XIII: FIDELIO
SSV Normandy
The elevator doors confined to a thin line and sealed themselves with a whirr of hydraulics, offering a final sliver back into the CIC before the view of everyone else was cut off for good. Shepard and Tali stood nearly shoulder to shoulder; their body language neutral. No one else could be all the wiser as to what was truly going on. The crew, the other admirals, they could all finally be pushed aside.
It was as if the lift suddenly became devoid of sound and time. Tali did not know who moved first, her or Shepard. But the two of them suddenly found themselves in each other's arms, Tali clutching tightly around the human's waist, while Shepard had his hands grasped upon her opposite shoulder blades, each pulling the other in so tightly that they could feel the expansion of the other's ribs as they breathed heavily, a deep and powerful resonance.
Shepard rested his cheek upon the side of her helmet. His strong grip refused to relinquish her. That was fine—she wanted him to hold her for as long as she could take. "God…" he whispered. "It's been too long. I was worried—"
"I wanted to see you," Tali mumbled. "I just… I would have given anything to even call you. But I couldn't."
Shepard leaned back and cupped the chin of her helmet with a hand. "What's done is done. You have no idea how happy I am to see you, Tali. This… it's the best thing that's happened to me in a while, believe me."
Recollections of the multitude of vids she had seen growing up flashed through Tali's head. It was as if she had been sucked into a silver screen plot. Fleet and Flotilla. Shalei and Bellicus on the balcony. Those big romantic moments where the lovers finally had their reunion and could consummate their passion in a manner that had been entwined on a genetic and primal level.
A part of Tali urged her to take that plunge, but rationality stayed her hand—there was no use in getting sick at a time like this, especially when she had not prepared beforehand.
If only she could shut everything out. Just blot out the whole galaxy with her thoughts and begin to expand it ever so slightly so that the human in the lift with her was the only other inhabitant. She wanted everything to stop on her whim and her whim alone, with them existing in their bare totality, his fingers caressing her naked stomach and her pale fingers tenderly tracing his chest.
If only…
Sometimes, there were some compulsions that could not be denied. Breaking free from Shepard for a moment, she then surprised him by giving a jump and swinging her legs upward. The human caught the airborne quarian with a surprised laugh, his hands gripping the strong thighs that wrapped around his waist, holding her up as they were now face-to-face. His hand slipped past her sehni, toward one of the catches that held her mask in place, brushed it, but went no further, his fingers just locking at the back of her neck. Her eyes shifted, knowing his plight. They caught each other's stare and knew they wanted this to go beyond what they were at now. But all she would have to do was tell him that it would be okay. He was only waiting for her permission.
They continued to exist in that elevator, breathing so fiercely that it was nearly coming out as panting. Tali's fingers traced Shepard's face, a warmth brimming behind her deep visor. Each knew what the other wanted, but they were both too afraid to say it.
The commander drooped his head, a burst of sanity momentarily overtaking him while he held onto the quarian wrapped around him.
"It wouldn't be safe," Shepard said quietly.
Tali nodded, her hands now cradling Shepard's cheeks. Memories of her fever flashed by. The congestion and coughing. A cluster of headaches. "I know."
"I want to."
"So do I."
"But I can't. Not like this."
For some reason, Shepard's obstinate chivalry was driving Tali closer and closer to the edge. The more he worried for her, the deeper her attraction grew. She was never going to resort to such tropes by ripping off her mask and kissing the man full on the mouth right here, right now, but Keelah… the urge was quickly becoming irresistible.
She pressed her visor to Shepard's forehead. "Then just treat me like you've always known me, John. As me. Not as a damn admiral."
Shepard's hands squeezed her thighs, which continued to constrict atop the man's hips. "I think you're making such a job easy for me," he retorted.
"Bosh'tet. Just take me to the bed. Now."
"Yes, ma'am."
The door irritably opened, having arrived on the floor a long while back and was desperate to expel its passengers. Still carrying Tali aloft, Shepard walked through the door, holding onto his girlfriend as though he was clutching a delicate vase. He made it down the steps and slowly brought his body parallel with the bed, gently lowering the quarian down onto the sheeted surface.
Shepard tried to pull away to reposition himself, but Tali grabbed at the lapels of his dress blues and forced him down atop her. If nothing else, she just wanted him to be close to her. To his credit, Shepard didn't resist and brought his head to her neck, kissing the malleable material there. Tali groaned and her fingers became hooks that dug into Shepard's back, all of her limbs ensnaring the human as if he were her prey, finally captured.
She guided his hands, silently showing him where she wanted to be touched. Where she wanted to be kissed. She was desperate for stimulation from him, as there was an undying thirst that could not be quenched completely within her. She lay on her back, clutching one of his wrists and guiding his hand to her chest. He squeezed the part of the enviro-suit that covered her breasts, which was not nearly enough for her, but it provided the barest waft of a neon glow that seemed to warp into her brain. The sensation was enough for her to slip back into that moment where they had laid atop the covers, both of them naked, where he was inside her, the two of them as close as anybody could be, their grunts and cries both loud as they approached their respective edges.
The recall gave her a momentary burst of energy. Tali raised herself up on one elbow and rolled, her outstretched hand firmly upon the man's chest, so that she was now straddling Shepard. She felt him harden against her (instinct? lust?) which made her give out a tiny moan. Shepard heard the sound and laughed, his hands caressing her firm stomach before settling upon her defined hips.
Like nothing had changed.
She had been here before and the images could not stop pulsing back. Filtered as if a vid had been playing on fast-motion. Her fingers seemed to move of their own accord—she unbuttoned the jacket of Shepard's dress blues and parted it with a frenetic violence. She then grabbed at his undershirt and started to hoist it upward when Shepard gave a hiss of pain. She jerked her hands away as if she had been burned.
"What did I do?" she blurted out.
Shepard closed his eyes and shook his head. Beads of sweat began to spring out over his brow. "It's nothing. Don't worry about it."
How come every time he said that to her, she could not help but be worried? Tali's fingers now moved slowly, her eyes low and bitter. Gently, she lifted his undershirt up.
A fresh swath of bandages clung to Shepard's side. Angry red knobs of scar tissue made divots in his skin. Gunshot wounds. Burns. The marks of injectable painkillers could still be glimpsed upon his skin. Inexplicably, she felt guilty that he had been out there, so hurt, and she had not been here to guide him through that pain. She had been running confabs and his boots had been on the ground the whole time. How was that for unfairness?
"Oh, John…" Tali murmured as she gently ran a finger across the bandages, her body still straddling his.
Shepard's face was one of solemn acceptance. "Tuchanka. Got sloppy trying to overrun a Reaper position. Thought my barriers were at a good enough strength. My mistake."
Tali shot him a look. Sometimes, his nonchalant tone was not all that appreciated.
"You incorrigible man. Why couldn't you just wait until your shields were up?"
"I was running against the clock on a rather… important matter. I behind schedule and needed to make up for lost time."
Her hands cradling Shepard's face again, Tali bent over and spoke in a private tone. "Wrex and Garrus already have enough facial scars between the people we know. Yours have only just healed. I'd hate to see you join that club again."
"I don't know," Shepard's voice was light. "I've heard that a scar in the right place can be quite the distinguishing feature."
