Sometimes Grace

by LMSharp

Garrus is betrayed. Ten men are dead on Omega. The gangs are already rebounding. Archangel is an unmitigated failure. After everything, there's no reason Garrus should be alive, but sometimes, people get what they don't deserve. "Just like old times," Garrus says, but it's not. It never will be again. An ME2 novelization. M for violence. Feat. Beth Shepard from The Disaster Zone.

61. Taming Cerberus: Down

LXI

Taming Cerberus: Down

As they drove back to Hermes Station with the bodies recovered from Prometheus Station, Shepard had Niels pick up Goto and Massani too. The two of them had finished the engineers' job and shut down every piece of tech the thing David Archer had turned into would be able to use against them. Project Overlord was now running on backup power, and even if they didn't head to Atlas Station to manually shut down the VI, there was a good chance it might die in less than a planetary rotation anyway. Of course, there was no guarantee they could save David Archer or anyone else over there if they just waited for the power to drain out.

It was time to regroup and shut this thing down. Shepard was grim-faced as she pulled into Hermes Station. "Dr. Solus, Mr. Taylor, I want you to take over for Miranda here. Add the bodies here to the accounting. Coordinate with Legion and EDI to hold this position, and keep in radio contact with the rest of us. Garrus, Tali, and I will head over with Lawson and Goto to end this."

"Understood, Commander," Taylor said, snapping a salute as he climbed out of the Hammerhead, moving around to open the cargo hold and retrieve the bodies. The tally was now at over a dozen.

"Gonna need to do some work on the interior here after this," Garrus observed as the others walked up to the Hammerhead.

"Don't suppose you have the time to do it." It was the first time Shepard had been so casual about his impending departure from Normandy.

Garrus didn't answer. He gave it a little over a week until he left Normandy on one hub world or another and headed home. They would finish up here, complete Shepard's mysterious favor for the Alliance, and that would be it. Shepard would have her bridge back to an ally to help her in the fight against the Reapers. She'd be about as safe as she could be, and he would be out of excuses, both to put off trying to bring in his own people and to be there for his family. He wanted to see his mother before . . . he wanted to see her. But he didn't want to see her the way he was going to. He didn't want to have to deal with Sol's anger or the way his dad was going to try and be strong even when a part of him was dying too. He didn't want to have to tell them that they wouldn't be able to spend all the time they needed to grieve, that he wouldn't be able to stay.

He didn't want to leave Normandy either.

He didn't want to leave Shepard. Beth.

Goto walked up from the Kodiak, and Lawson came through the base toward them. Taylor closed the Hammerhead's empty cargo hold, and then there wasn't time to talk more anyway. They were driving across the planet again toward Atlas Station.

"I've still got you on my screens," Archer told them on the radio. "Your machines do good work, Commander. I wouldn't mind seeing some readouts, though I understand if you're uncomfortable. When you arrive at Atlas Station, you'll need to find the main server room to shut down the VI experiment. Good luck."

"What are your plans for Archer after we're done here, Shepard?" Lawson asked. Miranda Lawson wasn't fond of screwups. She'd do what Shepard wanted here, but she definitely had opinions about what they ought to do.

"In the Alliance, think you know it'd be a dishonorable discharge at the least," Shepard answered. "Probably a court-martial. Cerberus doesn't have dispensation to conduct experiments like the ones that went on here, and messing with the geth is illegal both under Alliance law and the laws of the Council. Archer has to answer for all the lives lost here."

"I agree," Lawson said. "However, you know that no one back in Alliance or Council space has jurisdiction over actions taken within the borders of the Terminus Systems. Whatever he's done, any case you try to build against him on the Citadel, Earth, or any of the colony worlds will fail upon those grounds. It's one reason Cerberus often undertakes its more extralegal activities on worlds within the Terminus Systems."

The right corner of Shepard's mouth turned down. Her eyes flicked to Garrus, and her hands flexed on the Hammerhead controls.

It was what had got Sidonis off, even after he'd decided to come clean. He'd confessed to being an accessory and a conspirator to the murders of Garrus's entire squad. Bailey had only been able to book him for fraudulent ID documents and illegal immigration. Lawson hadn't ever told him more about what had happened to Sidonis, and Garrus hadn't ever asked Liara, but he knew. The worst Sidonis would have gotten was a pretty steep fine and temporary expulsion from the Citadel.

Crime didn't exist in the Terminus. Proper channels didn't exist. On most worlds out here, the only justice that mattered came at the end of a barrel, and it was usually dispensed by warlords who only bothered due to profit margins. Most vigilante justice went about the way Garrus's attempt had or worse, and sooner. Spectre justice was risky; not a lot of people would argue with a Spectre even in the Terminus, but technically, they were only supposed to operate within Council space.

Ronald Taylor had been a rare exception to the rule. He'd been employed by a human colonization company that did actually answer to Alliance law, so the Alliance had been able to book him for the crimes he'd committed against the crew of Hugo Gernsback. With Morinth? Most of the crime lords and gangsters they'd faced out here for the past several months? There hadn't been an option.

Archer had to be disciplined for what had happened here. They all knew it. They also knew he wouldn't be if they took him in and tried to turn him in someplace else. Any half-decent lawyer could have the case dropped in a week.

We don't have the luxury of a private jail. If we want Archer to pay, we're going to have to make him.

Shepard wasn't fond of executions. When the guy who needed to go down wasn't actively pointing and shooting a gun at them, she always wanted to find another way. But out of the entire ground team on Normandy, Garrus thought only Tali, Goto, and Taylor might have a problem if Shepard went through with an execution here. A couple more of them might lose some respect if Shepard didn't do the job herself.

Garrus wasn't about to tell Shepard she had to execute Archer, or even suggest she should. He would have on the SR-1 tour. Might have thought so at the beginning of this one, though he might not have said it.

It's not like you know better now. But if there's another way . . .

If they could spare Beth beating herself half to death in the cargo bay after this, second-guessing everything, wondering what else she could have done, if she'd been compromised down here by her own hate for Cerberus, if they could save her that, he wanted to do it.

She's sacrificed enough lately. She's sacrificed enough, period.

Not a very turian sentiment, maybe. Well. You've already basically resigned your citizenship in the Hierarchy. Might as well go full human.

Except you're not going to be able to.

Shepard pulled up to Atlas Station, positioned behind a stunning waterfall. The garage doors opened for the vehicle, and she cruised into the hangar. "Let's see what the situation is here before we decide what to do with Archer," she said.

As if he'd heard them, Archer came in over the radio again. "Looks like you're in, Commander. Good. I'm getting some troubling readings here. Uh . . ." his voice trailed off, then went tense. "Your ship is coming into orbit above? The VI is trying to upload its program directly from your location. Get to the server room and shut down the core before it can—" he cut out.

Lights flickered down the hallway. One of the VI-controlled cameras swiveled to point at them.

"Great. Love a time constraint," Shepard muttered.

Goto was staring beneath her hood at the camera. She waved, flicked her wrist, and the camera exploded in a shower of sparks. "Uh, David? If you're listening, it's kind of rude to film people without their permission," she said.

"Not like we're asking permission," Garrus observed, gesturing to his own visor.

"You have my permission. That's better," Shepard said. "Stay on your toes." Locust out, she led the way down the hall, a tacit signal she was going to take point with Tali. The rest of the team responded on instinct. Lawson fell back to the mid-range with Kasumi, and Garrus changed out the Mattock for his sniper to provide a rearguard.

Tali moved over to a datapad on a shelf and activated it. Archer's recorded voice moved through the room. "Archer Log 155.2: For years, my brother's condition has been a handicap. That changed today. His autistic mind is the breakthrough I've been looking for. His autistic mind can communicate with the geth. Such a tremendous grasp of mathematics. It seems serendipity is alive and well in the twenty-second century."

All the humans exclaimed at the same time, Shepard with a particularly vicious curse. Garrus didn't have a window to look up "autistic" with the camera running and a grip on his rifle, but he knew "handicap."

"The human hooked up to the VI is disabled?" he guessed. It could explain a lot.

"Yes," Shepard said.

At the same time, Kasumi said, "It's more complicated than that."

The two women looked at one another. Something shifted in Beth's face. "You?" she asked Goto.

Kasumi shrugged. "I'm not really into labels," she answered. "They sent me to a lot of doctors as a kid. I've been diagnosed with a few different things. I'm not sure who's right, and I don't really care. I'm just me. But Shep, I don't like this guy. Dr. Archer. Isn't he meant to be a scientist?"

"Supposedly," Lawson said darkly.

"You'll have to explain for the aliens," Tali reminded the humans.

"Developmental condition in humans," Shepard explained. "It's a spectrum, really. Some autistic humans would be considered disabled; others wouldn't. Just different. I knew a few kids back in foster care with ASD. Their brains work differently from most humans in a way we've categorized. Senses can be hypersensitive to the point of pain; language can be slow to develop or fail to develop at all. Other autistic people just prefer not to speak. Sometimes their emotional range and ability to focus can be closer to what you'd expect from a salarian than your average human."

