Apostate – Jack

–

"I take it the dryers in the bathroom are broken, then."

Jack turned away from the cabinet. She made no effort to hide the half-dozen boxes of food she'd pilfered, but it would not have mattered anyway – Gardner wasn't looking at her, but at the widening puddle of water that had pooled on the floor of his galley. She was sopping wet.

Jack wiped her face with the heel of her hand and gave the mess sergeant a defiant glare. "Nope," she admitted, shrugging. She followed his gaze down the trail of water she'd tracked from the men's showers. "Didn't use them." Shepard's training was entertaining enough, but by the time he'd released them from their morning session in the hangar she'd been so sweaty and sore that she hadn't even bothered disrobing. She'd made a beeline for the showers and soaked herself to the bone, fully-clothed (or as fully-clothed as she ever got). That had been… she wasn't sure, maybe two hours ago? And now she needed a snack.

She stared at Gardner with a satisfied smirk, daring him to protest.

Gardner sighed as the puddle licked at his boots. "Of course you didn't," he said, shaking his head in resignation. His face was stone, even when his eyes flicked up to the disarray of his cabinets.

Jack shimmied off the counter to meet him face to face. The man was a good head taller than her, but even with her implant dormant she could kill him ten times over with her little finger. She grinned up at him, eyes blazing. "I don't have time," she explained, poking him in the chest with each syllable, "to use your fuckin' dryers. What are you going to do about it?"

The flicker of fear she'd been hoping for never crossed Gardner's face. He just shook his head, unimpressed. "You know what? I'm not even surprised anymore," he said, stepping over Lake Jack with an indifferent shrug and walking away without a backwards glance. "Take what you want. I'll mop this up later."

Jack stared after him, eyes narrowed. "Good," she snapped at his retreating back. "I will." Gardner paid her no mind. "Yeah you better run… Mother fucker…"

The mess sergeant was gone.

Jack tried not to let her disappointment show as she returned to her thievery, climbing back up onto the counter to empty out the cabinets of anything else that looked halfway-palatable. Their stay at Minuteman had left the ship well-stocked and Jack took nearly everything, stuffing her mouth with a handful here and there as she stacked up the boxes she liked, but somehow it just felt like a chore now. Raiding the galley wasn't half as fun when nobody gave a shit that you were doing it.

It wasn't just Gardner, either. The crew had been treating her differently lately. When she'd first stepped aboard the Normandy she'd been fuckin' untouchable. People tiptoed around her like she might blow up at any second. Even the krogan hadn't demanded such fear, and he'd actually attacked people. Jack had done it without even trying. That's how fuckin' scary she was. But then she'd grown a little hair and everyone had seemed to forget she was a fucking psychopath. The engineers and Tinbucket didn't give her lair near so wide a berth as they used to, Thane had offered to pray to his fuckin' lizard gods for her, and Kasumi had even had the gall to come down and rifle through her shit.

Now Gardner wouldn't even yell at her for tracking water everywhere? It was bullshit and it was getting fucking old.

There was only one explanation.

Pragia.

They felt sorry for her. The thought was sour, but there was no other explanation. The fuckers didn't fear her anymore because they felt sorry for her. One little mission in the rain and now they all thought her threats were just cries for help.

Fuck them.

Fuckin' assholes.

Jack ran a hand down her scalp to squeeze the water from her hair. It was two centimeters long, if that, but she'd been shaved for so many years that the weight of it on her head still felt fucked to her. Some part of her wondered if it was the hair that made her look less threatening, if she should just shave it all off again and be done with it, but she had to admit she liked the change.

"Whatever," Jack growled to herself. At least they still feared her enough to keep her implant off when she wasn't training. If she wanted respect, she'd just have to up her game. Maybe she'd come visit Gardner in the inducer pods tonight and teach him a lesson about patronizing her. Or maybe she'd just block all the shower drains and flood the whole crew deck. She'd show them a fucking cry for help.

Her stomach gave an insistent gurgle and she helped herself to another handful of little gray crackers. The shower had eased her aching muscles, but the hunger she'd worked up still gnawed at her like a stone in her belly. Even on days when they left her implant off Jack ate like a man three times her size, but ever since they'd started their squad training with Shepard she'd been positively ravenous. On Minuteman Station she'd spent half her time in the cafeteria intimidating the Cerberus cooks (they, at least, knew nothing about Pragia and cringed properly when she threatened to skin them with their own ladles), and now that they were back aboard the Normandy her nest in the lower decks was strewn with stolen food packages.

It was time to go add a few more. Jack stacked snack foods on a tray until she could stack no more, stuffed an ice cream sandwich into her mouth, and hopped off of Gardner's counter with a little splash. She ignored the looks the crew gave her as she lugged her prizes to the elevator, sodden pants squishing with every step.

Thane was waiting for the elevator, his hands drawn behind his back beneath a freshly-cleaned arsenal of guns. He smelled like gun oil and rubber. He was dressed for low-gravity wetwork – a set of magnetic crampons had been strapped overtop his boots, and his breathing mask dangled around his ribbed neck. The drell was as clean as his weapons, his scales scrubbed to an emerald shine and his suit dark and wrinkle-free. He inclined his head as Jack approached. "Jack," he said, polite as always. "Can I help you carry your meal?" His voice was a tortured rasp.

Jack frowned. As pretty as Thane looked all polished up, he sounded worse than ever. She found her breath caught in her throat, as if she was waiting to see if he'd keel over right there in front of the elevator. He did not. Still… she couldn't miss the flecks of red staining the once-clear plastic of the drell's breathing mask. She wondered if she should say something. By the time she'd bit through the sandwich, however, she'd decided against it. "Get your own," she said instead, through a mouthful of ice cream.

Thane only smiled. "I imagine you must be hungry, after the rigor of the morning's training. I myself ate three entire pears."

Jack rolled her eyes, chewing. "Three whole pearth? You mutht be thome kind of badath."

"Indeed," Thane agreed, oblivious. "I also enjoyed a liter of water." He stared at her with his strange dark eyes. "I normally avoid it before engagements, but rare indulgences can be heartening. Even meditative. Something like your shower ritual, I suspect. When I spoke to you in the bathroom you were quite unresponsive."

Jack felt the heat rising on her cheeks. During her two-hour shower she had been dimly aware of people coming in and out of the bathroom – even showering next to her –but with the water thundering down on her head like so many raindrops she had found them easy to ignore. She swallowed her ice cream. "Yeah, well… I was tired. You're all pussies but I did have to fight you all at once." Shepard had had her on Harbinger duty again that morning, tossing debris at the ground team as they practiced their drills to help imitate the biotic attacks of the collectors. The hangar of the Normandy was too small for her to really let loose like she had on Minuteman, but she wasn't going to complain – she much preferred being Harbinger to running the drills with the rest of them. Even in the cramped hangar, Shepard had insisted that she try to make it as real as possible, and she'd gladly obliged, raining steel crates down on her colleagues without restraint. One of them had very nearly taken Miranda's head off this morning – the memory filled Jack with warm feelings.

Thane nodded, immune to her insults. "Of course," he agreed. The elevator gave a chime and the two of them stepped through. Jack, still balancing a mountain of snackfoods, reached for the engineering deck button with her elbow, but Thane had beaten her to it without a word.

"I assume by your state of dress you will be remaining behind with Mr. Taylor and Justicar Samara instead of joining us on the geth station," Thane said.

That was today? Jack shrugged. "Fuck yeah I'm staying behind. Geth are boring." She grinned evilly up at the drell. "They don't scream." Technically, Shepard had wanted all of them to go, but so deep into geth space it had seemed foolish to empty the Normandy of all its defenders, so when Jack had refused to fight in a spacesuit he hadn't pressed the issue. The fact that he was leaving Taylor and Samara behind to babysit her gave Jack a flash of satisfaction. Samara still feared her. The rest of the crew might not think she was a threat anymore, but Samara would kill her in a nanosecond if she could. She'd admitted as much right to Jack's face. She would never feel sorry for her. "Besides, we can't all fit on that fuckin' shuttle anyway, are you kidding me?"

"I admit, I do not know what to expect," Thane said, as if he had not heard her. "But few organics get the opportunity to see the geth in their own territory. I suspect it will be an educational experience."

Jack rolled her eyes as the doors opened to the engineering deck. "One geth is enough for me." Legion had only been on the ship a day and a half and, while everybody but Taylor and Tinbucket had taken its inclusion in stride, Jack had to admit the thing was creepy as shit. Fighting through dozens of them in an airless, gravity-less station? She'd pass on that, no matter how educational it was. "Look at me," she said, backing out of the elevator. "I'm soaking wet, my amp's off, I'm fuckin' hungry, and I'm fuckin' tired. The last thing I want to do right now is suit up to go join the tech-nerd circlejerk." She turned and headed down the corridor towards the staircases, shouldering past the waiting Tali and Zaeed, who eyed her dripping clothes and towering stack of stolen food with confused faces as they filed onto the elevator in her place. "You have fun, though," she called back, cackling.

"And you as well, Jack."

9 years previously…

–

Grand Brightgust Towan stood at the pulpit above his audience, speaking of winds and persecution and families.

"All too often have we seen it," he was saying, spotty white hands clutching at the ceiling as if trying to grab a better world for them all. Below him, the congregation of brothers and sisters – Gusts, Towan called them – stared up at him with rapt attention. "Men and women filled with the wind, hated and resented by those without. Feared. Used. Persecuted." He stared down to look at his Gusts, and yet even in the back row Jack felt like he was speaking to her and her alone. "Even killed."

Towan was not a pretty man. He was old and fat, and the loose skin beneath his chin waggled with every syllable he spoke. Without eyebrows or hair he looked something like a big pink grub, and the warehouse that was the current Chamber of the Winds was hardly an awe-inspiring podium to orate from.