"I like you the way you are now." Then, she acquiesced, "Even maimed, it won't lessen how I feel about you."
"Oh, good," Shepard chuckled. "Because I have more scars to show you. And the stories I have to tell…"
Tali rolled her eyes, but was grateful for the back-and-forth of their dialogue. Her dreams had been coming back to life, where she could just walk back into his world and pick up where they had left off.
But the gravity of her predicament would not leave her mind. Tali tipped her head upward and sighed, bringing her back down to reality. There was just too much at stake for her to enjoy this right now. Her people were dying in orbit over Rannoch. The admirals were a deck below, trying to coordinate a counterattack. And she was up in the captain's cabin, tumbling around with her lover as if the rest of the galaxy was not burning right at this moment.
Shepard sensed this and he sat up, continuing to hold the quarian before him. Tali's legs spread out behind Shepard, continuing to flow around him as if his body was a large rock within a powerful river. She sat on his lap, their bellies nearly touching, arms encircling the other like they had become entangled in a thicket of their own making.
"Why did I let you go?" Shepard whispered aloud. He could not tear his eyes from hers. "Why did I do such a stupid thing?"
She had wanted to ask that very same question ever since they had been forced apart. She wondered if he even knew that pit of emptiness that had set upon her like a heavy stone in her gut when she had to go back home, without him. The transit to the flotilla had been sparse and gray, just days spent aimless of her staring at a bulkhead, a thousand pleas and arguments running through her mind in sequence.
Any castigation she had planned for this day all died when she saw that trembling flame in his eyes. Her vocabulator moved so close to his lips. "You were doing what you thought was right," she said. "You thought it was best for me. For yourself. John… I understand."
"I don't think it was worth it, Tali," he muttered, his brow furrowing in anger not at all directed toward her. His mouth compressed into a bitter line, but it soon cracked towards a dim warmness. "It was just a moral decision. But meaningless in the end. Maybe."
"But you're back in the Alliance now, right? You have command over the Normandy again. You won, didn't you?"
It seemed that Shepard wanted to shy away, but in this position with a quarian on his lap, that was a nigh impossible prospect to consider.
When he spoke next, his voice was heavy with some invisible emotion that she could feel from the subharmonics in the air. "I never did think of it as winning. It was just… the only card I thought I could play at the time. Maybe there had been another way all along. If there was, I couldn't see it."
"You're not omniscient, John," Tali reminded him, visualizing herself radiate her patience and trust unto him.
He seemed to sense it and the corner of his mouth lifted. "That's not what the newsfeeds say."
"Screw them. Screw all of them. The news. The Alliance. Everyone who has ever doubted you or tried to stymie you." She reached for his hands and knotted all four of them together in a web of determination. Above her, through the skylight, the infinite night sparkled with billion-year-old light. The young admiral and the battle-scarred soldier, intertwined across leagues hitherto incomprehensible to their ancestors, just looked at each other, for there was nothing else they could bear to look at. "You think I expect you to be perfect, John?"
"Would that be a bad thing?"
She nearly yelped in frustration. "I could hit you, you know?"
"I thought you were trying to avoid adding scars to my collection?"
Tali blew air from her nose, a noise of derision. The same agonizing and unyielding personality. Unbending to the brink of exasperation.
After a moment, she touched his cheek. A caress. "You think I blame you for this," she said.
He nodded. "It was a mistake."
Pity wallowed within Tali, but she bit it down. "We're here now, aren't we?"
He seemed to know where she was going with this. He found that he could not muster an argument as anything he had in the barrel would be weak and ineffective. "Yes. We are." He then seemed to focus on something far off in the distance. "But for how long?"
Her legs instinctively tightened around John as he said that. Tali's other hand slowly clamped down on Shepard's fingers. "Why do you say that?"
But now Shepard's grin grew broader, sadder, as if he was sinking back into an old mindset. "You think it'll be easy? Admiral Tali'Zorah? You're not just the admiral's daughter to your people anymore. You're an admiral. Their admiral."
"I didn't ask for the rank!" Tali hotly defended.
"I know. But you wouldn't have accepted it if you thought you couldn't make a difference. Or am I wrong about that?"
Tali was quiet for a long time. She glanced about the room, trying to compose her answer.
Then, she quickly got up from Shepard's lap, executed in a loping roll of her hips, and sat next to him upon the bed. Then, she laid down, her head indenting the pillow on the right side of the bed. Shepard mimicked her movements, making himself prone next to her. Their hands crept close to each other until their fingers were both brushing. Wordlessly, as if magnetically drawn, they became interlocked once more, and they spent a couple of minutes staring through the patch of glass in the roof, noting the milky wisps amidst the zones of blackness between the stars, their existence beholden to quintillions of life forms.
"When I took the role," she said next to Shepard, "I asked myself what would be the choice that you would make. I didn't think what it would mean to the other admirals or to anyone on the fleet. I just thought of you. Only you. How you fought for so long without allies, standing against everything the galaxy was throwing at you. But you were always alone. Always."
She turned her head, eyes hopelessly drinking in his face. "I didn't want you to feel alone anymore, John. I wanted you to have someone to count on."
Shepard nodded, a diamond glint in his eyes. "You know I've always counted on you, Tali."
"Not like this. I couldn't bring about real change before. Maybe I still can't now… but at least I have a chance."
The human just slowly closed his eyes. "But you have to be with your people." It was not an accusation, but Tali's cheeks stung the same.
She relinquished her grip on his hand and brought her fingers up to touch his cheek, the sensation bringing his eyes back open. "Not if you ask me," she implored.
She thought he would be delighted that she said such a thing. That a smile would crack apart that face and show her the full breadth of his love.
What she did not expect was what his answer would become.
"No."
Tali nearly gave a lurch. She lifted her fingers away from his cheek as if she had been burned. "…No?"
"I'll never ask that of you, Tali. Never. You know I want you to come with me after all this is all over."
"Then why not just say it?" Tali asked, not understanding. A feeling like bubbling tar had begun to pool in her gut again, bile churning and broiling with its stinging acid.
He reached up and took her hand again, easily encasing it with his palm. "Because it has to be your choice. I can't, in good conscience, force you away from your people. You think I would disrespect you like that? No, Tali. You need to decide what you think is best, not just for yourself, but for everyone you care about. Please—I want you to think very carefully about this. About what it is you want the most."
Tali folded her hands over her stomach and turned her head away from Shepard. Head propped up by the pillow, she felt herself develop a chill. The room seemed startlingly empty and her future seemed to dissolve into a corrupted jargon of bad data.
There was a deep strength that ran within Tali, but Shepard unknowingly had the ability to expend all of it with just a few words. She had tried to hold onto it, to keep it safe from the galaxy that had been hunting her all her life. But she could feel it slipping away, the transmission in her brain becoming more and more violated with each passing moment.
Shepard was quiet as they lay side-by-side. Inexplicably, she found herself thinking of the roar of ocean waves and the vivid hue of an amethyst sunset, cliff walls of an ancient desert turning the color of a wildfire all around her.
You know what I want the most, John, she thought. I've never wanted anything else so badly.
Hong Kong, Earth
The fuel-cell car that Qual had rented whirred quietly as he pulled into a space in the underground parking lot, well away from any other parked vehicles. He had navigated dual-layer highways and an astounding grid of traffic since arriving at the spaceport just to get to this point—his irritation had reached a considerable peak in that time.