"Autistic individuals can develop amazing talents—or at least, an amazing breadth and depth of knowledge—due to the intensity of their focus on their particular areas of enthusiasm. Not all are what we would call savants; in fact, savant syndrome only rarely accompanies an autism diagnosis. But if David Archer is an autistic savant, as Archer's language and use of him in the experiments here suggests, he could have highly specialized and valuable talents for a human. He also may not have the social or life skills you would expect from someone else. He may have been dependent upon Dr. Archer." Lawson's jaw was tight, and her eyes were hard. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in, then released carefully. Lawson was angry. So was Shepard. Garrus could smell it on them, chemicals in their sweat that didn't release except under a particular kind of distress in humans.

"We need more data," Lawson said. "If it turns out that David Archer didn't actually volunteer for this—"

"We know that he wants out now," Tali said. "Are you saying Dr. Archer might have forced his brother to participate in this project?"

"I'm saying that depending on the severity of David's handicap and the accommodations Dr. Archer had in place for him, David may or may not have been capable of signaling something that Dr. Archer—or any neurotypical human—would recognize as consent to participate," Miranda said, face grim. She turned toward the door.

Shepard's face mirrored Lawson's. "If he didn't agree to this in the first place—" she began, then trailed off. Usually, Shepard's voice was pretty flat, like most aliens. Oh, you'd hear changes in pitch and tone, but nothing underneath it, nothing filling it out. Interpreting alien voices was complicated, even before you got into the effects of base language and culture on the meaning of what they said. In basic training, they taught you to focus on picking up facial expression and body language, even if it seemed stranger at first. Turians straight off Palaven and a lot of colony worlds always wanted to try to find a one-to-one translation for the changes in alien voices. Usually, you couldn't.

At this point, Garrus had probably worked closer with humans than 99 percent or more of the turians in the galaxy had. For several given definitions of 'working closer.' Five years living on the Citadel with more humans arriving and setting up shop every month. Two years on Omega in a vigilante squad that included three humans, living and laughing and killing with them, going to the Butlers' for dinner, trading playlists with Luc and gun recs with Weaver. About the same time now living on majority-human ships. Human voices usually made sense to Garrus now. At least, human voices speaking Alliance Standard and coming from communities where Alliance culture dominated. He'd never be able to explain human aural nonverbals in an academy setting; be a lousy cultural translator on any but the broadest substantive levels—but that's just skillset. But he knew what happy, angry, aggressive, demoralized, and conflicted humans sounded like, and what happy, angry, aggressive, demoralized, and conflicted Shepard sounded like best of all.

That guttural edge to her tone, that particular drop in pitch—that's Shepard on the edge. That's Shepard, starting to lose control. Part of him always had Shepard on scope—checking for orders, watching her back, making sure he knew where she was and what her objective was every time she cloaked. Looking because it's a damned nice view, whether you're talking professionally or not. But when Shepard sounded like that, he always watched her closer. There's not a soldier in the galaxy who's never been compromised by a mission. Sooner or later, something hits a little too close to home. Sooner or later, you run into something you can't take. You serve long enough, it happens more than once. And every time you hit a day like that, you're vulnerable—you get reckless, sloppy. You do something you regret. Or you do something you don't regret—and always know you should.

Garrus heard the sound of an airlock opening again and again, of a monster roaring in the dark where no one would hear. He thought of Tali's confusion coming back after the geth station; of a crazy merc back in the Attican Traverse and of another Cerberus scientist they'd met, one more like the insects that had experimented on Jack and the other children than Dr. Archer here, a man who was currently living his life in peace after a dirty plea deal. And he watched Shepard.

"Autistic humans—any human who's neurodivergent from the norm or disabled in any way—we have laws against abuse, exploitation, and discrimination. But people get off for it all the time," she was saying. "Poverty levels, filicide, domestic violence, vilification, and unlawful imprisonment—the statistics could make you sick. Humans will talk about having compassion on people who are different, protecting vulnerable populations, but there are plenty of bastards—even scientists—caught up in the rhetoric of centuries ago. And the feelings that never left." Her voice dropped again. Her mouth shut like a door on Normandy, and her eyes were the storm-gray that meant trouble.

Garrus shifted, scanning the hall. Every species had its dirty little secrets, features of their societies they didn't like to bring up in interstellar politics, or tried to spin any way they could. The Hierarchy had come under some criticism for their treatment of disabled or different populations. The asari in particular liked to harp on the cabals, ignoring how a species who had hardly any biotics had to conserve its biological assets to compete, how most turian biotics knew what they had to offer and were proud to serve.

Or that's what they tell us, Garrus thought. He'd noted the similarities between Krios and Ripper, understood they both had been subject to the same kind of conditioning and control. He had never approved of the Hanar Compact with the drell. He'd never looked too closely at the cabals. He wasn't a biotic. It wasn't his problem. He'd been content knowing the Hierarchy made provisions for disabled individuals to complete their years of service and earn full citizenship, but he'd heard about problems they'd faced in actually completing them. He'd generally ignored that too. Merit gets promoted. If you want to live in a safe, prosperous society, you need to do your part to contribute.

Suddenly, that attitude didn't seem like enough, and suddenly he knew Shepard wouldn't be impressed, though he'd never thought about her attitudes on the disabled before. He wondered about those kids she'd mentioned, the ones she'd known during her time in foster care. He'd come to respect Jeff Moreau over his time on Normandy, but it'd taken time. From the start, Shepard had been close to Joker. Closer than she was to a lot of people. Some of that made sense now.

Shepard led them out of the base entryway and into a hall. Garrus frowned as a door down the hallway shut down and another one opened. Shepard approached the first door and tried the access panel, but it was dead. Unresponsive.

"VI says go this way, apparently," Goto muttered.

"It did this in the geth ship too," Garrus told her. "Not quite the same way, but it was in the doors. Be ready."

"Yeah," Kasumi agreed, rubbing the barrel of her SMG with a gloved finger.

The second door opened onto a large, split-level laboratory. The lighting was dim, mostly powered down, but Garrus saw papers scattered across several worktables, workstations, consoles. This base was obviously where most of the actual work on the project had taken place.

Tali keyed into a console on the upper level, and another Archer recording played. "Archer Log 157.8: Unless he sees results, the Illusive Man is shutting us down next week. I have no choice. I'm going to tap David directly into the geth neural network and see if he can influence them. The danger should be negligible. David might even enjoy it."

"Well, Dr. Archer got that one wrong," Tali remarked. Garrus saw her shiver as she looked at one of the swiveling cameras in the room, fixing on their squad. She nodded at the door on the opposite side of the room—an elevator instead of an exit to an adjoining room. "We need to be careful, Shepard. That elevator is probably controlled by machinery that VI can infect."

"Yeah," Shepard agreed. "We still rolling, Garrus?"

"Yes, Commander," Garrus said, taking in the green interface flickering over the consoles in the room, the pervasiveness of the VI infection.

Lawson was staring at the console where the log was stored. "He was desperate," she said, referring to Archer. "He did this because he was afraid that if he didn't, the Illusive Man would abandon this avenue of research. Shepard—do you think the Illusive Man would have wanted this to happen?"

"This specifically?" Shepard asked. "I don't think so. But they were trying to fuse human and virtual intelligence to manipulate the geth. I wouldn't put it past the Illusive Man to argue that they've achieved that here and that all this was just a learning experience and a necessary sacrifice."

Lawson was silent for a long moment. "You're right," she said then. "He would say that." She looked around at the abandoned laboratory. "Back at base, I used to agree, when he said things like that. It's . . . different from this side of it."

"Hard to see the damage when all you're looking at is reports and new discoveries," Shepard suggested.

"I should have gone into the field more often," Lawson answered. "I should have investigated sooner. Shepard, do you think Dr. Archer was his brother's guardian?"

"it's starting to sound that way," Shepard said.

"If he was, this was abuse," Lawson said, decisive.

"Maybe on more than one front," Tali agreed. Garrus looked at her, and she looked back at him. "The geth. We still don't know whether the ones they brought over from Prometheus Station were sapient or not," she reminded them. "The true geth signals in the platforms we've fought here have all been corrupted. Legion says if these geth were ever alive to begin with, they've all been crushed and overwritten by the VI programming. But I don't think Cerberus would have as much use for a VI-human hybrid that could only control dormant or inactive machines."

"No, they wouldn't," Shepard said. She didn't comment on Tali's newfound sympathy for geth victims of experimentation, though Garrus saw she noticed too. Shepard just marched down the stairs and summoned the elevator.

I guess it is pretty pointless talking about it now. Lawson's right: We need more data. And even if all this is just as bad as they think, we aren't going to stop it from this room.

The elevator machinery worked. "Arriving at Level 2," a synthetic voice announced. Garrus looked at the plaque next to the elevator. They were on the seventh level of the base.

"Well. If we wanted an answer to the question of whether the VI is in the elevator," he said. He looked around the room. Several consoles in the lab that had been powered down and inaccessible before had come on, lighting up in invitation. It wasn't very reassuring.

"I think David wants to play a game," Goto murmured. "Creepy. I can say that, right?"