Still, there was no denying his majesty. He was a biotic prodigy, the brightest of the Brightgusts and beloved father to his flock. His robes were blue-grey like those of his sons and daughters, but inlaid with dozens of glittering blue Kahjean sand-diamonds, relics of his time training with the little-known hanar farseers. The band on his left sleeve, or so Jack had been told, had been a gift from the Asari Huntsmistress. Around his neck he wore nine simple chokers, each fastened with another crystal to represent his mastery of the Nine Levels of Biotic Enlightenment. His podium, too, was inlaid with gems, and though the ceiling lights were the same sickly fluorescent fixtures that lit the rest of Omega, the crystals that hung from them made the light sparkle and kaleidoscope out in a thousand directions, wreathing the Grand Brightgust in glimmering pinpricks.

Towan was fat and old and yet somehow he had a beauty to him.

Grand Brightgust Towan. Even his name had power.

Jack sat amongst the audience and listened to his every word.

"Those who have the wind are the chosen," Towan was saying, and his outstretched hand filled with the dim blue glow of a biotic corona. It danced at his fingertips. "Those who have the wind are our brothers and sisters, every one. We pluck them from their oppressors, those who would fear them, use them, persecute them, KILL them." He held his handful of light up and it flared brighter with every word. "We pluck them from gutters and orphanages, we pluck them from slavers and mercs, we pluck them from whatever hell they find themselves in! And…" He clutched the light to him, extinguishing it against his chest. "We make them our family."

Family. Jack swallowed heavily as Towan went on.

It had not been easy to find the Church of the Winds. She'd heard furious whispers wherever she went – the Church's habit of poaching biotics from merc groups had not made it popular on Omega – but none of those whispers had said how to find them, and when she'd risked asking around a little she'd gotten nothing but threats and confused looks. The Church of the Winds were a bunch of zealots and terrorists, but they were well hidden. "With any luck," one turian had slurred at her, "they've tossed themselves into their fanblades down to the man. Might as well give it up."

But it was said that the Church of the Winds took in wayward biotics. It was said the Brightgusts who led them had mastered the biotic arts, and could bring enlightenment to those who cared to learn. It was said they were a family.

Jack had refused to be dissuaded.

Now, after weeks of hide-and-seek, after telling her whole horrible story to a hooded man at a bar (one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do), after toiling away selling herself or her implant's deadly skills to scrape together the two thousand credits the recruiter had demanded of her, after submitting to being blindfolded and drugged and flown to the Gusts' secret base in a dirty old hovercar, she was finally here.

"We protect them," Towan was saying now. "But we do more than that. We teach them. We nurture them. We train them to use the wind they have been given." The old priest flicked a gesture to someone in the front row and a tall asari rose to her feet and climbed to join him at the pulpit. Her scales were bare to match Towan's baldness, none of the colorful tattoos or jewelry that most asari wore even on Omega. She had a hard look to her that went deeper than the armor she wore under her robes – she'd obviously been a soldier or something before – and when the asari's gaze passed over her Jack could not help but feel her implant stir. Dark, spidery thoughts snaked through her mind.

I could take you. Soldier or not, come after me and I'll fucking kill you. A thousand biotics on Omega, and not one of them can kill like I can. Not Aria's commandos, not the Winds, not anyone. I'll fucking kill them if they try anything.

The thoughts came unbidden, so loud and angry that they left Jack trembling. Her blood sang in anticipation of a fight, as it always seemed to when her implant decided someone was a threat to her. It clenched at her brain and rubbed its hands together with a violent hunger.

I don't need their protection. I'm the most powerful biotic the galaxy has ever seen.

Jack shook her head, willing her body to calm. She did need their protection. She was not the almighty warrior Cerberus had tried to make her. She was a terrified little girl, over her head on a station of murderers and thieves. She hadn't been strong enough to protect herself from the freighter crew that had picked her up on Pragia and dumped her here when they tired of her, she hadn't been strong enough to protect herself from Myceh and Kash who had told her they only wanted her to lift crates, she hadn't been strong enough to protect herself from anyone. She had brute force, but she didn't have control. She didn't have enlightenment.

That was why she was here. The asari was not her enemy. Hard look or not, she smiled as Towan put his arm around her. She was not her enemy. She should not think that way about the Winds. They were her allies. They were going to help her. They are my new family.

"When I met Brightgust Aoire she was lost and afraid, her face huddled away from the wind that filled her. She was hungry and she was scared, chewed upon and spat out by Omega as so many are." He patted her on the shoulder. "But she was turning away from herself. Afraid of what she was, of what she could be. And I was moved, and I took her in as the first of my Gusts, and now…" He smiled at her. "Look at her." Aoire gave her mentor a thankful nod, and there was a weak smattering of applause from the front rows.

Once Aoire had retaken her seat, Towan stepped down from his pulpit to regard his audience. The Brightgusts, the bareheaded elders who taught the levels of biotic enlightenment, sat in the front row. Behind them were the more junior disciples, behind them the initiates, and last of all, the two dozen new recruits that had come with Jack to be inducted into the Church. The Gusts parted as Towan stepped past, turning to watch him stand before his newest members.

"My little Gusts," he said, smiling at them. "I can help you. Whoever you are, whatever your race or origin, you will not be alone. Whatever you fear, whatever you need, I will not turn you away. Say our words and you will be Gusts. You will be my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters, until the end of time. But it will not be easy. To join the Church of the Winds – to gain enlightenment – you must embrace the wind within you. You must learn to harness it, to control it, to sail upon it. If this is something you cannot do, then leave us, and go in peace. But if you are willing to give yourself to the wind, then the Winds will give themselves to you."

Nobody left.

Towan smiled and turned back for his pulpit. "Then join us." He accepted a datapad from Brightgust Aiore and stared at it for a long moment, letting the quiet gestate. Then, he looked up. "Cotyr Vallusi," he called. A young turian a few seats to Jack's left rose to his feet, looking as nervous as Jack felt. Towan smiled down at him. "Join me. Come, speak the words and begin your journey as my brother and son."

Cotyr climbed the pulpit to stand beside the Grand Brightgust. The words, Jack had been assured, were simple, and so they were. "Are you a Gust? Will you accept the wind into your heart, devote yourself to the pursuit of biotic enlightenment, divest yourself of greed and ambition and falsities, and accept yourself as one of us?" Towan asked, "bound to your family forever and ever?" And Cotyr said "I am and I will" and clasped Towan's hand and that was that, he was a Gust. He was ushered aside to sit with the Brightgusts as Towan called the next name.

Jack's heart felt like it would explode out of her chest as she waited for her turn. She had spent so long alone that even at the very back of the congregation it took all her willpower not to turn and bolt. People betrayed you. People hurt you. People were never worth investing in.

But families? Surely that was an exception.

She needed them. When she'd landed on Omega for the first time, she was sure she'd be dead in a week. Now, eight months later she was still alive, but she was on her last legs. Every day had brought her lower. Cerberus had nearly caught her three times already, and she had escaped more narrowly each time. She had tried to disguise herself, tried never to use her abilities, and yet a biotic little girl with a mechanical ear and two hundred medical tattoos tended to attract some interest, and they'd found her every time.

As much as she hated to trust, she needed help. And who better to help a biotic on the run than the Church of the Winds?

"Jack," Towan said, and Jack swallowed her fear. She rose to her feet, shaking, and made for the pulpit, staring at the floor and feeling every eye on her. It was not until she'd climbed the steps to stand next to the Grand Brightgust that she realized something was wrong. Towan was not speaking. She risked a glance up.

"Child," Towan said. He looked concerned, his voice was barely a whisper. "What happened to your head?"

Jack's stomach did flips. She looked around nervously. "I… I shaved it," she admitted, reaching up to touch one of the cuts on her scalp. She hadn't been able to get a proper razor, and her knife had gotten so dull, and so her head was covered in little mistakes that left the flesh tender and painful (and covered in more than a few missed tufts of hair). "To be a Gust," she explained, gesturing to the bald church members in the front row.

Towan looked distressed. "Jack, child, the Brightgusts of our church bare their heads to rid themselves of vanity, to show that they are moved by the wind and the wind alone. You aren't…" He shook his head. "Did you use a knife?"

Jack nodded, ashamed. She dug in her pocket and produced the knife. "This one," she mumbled, staring at her feet.

"Perhaps someday," Towan said, voice gentle, "you will reach the sixth level of enlightenment and be a Brightgust yourself. On that day you will shed your hair not with a knife, but with a crystal razor. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, Little Gust." He smiled and squeezed her shoulder like a father should. "Give me the knife, Jack," he said, and held out a hand.

Jack's implant roared in protest. He was going to kill her. He was going to fucking kill her. Adrenaline coursed through her veins and her blood sang. She clutched the knife to her chest, eyes wide. "N…no. I need it."

Towan was patient. "Why?"

"Protection."

Towan shook his head. "The Church is your protection now," he said, and held his hand out again. "Give me the knife."

Jack hesitated. She couldn't give up her knife. She couldn't. She needed it. It was the only weapon she had – at least since she had resolved not to use her biotics anymore lest Cerberus catch wind of her again. But Towan was unyielding. She had to trust him.

She gave him the knife and tried to look brave.

But even as she said the words, Jack felt the terror welling up inside her. Unarmed she felt naked, vulnerable, and she had to grit her teeth to stop the tears from coming. They are my family, she thought to herself, again and again. They are my family.

Presently…

–

Jack breathed deeply as the boamaleaf did its job. A quiet haze of calm settled over her nerves and she sank a little deeper into the nest of torn foam that was her bed, watching the smoke twirl from the end of the stubby little cigarette. It wasn't cheating, not really – especially since she had never promised to quit in the first place – but she could just imagine the disappointed look in the salarian's eyes.