He exited the car, fully knowing that he was in view of multiple security cameras. He was not concerned—his omni-tool was wirelessly transmitting focused junk data that wiped his image from all camera feeds, a localized virus. The garage was empty as it was still early in the day. Qual checked the pistol that was strapped to his side and made sure the suppressor had been fastened tight upon the threaded barrel. He had not brought his revolver as it was too loud for this assignment. Sometimes, a light touch was needed.
A stairwell led to a crisscrossed maze of glass-walled skybridges that spanned across the wide boulevards of Hong Kong. Qual strode across one of the larger pathways, a continuous artery of cars and trams bustling both above and below him. The jagged crystal skyline of Hong Kong sparkled on all sides, warping light into Qual's visor. The skybridge led him to a building at least eighty floors tall—it was being leased by at least three banks and several Alliance agencies.
Qual came into the lobby, which was elegantly furnished with crystal chandeliers, golden handrails, and ornate wood paneling. Stylized calligraphy in a language that the quarian didn't recognize flowed upon the walls, the holograms bright and searing. A trio of well-dressed guards stood watch in the next room. Qual wasn't fooled, all of them probably had no less than two weapons hidden on their person. He passed by without breaking stride and headed to the elevator bays, but a security checkpoint barred his way. That did not faze him either as he just walked through the scanning zones, which beeped in accommodation. He had spoofed the credentials of the building staff, which gave him admin rights to all of the doors and areas in the spire.
He got off the elevator one floor below his target. No sense in taking chances where he could be spotted in the bay right off the bat. The quarian headed for the nearest stairwell and used his admin access to open the door. In contrast to the rest of the building he had seen thus far, the stairwell was cold, a tube of gray concrete.
The steel door that barred the way to the next floor parted easily with just a touch of his hand. Qual activated his active-camo at the same time, a wreath of static fizzing in the shape of his body for a moment before the air seemed to liquify, absorbing his image with the background.
He was spat out into a carpeted hallway that muffled the sound of his footsteps. Qual continually shifted wavelength views in his visor, scanning in ultraviolet and infrared to ensure that there were no guards lurking around the corner that he was going to have to tiptoe past. Seems that he was in luck, as there was no one on the floor at this time of day. His intel had been accurate.
The Alliance Energy Regulatory Commission, or AERC, occupied the entire floor on this building. A set of frosted glass doors with the logo emblazoned upon it greeted the quarian as he approached. His admin access bypassed all the security and silently parted for him.
The office that he was looking for was in the corner—he had studied the blueprints beforehand. Qual walked down the hallway, which was adorned with the portraits of prominent staff members, until he reached the door he was looking for, the one that belonged to the subdirector of the Office of New Reactors.
He opened the door, his pistol already pointing past the threshold, the safety having been flicked off. There was no one there. This did not discourage Qual—this only meant that he was early. The person that he wished to see simply had not made it into the office yet. Past the tinted glass, Qual could see the irregular coastline of the city stretch to the contours of the mountains, a nearby Ferris wheel slowly rotating from the park it was located in.
Qual made sure the door was closed and locked behind him as he stepped into the office. He scoped out a chair that gave him a perfect view to the door. He sat in it and waited.
He didn't have to wait long. Ten minutes later, Qual's audio sensors picked up noises from behind the door. Someone was approaching. He got up from the chair, still camouflaged, lifted his pistol from his holster, and calmly pointed it towards the door.
Two people entered in the next five seconds. One of them was the subdirector, whom Qual recognized from their extranet photo. The other was a subordinate, judging by the deferential way he was speaking with his target and how he entered the room last.
Qual took a step forward, shifted his aim, and waited until the door closed again before he shot the subordinate in the throat. A dark red geyser fountained into the air and coated the far wall.
Even suppressed, the sound sent a jolt throughout the office. The subdirector blankly stared as his direct report fell to the floor, twitching and gurgling, not knowing what the hell had just happened. Qual just stood in place, letting the pale smoke wisp from the barrel of his weapon. The subordinate had a hand to his throat, but blood was spurting past his fingers, staining the rug. The subdirector was frantically glancing back and forth for something to stem the flow with, but Qual doubted that this elegant office contained so much as a field kit for injuries of this nature.
The subdirector knelt to help the mortally wounded man. Qual chose that moment to disengage his active-camo. The subdirector looked up at the quarian, right down the barrel of the pistol that was pointed towards his face.
"Leave him," Qual hissed.
Frozen in place, the subdirector looked back to his wounded worker and back to Qual in rapid succession. Concern for his worker overriding his own self-preservation. "Please. I just need to—"
Qual was not interested in negotiating. He lowered his arm and let off another round. The subdirector grunted as blood burst from his gut, the force of the shot bowling him onto his back. Qual's readout ID'd the damage: ruptured stomach and intestinal damage. Sepsis was imminent, if blood loss didn't kill him first.
Dropping to one knee beside the man, Qual holstered his pistol and reached over so that he could hold open one of the man's eyes with a hand while he scanned the retina with his other. A spear of light zapped forward and conducted the eyeball for a few seconds. In an instant, Qual had a complete mapping of the subdirector's retinal pattern. The government loved to use bio-authentication measures as an additional layer of security. Even the most basic of files were bio-locked, hence the reason why most console hackers did not bother trying to break through the ice of regulatory agencies.
Qual stood back up and started running a root search through the files he was now able to access. While he was doing that, the subdirector managed to lift his head, blood streaming from the corners of his mouth, a miraculous feat considering that he was dying.
"You… stupid… bastard…" the man coughed. "You can't… hide… from this."
Somehow, Qual doubted that. What the subdirector did not know was that, now that Qual was in the system, he was in the process of fabricating a digital trail that left sloppy traces of code in the registry values. There were snippets of blackcode that one could purchase on the darknet, programs that were heavily favored by cyberware gangs. Leave enough traces of that code and it would create a near-perfect trail that would lead any investigating body in the wrong direction. And in this part of the world, Qual had learned, there was still a heavy presence of organized crime that had a hand in any industry that stood to generate a profit, which included the energy sector.
The truth of the matter was that power plants on this part of Earth were bankrolled in some fashion by the mob. Whether overtly, such as the entire workforce being mobbed to the gills, or privately, like having a cash inflow be funneled to the contractors through multiple shell companies, the gangs stood to profit in some fashion by tugging at the purse strings of the businesses that encroached on their territory.
It was all part of keeping up appearances. Crime syndicates were constantly chasing the goal of going legitimate, eventually accumulating enough wealth and influence to push their seedier avenues of revenue aside, which typically involved drugs and prostitution. Qual had done his homework—Hong Kong was home to at least ten different Triad groups, all of which had stakes in multiple different industries.
The difference between government contracts and syndicate contracts was that the syndicates were far more impatient. Any delays in construction timetables would be met with fierce reprisals—the longer a money-generating project was postponed, the syndicates would see that as an immediate loss of revenue. And anything that threatened their cash flow was to be seen as a threat to take care of, without hesitation.