Lawson shot her a look but said nothing. Like Shepard, she was moving around the room, studying the consoles. Garrus kept a grip on his rifle. "Shepard, I think—"

"Hang on," Shepard said, by a console on the upper platform. She pressed a button, and it didn't shock her or gas the room. The elevator went up three floors to Level 5. She frowned, but not like she was upset. She walked downstairs and pressed a button on another console. The elevator went back to Level 4, and Shepard nodded with satisfaction. "Get in cover," she advised them, moving back up to the first console she had tried.

"He'd adapted the work on those consoles to translate to a simple mathematical code?" Lawson said.

"You saw it too?" Shepard replied, kneeling behind the railing of the upper platform and sighting down the barrel of the Locust at the elevator as the Cerberus voice announced its arrival on their level.

The elevator doors opened, and a gush of flame and an enemy drone flew out. Destroyers and a prime. Shepard had been right to be ready.

They had the geth in a crossfire from the start, but it still took some doing to put them down. The prime boosted the destroyer shields, and none of them could focus fire on it for more than a second without their own shields going down to its heavy weapons. But Shepard had brought all Normandy's techs for a reason. Concentrated attacks to the shield matrices brought down the shields on one of the platforms—hard to tell which one. But Shepard's burst of incendiary tech was able to get through and ignite a destroyer tank. There was a large, loud explosion.

Smoke and the smell of burnt metal poured out of the elevator, and the prime staggered out with melted guns. Its drone hovered around the barrel, trying to repair the damage, but they were already firing.

The prime fell down useless, and they crossed the room toward the elevator. Kasumi eyed the carbon burns with misgiving. "I know David was in it a second ago. You think that cleared him out? Think we can use it?"

"Dunno," Shepard replied, glancing at an omni-tool map of the station EDI had beamed her. "But he isn't giving us access to the stairs."

"Great," Tali said. "Garrus, why don't you and Shepard go first?" Her eyes cut to him through her visor, and he felt both her mischief and her sense of trepidation.

"You want to head home, Tali?" he asked. "I'll be happy to tell you all about the human Cerberus hooked up to the geth and how it worked. Of course, I won't understand it all like you might—"

"Oh, shut up," Tali snapped, slapping his armor as she moved past him into the elevator. "Bosh'tet."

Shepard's smirk was a little forced as she followed, but it was there. "Well. Takes one to know one. Brace yourselves." She hit the button, and through the speakers, David shrieked.

The elevator doors slammed shut. The gears screamed. As the floor fell away beneath them, faster than they could move with it minus inertial dampeners, the gears were not the only things screaming. Garrus's stomach dropped. His guts twisted. His ears protested the pressure change, and the only reason he wasn't sure they were about to die was that he could also feel his hide itching from a nearby biotic field. Beside him, Lawson had lit up blue. Her biotics were extending, wrapping them all in Lawson's own protective barrier.

"This elevator is not in service," the elevator told them. "Please—"

The grinding gears drowned out the pleasant synthetic female voice. Tali and Goto were clutching at the elevator walls, trying to find something to hold onto. Shepard had grabbed onto him—clutching at his wrist with her left gauntlet—and he'd grabbed her right back. Away from the elevator walls, he'd wrapped his right arm around her to brace them both against the crash.

The floor jolted as they crashed to a halt. His shields blinked out like they'd never been, and Garrus felt the impact in every bone of his body, but Lawson's barrier held. Smoke poured in through the venting systems. Garrus's visor registered a temperature spike—nearly seven degrees. His helmet life support systems came on, filtering the air, and the elevator crashed down another meter or so.

"Smoke has been detected," the voice announced. "Please extinguish all cigarettes. This is a nonsmoking facility."

The elevator jolted just a few more centimeters, and then the doors squealed open, several centimeters below the landing for Level 2.

Shepard let go of his wrist, and Garrus released her torso, stepping back as she preceded him, climbing out of the elevator. "Well. That was exciting," he said. Sweat stood out on Goto and Lawson's faces. He helped Tali, then both of them out of the elevator. Shepard pulled him up after.

"Thanks, Miranda," she said. "We probably would've lived through that—but it could've been a whole lot worse."

"Right. Maybe don't let the human-VI hybrid have another shot?" Lawson suggested, smoothing her hair back down around the biotic barrier she still had in place over her face, filtering the smoke.

"Do my best," Shepard said, looking around. "Now where has he taken us?"

They were standing in another laboratory—this one filled with dormant geth platforms like the ones at Prometheus Station. Parts and pieces were draped over every available surface, along with wires and consoles and technical readouts, some of which were still running.

"Should we take them out?" Garrus asked. "Dismantle them before it can get a hold of them?"

Shepard shook her head. "Negative. A lot of these don't even look like they're in good enough condition to be a threat. Those that are—if we can get past without hurting them, I want them intact. See if Legion or EDI can find anything left of them. That way, when Legion goes back behind the Veil, it can report we didn't just blow up every geth we saw."

"To be fair, most of the ones we've seen have tried to blow us up first," Garrus muttered.

"To be fair, most of the ones we've seen have either been working for the Reapers or under torture conditions," Shepard retorted sharply. "Now we know not all of them are."

"Shepard, if it's us or the geth—"

"I'll pick us." Shepard cut him off, but her eyes had gone dark again, and she was scowling. "Leave the geth alone until David makes them fire on us."

"Aye-aye, Commander."

They picked their way across the lab. Garrus felt twitchy. Bad strategy, to walk further into a room where the enemy could outflank or surround them in a second. That VI was watching. The cameras in the corners of the room still followed them around. He knew David was crazy, begging for this all to stop. But David had also killed a dozen or more people who didn't understand.

They found another log across the lab. Shepard hit play, still scowling, waiting for what they'd hear. Dr. Archer's voice filled the room again. "Archer Log 160.4: I'd be lying if I said no harm could come to David. His autistic mind is as alien to me as an actual alien. Anything could happen when I plug him in. But I have to try, don't I?"

"This human disgusts me," Tali announced. "David is Dr. Archer's brother. How was he willing to put his brother in this situation when he knew something horrible might happen?"

"He answered, didn't he?" Goto said. Her voice had changed now too. It was lower and harder than Garrus had ever heard it. "Dr. Archer doesn't see David as another human, let alone treat him as a brother. And you're right: It's disgusting. I want to kill this guy."

"Quarians hardly ever have siblings," Tali said. "Reproduction is highly controlled on the Migrant Fleet so our population doesn't strain our resources. It's been more than a decade since the admiralty board has allowed couples to have more than a single child, and most relaxations of the single-child law only last for a limited time. Even when quarian families can have more than one child, though, most don't. Reproduction has become complicated for us, so children are precious. Treating a member of your own family like this—it would be a charge nearly as serious as treason on its own, and with the danger David has become to others—"

"No," Shepard agreed. "Humans don't condone this behavior either, Tali. Or they shouldn't." She led them out of the laboratory and into another hall. "Map says this way to the access elevator to the base's center," she said, then paused. The access light over the door at the end of the hallway, the one Shepard said led the way they needed to go, was flickering with the green light that meant the system was infected by the VI. This time, instead of simply shutting down the door, the access panel moved over empty wall, rolling like a wave of pixels and coming to hover over a door to their left instead. Like before, the door at the end of the hallway was dead.

"What's in there?" Lawson asked.

Shepard chewed the inside of her cheek. "Monitoring station," she said. "Just a readout console. No control over the system as a whole. I got a bad feeling about this." She looked up at the camera. "Alright, David," she said. "We'll play it your way one more time."

She led them into the small room off the hall. The VI infection hovered over a button on the center of the console, a sinister invitation. Shepard flexed her fingers. "Pushing this button is a bad idea," she said. "EDI?" There was no answer. They were on their own. At this level, either they were past EDI's range of influence or the VI had locked her out.

"It hasn't really given us another option, has it?" Lawson reflected.

"No," Shepard answered. "Get ready. I wouldn't be surprised if this button summoned a Reaper." She pressed the button. Sparks flared, and then she threw back her head. At first, Garrus thought the VI had rigged the console to overload, but when Shepard's mouth opened in a silent scream, he knew it was even worse. Shepard's eyes—they weren't looking at anything inside the room anymore. There was a strange green light around them.

Panic flooded through Garrus. He moved to her, seized her shoulders. "Shepard! Beth!"

She shoved him away with incredible strength. Garrus tripped backward, more surprised than injured. The way she was moving was all wrong. Her posture, her movements, everything was wrong.

"She's been hacked!" Tali cried. "The VI—watch out!"

They all looked to Shepard's weapons. They couldn't shoot Shepard, but if Shepard fired on them—she didn't. She didn't even draw a gun. Her feet moved instead, carrying her forward. She moved like she was drunk or sleepwalking, mouth open. It wasn't contorted in pain anymore, it was slack, like all the muscles in Shepard's face had gone dead. But she wasn't dead. Her heart rate had jumped nearly forty beats per minute. Her temperature was climbing, particularly in her brain. The readings were too hot, but she was moving like a glacier.

She staggered and rolled forward, moving toward the door like a husk. "Get a tranq or something, a cryo ammo program. We have to stop her!" Goto said.