"Oh fuck you, Mordin," she said to the ceiling, taking another decadent drag. She'd bought the leaf from a kid the last time they were on the Citadel, and it had cost her half of her cash. Like hell she wasn't going to use it just because some fuckin' salarian had a stick up his ass about drugs. Boama wasn't even much of a drug at all, some leaf from one of the colony worlds with hardly any kick to it. She had no doubt it rotted the lungs or the brain or something, but compared to the stuff she usually did?

Practically nothing.

Still, while she would never admit it aloud, Mordin had actually been right about cutting back on the heavier stuff. The first week or two after he'd started weaning her had been rough, but now she was through the worst of it and she found herself missing it less and less with each passing day. Her energy was better, her appetite was better. She shook less. It was 'common knowledge' back on Omega that drugs made your biotics stronger, but now that she was clean(ish) she was stronger and faster than she'd been in years. She could fight fiercer and longer, and though her head would hurt when her implant dug in its spider legs, it was better than the tremors. And so while she'd kept up the complaining and the death threats every time she saw the professor, she'd quietly taken the pills he'd been giving her and did her best not to cheat.

On the heavy stuff, anyway. Mordin's pills could curb the withdrawal – the need – somewhat, but it was like craving a nice steak and filling up on syntheti-bars instead. Yeah you weren't hungry anymore, but you still wanted a fuckin' steak. Boamaleaf – weak as it was – was her steak today.

Jack had finished her first cigarette and was contemplating whether she wanted to roll a second or just raid Gardner's stores again when the quiet darkness of her hidey-hole was plunged into chaos.

BRWAAAAAOOOOOOWWWWWWRRRR

A great tearing noise shook the ship's hull so hard Jack's makeshift bed collapsed, dumping her headfirst onto the floor in an avalanche of food wrappings and debris. The hooks of her implant dug deep at the impact, sending pain lancing up her neck so fiercely she almost cried. Stars swum in front of her eyes.

"Fuuuuuck," she snarled, rolling onto her side. It felt like she'd been kicked in the gut. "EDI, tell that crippled little fucker to get his thumb out of his ass and fly fuckin' STRAIGHT!"

Silence was her only answer.

And then, above the silence… a buzzing sound.

Jack righted herself, staring around the room in confusion. The emergency lights were on, blinking out the paths up the stairwells.

The buzzing grew louder and louder.

She heard the first swarmer before she saw it. It was clearly unused to closed spaces, and bounced along the wall like a confused moth as it wound its way down the stairs. It hadn't seen her yet.

For a moment she dismissed it as another of Mordin's experiments, but a second later there were ten more, then fifty more, and then the hold darkened with their numbers. Black shadows traced along the walls, flapping through the red dim. The heady buzz of their wings seemed to swallow the room.

Even as the swarms swelled on her, Jack stared accusingly at the boamaleaf – she'd never known it to cause hallucinations.

Then there was a scream from the floor above and the thump of armored feet and the glowing yellow eyes of a collector descending through the darkness.

Jack's eyes went wide. This was no hallucination.

Her first field exploded from her hands on a surge of adrenaline. Her implant was off, just a dead weight in her skull, but the push was still strong enough to send the swarms soaring away like dry leaves. They reeled in the dark, their buzzing crescendoing to a furious pitch as they careened into walls and machinery. The collector stumbled.

Jack knew she only had a moment. She dove into the mess of debris, feeling desperately in the dim light for her gun. Her fingers closed over something hard, but it was only an empty can of aerosol cheese substitute. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck!" she swore, tossing it aside with a frantic shriek. Her head swam with uncharacteristic terror. She was vulnerable. She was a scared little girl. She was going to die. Her hands shook, and found nothing. No implant, no gun.

Behind her, the collector took aim with its own weapon.

Too late. She had to do without.

With another desperate biotic push Jack sprung to her feet and dove onto the collector, relishing the wet thunk of its bulky head cracking against the bottom of the stairwell. She drew her knife in a liquid motion and jammed it into the soft crease between two of the alien's plates, thrusting it deep with her body weight. The collector screeched and fought, its limbs scrambling at her skin, drawing blood as it tried to bring its gun to bear. Jack pressed down with all her might, digging the knife in further, but the creature was much too strong, and once it had found its grip it lifted her like she weighed nothing at all. Its fingers quested for the trigger.

Jack did the only thing she could think of and bit down on the collector's hand. The carapace tasted foul, crunching and flaking as the digit came off in her mouth, splashing her with a gout of goopy black hemolymph.

She felt sharp claws sink into her skin as a swarmer landed on her shoulder. Even in the darkness she could see the glint of its stinger extending from its abdomen. One sting, she knew, and she'd be done. Mordin had assured them that biotics would metabolize the paralytic much faster than a regular human (and who knew, with all the sand she'd done perhaps she'd do it faster yet), but it wouldn't matter. One sting would be more than enough.

She smashed the swarmer with a fist and scattered its brethren with another biotic push, only for the collector to do the same to her. She flew across the room in a burst of brown-and-black biotic energy.

Jack panted and rose to her feet, winded. Without her amplifier, the tiniest field was a great exertion, and the swarmers were still pressing in. She batted them away again, her head pounding with the effort. Her eyes scanned the room for the glint of her shotgun, one of her pistols, something she could use as a bludgeon, anything that could help her.

There was nothing for it. Jack dove for the collector again, smashing its gun aside before it could get a shot off. The two of them went down again in a tangle of limbs, and Jack brought her knee slamming up into its gut as hard as she could. Her knee bounced harmlessly off of the alien's rocky stomach with each strike, but it was all she could think to do. Her hands found the hilt of her knife - still buried in the collector's chest - and she yanked it out with a quick tug before plunging it in again. In the chaos, it was hard to find the soft spots on the alien's body, and two in every three strikes only scraped harmlessly against chitin plates, but nonetheless soon it was pooling hemolymph from a dozen holes. The collector seemed not to feel it at all, lashing out with its clawed limbs until Jack's vest was bloody tatters.

Jack stabbed over and over again. In the heat of the struggle, she almost didn't notice the man who came tumbling down from the engineering catwalks above. He was conscious – he screamed as he fell – but then the swarmers were on him and he fell silent. One of the engineers, probably. It didn't matter. He was done.

But he stirred, and looked up, and Jack recognized his red beard.

"Little Man!"

Donnelly was bleeding from a head wound, but his face brightened when he saw Jack. He cursed as he smashed a swarmer that had landed on his neck, and lurched clumsily to his feet. "Jack! Help! They got Ga-"

"I don't give a shit!" Jack roared, pressing down on the thrashing collector. She was losing. "Turn on my fucking implant!"

Donnelly stood there, confused, for a moment. But then his omni-tool was out and Jack felt the power surge to life inside her.

The collector's head exploded in a blue flash, its body falling limp beneath her. Even as she felt the prick of the swarmers claws on her back, on her arms, on her head, she gave a last, furious push, so strong it shook the ship. Swarmers scattered away in every direction like little rockets, pulping against the floors and walls.

Jack rose to her feet, chest heaving. The buzzing had stopped.

She leaned on her knees, staring at her feet as she struggled to catch her breath. Blood pattered on the floor beneath her from dozen ragged gashes, but even now her implant seeped endorphins into her system, and the pain and exhaustion started to seep away. "What… the fuck… is happening?" she panted, probing at her injured stomach with tattooed fingers.

"More of 'em up there," Donnelly said, clumsily extricating himself from the pile of debris Jack's attack had kicked him into. "Lots more. Rammed some kind of landing claw through the hangar." He winced at the gash in his head. "They… they got Gabby."

Jack turned to look at him. He was bleeding in a dozen places himself, and covered in insect pulp, but he looked more or less intact. She gestured to his chest, where half a swarmer still clung with dead limbs like fingers. "How come they didn't get you?"

Donnelly blinked stupidly and peeled the swarmer off. "Dunno," he said, staring up at the ceiling. Faint sounds of combat and beating wings could be heard echoing down the walls. "The rest of the crew. We gotto help 'em, Jack."

"Fuck," Jack groaned. How the fuck had the collectors found them? Wasn't that what EDI was for, keeping everyone else in the dark? She spat flecks of chitin on the floor. The collector's finger had left a bitter taste in her mouth, and so soon after she'd eaten. She wanted to vomit, but she dared not.

Their ship was under attack. Shepard was gone. Of the ground team, only she, Jacob, and Samara had stayed behind. The crew was helpless. The defense of the ship was up to them. Up to her. "I shoulda gone to the circlejerk," she lamented.

Donnelly blinked at her, confused. "You have to save them. Jack, you… I can't…" He looked lost, all his usual bravado gone. "Please, Jack. They put her in one of those bloody pods! Gabby is up there wi-"

"Shut up," she snarled, cutting him off. Her head was pounding, and she found herself wishing she had time to smoke the rest of the boama. "Just shut. The Fuck. Up." He quieted, watching her as she surveyed the remains of the room. She could probably find a decent hiding place to wait out the worst of it. Lift up a grate or something, hide under something too heavy for the swarmers to climb in. But then what if the collectors decided to drive the ship into the nearest star as soon as they'd grabbed everybody?

Still, it might be her best chance.

But of course, even if she lived, everyone else would be fucked. And Shepard would be pretty pissed if he got back to find out Jack had let his precious crew get abducted.

Jack sighed. She supposed she had no choice. Somehow Shepard's 'be-a-team' kumbaya bullshit was rubbing off.

"Fuck," she observed again, spying her shotgun at the base of one of the benches. How had she not seen that before? She picked it up and wiped the collector blood off of its grip. A short search found her heavy pistol too – she tossed it to Donnelly, who fumbled for it and missed. The gun clattered to the floor, and he scrambled to reclaim it. "Sorry," he said, wincing at Jack's angry glare.