Best case scenario, the federal officers investigating this case would assume that this was the result of an extortion ploy gone bad by one of the local gangs. The digital evidence in the system would point to "attempts" of brute-force attacks in an effort to access the agency's database, which would contain patterns used by the crime organizations in the region. No one would suspect that this had simply been the attempt of an outside (and legitimate) bank to grease the wheels on an infrastructure project where a huge chunk of their investments were tied up in, who would indirectly benefit from a huge bump in the stock price once the reactors of the plant they were investing would come online.
Speaking of which, Qual had finally located the document he was looking for. He opened up the file labelled COMBINED LICENSE – KAMOJANG GENERATION PLANT UNIT 12 – MANTLE FUTURES. The document was already filled out, it just needed the subdirector's signature. With the retinal code that Qual scanned, he imported the signature directly onto the document. Navigating through the automation platform, Qual found the right menu to submit the COL application, but not before he altered the date of the submission to two days earlier so that no one would suspect foul play in relation to the creation of the reactor. Mantle Futures would be able to continue with construction down in Indonesia and SolBanc would stand to profit from its completion. It was the perfect crime.
Qual's program was rechecking the separate branches of the blackcode he had inserted into the system. It was a clever program, substituting singular values at irregular intervals to form the basis of the virus. At the same time, it erased all evidence of Qual from the Alliance's systems, the firewalls and security gates snapping closed from where his icebreakers had pierced the strata of the net.
The jewel-glow of the sprawling matrix snapped closed in the corner of his visor. The maroon paths of his entrance and exit dimmed to a fine thread before dissipating completely. Easy in, easy out.
Now, he could finally concentrate on this miserable Tali'Zorah business.
Qual crossed the room again and stepped over the subdirector's body, who had died a few minutes ago. The active-camo once again shielded him from view and he stole his way out into the hallway. This time, he was going to take the stairs all the way down. No sense in taking a path where he could be potentially detected by the guards.
The concrete shaft was dry and musty, but that bothered Qual little as he soon built up a sweat as he headed down the stairwell. He took it all the way down to the underground maintenance corridors and followed them all the way back to the garage, where he had left his vehicle.
Two minutes later, he was back on the road and headed in the direction of the airport. The quarian could not even hear sirens in the air just yet.
Nice, Earth
Twilight on the Riviera, salt-infested air turning the edges of the sky white, electric mopeds beeping, and the crowds tunnelling by on the sidewalks like they were on a conveyor.
Tali stepped from the doorway of her hotel on the Rue de Marechal Joffre and yawned. She had spent most of the day sleeping, the jet lag having finally caught up to her. An ache that wasn't an ache at the base of her skull, the backs of her eyeballs feeling oddly heavy. It would be a bit before she would fully wake, which meant that she was going to have the night all at her disposal.
There was the teeth-jolting chatter of a jackhammer in the distance. Down the window-cliffed boulevard, she could see a forest of cranes and construction hovercraft line the skyline. The quarian stood in the doorway for a while, watching the faces pass her by, studying the serious intent of the businessmen lost in thought, the harried mothers pulling along their children, the street punks in their vibrant clothes laughing and joking to themselves.
Half of the road in front of her was being rebuilt by the French crews, but every couple hundred meters there was a little rubber pathway to cross between the fenced off areas. Blotchy patches of asphalt and dusted concrete, along with mats covered with pickaxes, organized as the tapestry of the route. An excavator sat next to a trench where the road had been shattered into chunks, exposing decades-old piping. Plastic orange cones sat in the road, the tops decorated with holographic lights and arrows, warning pedestrians to not fall into the open pits that had been dug up. It was as if Europe ran on common-sense laws—if some random civilian fell into a pit that was marked, but not completely walled off, then it was their own fault.
Nice was not tailored to tourists. Not deliberately. The area was jam-packed with resorts, but the people here did not thrive on the whims and urges of the city-hopping visitor. Anyone who lived in Nice seemed to take on the personality of the city itself. It ran to the beat of its own drum, which was a lackadaisical stride, not at all frenetic business like Zurich or any of the other major cities on the continent. It was a city of first impressions, of style. Where every other storefront was a boutique clothing store and that every tea shop had the name of their establishment etched out in bronze above the doorways.
Tali was not hungry, but she was in the mood for a drink. Or several. She found a place on her map and began walking along the pedestrian path, passing by many a pharmacie as she walked, made evident by the bright green crosses that hung outside of each one. She spent some time window-shopping, observing the curious human fashions in a Hermès store, only to be confounded by the styles there—the purses in particular were a source of great puzzlement for Tali. Why carry around a luxury bag when they can simply give women bigger pockets in their pants? Even the extranet seemed to fail her here.
She hooked a right towards the Place Massena, but took a left only one block later. She thought of Garrus, whom she had left behind in Geneva, after they had taken the cogwheel back down from Zermatt and the magrail to the closest megalopolis. They had said their goodbyes at the transit hub in Bern and had parted with a hug, with Tali promising Garrus that he would not have to go to Liara next time to find out where she was.
She was a bit embarrassed about having poured a bit of her heart out in front of the man the other day, but she felt better about it by the next morning. The turian had rented a room in the same chalet, just to keep an eye on her, and they had breakfast together before they had headed to the train station. He was worried about her, of course, but she had assured him that his fear was misplaced. She had been lying through her teeth, but Garrus appeared to have bought it.
Now, a short flight later, she found herself on the Côte d'Azur, the south of France, looking to lose herself in the glitz and glamor, which reminded her of the life she had once idolized. All of her years on the flotilla, looking through bootleg feeds of awards shows and celebrities lining the steps of Cannes, hover-cameras machinegunning flares from all angles, unable to take her eyes off the snappy suits and the flowing dresses that seemed to be made of liquid crystal. She had borne witness to the ultra-elite of the galaxy from watching it through the holochannels and of the individuals that captivated the net: asari, turians, and of course, humans. But never quarians. Not a single one. None of her people had ever gotten so rich or famous that The Corona would ever do a thirty-minute feature on their life. Aside from Fleet and Flotilla, the only blockbuster vids that had ever featured quarians did so in a negative fashion, stereotyping them almost to the point of parody. They were always the thief or the fence, a quippy hacker-type. Occasionally, they were the heavy, but never the mastermind.
Tali was glad she never saw those films in front of a live audience—she had heard that the crowds tended to roar with approval whenever the bad quarian got their comeuppance towards the end of the vid. It would have made her absolutely sick to her stomach to witness such horrible things.
Her destination was approaching on the left side of the road she was walking alongside. Parked cars of dull colors lined what was a glorified alleyway. As she approached, a slurred chant began to make itself apparent from the other end of the block.
"You're making them!" one voice clamored.
"You're making them!" another bellowed back.
"You're making them look like fucking Brazil!" a deep choir roared en masse.
Tali lifted her head, the groved promenade in sight. A quartet of humans, around her age, perhaps older, spanned the entire sidewalk, forcing people to walk around them as they lumbered forth. A couple of them carried bottles in their hands—not even nine in the evening and they were already loaded. They were loudly interjecting swears in between verses of their chant, which seemed to be sports-related from context clues, and all were dressed in baggy dark clothing appropriate for hoodlums. The man at the head of the pack had tired eyes, thin blond hair, and a beard that blended in with his sallow skin. His eyes fell upon her but for a moment before slowly drifting off, uninterested.
She decided she'd better cross the street anyway. Not that she was worried if any of them would try anything with her, she just did not want to deal with this shit right now. She looked both ways before she jaywalked across. One of the group catcalled her as they passed. "Curves in all the right places!" She ignored him.