None of them had come equipped with tranquilizers, but as Goto herself started searching her omni-tool, seeing if she could access Shepard's cryo ammo program through the network, Lawson seized her wrist. "No!" she snapped. "If she keeps moving anyway, you could snap her limbs! Look, she's not . . . she isn't hurting anyone. If we try to neutralize her, we could harm her."

"It's got her!" Garrus said, his subvocals strangling the sound.

"I know," Miranda said. "Let's just—let's see where it's taking her."

Shepard stumbled forward, out the way they had come and to the left, toward the door that had been locked before. Garrus moved after her, but as soon as she passed through the door to their little analysis station, the door shut. He heard the lock engage. "No!" he cried, slamming his hands against the panel—dead. "Tali!"

"On it!" Tali said, moving to the access panel near the door.

Garrus glared at her, willing her to move faster, to get the door open. Desperation pulsed through him, hotter and more urgent every second, and he rounded the tiny room, trying to find something, anything he could do. "EDI, Legion, Archer, come in! It's got Shepard!" he shouted over the radio. Again, there was only silence.

Tali worked at the access panel, cursing steadily in a rising pitch under her breath. Kasumi was by her, fingers twitching to help, but there was room for only one of them at the panel. Lawson was by the console that had taken Shepard, scanning it with her omni-tool. Suddenly, he was furious with her.

"You didn't see this coming?!" he demanded. "How much of her is synthetic?!"

"It shouldn't have been able to do that!" Lawson snapped back. She took a breath and pushed her hair back from her face. "The Lazarus Project had to resort to biosynthetic fusion in order to bring her back. She was clinically brain dead when we started. Her . . . her body contains several synthetic and cybernetic components, but I designed many to become redundant and surgically removable once her brain began showing electric activity and her wounds began self-healing again. Dr. Chakwas's recent checkups have shown she's more organic now than she was when she woke up. Other implants have . . . evolved. I don't—" she stopped. "I've got her on the scanner. EDI's back."

"I apologize. The VI has been demonstrating significant resistance and resilience against my cyberwarfare suite," EDI said. "I am finding it difficult to maintain a presence within the Atlas Station systems."

"Can you access Shepard?" Garrus interrupted.

"No," EDI answered. "I was not built or programmed to have access to the computer components inside the commander. Project Lazarus intended Commander Shepard to be an independent entity as close to the human she was before Alchera as possible. I have secured this console for Operative Lawson for the time being, and my systems allow me to track Shepard through Atlas Station, but I cannot access the commander herself." EDI paused. "Nor do I think you would want me to," she added.

Some part of Garrus knew this was true, that Shepard would be relieved to hear it. The larger part of him just wanted her back from that crazy VI five minutes ago. "How can that thing get into Shepard and you can't? You're supposed to be the most advanced AI in the galaxy!"

"David Archer is a hybrid intelligence the likes of which has not been seen within the galaxy," EDI answered. "The protocols to respond to him have not been invented yet. I am doing what I can."

"Hang on," Lawson interrupted, gesturing to the map readout now displayed on the console screen. "I don't think she's fully under David's control anymore. Look, on the monitor." She pointed to Shepard's signal. "Those are geth signals, closing in on her. If she was still fully under the VI's control, why would it be sending its geth after her?"

As if in answer to Lawson's observation, the sound of the Locust broke out across the base. "She's awake," Garrus said. Waves of relief washed over him. "She's back."

"She is not back, Garrus," EDI corrected. "My readings show David Archer still spending considerable power broadcasting his program to hardware it is not fully compatible with. This would suggest Shepard's human biology is rejecting his hacking attempt, though he might have some control of her cybernetics."

"What could that do to her?" Garrus asked Lawson. "If her biology fights corrupted cybernetics . . ." He suddenly had an image of finding Beth in brain or organ failure, of bones or joints splitting as her mind tried to give orders to a body that wouldn't obey. Who knew what the consequences could be!

Lawson was worried too, which made it worse. "I don't know!" she repeated, voice rising like Tali's.

"Got it!" Tali interrupted. The door beside her opened.

Garrus didn't wait for Lawson to say another word. He drew the Mantis and plunged through the door, heading left after Shepard. Behind him, he heard Tali and Goto talking about the door hack. Part of him knew they were right behind him, moving time-and-a-half like he was to get to Shepard. The Locust fire seemed so much closer.

She always goes for the Locust's fire rate when she's in tough and can't line up a shot. Could get a visor to speed up her reaction time, but no . . .

". . . and if that VI wasn't distracted trying to control Shepard, I'm not sure I could have managed."

"I wonder what she's seeing," Lawson said. "Did it hack her trying to communicate or to capture her?"

Garrus stepped into a lab. Shepard had been here—he saw broken glass in a pane adjacent to a second lab, three exploded geth hubs like the one on Prometheus Station. Geth platforms lay like rag dolls and cut marionettes over the floor. Garrus catalogued the profiles—troopers and destroyers. No hunters or primes. Good.

"Well. I suddenly feel completely superfluous," Kasumi said.

"She's N7," Tali said. "Not to mention a Spectre. But she has gotten particularly good against geth and synthetics."

"You think maybe because she's been one?" Kasumi wondered.

"Shepard's human," Lawson grit out through her teeth. "She is shaking off that thing right now. She'll be in full control of herself again any moment, and even half in whatever plane Archer's got her in, she's tearing his defenses apart."

She'd gone out the far side of the lab. They followed the technological carnage through a curving corridor, moving around what was obviously a central area. "He's taking her to the main lab," Garrus said.

"Or she's just going," Tali suggested. "Is there another route? Can we catch up to her?"

"Everything's blocked," Lawson said, examining the map readout on her omni-tool. "There's massive energy readings just past this wall and below—that has to be the VI, but it's locked down almost every door that goes down there."

The Locust rang out, closer, just ahead, but even as the door to the next lab opened to them, Shepard's helmet disappeared, moving down on a lift in the center of the floor. Garrus ran but got there too late. He stamped on the blast doors over the lift. "Damn it! It's sealed—armored and shielded!"

"That door's not," Tali said grimly, nodding at another exit on the other side of the lab, past the smoking chassis of another destroyer and two downed troopers. "If the VI won't give us a shortcut, we can make one."

"Miranda?" Garrus asked.

"You'll have to help me," Lawson answered, turning blue with biotics. "Concussive blasts once the door is caught up in the warp field."

"You got it," Garrus said. "Everyone, stand back."

With Lawson warping the metal of the lab door with dark energy every second, Garrus hammered it with concussive blasts from the Mattock. The noise was deafening, and the tech in his helmet self-modified to provide auditory protection. The door buckled, twisted, blackened, and finally Lawson held up a hand. "We can force it now," she said. "Garrus?"

Still blue with biotics, she pulled at one side of the door. Garrus joined her, pulling at his own side. He couldn't match the power of Lawson's biotics, but he was stronger than either of the others. The door shrieked and whined, but it opened, as Cerberus's automated protocols echoed through the base. "Normandy SR-2 is within range. Attempting to establish upload link."

Lawson wiped sweat away from her forehead. "What?!" she demanded. "EDI?"

"Stand by. I am attempting to block the VI upload," EDI answered. Her synthesized voice sounded more stressed than it had even on Horizon or fighting Collector technology on their cruiser.

The hallway ahead curved like the last, but this one had a picture observation window into the area below running the length of it. Garrus fired at it point-blank, but the bullets hit a force shield and bounced back. They were blocked.

Below, more Locust fire broke out, and underneath, Garrus heard a scream. He raced to the window, scanning the room below. It was the central laboratory. An energy-shielded globe of tech dominated the floor. Hardware wires extended out from the globe like tentacles, hanging from the ceiling and plugged into ports below the viewing platform where they stood. The platform was supported by columns around the room. Garrus could see two geth troopers moving behind the columns on the other side of the room. There could be more underneath.

In the room's center was Shepard. She'd painted her armor matte mauve today, aside from the usual Alliance-blue stripe, so she showed up nice and clear against the station's sterile white walls and floor. She was moving like herself again—fast and fluid, graceful and strong—and her helmet was on, so while it was impossible to tell if the implants behind her eyes were still glowing, she'd obviously come to herself enough to put it on. But she didn't even acknowledge Tali and Goto as they called out, and when Garrus tried to patch into her suit radio, he only got static.

Shepard dodged behind a pillar to the right of the room, turned, and fired a three-burst shot up at one of the hardware wires, then arced a ball of tech around a pillar toward one of the geth. Then she was moving again, cloaking. All her tech was working for her now, not the VI, whatever she was seeing. The fire up at the wires didn't make sense, but as she emerged from her cloak halfway around the room and fired at another wire, the Cerberus voice echoed through the base again. "Connection lost."

"What's she doing?" Garrus asked.

"I believe the commander's connection to the VI is allowing her to target vulnerable points in its hardware, places facilitating its upload attempts," EDI answered.

Shepard had changed weapons now. An alarm was shrilling through the base. She knelt to steady her fire and fired the Widow again and again at the energy shield in the center of the room. It flickered. She sent an incendiary at it.

