years old. You just saved the Alliance billions of dollars in research in what you just did. I think they can overlook your lack of higher education."

She smiled at him, and nodded.

"Well, in that case, report to clinic." He handed her a datapad. "Do you have any questions for me before you go?"

She shook her head and stood up. At the door, she paused, "What's your name?"

He laughed, standing and following her into the hall, "Lieutenant Ernesto Zabaleta. You can call me Ernie until you get through all the paperwork, then it'll be Lieutenant Zabaleta."

"Or sir," she questioned.

"Or sir, exactly. And," he paused, and reached out, stopping her with a hand on her arm. "I wanted to thank you."

"For what? Agreeing to become an officer?"

He shook his head, and sighed, "No, for saving me. What I saw...everything that happened to your family, your home. I was in a bad place when it was all over." He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck, "Thinking about you, and your sister, knowing that you two were okay, that out of everything that had happened that you two were out there. I kept going because of you two. I almost lost everything, I started drinking. And I sat down, took a look at my life, and wondered what you'd say if you knew. I didn't think you'd be too happy with me."

"I didn't even know your name."

"Still didn't think that you'd appreciate it if you knew that the guy who found you turned into a drunk." He shrugged. "Anyway, thanks. And the next time I see you, you better be saluting. Give your sister my best."

She nodded solemnly, and checked the datapad for directions to the clinic.

Her mind was swirling with what he had said. Just another failure to lay on her shoulders. She didn't believe that he had stopped because he had been thinking about her. She had barely been coherent the last time she had seen him. But had she done something different, had she been able to save someone, anyone, from the town she'd grown up in, maybe he wouldn't have been drawn to drink in the first place. She was glad he had overcome it though, even if she thought his thanks was misplaced.

She asked the overly perky lady in the front room if there was a place where she could write a letter, and then sent a message to Clara. Just as she said she would. She knew she should cut ties, that her baby sister would be better off without her, but the bottom line was that Lillith needed Clara so much more than Clara needed her. And though she hated herself for being so selfish, she told Clara everything that had happened, and Lieutenant Zabaleta's greeting, before heading to the clinic for her physical.