Something told her that she'd better take a look back, just in case. The quarian did so behind the shield of a parked truck. The group of hooligans had now approached a young woman that had been leaning against a brick wall, typing out a message on her omni-tool, previously unaware of the gaggle of potential beaus heading her way. Quick as a flash, they surrounded her, their laughter now increasing in volume. One of them offered the woman a drink, which she silently rebuffed, but it was clear from Tali's angle that the woman was quite uncomfortable and getting more and more nervous with each passing second.
Tali could not hear what the gang was saying to the woman, but guessed they were making lewd attempts in the vague hope that they could score for the evening. She placed a hand on the hood of the truck she was using as cover, her hand gripping so hard it was nearly crumpling the alloy in her fingers.
She unleashed a sigh of relief as she saw the woman finally wave her hand and scrunch her way from between the group members, now walking down the block, and to safety. The blond man at the head of the pack looked somewhat upset, but he took a long pull from the bottle he was holding and gestured for his retinue to proceed onwards, down the street the way they were heading.
Tali had a bad feeling about those guys. They were going to hurt someone if they kept their behavior up, she just knew.
"Keep walking, you bosh'tets," she grumbled. She waited until they rounded the corner and were out of sight.
There was little time to dwell on it, for she finally turned away and reached the club she had scoped out beforehand. There was a bouncer at the door who was checking IDs. He let Tali go in after she flashed her credentials. In a way, she was grateful. Humans, being the newcomers to galactic society, comparatively speaking, did not have the luxury of cultivating centuries of racist ideologies against her people. They simply saw quarians as a fascinating species, a fellow peer.
The bar was called M8ZE and it was accessed by walking down a dim staircase with strips of light embedded in every third step the color of winter ice. Tali reached the bottom and pushed open the door. There was a brief resistance from the motion—soundproofed. A blast of music muscled her body and she instinctively lowered her audio receptors to compensate. A full sensory overload, lights and sounds and everything. The constant chugging of the base jolting her insides was the one thing she concentrated on, a second heartbeat within her very chest.
Without software-enhanced visuals, it would be quite hard to tell the dimensions of M8ZE. Tali's light-compensating filters in her visor allowed her to see to the far wall, which seemed to span the length equivalent to the Normandy's third deck. The décor was like a basic template package: black and white. The dimensions of the bar and tabletops were boxy, almost pixelated. Square tables that, in the darkness, looked to almost be pillaring up from the unknown earth itself. A pill-shaped bar took up half of one of the longer sides of the rectangular room. Directly across from the counter was a dance floor where patrons were flailing and writhing to a gritty synthwave beat, the sound of manipulated electric guitars and saxophones blending together, with the sound of a Japanese flute providing a worldly texture to the noise. Vibrant lamps speared columns of neon in all directions, cutting through the shadows and bathing the jerking and undulating dancers in seas of singular strobing hues.
It was not a boutique joint and Tali blended right in with the usual aesthetic. Matter of fact, she was downright dressed for the occasion, with M8ZE's adornments complimenting the overall profile her enviro-suit cut within the place.
As expected, humans dominated the alcohol-soaked arena. There were a few turians and one krogan that she could see but overall, the demographics were solidly skewed towards the species upon which this bar was located.
Tali shouldered her way through the forest of tables—standing room only at this part. She caught snippets of conversation, vague tidbits about a tech launch, women crying after nasty breakups, desperate junkies looking for their next fix. The perimeter of the room was ringed with booths. Sound dampeners installed in each one provided zones of comfort where patrons could carry out private discussions while the rest of the frequenters carried on in their carefree lives. Tali could see that a few couples, along with the occasional throuple, engage in some rather intense bouts of PDA. In one booth that she saw, a turian was starting to reach his hand into the pants of a girl who barely looked to be budding out of her teens.
The quarian bit her tongue and looked away, a lump rising in her throat. Images started to drench her brain, of white light and flimsy paper sheets. A golden sun melting outside the windows while screens of raw iceberg blue floated delicate heartbeat strings around the motionless patient.
She wondered what her own EKG would show right now. An erratic scribble, most likely. An attempt of someone trying to blot something out.
She needed that drink. Now.
There was an empty space at the counter as a pair of human males broke off, their glasses in hand. Tali squeezed into the opening and one of the staff came over to her within a minute. He pointed to a code embedded into the counter for her to scan. She looked at it and her visor automatically brought up an extranet page that routed her to the bar's menu.
"Just holler when you're ready," the bartender spoke in his normal volume, but Tali's visor spelled out the dialogue as subtitles at the bottom of her visor. "The specials today are a 'Neuromancer' or a 'Snow Crash.'"
She was looking for something with a bite. Her eyes immediately gravitated to the top drink on the menu, which had the dextro equivalent of terroir gin, toasted coconut rye, maraschino, and a redwood sprig.
"Give me a '2077,''" Tali called.
"Start a tab?"
She didn't even hesitate. "Yes."
It took a while for the bartender to prepare her drink as he had accumulated a backlog from other habitues. Tali took the opportunity to make a slow scan of M8ZE. There were a lot of people in suits in various disheveled states—most likely having jumped here straight from work, desperate to get blind drunk in order to take the sting out of their interactions with picky customers. People were playing holographic bioti-ball in the corner, where a small arcade had been set up. In the middle of several of the standing tables, patrons were sharing video clips, bootlegs, soft patches, and even illegal rips of contact numbers.
"Your drink," the bartender said behind her as he pushed a glass toward her, which was dominated by a large, clear ice cube, filled with an amber liquid. A small branch of pine had been inserted into the glass. For the "aromatics." Tali suspected it was just aesthetic.
The 2077 came with a straw and she inserted it into the slot in her helmet. Brandy-infused oaksmoke with a hint of herbal florets. It was a drink to be savored, not scarfed. She downed it in minutes, regardless. The wallop of inebriation began to surge just behind her eyeballs, a welcome blow.
"Start running down the menu," she told another bartender as she flagged them down. "I'm going to be here a while."
"Yes, ma'am."
In fifteen minutes, Tali had consumed three of the high-power cocktails that M8ZE was notorious for concocting. Gray eyes started to see the world without contour, the edges bleeding into one another like a drenched watercolor. She drank until her body seemed to be moving on a delay, the impulse hitting her brain and her arms seemingly only jerking five seconds later. She was aware she was swaying and she had to take a grip upon the barcounter in order to keep from toppling over.
A nearby turian saw her in her stricken state and flashed a small plastic bag with a hexagonal candy-looking substance within. "Dex?"
"Huh?"
"Dexedrine. Central nervous system stimulant. Pharmaceutical-grade. Cuts the alcohol. Everyone here's using. Uppers, mostly. They always want to go up."
Tali looked at the drugs and glared at the man. She had never taken synthetic speed before and she did not care to form an addiction. Alcohol was still a vice for her and one that she felt she had a handle on. Reasonably. Also, her suit helped her digestive system filter out alcohol more efficiently, so her periods of drunkenness tended to last quite a bit shorter than someone who did not possess such medical tech.
"Get you a free sample?" the drug dealer tried again.
Tali did not even bother with sporting a response. She just waggled her fingers in the air towards the turian in the universal gesture for "get the fuck away from me."