"Look, Archer!" Tali cried, pointing at another hallway on the observation deck, one directly across from their position. Dr. Gavin Archer was framed there, looking down at the scene, face white.

"Attempting to establish upload link," the automated systems announced again.

From an elevator opposite them, three more geth platforms emerged into the laboratory.

"Can we get down there?" Garrus asked.

"It'll be locked down like the one behind us now, and we'd have to force at least two more doors. We could see if the VI activates those other platforms from storage in the room behind us. If it brings up the elevator again, we might be able to commandeer it," Lawson answered.

It was a lot of ifs, but it was their best shot. "Let's do it," Garrus said. He turned on his heel and made for the forced door again.

"Connection lost," the automatic systems announced.

"I have reclaimed Shepard's suit systems," EDI said suddenly, and Shepard's radio flicked on.

"Shepard!" Garrus said at once. "Come in!"

"Little busy," Beth grit out, followed by the sound of more gunfire, but she was talking.

"What's the situation?" Garrus demanded.

"Seeing things like the VI does, I think, or to some extent. Can see what he's trying to do, but I can't get through to him. Gotta . . . hang on . . ."

Two more shots, from the Widow this time, and suddenly, the alarms stopped ringing. The base went deadly silent, but the lights on the elevator access panel Kasumi stood at suddenly flicked on. She pressed the button to summon the lift, and the sealed door in the floor opened up as the platform rose up from the lab underneath.

"I think it's over," Kasumi said.

A new voice came through Shepard's radio then—someone near her but not too close. Human, young-sounding. Exhausted and defeated. "Quiet. Please make it stop. Quiet. Please make it stop."

Garrus and the others stepped onto the lift, and it carried them down a level. As the access door into the laboratory opened, so did the door on the other side, and Archer rushed into the room.

"Wait! Commander," he yelled. "I'm begging you! Don't do anything rash."

Shepard was standing, staring up at the place where the force shield had blocked the view of David Archer. Her fingers tightened around the grip of her pistol. "Rash?" she repeated. The dangerous edge to her voice was back. "Like forcing your own brother into an experiment?"

Garrus and the others drew level with Shepard. Garrus looked up and saw what Archer had done to his brother. He swallowed. Archer had been under pressure from the Illusive Man. A minute ago, they hadn't known how much say David had had in joining the experiments, but now Garrus knew. No one alive would agree to the kind of thing Cerberus—Gavin Archer—had done to David.

David Archer hung naked, suspended by a metal harness from a circular mainframe in the center of the room. The hardware wires running all around the room had been drilled into points along his arms, into his feet. There were tubes coming out from under the harness for waste disposal. They'd shaved his skull to attach electrodes to it. More electrodes fit into a collar around his neck. His bloodshot eyes were held open by still more tech.

You could see the blood and bruising where he was attached, the sores and abrasions from the frame. The salinity of the tears from his open eyes had worn more rashes along his cheeks. His lips were cracked. So were his finger and toenails. David Archer was one of the worst things Garrus had ever seen.

Gavin Archer had done this to his brother.

David stared out at the rest of them with eyes that didn't see them, repeating the same words over and over again like a glitched vid— "Quiet. Please make it stop."

Garrus's gizzard clenched. So did his fists. His mandibles worked, and beside him, Shepard was shaking as she removed her helmet. He saw tear tracks on her face to mirror David's.

Dr. Archer was pale as he pled with her. "I know how this must look," he said, "but I never intended any harm to come to him. You must believe me. It's not like I planned this! It was an accident! Seeing David communicate with the geth—it all seemed harmless."

Shepard snapped. "Shut up!" she shouted, stabbing her arm up at David. "This was an accident!? It took what, an hour to get him in there? More?! Him screaming the whole time for you to stop it?"

"He assisted readily enough with our early experiments," Dr. Archer protested. "I felt sure if he knew what was at stake—"

"Shut. Up. I saw your brother's memories!" Shepard roared. "This whole time, everything he's done here, he's been screaming in pain with what you did to him, trying to get anyone to understand! And you knew! He begged you not to do this!" Her hands flexed on her gun. Tears streaked down her cheeks, and she was still shaking.

Garrus just stared up at David Archer. His eyes had begun tracking again. As they rolled behind the electrodes plunged into nerves inside, they visibly bloodied.

"I was desperate," Archer said. "The Illusive Man doesn't broker failure. Any war we fight with the geth will be bloody. I was asked to find a way to avoid that."

Shepard shook her head, paced away. "Fucking Cerberus!" Tension built up in her. Behind Garrus, he felt the others stewing, fuming, ready to back her in whatever she did now. This was an atrocity. Suddenly, Shepard stopped. She pressed her lips together, and her voice went quiet. "Guess I came here to end this," she said. "Maybe I should end it."

Something in her tone broke Garrus out of his stupor, staring up at David, and he was moving before he knew what he was doing, gripping her shoulder even as her arm came up with the gun. She stared at him, disbelieving. Part of him had no idea why he had done it. He didn't let go.

She broke away violently, shoving him away, but she hesitated and held his gaze anyway, a silent demand for an explanation.

Garrus swallowed again, taking in David, Shepard's anger, everything Archer had done, all of it, and fully understood for the first time why Shepard had done what she did back on the Citadel. "Not like this," he told her. "Not you."

Shepard stared at him another moment, then let out a strangled cry, gesturing at David again.

"Who gave them the right to play God?" she ground out.

It was a rhetorical question, but Archer answered. "People who were too afraid to make difficult decisions themselves." He looked up at his brother. He had gone preternaturally calm. Disassociating. "When they pray for a miracle, they're . . . really praying for men like me to make the tough choices. If my work spares a million mothers mourning the loss of a million sons, my conscience will rest easy."

Shepard rounded on him, vicious. "There is a difference between going to war and forcing someone else," she hissed. "You are an insult to every parent, sibling, and partner who has someone in the service. You don't get to coopt our rhetoric for this atrocity. Without even touching on what you and Cerberus were trying to do to the geth, assuming you don't care about anyone but human beings, this is an affront on every human level. Look at him!" She gestured at David again, and her voice broke. "Your brother will never be the same!"

Archer's calm flickered. "The damage may not be permanent," he argued. "He might recover some semblance of his mind."

Shepard shook her head. "Cerberus will never leave him alone. Your brother will always be a lab rat."

"But a well cared-for lab rat," Archer said. "At least he'd still be alive."

Kasumi and Tali exclaimed, and Shepard shouted, "He would have never been in danger if it weren't for you! A dozen other people would still be alive too! And what—you call this well cared for?! Naked, half-starved, sores all over his body, scarred—how long has he been awake?!"

Archer's calm broke. "No one could get near him!" he yelled. "I—"

Shepard rounded on Garrus, eyes blazing. "Garrus, so help me, I—"

"Square root of 906.01 equals . . ."

It was David—saying something else now. His eyes were on his brother. A drop of blood ran down with the tears from them.

They all went silent. Archer suddenly looked about twenty years older. "30.1," he murmured. The answer to the problem. "What I've done to David is unethical," he said then, turning to Shepard. "If he dies, it's unforgivable. Let me take care of him. Please."

"Quiet," David said again. "Please, make it stop." This time, Garrus didn't think he was repeating just for the sake of it.

Shepard looked back at him, then at Archer. "Fuck you," she said softly. "I'm taking David away."

She beckoned Miranda and approached the mainframe, and Archer snapped again, rushing forward weaponless. "No, leave him!" he screamed. "He's too valuable!"

Shepard met the attack with a brutal pistol whip with the Locust and a knee to Archer's gut. She followed up with a backhanded swing across his spine, bringing him to his knees as she leveled the gun at his forehead. "He's your brother!" she said. Garrus saw her finger tighten on the trigger, saw a shiver across her back and thighs that was the muscles beneath spasming. He held his gaze on Shepard. Her eyes darted back to him, just for a second, then back to Archer. "I won't kill you," she breathed. "I won't do that. No one could say it wasn't justified after this, but here and now, I'm so angry it would be murder, not justice." She lowered her gun, but Archer stayed on his knees, eyes moving to his brother with a mix of desperation, regret, and self-hatred. Shepard paced away. "We can't bring him to the Alliance," she told the rest of them. "There's probably a handful of sick fucks up at Arcturus who'd agree with him, set him free, and bring in some other poor kid to replicate this disaster and mind-control a sapient synthetic race who mostly don't want to fight us. So. What do we do?"

"Take David away," Miranda answered. "We were going to do it anyway. Without his 'alien' autistic savant, Archer has no way of replicating even the partial success he's found here. Destroy the data and leave him to the Illusive Man." Her voice was crisp and cold, but her hands were gentle as she began to unscrew the fasteners keeping the mainframe suspended in the air.

From the way Archer's eyes flashed and panic and despair began to seep into his expression and out of his every pore, Lawson had had a good idea, and Shepard saw it. Her face twisted with angry satisfaction. "That'll work. You can explain to him why you don't have his results. Or you can run. And keep on running."