It figured. Of all the people to miraculously escape the swarms, she had to get stuck with Donnelly. To be fair, the man was probably trustworthy enough – he just wasn't smart enough to betray anyone – but Jack would much rather have had his cleverer half if she had to drag around an anchor. Daniels was a bitch, but she wouldn't have dropped the gun. Hell, she'd even take Tinbucket. Or better yet the old man with his flamethrower. But no. She got Donnelly.

Jack shook her head. When they got back, she was gonna make Shepard buy her a whole fuckin' pharmacy. "Let's go, Little Man." They headed up the stairs to the engineering deck, stepping over the collector's headless corpse. A few swarmer stragglers had found their way back down the stairwell – she smashed one against the wall with one fist. "We're gonna need the salarian's countermeasure things or these swarmers are going to fuck us up." She spat on the wall, still trying to expel the cloying taste of collector blood. "Fuckin' genius took them from us to make some adjustments."

Donnelly nodded. "They'll be in his labs. Probably the big one on the command deck," he agreed. "Or maybe the armory. Pretty sure Miranda's office is just bio stuff, no tech."

Jack sighed. "Command deck," she repeated. Two floors up. Great.

She held out a hand, silencing the engineer as they reached the top of the stairs and approached the door panel. Shotgun leveled at the center of the door, just about at collector head height, she steeled herself and palmed the button.

She almost pulled the trigger out of sheer nerves alone, but when the door parted, nothing was there. Zaeed's door was open, but his quarters were empty but for a few confused swarmers flitting around the ceiling. Through the window on the far wall, they could see down into the hangar, where a half dozen collectors tended the great, rocky landing claw that had ferried them into the ship. The hangar was absolutely crawling with swarmers, so thick they covered the windows in places, their wings a blur as they quested blindly about for crewmembers.

Donnelly swallowed audibly at the sight, but Jack ignored him.

Inching forward to the doorframe, Jack risked a quick glance into the corridor. She pulled back in an instant.

"Two collectors," she whispered. They were standing in the center of the hall, calmly waiting for the elevator. Three of the coffin-like stasis pods floated at their side, but if they were empty or full, Jack could not tell. Perhaps Daniels was in one of them. Jack snuck another peek at the collectors, sizing them up. They wouldn't be much trouble. She was tired, yes, but with shotgun and knife in hand and implant smoldering happily under her skull she was back to the all-powerful bitch.

"What do we do?" Donnelly asked, and Jack turned to meet his eyes. The fear was plain to see on his face, but he clutched his gun with determined purpose.

"You do nothing, Little Man," she said. "I don't want you shooting me in my ass by mistake. I'll handle them."

Offense and relief jostled for Donnelly's expression, but relief won out. He nodded, lowering his gun, and Jack turned back to sneak another peek at her prey. They didn't seem to have heard them. They stood, stone-still, waiting for an elevator like everyday schmucks in all their chitinous hideousness. It was almost funny.

"Hey Jack?" Donnelly said, touching her shoulder. "Thanks."

Jack stared darkly at him, straining to resist punching his face in. Why the fuck was everyone so buddy-buddy anymore!? "Get your fuckin' hand off me," she snarled, "or I'll tear it off and shove it up your ass."

Donnelly removed his hand like he'd been burned. "Fair enough."

Jack turned back to her prey. She had no time for this lovey-dovey bullshit. She wasn't doing it for him anyway. She didn't give half a shit about anyone on this ship. "I like killing shit," she said. "And as long as I'm on this ship, the only thing I want you scared of is me."

Donnelly chuckled wearily. "I am scared of you."

"You're a pussy," she said, but she grinned all the same. "Let's go." She did not wait to see if he was following as she leapt around the corner, shotgun booming. On the other side of the windows, the swarmers scattered furiously at the sound, but the two collectors waiting at the elevator had barely enough time to turn their heads before the shrapnel was tearing through them. The first went down in a spatter of hemolymph, dead before it struck the ground. The second only stumbled, but it was enough of a window for Jack to close the distance between them and send him rocketing into the stasis pods with a biotic kick to the neck.

It was only seconds, and they were dead. Jack smirked victoriously at their corpses, but Donnelly only had eyes for the pods. He pushed past her, frantically wiping the gore away to get a look inside. His face fell.

"Empty," he said, deflated.

Jack stayed silent. No doubt Gabby was on one of the pods already being loaded down in the hangar below, but Donnelly would find that out soon enough. He didn't need to hear it from her. "Keep it together," she said instead. "We gotto get to the command deck." She palmed the elevator panel, but its lights were dim and unresponsive. Behind her, Donnelly was no better. He said nothing, too busy staring down into the tangle of wings and gleaming eyes in the hangar, and Jack had to grab him and shove him bodily towards the elevator to get his attention. "Fix it," she snarled, jabbing at the controls with her gun. "Call it down here."

Donnelly looked at the panel with a hopeless expression. "It's already called," he said, pointing at the dead collectors who had been waiting for it until Jack had killed them.

As if on cue, the elevator doors slid open.

There was a praetorian inside.

9 years previously…

–

The Little Gusts looked on as the turbine slowed, sputtered, and died in a flutter of blue light. The steel axle was thicker than a krogan's waist, the engine the size of a small house, but they had been no match. Thirty feet across, the impellers had groaned in protest as they had lurched to a halt, smoke belching between them to pour from the bars of the protective grate.

The blades finally stilled and the chamber was filled with a queer silence.

Jack grinned wickedly, her implant singing. Fuck yeah.

No one said a word. Brightgust Oya, the stunted turian with his frill sanded down to nubs, stood at the vent control panel with wide eyes, talons still grasping the speed modulator. Brightgust Aoire's face was drawn in disbelief, her eyes flicking back and forth between the dead turbine and Jack, all alone in the airshaft. Below them, their students stared on with expressions of fear or jealousy or amazement.

Each of them had taken their turn in the shaft, flaring their barriers as the winds buffeted them. They stood as long as they could as Oya revved the fan faster and faster, but in the end the fan always won.

Until it had faced Jack.

Aoire found her voice first. "That… that was amazing, Sister Jack." She was still staring, like she was only seeing Jack for the first time. Jack beamed.

"It was foolhardy!"

Jack's smile disappeared as Grand Brightgust Towan came shuffling up the steps to join her in the shaft. He passed by her without so much as a second glance, staring up at the ruined fanblades with dismay. "That was part of Omega's life support systems!" he cried. He rounded on her. "You… you were not supposed to destroy the fan!"

Jack's cheeks were burning. She stumbled for words.

Towan spared her the need. "That was not the point of the exercise, Little Gust," he spat, and all the fatherliness was gone from his voice. "It was an exercise in restraint, in humility. You were supposed to yield when the wind grew too strong to hold at bay, to admit that you are nothing before its will. Not destroy the fan."

Jack stared up at the dead turbine. She hadn't meant to destroy it. She hadn't meant to do anything, really. She had just been trying to keep on her feet.

She hadn't even considered that the falling might have been more important than the standing.

"S-sorry," Jack muttered, averting her eyes. "It was an accident."

Towan's face was red. He chewed his lip, for a moment too angry to speak, and Jack half expected him to hit her. But he did not. With a final angry gulp of air, the Grand Brightgust turned on his heel and strode from the room without a word, his crystal robes trailing behind him.

Jack stepped down from the shaft. She could feel the eyes on her, hear the whispered gossip starting already. Towan was mad at her. Again. She stared at the grating beneath her feet and wondered if she could disappear down into it if she tried hard enough. Fuck. It seemed so obvious now. Most of the students hadn't even made ten seconds – even Towan's demonstration had only lasted half a minute or so before he'd dropped his fields and submitted to the wind – but Jack had fought the wind for three minutes before she'd lost control of her push and overwhelmed the fanblades.

How could she have been so fucking stupid? And we will purge the galaxy's false teachings from our minds. Jack was still thinking like she was on Teltin, where brute force was everything and submission punishable by death. How was she ever going to reach enlightenment if she couldn't set that mindset aside?

Jack was mortified. Life with the Winds was not easy – they lived humbly to avoid detection, with little to eat and only scratchy robes to wear – and yet they had been good to her. They had taken her in, fed her and clothed her, trained her. They had hidden her from Cerberus – in three months hidden in the Winds secret compound they still hadn't found her. One of the older Gusts – a quiet batarian girl – had even helped her repair the tufts of hair that had remained to her after her botched shaving attempt (Towan had insisted she grow it back – a girl should have a few years to enjoy her hair before she cut it all off, he'd said), and she had not even tried to stab her with the scissors once. Jack had been elated for days.

Trust still came hard. Jack still slept in the quietest, darkest corner of the Little Gust quarters she could find, and some nights she still missed her knife so bitterly she cried, but still the Winds had given her a family.

So why couldn't she go one fuckin' week without getting into trouble? It wasn't for lack of trying – she'd dived into her lessons with vicious aplomb. She knew the edicts. And we will respect and learn from the Brightgusts. She'd tried – honestly tried – to learn what Towan and the other elders had to teach her about biotics. And we will give freely of our wealth and time to those we call family. Jack didn't have any money left, but she'd worked hard, washing dishes and cleaning floors and spending long hours acting as a lookout for the Brightgusts' trips to the Gozu markets or the Afterlife for supplies and news. And we will be thankful for our gifts, and not seek to augment them at the cost to our health. That meant no experimental amps, no eezo injections, none of the Miracle Biotic Booster that Eclipse sold in every other alley on the station. Jack's implant was no normal implant, and had come at considerable cost to her health, but it was bolted into her skull. She could hardly be blamed for that, could she? And our loyalty is to our fellow Gusts, and no one else.

She knew the edicts. She had tried so fucking hard to make this work.