The turian shrugged and moved off to find clients that were more amenable to his services.
The encounter was enough for Tali to start keeping a close watch on her drinks, despite her inebriation. She had heard the stories of less than savory people slipping compounds into the drinks of unsuspecting women in an effort to take advantage of them. As soon as she had been passed her latest cocktail, her eyes were on it at all times, her concentration never leaving the contents of her glass until it had been fully drained, the next one only moments away.
However, after two more strong cocktails that tasted powerfully of anise and vermouth, she was beyond all caring. She had been cut off by the bar, thankfully, with the only drink remaining for her purchase being water or soda.
The sounds of the facility rolled into her ears. The halogens the color of candy, whitehot light columns. The grind of the music making her back molars chatter, the frequencies of the bass tuned just so. She heard a distant fight—having to do with some uncouth comment made about a certain woman—along with the two sharp noises of fists making contact with the perpetrator's face. A burst of 'oohs' slurred from the individuals who witnessed the fight, however short it was. Hands were slapped in earnest and there was the chime of chits passing along wagers.
A group of young men were playing holographic darts over in the corner. The current thrower, his eyes wide and bloodshot, lurched forward and threw his dart so badly that he missed the dartboard entirely and shattered a glass at a nearby table. One of his friends looked over at him, shook his head, and said, "Nice shot, Hellen Keller."
Two women in their early twenties, both wearing bright dresses that looked like shiny plastic, were loudly chattering over drinks just as vividly colored as their wardrobe. Tali had another table separating her from them, but found she could still hear their shrill voices carrying over the music.
"I dunno, Tori, you think he'll like it if I get an omni-tattoo of his face on my hip? I just want him to see how much I fucking like him!"
"Are geth gentle lovers, Reagan? Do turians naturally smell like strawberries? We've just now asked each other pointless and stupid questions."
After rehydrating, her suit holding back the brunt of drunkenness, Tali slid out of her chair and headed towards the main dance floor, the ebb and flow of the rhythm driving something within her. Multicolored lights and holograms spiraled and cascaded above the vague shadowshapes of the dancing horde, strobing above the parlor in their own spasmodic trance. Limbs, torsos, and heads thrashed wildly to the music, the lights only splintering across their features for microseconds, offering scant flashes of detail that were swallowed up in the chaos and noise.
Tali edged her way into the middle. No one paid her a second glance. They were all too drunk, too high, or too hopped up on adrenaline to fully take notice of a quarian in their midst. Or maybe none of them truly cared at all. They just appreciated having some moving bodies to bring greater excitement to the overall equation.
She stood in the middle of the throng, watching the girl in a nylon dress and spiked shoes next to her absolutely lose herself to the music, her hair flying in all directions.
Then, the song changed over… a low electronic growl…
And synth drums charged forth, spacey electronics maxing out the trebles while the basses were shaking the walls from their foundations. The crowd, energized, started to flail in a jerky but distinct cadence. This time, Tali joined in, her arms raised over her head, jumping up and down much like the people all around her, ripples that emitted out towards the ragged edges of the dancers, a blue haze warping all around them, the lights of lasers bathing them in unearthly glows. Digital thunder crackled about them, the LED walls gleaming with an intensity so bright that it reduced all color to either its totality or its absence.
Light sparked and exploded in shockwaves across Tali's visor. A full-scale war existed in that vague facsimile, a mirror world, where her eyes were twin suns that pulled at the substrata of all existence in its wake.
She was feeling her age already and she wasn't even thirty. Lines of pain tugged at the corners of her eyes, that pale look obvious and invisible all at once. She moved with the crowd, swaying, jumping, imprisoned by walls of bodies. The alcohol making her forget her fatigue. She was gasping, sweating. The dance becoming a workout.
He was there. In her mind.
Searing blue. Jagged vines of heartbeats. The hiss of machine-like breath through tubing.
Closed eyes. Serenity. Peace locked behind his frozen corpus. Perhaps she was with him in that slice of paradise, a carbon copy constructed atom by atom to its aetheric perfection.
Holographic rain sizzled down upon the dancers and then the simulated lightning rolled in. The crowd's fervor merely intensified and they pounded their fists harder in the air. Tali mimicked their gestures, thrashing her head back and forth while she raised her hands as if in supplication to some grand code that demanded fealty. She dialed back her audio inhibitors and let the music and the roars of the crowd overwhelm her, just as she let herself be taken away by the tide, lost in this place, a neon phantom that was drenched in hues of molten gold and flaming azure.
And she was screaming… screaming. An unheard cry to join in with the choir of revelry around her. She spread her arms wide and howled, with only her vocabulator blinking placidly, containing the boiling silver fervor that whipped inside her like the mistrals in her bedtime stories. The rest of the crowd screamed with her.
It was very late by the time she staggered out of M8ZE, a headache splashing at the breakers of her mental facilities. Early morning on a weekday, the streets of Nice were deserted. The roads and sidewalks had been splashed with water from a passing streetsweeper, which reflected the lamps and lobed moon like a smudged speculum.
Her balance had not yet returned to a hundred percent, but she was able to retain most of her sense of direction and headed in the direction of her hotel, fully intending to sleep through breakfast with her upcoming hangover all but assured. She passed by the darkened windows of electronics shops, a luxury furniture store, and a tea shop called "Libre'T." She must have passed by at least three blacksoft clinics, her paranoia spiking as she counted the number of darkened alleys that she chanced upon during her route back.
She stared up at the starless sky. Someday, this would all have to come to an end. The wallowing, the self-pity. All of it. Many times, she figured that she was just in the process of circling the drain, beholden to the whims of a grand equation that she could not fathom beyond her own existence.
The quarian was alone in the cold night, a chill blowing in from the sea. A patina of chrome light rolled over her as she passed under a streetlight, her sehni shielding her visor from its glare as she trudged ever forward into that dark unknown.
A car whirred by, the only other thing moving on the road, the twin headlights sending out waves of bright white scurrying down the concrete canyon. Tali watched it go, taking a moment to glance at the map in the corner of her HUD—she was just two blocks from her hotel, very close to the Parc Jean Moreno.
The light from the headlights receded, leaving only the lobed glow of the streetlamps to mutely outline the streets, but Tali's eyesight adjusted to see a cadre of shadows down an adjacent street to her left wrestle and struggle. Sounds of a commotion. Muffled noises. Sounds of panic and fear.
Tali edged out from being drenched in the glare of a nearby lamp so that she could blend in with a curtain of ivy at her back. Whispers from across the way. Deep and male.
"Shut her up, man. She's trying to bite me!"
"We're there. Hit her if you have to!"
Shrouded by the darkness, she peered out towards the sounds. At the crossroads, she could see the twisting outlines of unlit beings urge towards a door cut into the side of a building. Four, perhaps five of them. Tali zoomed in onto the group. A gaggle of humans were dragging a young woman towards the door and the woman was clearly struggling. One of the men had clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her screams. Another person of the group strode up to the door, rapped on it five times—one short, two long, two short—and it opened up to reveal a similarly unlit interior, a heavyset bouncer quickly ushering the group inside, ultimately unconcerned with the woman's plight.
Her audio sensors picked up a tiny sound, a frequency unnoticeable at this distance, but it was unmistakably a cry for help. A wordless note that tried to blister through fingers covering a mouth.