He'd have to. Because the project had gone offline, the Illusive Man would know something had happened on Aite. To the Illusive Man, it would look like Shepard had come in, trashed Overlord and wiped all the records on purpose, and like Archer had stood there and let it happen. They might have come in to trash Overlord on purpose or they might not have, but when they'd gotten here, there hadn't been a choice. Garrus believed that much. And leaving Archer to explain to his insane boss—or keep one step ahead of him the rest of his life, living his life on the run—would be a longer, harder punishment than one quick bullet to the skull.

"We have to destroy the data, Shep," Goto said. "Make sure they can't replicate this stunt anywhere else."

"Right. EDI, you got that?"

"Loud and clear," their AI answered. "I am in control. Deleting all project files."

Everything they had on Project Overlord would now be on Garrus's little video. Garrus zoomed his visor in for one last take on David's ravaged, ruined body, then shut it off. They had enough. No need to linger on the indignity he'd suffered here. It was clear he was as much of a victim as anyone who had died while he was linked up to Cerberus's virtual intelligence. Everyone would know why they'd shut down the project.

"Tali, Kasumi, there has to be an infirmary around here somewhere," Lawson said. "There would have to be to enable them to set up. Find it. Get clothes and bandages for David. We'll have to be careful unhooking some of the couplings."

"Level three," Archer told them. "There's a staircase near the lift that I took. With the VI shut down and your AI in charge of the systems here, you should have full access to the station."

Tali and Goto glared at him but turned to follow his instructions. Archer turned back to Shepard. "Where will you take him?" he asked.

"Grissom Academy," Shepard answered. "They can help special cases like David. Minus the torture. Jeff, contact the academy and let them know we'll be there within the day. They'll need to have medical staff standing by."

Joker's voice came over the radio. "Aye-aye, Commander."

"The square root of 912.04 is 30.2," David said in a cracked, broken voice, his bloody eyes rolling back toward his brother as Garrus joined Lawson and Shepard in laying the mainframe down on the ground. "It all seemed harmless."

---

They all had reason to remember Miranda Lawson was a medical doctor as well as a combat operative in the next couple hours, but when some of David's lesions from the mainframe began bleeding more heavily, he panicked. He started screaming and crying, began lashing out at them with his fists and his feet. He was malnourished, weakened after his time connected to the mainframe, but his movements were hurting him. Lawson ordered a tranquilizer, but they didn't have any.

Shepard took over then. She knelt beside David's shoulder. She didn't restrain him or even make eye contact, but instead, looking at a point just over David's shoulder and using a soft, even voice, she talked math. She ran him through famous mathematical sequences: golden ratios and prime number sequences, the equations for speed and distance and the mass effect on different-sized envelopes of matter. And as she spoke, David calmed. He started hiccupping, then whispering the equations with her and offering alternatives.

Shepard talked him through the half hour it took the professor to arrive with the sedatives, as Lawson disconnected David from the mainframe, as she disinfected and bandaged the worst of his injuries and took notes on her omni-tool hypothesizing about the worst of the damage. She'd deleted her scanning apps after the completion of the Lazarus Project, and she cursed about that more than once.

Somewhere in all the bustle, Archer disappeared. Goto and Tali complained about not shooting him, but no one was really sorry to see him go. He had been looking progressively sicker as more and more of the tech was peeled away from his brother, revealing more and more of the horrific damage to David's body, and especially when David began to lash out and Shepard stepped in to calm him. He would have years to think about what he'd done. Or at least as long as he had before the Illusive Man caught him. Another thing Garrus understood from the Citadel now. Shooting Archer just wasn't good enough. He needed years to think about all that he'd done. The men and women he'd betrayed. The brother he had tortured.

It was a long, long half hour, and a couple of times, Lawson worried as David's vitals dipped. He was in bad shape. Finally, Mordin arrived with sedatives and a motorized stretcher to get David aboard the Kodiak.

Shepard hadn't left David for a single minute, though her whole body had gone so tense over the time that she almost seemed made of stone now. As Lawson and Solus took David under sedation to the med bay, though, the professor making nonstop recommendations for vitamin boosters and medical regimens for David in the same breaths he excoriated the Cerberus scientists—Disgusting! Unethical! Soulless! Wrong! —Shepard turned on her heel and strode back into the elevator, leaving the rest of them standing awkwardly in a clump upon the crew deck. They turned their tail to Aite, none too soon, in Garrus's opinion.

Chambers had been off since the crew abduction. As Normandy gossiped about David Archer in low voices, she looked like she'd been physically shot. Once upon a time, Garrus knew, Kelly Chambers had been a believer in Cerberus. She'd thought that they were a force of good in the galaxy. Along with Miranda and EDI, who had said as much, Garrus and Shepard and Tali thought she had probably been reporting to the Illusive Man over the course of their trip, sending regular updates on the mental and emotional conditions of the team. Shepard had been confident after a while that Chambers had developed more loyalty to her than to Cerberus. Naturally, being abducted by the Collectors would have interrupted any report schedule she had set up, and since, if she had tried to make any reports, EDI would have stopped them. She hadn't tried. But hearing about Project Overlord, seeing David, even in passing—that had to be a blow to anyone who had once believed in Cerberus. Taylor had been quiet since their return to Normandy, closed off and frowning often.

They arrived at Grissom Academy in the Traverse in several hours. Moreau had called ahead, but the couple med techs that came aboard to collect David still seemed suspicious—stiff, with their hands too close to their weapons.

"Ms. Shepard?" one said, raising his eyebrows at her. "You sent a distress call? Something about a young man we might be interested in, tortured by Cerberus?"

It was early afternoon back on Normandy. A lot of the crew was in the mess—some waiting around for Rupert to start dinner but most of them to get a first look at what was going on. Several bristled at the young man's pointed use of Shepard's civilian title.

"Relax," Garrus muttered to Hawthorne, who was closest, though he was angry too. Technically, the Alliance human wasn't wrong: Shepard hadn't been reinstated in the Alliance military after being reported killed two years ago, just into the Spectres. But the absence of even the courtesy title was hard to take. Shepard flinched a little at it too, but lifted her chin and took it in stride.

"The young man in question, David Archer, is a mathematical savant of some capability," she said. "He's shown a unique ability to understand and communicate with synthetic lifeforms, a talent that Cerberus has unfortunately exploited to his mental and physical detriment," she said. "Normandy's doctors and my own observation lead me to believe his mental facilities may not have been permanently damaged. Nevertheless, his current condition is critical. I trust the Alliance to help this young man, not to take advantage."

"Why call us?" the other med tech demanded, lifting her own chin. She couldn't be much older than Jack, who was leaning against the closest mess table, arms folded. "You're Cerberus too now, aren't you, Commander? That's what they say."

Despite the belligerent tone, or maybe because of it—the respect the title signaled right alongside the challenge—something about this human reminded Garrus of Ashley Williams. He almost smiled. Shepard raised her own eyebrows.

"I've been operating with Cerberus funds and resources for the past year, yes," she answered. "My ship completed the mission they contracted us to complete—in a way they didn't care for—and now I'd categorize us as independent, Ensign—"

"Elliot," the girl replied. "Peggy Elliot, ma'am."

"Right, Peggy," Shepard answered. "As a civilian, I'm requesting harbor and medical assistance for David Archer under the Alliance's humanitarian and compassion policies. If you need to clear it with your supervisors at the academy or have them send to the Council for verification, one of my people can wait with you on the station. Councilor Anderson and Alliance Command are both aware of the recent changes in my situation, and I'm certain both of them would want you to help this young man."

"We have orders to take him onboard, Ms. Shepard," the man said. "You have to understand, though, this is an unusual situation. And Cerberus—" he looked around at the insignias on every centimeter of Normandy. His lip curled.

"I'll go with 'em," Jack volunteered from behind them. Shepard's eyes snapped to Jack, then narrowed. "I'll make sure he gets to their infirmary. Talk with whoever's in charge over there and make sure things are as squared away as you think they are."

"Jack," Shepard warned, and Garrus remembered what she did: that the logs on Pragia had said some of the scientists from the Teltin facility were going to try to infiltrate at Grissom Academy.

"Don't worry," Jack said. "Hands off as long as they play nice. I just want to make fucking sure this is a good place to leave him." She stood. Then she waited for Shepard's okay.

That's something that wouldn't have happened back in the day.

Surprisingly, Shepard smiled. Her eyes flicked back to the med techs, challenging. "Alright, Jack," she said. "Ensigns? My associate here will accompany you with David Archer back to your infirmary. Take her to your superiors. When she reports there'll be no problems with his transfer, I'll believe her, and we'll be on our way."

Jack wore a shirt every day now. Since the Collector base, she'd started growing out her hair, and it was a dark stubble across her scalp now. Together, it lent to an overall softer appearance. She looked closer to her probable age, but she was still plenty intimidating, and the implant scars behind her ears were still more than evident. The med techs looked her over, and she bared her teeth at them in a humorless leer.

"Right," the man said. "Show us the patient."

Garrus heard the woman swear when she saw David. "Alright," he told the others in an undertone. "Let's give the techs some space to do their work. David doesn't need everybody seeing this."

