Sara couldn't remember much of the firefight. She'd stick her pistol out and shoot, sometimes she had time to properly aim. It was just surge after surge of deafening fire as they pushed up to the rendezvous point.

There were little moments. Adrenaline made her giddy and she had the stupid, surreal thought of it all being too easy. That's when a bullet zipped by, breezing her head close enough to send her helmet buzzing. That was before she was aware of the enemy's objective.

It was easy for Sara because she wasn't a target.

At the beginning, there were twenty-three salarians. Prisoners, rudely awakened from cryostasis with only the clothes on their backs. Most of them were civilians, all of them were scared. Why would the kett shoot at the armed escort when they could gun down helpless civilians?

Maybe Sara should have chosen the krogan scouts.

They made it back to the Tempest. Sara, Cora, Drack, Raeka and a whole whopping eight prisoners.

They were grateful. They were always grateful in the moment, before they had time to do the math or look at the ark's decimated roster.

Paarchero had already zipped away from the Tafeno System on Raeka's orders and Kallo followed suit with the Tempest the second its passengers passed the airlock. Cora was the first out of her suit, her sweaty, matted hair a warning of even uglier things inside Sara's own helmet.

"Let the Nexus know," Sara told her.

Cora shook her fingers through her scalp. "About the ark? Or..?"

"Everything," Sara said. She kicked her boots off and felt her toes wriggling beneath.

Cora didn't argue or ask for clarification. She only nodded and hurried off to the meeting room. "Everything" just about covered it. The ark, the salarians, the kett, the relic, impending doom.

The relic! It was why they boarded the Verakan in the first place. It was a good thing SAM remembered.

She went through the motions of showing the salarian survivors to the med lab so Dr. T'Perro could tend to them. There were so many questions, so many people with things to add, so many trying to be helpful and lighten the load. It was good, it was the way a functioning crew ought to be. But all Sara wanted was a shower and to dissolve into her bedsheets.

She was good and she didn't. She went to the meeting room so she could first properly earn herself a pity party.

Cora had already finished up and left for the roses in the bio lab. Sara joined Raeka and Drack in the meeting room, interrupting their strained silence.

Sara coughed. "Once you clear the ark, a team will escort it back to the Nexus."

The last original Pathfinder jerked away from the krogan. "Thank you again, Ryder," Raeka said. The salarian woman drummed her fingers against the long table and glanced at Drack. "But I owe you an apology. I made a mistake."

"Oh?" Sara frowned.

Raeka shook her head. "I shouldn't have called you to say goodbye. The choice you had to make... I put too much on your shoulders."

It wasn't a choice, not really. Sara was beginning to understand that, if for no other reason than she needed to sleep at night. They were split-second decisions made based on numbers, location and probability. SAM had preferred saving the scouts, but that was due to the fact that they were closer and the krogans were guaranteed additional muscle. But there hadn't been twenty-three scouts and certainly not any that Sara knew by name.

"I'm the Pathfinder," Sara told Raeka, to convince them both as much as to downplay the earlier events.

"I'm sorry," Raeka said. To her and Drack. "As Pathfinders, we have to serve our own people, but also the greater good. It's a difficult job."

"You made some tough choices, yourself," Sara replied. "How about we call it even?"

"I appreciate that." Raeka walked over to her, and offered an approving nod. "Whatever the case, the salarian people are forever in your debt.

Drack, who had stayed silent during their exchange, finally stuck his chin out, "Earn this."

"We will," the salarian promised as she left for the med lab.

Now that it was just the two of them, Sara knew her reckoning was coming. She figured she'd beat him to the punch, not that she knew what she was going to say. "Drack..."

"Wasn't enough to save the whole ark, huh?" he wanted to know. "Had to grab a few more salarians on the way out."

"Drack, it's-"

"Complicated?" he snarled. He stalked across the room and leaned down to meet her eye to eye. "Except it's not. Leaving my scouts behind was worse than killing them outright. And you're not the one who has to explain it to the rest of the clan."

"I'm sorry-"

"Yeah, I'll bet," Drack scoffed. "It's always 'sorry.' Sorry, there's no room on the council for you, sorry you breed too quickly, sorry we don't know what to do with you if you're not cannon fodder-!"

"You know it's not like that!" Sara exclaimed. "You know I've busted my ass for you too-"

"And a damn good thing that you did, otherwise your corpse would be on the Verakan right now." He jammed a finger into her chest plate.

"They were civilians, Drack," Sara said. "Civilians."

He shook his head. "The krogan are worthy of being saved, too," he said. "They are worthy of being uplifted. They are worthy of being protected."

"I'm sorry," she repeated.

"Good." He stood upright. "Keep being sorry and leave me alone."