And yet she was always in trouble. If it wasn't cussing during discussion time it was speaking out of turn, or mentioning her biotic fights back at Teltin, or even just cleaning a dish the wrong way. She'd been sentenced to extra devotions for commenting about how there were no drell in the church (Gurrma had explained that the drell habit of intentionally inducing biotics with eezo rubbed Towan the wrong way, and Jack had been too worried about them learning about the sick shit Cerberus had done to her to ask why that was). She'd been banished from the common room for a week when she'd stabbed a fellow student for… she didn't even remember anymore. Something stupid, something that even she knew didn't deserve a knife wound. But even here, surrounded by friends and safety, the tiniest things could set her amp off, and she would be back with the ghostly doctors and their notes on Teltin.

When the amp took hold, all the edicts in the galaxy couldn't tame her.

She wasn't like the other Gusts. She wasn't normal. Cerberus had ruined her.

She would have to try harder.

Brightgust Oya was ushering the Little Gusts back home as the station's computers recognized the loss of the turbine and emergency lighting lit up the corridors. Jack followed them at a distance, sullen, until she felt someone step into pace beside her.

"That was amazing, Jack." Jack turned to see Aoire with a shy smile on her face. The asari was Towan's right hand and looked the part of a former warrior, but Jack had been astonished to find her in fact quite timid, the polar opposite of her blustery leader. She spoke seldom and quietly, and tended to flinch whenever someone came too near her. Only when she was training them – and Jack could tell that among the Gusts Aoire's biotics were second only to Towan's – did she seem to come out of her shell. Jack had often wondered if Aoire's implant was a spidery one like hers, one that bit like a knife with every thought but sang so sweetly when called on to tear someone apart. She had not told any of her family about Cerberus or their strange experiments, but sometimes she looked at Aoire and thought the asari might understand.

Whether that was a comfort to her or a threat, Jack had not yet decided. She'd kept her distance from Aoire, just in case.

Aoire took no notice. "How did you do that?" she pressed. "The wind… your wind is… Towan's wasn't even… It was amazing."

Jack fought the blush creeping up her cheeks. "It was foolhardy," she said, and hastened to escape.

–

Jack might have thanked Aoire later, after she'd put some thought into it. By the time they'd made it back to the compound it was time for the Little Gusts' dinner, but she left her fellow students and climbed into her humble bed to wallow in self-loathing. She had been a terrible Gust and a terrible biotic, struggling with every lesson and philosophy they'd tried to drill into her, but if it hadn't been for Aoire's uncharacteristic praise, she might not have realized just how foolish she'd been.

Aoire thought she had shown up Grand Brightgust Towan.

And we will respect and learn from the Brightgusts.

It was obvious, in retrospect. Towan wasn't just mad about the destroyed fan, or because she had misunderstood his teachings. He was mad because she had emasculated him in front of everyone. Towan had demonstrated the exercise for them, and Jack had gone up there and stood in the wind five times longer. Towan had taken her in, offered her shelter, and she had practically flipped him off in front of all of his students. And to make it worse it was patently ridiculous – Towan was a master biotic, who had achieved the ninth level of biotic enlightenment. He was too humble to flaunt his abilities, but Jack had heard whispers that he could even fly. If it had been a competition, Jack had no doubt he could have ripped the fan out of its socket with the barest thought. For one of his talents to be made a fool of by an upjumped little Omega rat like her… It was no wonder he was so angry. She would be lucky if he didn't kick her back out on the street for Cerberus.

She could not let that happen.

And so later, long after the other Little Gusts had returned to their beds and fallen quiet, Jack crept from between her blankets and went looking for Towan. It was after curfew – even the full Gusts had to obey it, for Towan had told them time and time again how unsafe the streets of Omega were for a biotic after dark – but Jack was determined. If she waited for morning, it might be too late.

She found Towan and the other Brightgusts in the common hall. He was sitting on a stool, a frock covering his glittering robes while Aoire stood behind him, re-shaving his head with the Winds' crystal razor. Towan's eyes were closed, but the other Brightgusts – the turians Oya and Niyell, the human women Ashla, Jenai, and crone-faced Linna whose L2 implant had robbed her of speech, and Gurrma with his bleary eyes, who was still not a real Brightgust – glared daggers at the interruption. Jack resisted her implant's urge to snarl. Fuck you and fuck you too. I could take you.

But that was unfair. She didn't care what the other elders thought. She was here for Towan.

When Aoire paused in her work, Towan's eyes opened to find Jack standing before him in bare feet. His hairless brows rose on his hairless head. "Little Gust? What are you doing out of bed?"

Jack took a deep breath and dove right in. "I know it's after curfew, I just wanted to say-"

She was interrupted as the Grand Brightgust grabbed her by the shoulder and pressed her to his side in an awkward half-hug. He had a perfumey smell that wrinkled Jack's nose. "No, Little Gust," he said, squeezing tight enough to press the air out of her. "I'm sorry. I should not have lost my patience with you. You are still learning."

Jack almost cried as he released her. "I… broke your fan."

Towan chuckled, gesturing to Aoire, who set aside the razor and took her seat with the others. "You did," Towan said, "But there are others. And if anyone important starts suffocating, Aria will send someone to fix it. They'll never know about you." He met Jack's eyes with a knowing look. Cerberus will never know about you, his eyes told her. "But it is not the fan that matters," he said, holding up a finger. "It is the lesson that you failed."

"I will try harder."

"You have a habit of getting ahead of yourself, Little Gust," he said, ignoring her. He gestured around the empty hall. "This is a safe place," he said, "but there is a certain order to things that must be observed. You act as if you think you can race your way to biotic enlightenment, as if all of the answers lie only at the end of the path, rather than all along its sides. Each level of enlightenment is a journey, Little Gust, and it is not to be hurried." He laughed, causing his dewlap to shake. "Why, Gurrma is with us twenty-two years and still working on the sixth level!" The other Brightgusts chuckled politely but Gurrma – a portly batarian with two pairs of overlarge spectacles on his face – sunk down in his seat, embarrassed.

Jack found herself staring at the razor on the table. It was simple but gorgeous, its handle made of Kahjean sand-diamond, clear as glass but for the ribbons of blue sediment that meandered throughout. It was said among the Gusts that Towan had received the razor from the Hanar farseers after mastering their gift, and it had been used to cut away the Elders' vanity ever since. It could slice through the bone of a turian's fringe, and yet was still sharp enough to cut hair or even tattoos away. Jack wondered how it would feel on her scalp. Would it feel like enlightenment?

Towan had returned his attention to Jack. "You and I will find another fan and attempt the lesson again later this week," he promised, ruffling her short, uneven hair. "Just the two of us, this time."

"Thank you, Grand Brightgust. I will do better."

Towan smiled. "I am sure you will. But do strive to be more patient. Enlightenment takes time, Little Gust."

Jack almost argued the point. She did need the answers at the end of the path. Towan and Gurrma might want to slow down and savor the journey, but she didn't have twenty-two years. She needed to get better now. She was broken and dangerous and terrified by her own violence, by the way the spider in her head seemed to take control of her temper so easily. She needed the answers now.

But she didn't say that. She nodded dumbly.

Towan smiled and patted her back. "Your journey is only beginning, Jack," he said, winking. He had Aoire fetch her a leftover biscuit from dinner and sent Oya to escort her back to bed. It was after curfew, after all, and tomorrow morning was their weekly mass devotion.

–

It was not until she was safely back under her blankets and licking biscuit crumbs off of her fingers that Jack realized she had not actually apologized to Towan. It was true, he had not seemed angry – not about the fan and not about the botched exercise – but he had said nothing of her showing him up in front of his flock. No matter how fatherly he looked, Towan could not have forgotten that.

She had to apologize. It was a gesture of her gratitude. She owed him that much.

And so for the second time that night, Jack climbed out of bed and crept barefoot through the compound in search of the Grand Brightgust. This time the lights in the common hall were off, and so she went tiptoeing down the corridors between the converted warehouses, ears straining for any sound. Omega had taught Jack the virtues of stealth – those who made themselves noticeable had better be able to kill whoever noticed them, or they would not last long – but the Gusts posted no sentries. All were quiet in their beds, and the only sounds were the low creaking of the station's life support machinery (perhaps a little quieter than usual now that they were down one turbine).

As Jack approached Towan's quarters, however, she heard voices carrying in the quiet. Towan's words were too soft to make out, but a dim light peered under his doorframe, and for a moment Jack was glad. Towan was still awake, that was good. She would hardly make a good impression waking an old man from his sleep. She held up a fist to knock…

But then she heard the second voice. "Then give me coordinates," it said, its timbre warbled behind some kind of communicator.

Jack could not have said why she didn't just open the door. She trusted Towan, and he trusted her. But as the spider's legs tightened in her head and the adrenaline started to pump, Jack found herself dropping back into the shadows. She held her breath and leaned forward as far as she dared, sneaking a peek around the doorjamb.

Towan was there, speaking to a well-dressed man on a console screen. "Nice try," he snarled. The dim light of the console cast deep shadows across Towan's scowl. "I have kept my family safe from you and your kind for thirty long years. I will not let you march in here to undo all I have done."

"How very noble of you," the man on the screen said. Jack risked leaning a little farther forward to get a better look at his face. The angle was too shallow to see much, but all the same Jack's breath caught in her throat. The man looked unthreatening enough, with short-cropped brown hair and an even face, and his clothing was plain and unadorned, but somehow Jack knew just who he was.

Cerberus.

Her heart thudded frantically in her chest. What the fuck was Cerberus doing calling the Winds? Was Towan on the run from them too? She listened, barely breathing.

"Very well, Towan," the man was saying. "Keep your secrets, if it makes you feel safer." He waved his hand, nonchalant, but Jack could hear the anger underneath his voice. Jack nodded in the darkness. If Cerberus was mad then Towan was winning. She wanted to hug him. But the man was not done. "But don't think you'll keep them for long if you betray us. We expect to get what we came for. Tomorrow."