Tali's blood ran cold. She shut her eyes, momentarily overcome with indecision. A minute or so on either side and she would not have been presented with this conundrum. It was just another weight on her conscience.
The galaxy was trying to punish her, it seemed. There was never a moment where she could soundly reject the reality that she had been presented with, doomed to align to someone else's program. But this time, she was the bystander. Someone was in trouble. Someone fully divorced from her own problems. But someone is always in trouble, the devil on her shoulder whispered. Everyone is doomed to hurt, sooner or later. What are you going to do, right every wrong in the galaxy?
Maybe it was the alcohol, but the length of time it took for her to arrive at an answer only intensified her frustration. The blurred night filtered into a dissolved melt of black. The hoods of the cars nearby glistening from the streetlamps. Not even the sizzling distant sea in the distance offered reassurance. The city was dead quiet, as if she was the only being out on the streets this night.
Drunkenness and adrenaline started to spiral together. A lit fuse hurrying towards destruction. A dim sensation flickered… something that she strangely enjoyed. But… why? Was it because she felt totally engaged and yet completely distant, as if she was controlling a third-person character outside her own body?
She knew what he would do were he in her position. He would have decided faster than she could.
It's hard enough fighting a war. It's harder knowing that no matter how hard you try, you can't save them all.
She turned on a heel, her fists clenched at her sides, eyes slowly narrowing into slits.
"I'll show you how hard I can try," she growled.
The quarian stalked across the empty road towards the door she had seen the group enter. The premises had no signage marking its existence, merely a lone red lamp illuminating the door. The hell was this place? A brothel? She just knew that any establishment without labels either meant two things: exclusive or illegal.
Tali walked up to it and savagely pounded the same rhythm on the door that she had heard earlier: one short, two long, two short. She brought her hand close to the handle of the door, a glow emanating from her palm.
A few seconds later, an embrasure in the threshold racked open, a clatter of cheap metal, revealing the dull glint of the bouncer's beady eyes, which widened as he noticed the quarian. She was apparently not an expected guest. "The fuck do you wan—"
The technical detonator wreathed upon Tali's palm flashed and exploded outward. A wave of pulsating force slammed against the door, throwing it against the old-fashioned lock and completely breaking it off with a teeth-crackling sound of metal shattering. Pushed inward, the door surged back inside and slammed against the bouncer's shiny forehead, slicing it open and sending forth a hot spray of blood that splattered the ajar opening. He fell backwards, concussed, unable to get back up.
Tali brusquely pushed the door open, the broken lock emitting a thin curl of smoke, and stepped over the faintly stirring bouncer. The vapors whipped past her and into the cold air outside. The concussive pulses of a dark synthbeat from within the place already stirred at her ribcage, only growing in intensity, a sinister drumming to revel the monsters within the lair.
Even though it was too late to back out now, Tali wished she had a gun.
Her intoxication was still driving her forward, up a thin staircase, where the darkness seemed to become intimate, a deep hue on the upper level throbbing and arterial.
She reached the landing and pushed aside the velvet curtain blocking her way. A long corridor, dripping with that same dark red color as if she had walked into an enlarged aorta. Her body was only a phantom, moving of its own accord, unable to be completely felt. She blinked several times, trying to penetrate the dim myopia.
The hallway was bare and carpeted with a thick material that depressed with each step. At some spots, it was crunchy. Velvet curtains lined the walls—gossamer portals separating the transit area from this building's true purpose, of which was all but confirmed when Tali saw a few men saunter from room to room in various states of undress, or in some cases, total undress. Deep moans from within the rooms agonized sparingly, the reverberations dry, swallowed up by all of the fabric. They were not sounds of pleasure. But of fear, or drugged instinct.
That sour feeling in her gut again. A spasm that quickly became a boil. Shooting rage that nearly manifested into pain, her world became redder. It became clear to her that this was not a place where consent mattered. There was a sullied terror inherent here, driven by the despicable tastes of its clientele.
She wanted to hurt someone. Bad. She wanted to hurt them all.
The curtain to her right parted and a very overweight man, in just a pair of underpants that was partially obstructed by his bulging stomach, presumably wanting to check if anyone knew anything about that loud bang from the entrance, poked his balding head out. Tali looked in his direction, a nearby dim fixture making a cross in her visor. She could see a trembling gray form of a girl at the far end of the man's room, curled up and in a state of disarray.
She couldn't explain what happened next. It was pure instinct.
Tali lunged at the man, her hands locking around his pudgy throat and she squeezed. The flabby flesh of his neck seemed to squelch between her fingers. He made a gagging noise and coated her visor with his panicked spittle. Barely remembering her training, she drove a knee between his legs and made contact with something small and soft. Bullseye. The man's body locked up as he squeaked, his eyes began to roll towards the ceiling, and he doubled over. Tali clawed at the man's head and slammed it sideways, against the wall of the room. There was a crack and he fell in a thick lump.
The shivering girl in the corner—not the one Tali had seen earlier—looked up, tears having streaked her mascara. Keelah, how many do they have here? The quarian tossed some of the strewn clothes that had been littered about the room. "Get out of here," she hissed, before she moved onto the next room, her drunken sway refusing to abate.
The curtain across from the stall Tali had entered had opened by now, revealing a sweaty bearded man in a tanktop. Tali was charging at him right out of the gate, hunkered down like a linebacker. She was rushing so fast that the tangle of bodies caught one of the oily drapes and ripped it clean from its brass hinges. They fell onto the ground together and Tali was just whaling on him with her fists without grace or even aim. She hammered his face, feeling his nose break and a warm gush of liquid coat her suited fingers. She beat the man until he stopped moving and slowly got back up to her feet, feeling like she was sloughing off layers of rust as she rose. There was a terrified scream from the still-dressed prostitute (more than likely a kidnap victim) who was cowering in the corner as she watched the quarian practically rip the man apart in front of her.
It took Tali longer than usual to straighten up and she stumbled a few times as the searing bulbs in the room seemed to streak into cometary trails. She mumbled something to the second girl, but between her drunken state and the adrenaline currently at war in her system, it was not clear if she was intelligible or not.
Like a machine, she stomped back out into the hall and went room to room. Methodical. A one-person tactical squad.
Another partially-dressed man attempted to exit his stall, a knife in hand. Arm's length, close-range. Tali grabbed the weapon-wielding hand and broke the man's arm in two places—the bone popped from the skin in a gory protrusion. Tali then kicked the man in the chest and he fell through the curtained portal, already going into shock.
Behind her, another belligerent emerged with a bottle in hand. He smashed it over Tali's head and she staggered forward with a yell, glass spraying everywhere.
Her helmet cushioned the brunt of the blow, but she saw stars regardless. She sagged against one of the flimsy walls that separated each nook from one another. The knife that one of the ravagers had tried to use against her now laid at the floor at her feet. She bent and picked it up. Summoning from her well of lucidity, whatever little of it remained, she whirled, a nuclear fire savagely burning within her visor. The knife whisked through the darkness and slashed at her assaulter's bicep and further obliterated remains of the bottle he was holding, a jagged stem that used to be a container of vodka.
An arc of blood flew through the air, the savage pulsating of the music drowning out his startled cry. He backed up a step, looking at the twin spears of light that threatened to burst through the quarian's mask, finally understanding her ferocity.