---

By the time Jack got back and Normandy was in flight again, Shepard had disappeared again, and dinner was almost over. Garrus had finished riding herd on the others with Miranda, keeping all the talk to a dull roar and the anger as low as it could be, and had sat down with his own meal. Jack made her way back into the mess. Gardner had already left his station and was sitting down the table. He started to rise, but Jack waved him off. "Never mind it, Rupert, I know where everything is."

She found a quick-heat protein pack and chucked it in the microwave under the service counter. She'd served herself in under a minute, grabbed an additional protein shake from the stash they kept especially for the team's biotics, and crossed the hall again to slide in next to Garrus.

"So that was . . . weird," she said, staring at the wall, but she was talking to him.

"Yeah?" Garrus prompted, willing to hear her out.

"Yeah," she agreed. She took a couple of bites of her dinner, swallowed without chewing it much. Shook her head. "There are biotic kids back there. Learning to kick ass, but they're not drugged or scared. They got rooms. They want to be there. They got friends, teachers and shit. Homework. Fuck." She took another couple bites. Garrus let her process. To someone who'd grown up like Jack, learned to use her biotics the way that she had, it had to seem crazy. "They're happy. Don't think they are. I heard like three of them whining about some shit or other just in the time I was back there—stupid shit—but they're happy. Fucking idiots." She shook her head again. Her fingers clenched around her shake, and sparks of blue flickered in her brown eyes. "They got no idea what's out there. Not a fucking clue."

"You didn't find any Cerberus infiltrators?" Garrus asked.

Jack shrugged. "If they're there, they knew enough not to start something when I showed up. All the kids are alright, anyway. David will be alright." She was quiet a moment. "This war's going to fucking destroy them," she announced.

Garrus listened, waiting. When it came down to it, the surprise was that he wasn't surprised. It made sense Jack would care about other high-potential biotics, and after what she'd seen, it made sense that she'd feel something about what was coming for them in particular. What would make her was what she decided to do about it.

Jack chugged her shake in one, then crushed it in a biotic fist, watching it crumple and warp away to nothing. "I'm going with Shepard," she told him. "When she's finished whatever shit she still has to do out here, when she heads in to the Alliance, I'm going with her. Those kids don't know how to fight. They don't know the shit you gotta do just to survive. They gotta know. We all do. We gotta be ready for the Reapers." She nodded, pleased with her decision, then looked at him. "What about you?"

"Me?" Garrus repeated.

"Yeah," Jack confirmed. "What're you doing? You're staying with us too, right?"

Garrus shook his head. "I have to go back to Palaven for a while," he said. "I'm going to do what I can, but I'll be getting off before she turns Normandy over to the Alliance."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "What?" she asked. "What the hell, Garrus? You're gonna bail on us now? You were there in that Collector base! Fuck, you actually saw the thing, the Reaper! I know like 90 percent of these guys are fucking off—bunch of pussies, fuck 'em—but you—shit! Aren't you her boyfriend or some shit?"

"I'm not her boyfriend—" Garrus started.

"Fuck buddy, best friend, right-hand guy, whatever!" Jack exclaimed. "She fucking needs you! Needs all of us, you bastard—"

"She as good as said I should go!" Garrus snapped, standing, gripping his tray. He glared around at Gardner, the two other crew members still in the mess hall, now staring at them. "We can't do this here," he told Jack, crossing the mess and placing his tray in the return. She followed suit and stalked him across the crew deck, cursing and scolding him all the way. She followed him into the battery and didn't even flinch when he closed the door behind them. "She said she can do this without me," Garrus told Jack. "That we might be more effective on our own now—her with the Alliance. Me doing whatever I can with the Turian Hierarchy. Don't you think I'd rather stay?"

"Bullshit!" Jack snapped immediately, arms crossed across her chest "You want to stay, you stay, Garrus. You think you got a shot of making anyone listen without her? I don't got a snowflake's chance in hell without her—it'll be jail for me or worse, and I don't imagine you're a whole lot better off, Archangel. You like to play cops and robbers, but you're an outlaw just like me. Turians don't like outlaws. You're gonna make all of them fall in line?"

It was the crux of his own argument distilled down into a few brutal sentences, but Jack had already calmed down a little. She wasn't quite as convinced as she sounded, and paradoxically, Garrus hated her a little for it, even as he realized what it meant that she could say he'd go down in flames with the Hierarchy but not believe it, as he recognized the panic and betrayal that lay behind her attack on him in the first place. Jack trusted him, not just in battle or as a lieutenant but as a friend. He was letting her down, not just in what she thought he was doing to Shepard but because she wanted him headed back with the others too.

He'd never asked for a friend like Jack, never made any special effort with her. But just like sometimes you can't get what want and sometimes you can't give people what they deserve, sometimes you get things you don't want and don't deserve yourself. Jack had come to him by association, by the transitive properties of friendship—because Shepard had made the effort. He hadn't worked for her respect or for her trust, and he didn't buy into it now, even though she wasn't outright saying he had it—was in fact saying just the opposite.

"I'm going to try, anyway," Garrus said. "I have to go back to Palaven anyway. It's personal. But while I'm there, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure my own people are ready to face the Reapers. Shepard may have focused the brunt of their attention on to the humans, but they'll be coming for all of us. I want to come back. I'll try. I'll bring the whole damn fleet if I can manage it, but even if you're right and they laugh me off of Palaven and out of the colonies, if I don't try to make people listen at least one more time, it's as good as letting the invasion happen. Only so many Reapers I can shoot right next to Shepard. The turian fleet can shoot a whole lot more."

It sounded good. Jack relaxed even more. The flickers of blue along her shoulders, in her eyes, and in the stubble of her hair faded away, and the heaviness around her of biotic potential left as well.

"Yeah, and what if they throw you in jail?" Jack demanded.

"It's like you said," Garrus told her. "Turians don't like outlaws. Everyone I shot out here in the Terminus was an outlaw. They might not give me a command or welcome me back with open arms. They're not going to throw me in jail."

Jack's jaw worked. "Yeah. Okay," Jack said. "Alright. Take care of your shit. Bring us the birds if you can. I'd hate for me and Shepard to fight this whole thing by ourselves." Her eyes narrowed, and she raised her chin. "Doesn't mean it's not bullshit, you leaving," she said. "Even if she really did say it's what you guys should do. Huh. Maybe especially if she said it."

I know. He wanted to say it, but that would cross the line. In his professional opinion, Shepard could be compromised, making suggestions less because of their strategic likelihood to succeed and more out of other considerations, but he wasn't about to say so.

Besides, it's not like you aren't compromised. And sometimes, you have to bet on the long shot, particularly if it's still your best shot and holding back means giving up. Sometimes giving up is more expensive than trying and missing the mark. And sometimes, you get lucky.

Instead, he turned around to the console and hit the button to let Jack out of the battery. She turned, but stood in the doorway for a moment. "Sorry," she muttered. "About back there. All the—sorry."

Garrus looked past her, out at the mess where in between half and a dozen people were probably talking about Jack's little outburst across Normandy's decks. "Sorry I can't come with," he answered.

"Yeah," Jack muttered. She left the battery and stalked across the deck back toward the elevator.

Garrus gave her a few minutes to get back to engineering before he made his own way to the elevator. It'd been a busy afternoon. Lawson had been with David for a lot of it. He'd taken over a lot of the things she normally did as XO after a mission—made sure the crew knew what they needed to know and no more than that, that they knew what was fair game to talk about and what they really should keep quiet, that everyone was doing their duties no matter how interested they were in what had happened. He'd sent the vid he'd taken down on Aite to EDI and to Shepard and drafted a preliminary report on his own impressions of the situation, the personnel and property damage that had resulted from Archer's irresponsibility and abuse of his brother, the ethics and dangers of the experiments Cerberus had performed as well as their overall goal. The Alliance liked their reports from multiple perspectives, and Garrus had seen more than anyone but Shepard down there. He'd asked Massani and Tali to draft their own reports. Lawson's and the professor's would be useful as well. He'd sent a message to Mordin making the suggestion, waiting for him whenever he had the chance to read it. Lawson wouldn't need one.

There hadn't been time to check on Shepard in the hours since Aite. If she hadn't been with David too, she'd been just as busy as he had. Now, though, he knew exactly where she'd be. Maybe Beth needed him, maybe she didn't. Maybe she wanted him to stick around and maybe she didn't. Maybe it was both at once. He had to leave within a couple days at most. But he could be there for her tonight.

Sure enough, she was in the shuttle bay, working out. She was already dressed down for it—in a simple tank and sweatpants and those stupid, dangerous lace-up shoes she liked off duty. She smelled like sweat, anger, sadness, and desperation. Her hair, with the day's gel already washed out, was coming out of her braid in all directions, looking like a halo of tiny antennae around her face and down the rope's length.

"Thanks for back there," she panted, without breaking her rhythm against the punching bag. She hit it with a southpaw combo, working her less dominant hand, and lashed out with a kick that connected hard. The chain holding the bag to the suspension squealed in protest, reminding Garrus of the elevator on Aite. "You were right. Could've killed him. Should've, maybe. But if I had—" she broke off for another combo. "Why wouldn't have been right," she said. "Still. God, I hope the Illusive Man runs him into the ground. Tries to torture all that information we burned down there out of him. Maybe hooks him up into a giant mainframe to see if David's knack with the geth is genetic."