"The day after," Towan insisted. "I have a sermon to give." He was all bite, but at the Cerberus man's frustrated look, he held out his hands in a placating gesture. "You'll get it then," Towan promised. "We'll meet at the Koout Plazas. You know them?"

There was a long pause, and the Cerberus man nodded. "You will come personally. Assuming there is no trouble, you'll get your money and walk away a rich man."

"And my Gusts?"

"Safe to continue worshipping the ground at your feet. We'll have no further interest in you."

Towan nodded, satisfied. "Good. I will hold you to that."

If Towan's rancor intimidated him, the Cerberus man gave no sign. "You and the package will come alone," he said.

"Fair enough," Towan agreed. His finger was on the disconnect button, but he did not press it. As if he was waiting for permission.

The Cerberus man looked satisfied enough, though, and seemed about to terminate the call himself when he stopped to lean into the camera. "Oh, and Towan?" he said, voice conversational. "Do the girl's tattoos still show?"

Towan hesitated. "Tattoos?" he asked, confused. "Yes. I suppose they do. I made her grow out her hair, but the ones on the neck..." He shrugged and gestured at the back of his head.

The Cerberus man nodded. "Have her wear a hat, then."

–

Jack walked away, feeling numb.

Presently…

–

The hangar windows were three inches of optically-treated lattice polymer, but Jack crashed through them like they weren't even there. Her split second barrier had saved her head, but the effort of deflecting the praetorian's strike left her brain afire even before she crashed down onto the floor seven meters below.

For a few seconds, nothing registered – not Donnelly's shout of surprise, not the praetorian lumbering into the corridor to follow her down, not the way the swarmers pulsed and bruzzed as they descended over her like a black cloud of carrion flies. Through the haze, she could make out the rocky silhouette of the landing claw and the yellow glimmer of approaching collectors, but she could not summon the wherewithal to care. The pain in her head was a thousand times worse than whatever the collectors could do to her. Her implant was a knife sunk down into her spine and now someone had twisted it so hard she could practically taste blood.

But the relief came quickly too. It was the feeling of being a hair's breadth from death. It was the best high there was. Jack had always wondered if everyone's mortality tasted so good as hers did, or if it was only the drug conditioning Cerberus had put her on to make her unbeatable in the courtyard fights, but the familiar feeling flooded her skull and the pain was gone.

She was an all-powerful bitch.

With a ragged cry, Jack let loose a biotic push so fierce that even the praetorian – struggling now to get its thick carapace through the shattered window frames – was sent careening back into the hallway with a resounding crash. A blue corona flashed with a sound like a cracking whip and the swarmers were sent scattering away to spatter against walls and bulkheads. A collector approached and Jack hit it too, sending it thundering up into the wall so hard it was reduced to a blackish smear.

She leapt to her feet, implant singing in ecstasy.

Around her, the swarmers were already reforming. Far from their drunken confusion in the confines of the lower deck, in the open volume of the hangar the swarms were a great form to themselves, a wisp of oily blackness that wheeled and moved like a single amoeba. Jack hit them again, then again, and again, and each time she scattered them they reformed elsewhere, as untamable as smoke. For each one she killed, three more came crawling out of the spiracles that dotted the great landing claw that dominated the center of the room, and the cloud pulsed darker and darker. They pressed in from every direction, testing and prodding for an angle of attack, and Jack had to whirl to keep up with them. She pushed and pushed and pushed, until spots were swimming in front of her eyes and her brain pleaded for rest.

Still they came, patient, implacable, numberless, so thick Jack could barely see the inky silhouettes of their collector masters, nor the stacks of pods that held who-knew-how-many of Jack's crewmates. She was tiring. Her strikes came less and less frequently, the swarmers came closer and closer each time. The buzzing grew louder and louder as they closed in, settling over her in a thick, suffocating layer.

And then, from somewhere behind the swarm, a shotgun boomed. The sound of gunfire rose to compete with the beating of wings.

Help was coming.

Jack gave one last monumental push, so hard her vision seemed to wilt at the effort, and this time, the swarmers stayed back. Jack opened her eyes to find the room filled with blue light, a ghostly halo that bubbled around her in every direction. The feeling as its edge passed over her was feather light, but to the swarmers it might as well have been a steel wall. They struggled furiously around its periphery, thrashing as they tried to fly through it only to bounce off with a shimmer of light.

For half a second, Jack thought she'd inadvertently discovered a new biotic trick, but when she turned to grin victoriously at Donnelly, she found Samara instead, standing astride the collector landing claw with her arms held above her head and her expression stony. She met Jack's eyes. "It is as I said before," she said, utterly unruffled by the boom of gunfire around her. "Balance can do much that brute force cannot."

Around them, soldiers were trading gunfire with the collectors too large to be excluded by Samara's field trick. Jack saw one of the guards – Tennard, she thought – and Rolston taking cover behind a pair of stacked stasis pods. Behind them, a man in gray armor was shouting commands and firing into the fray with a shotgun. He darted past Jack without so much as a sidelong glance, pulping an approaching collector with another well-placed blast and diving into cover behind a stray stasis pod. He was covered head-to-toe in collector guts, but they did nothing to hide the red stripe that ran along his right arm.

Jack's eyes were wide. Shepard? It didn't make any sense – Shepard was on the geth station, and had warned them they'd be out of contact. Still, there he was.

Jack smiled. That magnificent motherfucker.

Jack did not bother responding to Samara's sanctimonious little lesson, and, scooping up her own shotgun, dove for the nearest cover. She was so tired she was shaking and she was pretty sure she'd ripped a vessel in her eye, but fuck if she was going to let Shepard see her sitting. She set up covering fire behind the commander, dispatching one of the collectors that were trying to flank them with a clumsy blast while Rolston and Tennard sprinted to catch up. Above her, Samara covered them all in her oh-so-balanced bubble, and the air was pleasantly swarmer-free.

But then there was a great screech of rending metal from above as the praetorian finally pried its way through the windows. It dropped into the hangar with a thunderous rumble, paying no mind to Samara's field. Its tiny eyes swept the room for a target and landed on the asari, standing unprotected in the open with her hands above her head. It descended on her like a fat black beetle, booming. The gunmen turned their fire on it immediately, but bullets pinged off of its inky armor like they were nothing.

Jack did not hesitate. She reached for the spider in her head and it answered.

Fuck balance.

The Praetorian was heavy – tons, easily – but when Jack pushed it flew like a plastic toy. It swung across the hangar in a confused arc, missing Samara by meters and smashing down into the landing claw. Jack grit her teeth, the coronas at her finger so bright they burned the eyes, and gave another push. Praetorian and claw alike crumpled together with a pained squeal of metal and tumbled out into space. Jack, Samara, and the gunmen all watched in silence as the praetorian bounced silently off of the hull of the collector ship and out into the abyss.

Jack finally relaxed, winded. It was all she could do to drop onto her ass without fainting, but she still managed to cast a triumphant glare up at Samara, who still stood, holding the swarmers struggling against the ceiling. The echo of Shepard's shotgun was the last sound in the room – the collectors were all dead, and the swarmers at Samara's mercy were muffled, leaving the hangar in an eerie silence.

Samara nodded with something that might have been approval, but she said nothing.

Jack was still seeing stars when the commander approached, panting. Jack stared at his gore-bespeckled boots, trying to fight off the stitch of pain that had started to spread from her neck down to her toes. "Fuck yeah, Shepard," was all she said.

The man's helmet came off, and Jacob looked sheepish underneath. "Me, actually," he said, tucking it under one arm.

Jack stared up at him, mind muddied. That made more sense, really. She shrugged, too exhausted to protest at the downgrade. "Well 'Fuck yeah Taylor', then," she said.

Jacob stared down at his armor, looking guilty. "Heavier than I normally like, but I figured these guys are after Shepard, and we had an extra set." He shrugged. "Maybe they won't know the difference."

"You mean maybe they'll take you instead of Shepard," Jack accused. She laughed, though whether it was at the man's silly nobility or at how little he apparently valued his own skin, she could not say. "Okay, Taylor," she said, holding out her hands in surrender. "I give up. You win the brown-nosing contest. Shepard's gonna give you a gold star."

Jacob frowned at the jibe, but nodded resolutely to himself all the same. He knew what he was doing. "It's good that you made it, Jack," he said. "Did you see anyone else?"

Jack turned to look up at the broken windows, remembering Donnelly. "I had one of the nerds with me for a while," she said, seeing nothing, "but he might be dead."

"Not quite." Donnelly's voice was strained, but he limped out of his hiding place at the far end of the hangar looking no worse for wear, Jack's pistol still clutched in his hand. "Pretty sure I'm the only man in history to kill a collector by falling on it." He laughed weakly and held out the gun to Jacob.

Jacob pushed the gun back to the engineer and clapped him on the back. "Excellent," he said, and he sounded like he meant it. "We're going to need everyone we can get." He pointed back to the open hangar doors, to the stony bulk of the collector ship below. Outside, the landing claw Jack had praetorian-d out of place was already extending back into position, no doubt crawling with angry insects by now. "They'll be back, and more of them," he said. "And if EDI's still down-"

"Disconnected," Donnelly interrupted, voice dour. "From her systems."

Jacob nodded. "Then we have no idea how many of them are still on the upper decks. We'll make our stand here, try to hold them off as long as we can."

"No, fuck that," Jack said. She was feeling a little steadier, and rose to her feet to glare at Jacob. She pointed up at the ceiling. "Those fuckers are up there stealing our guys. We need to climb up there, grab Mordin's countermeasures, and clean them the fuck out!"

Jacob shook his head and, reaching for his pauldron, detached one of the jammer boxes. He tossed it to Jack. "No dice," he said. "I picked them up from the armory when I got this suit. They don't seem to do much here. Maybe the halls are just so tight the swarmers don't need to see us to sting us – they just fly straight and they'll more than likely hit someone." He turned to stare up at the shattered remains of the hangar windows. "And the upper decks are bad, Jack. Everyone's taken already. Hadley's dead. Matthews too, I think." He trailed off for a moment. "We stay here," he said finally, nodding to himself. "No countermeasures."