All in all, it could have gone much worse. Sara watched him leave and then slumped down in the chair by the vidcon terminal. She let her fingers and omni tool do the work while her brain spaced.

"Ryder?" From the screen, she could see Reyes' grainy image. "Do you know how late it is here?"

"Not really," she admitted. "Sorry."

"It's fine, I just wasn't sure if it was an emergency."

"I mean, maybe?" Sara shrugged a shoulder. "It seems like all I've been doing lately is running from one emergency to the next."

Even with his image unclear and systems away, she could see that smirk. "Ryder, are you calling because you missed me?"

"Well, yeah," she said, glancing down at her hands. "But I think I just needed to see a friendly face too."

"That bad, huh?" He dragged a hand across his eyes and began to wake up.

"It always is," she replied. "It's always bigger, it's always worse, it's always complicated."

"That's how we like it," Reyes said slowly. "Complicated."

Sara laughed. "Well then, have I got a doozy for you. I was just onboard a kett flagship."

"Shit, you're serious," he realized, that carefree grin disappearing.

"It was the whole reason I met with you way back in the first place," she said. "This op was planned from the beginning. Board the Archon's ship, steal a relic, save the galaxy."

He coughed. "Oh. Well said like that it's just a walk in the park, isn't it?"

"I know right?" She snorted and pressed her forehead into the back of her hand. "But they had the salarian ark and a bunch of krogans... they're ready for us, Reyes. This isn't a war, this is annihilation. They literally have tech that can encase and immobilize living, organic material. The only way it releases you is if you die."

"And you saw this?" he asked.

"I was trapped in it," Sara said. "I had to have SAM stop my heart so I'd be clinically dead long enough to get free."

"Wait. You were dead?"

"...I got better."

"Sara!" Any vestiges of sleep were long gone and he peered into the vid screen. "Sara. Sara, I need you to slow down and think about what you're telling me. This is not- the people I kill stay dead, understand? You don't just drop dead on a weekend for fun."

"Hey," she shrugged, "I'm the Pathfinder."

"Oh no," he said. "Don't you start flinging that around. You tell me you're the Pathfinder, the next thing you follow that with is ordering me to disrobe- not telling me it's okay you died because you 'got better.'"

"I miss you too," she told him.

"Yeah?" Reyes shook his head and tried to scoff away any amusement. "Jokes aside, you know this isn't a game. I don't want to be stuck missing you, because you took this hero thing too seriously and died for it."

"Careful there, I might start thinking you like me," Sara murmured.

"You know me. I get sentimental, is all."

"Uh huh."

"Course I like you." He sighed, "Too bad you're all the way wherever the hells you are, now, eh?"

"Yeah, too bad," she agreed. "Listen, I'm going to send you a rundown of what I saw on that ship. Everyone should know, not just Initiative brass. But just... promise me you won't ever let the kett take you, okay?"

"Me and promises don't really have a good track record, you know-"

"I'm serious," Sara said. "It's bad news. Don't let them take you alive."

"Okay." Reyes nodded slowly. "Alright. I won't let them take me."

"Thanks." She nodded back. "Sorry for waking you up."

"Hey," his voice took a stern tone, even as his brows angled downward, "you call me anytime."

"Okay." She smiled. "I'll do that."

Sara sat like that, in a daze staring at the empty vid screen, for a long time. Once her brain grew quiet and her nerves started to feel normal, she stood and moved on.

Salarians aside, the whole purpose of their mission was the relic. That blasted little gem of Remnant tech that was currently tucked away in the Pathfinder's quarters. Sara needed to complete her mission and determine if all the risks were worth it. She hopped the lift down into the bowels of the Tempest and immediately flopped across the red and blue comforter on her bed.

The relic had been crammed precariously next to her private SAM terminal, SAM's home away from home when he wasn't in the Hyperion's SAM node. Or in Sara's head. Sara glanced at the strange rectangular structure. The relic was about the height of a datapad, but much wider. Peebee wasn't there scurrying all around it, so maybe she didn't know where it was located yet.

Unless of course the asari was actually displaying some kind of restraint in regards to the strange path their friendship had led them down. Weirder things had happened.

Sara rolled off the bed and shuffled over to the terminal. "Ready to take a look, SAM?" she asked.

She held out her omni tool and as it scanned the relic, the top of the rectangle opened wide. A map of Heleus danced across the ceiling of her quarters, little dots of light spelling out locations. Havarl, Eos, Voeld, Aya, Kadara... Sara could see them all. There, in the middle of everything, she saw it: Meridian. That was what the Archon sought and now Sara had it.

"Wow," Sara murmured. An answer for all the suffering and all the hardship. Wow, indeed.