She stopped, leaned over on her knees, and rubbed some sweat off her chin with the wrappings on her hand. "I don't hope that," she said then. "They'll kill more people, Garrus. Damn it, I should've killed him."

"I could've done it for you," Garrus said. "Or Miranda, maybe. We could probably still find him. Get Liara to help us track him down. Or just send some of her people."

Shepard considered it. He saw it behind her eyes, saw the moment she dismissed the idea. "I don't think Archer would let someone else torture his brother," she said. "I don't think he would hand David back to the Illusive Man now that he's gone. Not that it means a thing when he hooked his brother up in the first place. But I think he'll keep quiet about what happened, even if the Illusive Man catches him. And I think he's fairly incentivized not to let the Illusive Man catch him. The Illusive Man also might be angry enough at me now that even if he does catch Archer, he might not ask too many questions."

Garrus hummed. "Can't catch and put you down, so hit the underlings you've screwed over. Makes sense." He went for the other hand wrap on the table by the punching bag. "What do you need? Want to hit something that hits back?"

"Actually, I'd like you to fuck my brains out," Shepard answered. Her tone was casual, conversational or even matter-of-fact, but when he paused, she turned, and he saw she was dead serious.

"I . . . um . . ."

She looked him right in the eye. "I don't want to remember a single thing we saw today, Garrus. I'd be in Kasumi's observatory getting blackout drunk right now if I could, but—" she shrugged. "Don't know how the hell Miranda thought the antitoxin tech in me was an upgrade, even if it did save my life back on Omega." There was a shadow behind her eyes, and with the reference to the antitoxin tech, Garrus knew she was thinking about more than just what had happened to David today. She'd been hacked. David Archer had hijacked her whole body through Miranda's cybernetics, even if it had only worked for a couple minutes. He imagined feeling a prisoner inside your own body, seeing what someone else wanted you to see and going where they wanted you to go without ever taking a single substance. Knowing it could happen again at any time, that a significant part of your body didn't belong to you and was just waiting to turn traitor.

He thought about the body that really, really seemed to belong wholly to Beth Shepard and swallowed.

"Have you eaten anything?" he asked. "I didn't see you at dinner earlier, and I've been in the mess most of the afternoon coordinating ogling around the infirmary."

"Got busy," Shepard said. "I had to make sure Anderson had replied with a confirmation on our leaving Cerberus. He has a tendency to ignore his messages. I wanted to make sure he knew about David and we wouldn't have the kind of trouble at Grissom Academy we almost did have. Well?" She raised her eyebrows, waiting.

Garrus shifted but shook his head. "Have a sandwich, Beth," he told her. "Have two of them, with egg or egg substitute and one additional protein foodstuff. A good-sized side salad. I was doing inventory this afternoon too. Before dinner, Gardner had a few pickles left. Eat, and then we'll talk."

Shepard's eyes flashed. "I'm not a biotic, Garrus. And the same tech that keeps me from getting drunk off my ass keeps me going ages after all of you are passed out on the floor."

"You aren't a robot yet," Garrus retorted. She needed to hear it, even if she wasn't saying so. "I talked with Miranda when you got hijacked. Some of your implants have shut down this past year. She designed them that way so you wouldn't be permanently dependent, so they wouldn't have to worry about you breaking in the long term. But you can still break in human ways. And humans need to eat."

Shepard snorted. "You think you can break me, Vakarian?" she challenged him. "You haven't come close yet."

"You also haven't asked me yet," Garrus pointed out. Shepard stared at him, facing off. Abruptly, she reached out a hand and placed it on his throat under the cowl of his armor. She felt him resonating there, the subharmonics she could only sense under his voice without an add-on to her translator. He shifted again but didn't back away, let her feel he wanted her. The position was shockingly intimate in turian culture, really—her naked hand on his throat like she was ready to eviscerate him if he kept telling her 'no,' even if it was just no for now. If she could eviscerate him with the flimsier fingernails she had in place of talons.

Her naked hand on her throat feeling his 'yes.'

Garrus suddenly felt very conscious of the window overlooking the shuttle bay that ran across the hallway in engineering. He didn't know if that window made this conversation, their position, a little hotter or even more nerve-wracking. Breaking the rules again, Shepard. Bending them, anyway. That—Shepard standing there physically as well as verbally propositioning him, right here in the shuttle bay, and as aggressive about it as she ever was in battle—it gave him the confidence to stand his ground. To push back and make her give a little.

"You're shooting yourself in the foot here," Shepard commented. "Little tip: when a human woman asks you to fuck her brains out, it's not generally good tactics to say no. Especially if you want to."

"You need to eat," Garrus repeated. "Shepard."

That was a taunt—using her commander's name, reminding her she couldn't dictate the terms on this side of their relationship. She could set the boundaries for what their sexual relationship would be, and she could step over those boundaries herself in the shuttle bay in full view of engineering if she wanted to. She could recommend he leave Normandy and mean it with most of her—even if I have to leave anyway, Jack's right, it is bullshit—but she couldn't demand he service her. Even if he did want to.

Not even with clearance—almost a mandate—to drop all the niceties, forget all the care they'd taken up to this point and just go as long and as hard as they wanted until all the crap they'd seen today faded into exhausted oblivion. He wanted that too. The freedom and the forgetfulness. But he wasn't going to let himself go there. Not if it'd be dangerous, and right now it would be.

Shepard flexed her fingers and folded them into her fist, withdrawing her hand. "'Two sandwiches with egg and another protein foodstuff,'" she repeated. "'A good-sized side salad.' Huh. You know more about human food than human women." She stalked away. But she got on the elevator.

Garrus took the ladder back to the crew deck. "Elevator was occupied," he told Chakwas, by way of explanation, leaving the med bay and skirting the walls back to the battery. He didn't look at Shepard where she stood at Gardner's station, making herself a sandwich and muttering to herself. But he smiled.

He cleaned the Mattock back inside the battery. Mordin had copied him on his own report of the day's events, which he'd sent to Shepard and Miranda. Garrus scanned it and sent his own approval to Lawson. She didn't need it, but it tied things up nicely and let him send a secondary thanks to Lawson for the way she'd handled David this afternoon, as well as an apology for taking care of some of her job. He didn't think she minded effectively splitting duties as Shepard's first officer anymore, but he didn't want to take advantage of her either.

He started a calibration sequence on the Thanix, and when it'd been about twenty minutes, he left the battery again for the elevator. A crewman on evening patrol of the deck saw him go. Garrus didn't acknowledge him in any way. He just hit the button for the captain's cabin.

His code got him into Shepard's cabin. She was sitting at her desk, the remains of her dinner on a tray sitting by her console. She'd combed her hair out and washed her face. Her color was better than it'd been down in the shuttle bay—less flushed and angry—and she smelled more like herself too. And the self she is up here when it's just us, Garrus thought, satisfied. A few weirdnesses of anatomy and social custom aside, human women weren't that different from turian women, or even people in general. Everyone gets a little cranky when they haven't eaten in a while. One of the best ways to calm either his mother, Solana, or really any of his friends back in basic out of a temper had always been to make sure they had a snack. One of the first things they taught you in basic about troop supervision was to always make sure everyone was well fueled before any kind of engagement.

Let alone any heavy engagement.

Shadows of the past day still passed over Shepard's face and behind her eyes. But even as he watched, her temperature and her pulse rose. He reached up and flicked off his visor.

"It's possible you aren't entirely hopeless," Beth admitted, standing.

---

No, I didn't take (yet another) interminable hiatus on this after the last chapter! We're just dealing with Illium-arc levels of original content, and it isn't as fun as you might think writing about this mission. The othering of David in this DLC really isn't great, nor is his stereotypical representation as a character with secondary savant syndrome, which is actually very rare in the autistic population but vastly overdone in media portrayals of autistic individuals. The abuse and misunderstanding David suffers largely due to his disability, sadly, is NOT a skewed portrayal, as I found in the research I did for this chapter. I have not been diagnosed with ASD myself. I showed some of the criteria in childhood that would match the diagnosis and show some still as an adult. It is a disorder that does have a strong basis in genetics, and I do have a family member on the spectrum. But there is a great deal of other criteria for ASD that I don't meet at all.

If you were wondering, I do think of Kasumi Goto as quite possibly being on the spectrum and certainly as being ADHD. While I don't believe Joker is on the spectrum, he does self-report some difficulty relating socially and show an enthusiasm for flying that is strong enough to qualify for a person with ASD's special interest, and my Shepard, who had close relationships with at least one neurodivergent individual in her childhood in foster care, and probably more, strongly identifies Joker with those others she has known.

(If you have not read all the works featuring my Beth Shepard or have forgotten in the years that the series has been running, Shepard had one particular foster brother on the spectrum at the last home she resided in. He was the only person to attend her high school graduation despite an environment he found overstimulating, as these foster parents, despite being quite possibly the best people she had stayed with, were also apathetic and neglectful, and her friends had recently dealt with an injury in gang-related violence.)

I hope you have a marvelous day. I will continue working toward the end of this fic!

LMS