"Well fuck." Jack frowned, looking at the way the swarmers up against the ceiling crawled, a tangle of limbs and wings. She was getting really tired of the little fuckers.

"Samara's handled them fine so far," Jacob said, staring up at the asari. "You alright there, ma'am?"

Samara still looked uninterested. She was still as a statue, not the slightest tremble in her upraised arms. "I am fine, Mr. Taylor," she promised. "For some time yet, assuming the swarms grow no worse."

"That'll have to be good enough. We've just gotto hold out until the away team comes back." He turned to the men behind him. "Tennard, Donnelly, I want you to try to make us some better cover. Drag some of those pods over into the corner to make a barricade. Jack and I will be the front line. Rolston, check the pods. See if you can figure out how to get our people back out. Maybe some of them can be revived." He turned to Samara and Jack. "You two take it easy for a few. They'll be back soon."

Privately, Jack thought having Samara standing around with her arms up like an idiot was a grievous waste of a biotic, but what did she know? For once, even she knew it was not the time for power struggles. Cerberus or not, Jacob was the only one here with experience leading a squad, and so Jack did not protest. She slumped down on an empty pod and tried to focus on breathing deeply.

"Have you made your peace, Jacqueline?" Samara asked.

Jack stared at the Justicar, confused, but her face was unreadable. She shrugged, deciding to be honest. "Nah. No need."

Samara said nothing.

"Those bugs," Jack said, pointing at the hulk outside the hangar, "are fucked. Who the fuck do they think they are, coming onto Shepard's ship? Onto my ship?" She shook her head. "They're fucked, Samara."

Samara still said nothing, but Jack thought she saw the ghost of a smile.

–

By the time the landing claw had settled back into place and the swarmers had started to waft out, the survivors had constructed a little makeshift fortress in the corner of the hangar, with a good view of the elevator and the hangar doors and a solid wall to their backs. Jack hunkered against a stumpy wall made mostly out of a dead collector, shotgun clenched in her hands. The first collectors climbed out of the landing claw, their feet clacking against the metal floor.

Jack didn't fuckin' think so.

9 years previously…

–

Jack's feet were black and blistered by the time she found herself back at the steps to the Chamber of the Winds. She had walked most of the night, mind and feet wandering, heedless of Omega's dangers. She had gone unmolested and now morning – or what passed for morning on Omega, anyway – had arrived, and she could hear the Gusts at their devotions. She was late.

For once she did not hurry. She stared up at the drab warehouse that was the cult's place of worship as if she was seeing it for the first time, listening to the chanting from within.

Grand Brightgust Towan would hand her to Cerberus tomorrow. He wasn't taking her to retry the fan exercise. He was taking her back to them.

It should have terrified her, but it didn't. She reached into the pocket of her robes and gave her new weapon a quick squeeze, as if to remind herself it was still there. But she didn't need reassurances. For the first time in a long time, she didn't feel scared.

There was no room to feel much of anything when her head was already full of her implant's fury. The implant wanted blood.

Jack adjusted her hood and climbed the steps.

Inside, Towan was halfway through his sermon. He stood at the pulpit, roaring. Blue flame whipped about his fingers. "And the Wind filled me!" he bellowed with the voice of a man three times his size.

"And the enlightenment came with it," came the response. The congregation sat on their stools, heads bowed. "The Wind gave you enlightenment, as you give it now to us." As she marched down the center aisle, Jack found herself saying the words despite herself – she had said them so many times.

"And the Wind filled me!" Towan repeated.

"And the peace came with it. The Wind gave you peace, as you give it now to us."

"And the Wind filled me!"

"And the shield came with it. The Wind shielded you from your foes, as you now shield us."

Jack pulled the diamond razor from her pocket and tossed back her hood, revealing her smooth scalp.

"AND THE WIND FILLED M-"

Towan hit the ceiling so hard he shattered one of the crystal light sconces before tumbling back down in a rain of glittering glass. He struck the ground with an audible whump, the crystals from his robes scattering in every direction.

There was a great gulf of silence.

Jack stared at Towan, as astonished as anyone. She clenched the diamond razor in her left hand, but it was her right hand now that lifted Towan again. Blue light bathed the devotion chamber as Towan smashed back into the ceiling and dropped back to the floor. This time he struggled, his own corona flaring as he tried to anchor himself, but all his vaunted enlightenment did not avail him and Jack's field bowled over him like he was less than nothing.

She had destroyed Teltin, torn her way through an army of guards and scientists, turrets and steel walls and her own fellow test subjects. She had sent Dr. Brenan rocketing through the cell culture room in pieces, broken Dr. Chela in half, reduced Dr. Davis' head to a crimson smear on the wall. All these months she had feared her implant for its terrible power, for the way it flooded her with pleasure at the sight of violence and filled her head with twisted fantasies, but now she saw the truth.

She was the most powerful biotic in the galaxy. Towan was a child next to her.

He gave a strangled cry that might have been 'mercy'.

But Jack's implant was not feeling merciful.

The congregation stared on in stunned silence as she smashed him up and down and up and down, each impact harder than the one before it. She was dimly aware of someone screaming but she paid it no heed. Soon the Grand Brightgust was almost unrecognizable, limp and bloodied and boneless, but Jack did not release him. She tossed him easily, now, into the far wall. It cracked, and Towan was already moving the other direction. He bounced against the floor, the ceiling, the walls. Gusts dove for cover.

Towan was little more than a bloody comet when she finally let his remains fall and realized that the one who had been screaming was her. She quieted, head so high on bloodlust that she could hardly feel the rawness of her throat or the blisters on her feet. Her implant glowed in delight as she turned to go.

The congregation stared at her as she strode from the chambers, too shocked to do so much as blink. Aoire was the first to regain her composure, and stood to block the door, eyes wide with terror. Jack very nearly tossed her through the lectern, but the asari did not reach for her weapon. After a second's hesitation, she dove headfirst onto the floor in the doorway, prostrating herself before Jack.

"Sister," she pleaded, staring at the floor. "Stay. With us. Teach us."

Jack stared at the alien, then at the razor still in her hand. The razor was deadly sharp. It had cut Aoire's markings away all those years ago – it could cut her throat just as easily. She had fully intended to stab Towan with it. Why not his lieutenant?

Jack tossed the razor aside and stepped over her. "Fuck you guys."

Presently…

–

The bubble was starting to fray. Where before it had filled the entire hangar and then some, pressing the swarmers to the walls and ceilings, now it barely reached the landing claw. The swarmers were back to the air, filling the far end of the hangar with furious wings and hungry stingers. They hurled themselves against the biotic wall again and again, lighting it up with a thousand little pinpricks like raindrops on a windowpane, and while they still bounced back, it seemed like every impact was a little closer.

Gunfire thundered around Jack's head as the unparalyzed crew of the Normandy struggled to defend their haphazard castle on two fronts. The collectors that came crawling out of the landing claw flew into battle with particle beams blazing, but few of the ones returning from the upper decks spared so much as a glance in the humans' direction. They calmly bore the pods carrying the rest of the crew onto the landing claw not five meters away, apparently oblivious to the firefight. Jack and the others were helpless to stop them, pinned down under a blistering hail of energy – the few times they'd managed to pick one of the loaders off another had simply taken its place.

One by one, the crew of the Normandy was taken, and they could do nothing but watch.

And the bubble was still shrinking.

Jack wouldn't have noticed if her shotgun had not overheated, but as she ducked down behind their battered bulkhead to change sinks, she glanced up at Samara. The asari's face was as determinedly neutral as ever, but she was flagging. A thin layer of sweat gave her blue skin a sickly sheen. Her shoulders trembled to hold her arms up, as if she was lifting a great weight and it was steadily crushing her.

"Samara," Jack said. "You still there?"

"I am… fine, Jacqueline," Samara insisted, but every word seemed to pain her.

Jack shook her head. "You're not fine." She turned to find Jacob, spying him down on the other end of their barricade struggling with a biotic collector. "Taylor!" she shouted. "We're about to lose our shield!"

"No," Samara insisted, but Jacob did not hear either of them.

Jack stared up at the exhausted asari, chewing her lip. Her stomach sank even to think of it, but she found herself asking anyway. "How do I do it?" she asked. "Let me help."

Samara was starting to bend, as if nine hundred years of living had finally caught up to her all at once. "It is not a technique one can learn while being fired upon," she panted.

"Fuck you, Samara," Jack snarled. "I can do it."

Samara actually smiled. "I've… no doubt." Still, she looked ready to refuse again until a particle beam seared across the wall above their heads and she dropped to her knees, shaking. "It's," she licked her lips, eyes clenched with the effort. "It's a barrier of a sort. Two fields in synchrony. They must balance one another or they will shear and break."

Jack nodded. Two fields, balanced against each other to make a sphere. Just like the stupid orb she always found Samara holding when she interrupted the justicar's meditations. How hard could that be? She turned, settling into a low spot and lifting her arms to imitate Samara's gesture. She reached out with her implant, pulling on air. Somewhere deep beneath her she could feel the mass effect field well of the ship, and the great pulsing core of the collector ship outside. Jack's implant flared and she grabbed them both and yanked, pulling the fields to her will.

A great bluish explosion ballooned from her fingers, and for a moment Jack thought she had done it. Not a technique one can learn while being fired upon, Samara had said. Jack smirked.

But then the balloon started to crumble. It bent and accelerated outward in a violent wave of shearing gravity, tearing a collector to pieces and tossing stasis pods about in its path.

Jack cast a quick glance back at Samara, but the asari was not paying attention now. She was breathing so loud Jack could hear her even over the firefight, her hands white and shaking.

Jack licked her lips and tried again. Slower this time. Balanced. Just like a normal barrier. Two fields, one enveloping the other in perfect reflection. Her implant burned in her head as the fields expanded out in every direction. There was a gentle halo of light as Jack's bubble passed through Samara's, and Jack saw the swarmers push back.

But then one of the collectors' warping fields tore through her effort like a cannonball, and Jack's field exploded with a violent shake. Behind her, Samara gave a pained grunt as the interference cut through the room, and for a split second her field evaporated. The swarmers lurched forward in a wave. But then the barrier was back, smaller and smaller yet with every passing second.

Jack's eyes were wide. She couldn't do it. She didn't have the balance.

But she did have brute force. She let loose with another great biotic push that dashed through Samara's bubble, hurtling the swarmers back.

"Stop," Samara snarled through gritted teeth. "You are making it worse."

"Drop the field," Jack snarled back. "I'll keep the bugs back this way." She gave another mighty push by way of demonstration. But Samara just winced and ignored her. "Drop the field," Jack repeated.

Samara did not drop it, but all the same it was coming down. The bubble was hardly three meters across now, barely enough to cover the barricade. The rest of the room had been ceded to the swarmers, which tossed themselves against the barrier over and over again, as if they sensed Samara's exhaustion.

EDI's voice boomed over the speakers. "I have regained control of the ship," she announced, but it was too late to offer any hope. Samara had no strength left and her field continued to shrink. Jack saw Rolston fall out of it and the swarmers were on him in seconds. He stiffened and fell.

The collectors pressed forward too. Jack dove for her shotgun and hit one full in the face as it tried to climb over their makeshift wall. She pushed again, scattering insects back. "Drop the field, Samara," she shouted. "Drop the fuckin' field! Defend yourself!"

Samara gave no answer. Her bubble glowed brightly, closing around them like a ceiling, and Donnelly and Tennard were gone too. Jack found herself shoulder to shoulder with Jacob, firing into the great black wall of limbs and wings and glowing eyes.

One swarmer touched her, and then a thousand others. Jack felt a stinger sink into her back, another into the back of her neck, two more just above her collarbone. Stingers slipped through the soft skin between her fingers, the heel of her palm, her scalp, her cheek. By then the cold, dead feeling was creeping through her veins. Jack roared and thrashed and tried to fight it, but her muscles deadened and froze around her.

And she was done. She felt herself lifted out of her cover by one of the collectors, and could do nothing but stare back in horror at Jacob and Samara and the swarm that pressed down on them. Samara's bubble was barely a glimmer.

Drop the fuckin' field you stupid blue bitch. Drop the fuckin' field and defend yourself!

Samara finally did.

Collectors and swarmers rained back like they'd been hit by a train as Samara lashed out with a few biotic attacks. Hemolymph spattered the hangar walls, and for a moment Samara stood above the swarm, glowing with blue fury.

But then a particle beam split the air and Samara fell to her knees with a shout of pain.

Jack tried to call out, to thrash in fury and astonishment, but nothing came.

The swarmers calmed like a switch had been flipped. The cloud receded, uninterested in the wounded asari. Samara might as well have been invisible to them.

But she was not invisible to the collectors. Even as Jack and the rest of the holdouts were loaded into their pods, one of the aliens climbed to stand over Samara. She stared up at it with a blank face, violet life pooling out of her.

The last thing Jack saw was the bloom of light that ended the Justicar, and then only darkness.

–

Codex entry: Excerpt from the introduction of "Bioticocracy: Mad Cults, Mad Scientists, and Thessia's Mad Conspiracy" by Dr. Corvin Gutierrez, published June 2183 by Pan-Terra Circulars

...The causes of this (biotic cultist activity) are innumerable, but at their root is a single inconvenient fact: All biotics are not created equal. And let me not be misunderstood as simply saying that some individuals possess more biotic potential than others – thirty seconds in the electrifying presence of a true master will make that clear enough – but that so much variation exists between individuals and species that unilateral comparisons are next to impossible.

It is the physical nature of element zero, upon finding itself in an organic body, to congregate in electrically active tissues like the brains and nerves of most sentient species, but this is a slow and uneven process. Sheer chance means deposits may be thicker in the brain or in the limbs, may be thicker in the left arm than the right, may be thin and uniform or clumpy and incongruous. And as the precise shape and size of a piece of element zero determines the strength and nature of the mass effect fields it can produce, different biotics will find themselves differently able to perform different feats. A biotic who could produce a pushing field of a whopping eight hundred Alleynes might be constitutively incapable of the shearing fields necessary to produce a warp field or a singularity. Another biotic might spike high but lack the widely-distributed eezo nodes to have any kind of finesse, while yet another, with eezo concentrated in his or her brain, might be incapable of summoning fields at all but only sensing the fields of others. This phenomenon is observed in biotics of every species save the asari. Various attempts have been made over the years to correct the problem – to normalize a biotic's eezo deposits – either by direct eezo injection or mechanical augmentation assistance, but devastating nerve damage and asari regulations, respectively, have stymied progress.

This heterogeneity of capabilities contributed to the gruesome mishandling of human biotics in the early years after their discovery. Conatix and BAaT were already well-underway trying to train children to weaponize their biotics long before it was understood that there was no one single approach to unlocking biotic potential, and that each individual had to be trained in line with their specific abilities. L2 implants were mass produced without compensating for distribution of eezo nodules in their hosts' brain tissues, and the resulting interference fields resulted in headaches, hallucinations, hemorrhage, or even death for many early biotics. This broad-strokes approach and the rush to produce biotic soldiers to compete with alien armies as quickly as possible is responsible for the great deal of resentment that still persists between biotic humans and the Alliance, and has been a major factor in the founding of dozens of biotic cults across the galaxy.

Public scandal forced the closure of BAaT in 2169, forcing the Alliance to adopt a new strategy. Amidst warming relations, Alliance officials approached the asari for assistance. The asari – having assisted several other species in developing their own biotics in the past – agreed to help and select human biotics were moved to Aisi under the newly-christened Aurora Initiative. All effort was spent to paint the initiative as a friendlier opposite to the mistakes made at BAaT, but soon new troubles became apparent. Aside from the significant physiological differences between asari and human biotics (gestating asari fetuses naturally sequester element zero and do not require cerebral jacks, nor are they subject to the debilitating side effects displayed by many human biotics), Alliance officials grew impatient with the asari instructors' intentionally-slow curriculum, which would have taken more than a century of gradual research, engineering, and training before it produced any functional biotic soldiers. Disagreements also persisted over whether or not human companies would be allowed to manufacture their own amps. The Aurora Initiative lasted less than a year.

New solutions arose from an unlikely place. Though not natural biotics like the asari, the hanars' Illuminated Primacy had centuries of experience in producing biotic individuals – in their own species and in their drell servants – on a made-to-order basis. Far from relying on ship crashes and industrial accidents, the hanar had developed safe, repeatable, consistent methods for exposing egg masses or drell fetuses to element zero to produce uniform biotic potential without side effects. Perhaps more importantly, the hanar were willing to share their knowledge with considerably less bureaucratic maneuvering than the asari. Human scientists, military officials, and teachers were sent to Kahje (at considerable expense) to learn new methods for controlling biotic development. These methods later served as the basis for the Ascension Project.

Though the hanars' role in reforming the Alliance's biotic training programs is rarely acknowledged in any official capacity, it has had a surprising effect on biotic cults throughout the Terminus systems. Perhaps because of their striking alienness, or because of the inaccessibility of Kahje's underwater cities to most of the galaxy, hanar biotics have attained a legendary status throughout much of the galaxy. Many biotic amps or performance-enhancing drugs are marketed (falsely) as being manufactured on Kahje, and indeed one major cult – Omega's Cult of the Winds – claimed to offer the secrets to biotic enlightenment otherwise known only to the 'hanar seers'. In fact, hanar biotics are very rare (most biotic tasks having been delegated to the more physically-able drell), and hanar 'seers' do not exist.

Mostly the hanar ignore the mythos surrounding their species, though on rare occasions the Illuminated Primacy has interceded to combat particularly-damaging rumors. The aforementioned Cult of the Winds was ultimately dissolved in 2180 after hanar prosecutors sued the group for slander. The group's leader – a former asari slave named Aoire – remains incarcerated on Thessia, though most of its other members ultimately escaped to join other cults like the Commune on Presrop.

–

A/N: This was another chapter that almost didn't make it, but I've wanted to do this one for a long time. Jack mentions having spent time as part of a cult in ME2. I think the player is supposed to imagine a crazyass drugged-up ultraviolent ultraviolet post-apocalyptic punk mohawk sci-fi cliche type of cult, but I wanted to depict it in a way that felt a little more genuine to me, as something more like a religion, and something that Jack pursued in an earnest attempt to rescue herself from the dark path she could see herself taking. (Of course, then I replayed ME2 and heard a line I'd missed, in which Jack basically confirms it was a crazyass drugged-up ultraviolent ultraviolet post-apocalyptic punk mohawk sci-fi cliche type of cult, but oh well. Artistic license.)

I have a lot of fun with Jack. If I were to write Interstitium again I think I'd have used her more. As it was I felt her arc was redundant in a lot of places with Grunt's, and so I ended up mostly glossing over it. But she's super cool.

Got a lot of cool answers to my question last chapter, many of which I agreed with and some of which I had never considered. Spawned some fun discussions. So, here's a new question: you probably know ME4 is not going to be a continuation of Shepard's story. But if you WERE to reintroduce a major character from the series, how would you continue their arc? What characters do you believe have stories left to tell? What characters do you think have come to a good closing point and are best left alone?

Anyway, two chapters and an epilogue remain. Chapter 31 splits perspective one-thousand, one-hundred eighty-three ways. Again, should be posted in about a week.