Tali just growled as she flipped the knife in her hand and threw it. She had been aiming for his head, but the knife stuck in his leg instead, causing him to stumble back into his room as he screamed, hands groping at the obsidian edge, blood hopelessly pouring between his fingers. He was still holding the razorsharp stem of the glass bottle. Tali then barreled into the man, her fists cracking ribs as she burrowed them deep into the thick and fleshy body. She paid no heed that the remains of the bottle could possibly slash her suit open from clavicle to sternum—she simply grabbed for the arm and wrenched it so that the shattered circle embedded itself into the man's chest. She smiled when she heard him make a gurgling noise.
Her vision was swimming and her mind was adrift, assisted by all the liquor she had ingested, but she had never felt this alive in a long, long time.
You're here and he's not. How's that for fair?
She decked her attacker in the jaw, knocking him out in an instant, leaving him to bleed on the floor.
Attendants and bouncers poured into the silent hallway, looking to suppress her. Tali hurled fists at them without reason or aim. Several times, she got hit pretty hard—one blow to the face nearly created a crack in her visor. She dropped to the ground and looked up, seeing someone level a gun at her face. Reacting to the sight of the weapon, Tali primed an overload function and the weapon exploded, Tali's hack causing the heat sink to instantaneously overheat. Flaming coolant doused the gunslinger and he ran from the building, shrieking, wearing a cape of fire, a beacon in the shrouded gloom. His cohorts stared dumbly at the alight man until Tali jumped back to her feet and clocked each one in the head in sequence, taking them out of the fight.
Wasting no time, she rushed through the next curtained parting and before the inhabitant within had a chance to extricate themselves.
Seconds, later, both of them emerged from the felt portal, Tali having jumped on his back and in the process of tearing his cheeks in half by hooking her fingers into the corners of his mouth and pulling. Screeching inhumanely, the man tried to shake the quarian off, but she held firm. In the room from which they had exited, a naked girl clutching her clothing ran at full tilt, shrieking her head off. In his throes, the man staggered back into the room he had just exited, slamming his back against the wall, sandwiching Tali, in a terrible attempt to shake her off. Her spine creaked with each blow that the man levelled against her, but her resolve still held strong.
The man strode forward for a few steps before he embarked into another reverse charge, but she finally let go and spun out of the way, dropping to the floor—her overweight combatant giving a whuff! of noise as his lungs emptied from smacking his own body against the wall.
Tali rotated and pushed off from her feet in a brutal lunge and bodily tackled the man, sending them through the thin wall of the private room, into the next one, and causing a specter of white plasterdust to shower down upon them. Shaking off the drywall, Tali punched the man in the face until he stopped moving and leapt to her feet. Everything condensed for Tali and it all seemed to rush back to her like she was being walloped in the face.
The occupants of this booth—a man and two girls, both of which did not look old enough to be here—sat up from the waterbed in the corner, startled. A gun sat on the nearby shelf. The man reached for it.
There was another empty liquor bottle within reach. Tali grabbed it and swung it like a club. Broken glass fragmented upon the man's face, replicating his smashed visage on a multitude of angles and ruining tens of thousands of credits' worth of plastic surgery. The shards of glass sliced deep into his skin, the razor edges making mincemeat of the flesh. He collapsed on the bed, his face no longer assembling a complete image.
Tali pointed at the two women in the bed, who were obviously not escorts. "Come on!" she shouted. "Get out!"
Heavy tattooed hands stretched out past the cloth barricade and gripped Tali's shoulders from behind. "Oh, shit," she had a chance to mutter out, before a muscled human bodily threw her out into the hallway, impacting her back against a nearby wall. The plaster cracked from her arrival, leaving behind a Tali-shaped indent. She slid to the ground, momentarily listless, her tailbone on fire.
"Ow," Tali grunted, more out of annoyance than pain. But it felt good to hurt, it would just drive away her intoxication.
The defined individual who had thrown her, possessing the physique of a bodybuilder, stepped into the hallway, a hunting knife now in hand. He wore a devilish grin and his torso was covered in tattoos of dragons.
"I'll skin you alive, cunt," his accented voice burst forth in a dreadful whisper. He knelt down so that he could plunge his knife in Tali's throat.
But the quarian rolled and the knife sank into the soft plaster walls, embedding it in place. She reached down to her boot and drew her own blade that she kept holstered there. In the chaos, she had forgotten she had it strapped. The knife was sharp enough to slice through synthetic armor, therefore it had no trouble penetrating flesh and muscle when she shot her arm up, the point of her own weapon bursting straight through the bodybuilder's forearm. The jacked man looked at his wound, strangely not reacting to the injury that would otherwise have the average person screaming in agony. He must have been too hopped up on gas or red sand to otherwise take notice of the wedge of metal that had become embedded in his arm.
He did notice, however, when Tali gave a surge and ripped her knife down along his forearm, tearing the limb open straight down the middle.
A horrendous torrent of blood coated the floor and the bodybuilder only now seemed to realize the gravity of the situation. He shrieked and clamped a hand over his gushing arm, a pitiful attempt to stem the uncontrollable flow. Tali, still on her back, lashed out with a kick and impacted the man's kneecap perfectly, shattering it. His leg bent at a horrible angle with a crunching noise like someone trodding on a sheath of dead branches. He went down at the same time she got back up, an override in her body refusing to let her stay down for long. Her knife sank into his side, then his neck. She plunged it into his gurgling body until he no longer made a sound, an entire side of her suited form glistening in the thin light.
Staggering forward, Tali could only view the world as a series of undulating shadows. She punched and slashed at anyone who dared come close to her. Blood sprayed upon her in a fine mist. Everything throbbed and undulated for her. Just being in the center of the hive, where all of these animals were brutalizing and taking advantage of these women made her feel absolutely vile.
She wanted to hurt them all. To kill them. Imagining every violation that occurred before her to be an insult to what Shepard had intended.
A completely naked man charged in, waving a pulsestick, the overclocked rod glowing whitehot with heat. Tali ducked the blow and slashed at the back of the man's calves, making him drop his fiery weapon. She retrieved it and pressed it against his sweatshimmered back, producing a thick cloud of evaporated blood as his skin began to bubble and boil. The rapist screamed and whirled to attack Tali again, but she just shoved the pulsestick deep into the man's mouth. Spittle vaporized into steam and the man's eyes popped a singular shade of red as the blood vessels let go. He collapsed at the quarian's feet.
Twitching bodies littered the floor in the quarian's wake. At one point, someone tried firing a gun at Tali, but they were so drunk that they missed and hit a nearby fire extinguisher, adding a mist of halon to the growing fog of smoke. She bent down, grabbed a baton that someone had dropped, and hurled it towards the sound of the gunshot. Her aim was better, and there was a squeal and a meaty smack as the baton made solid contact with the man's head. Still clutching her knife, Tali ran up to the shootist before he could get another round off and brutally plunged her knife into his gut over and over and over again. Her victim spasmed and screamed but ultimately stopped resisting after the fifth time he was stabbed, becoming deadweight against his ultimate killer.
Tali let the body fall to the floor, the blue lightning of her shields sparking and washing over her. There was a dull thrum in the lower recesses of her ears. She was alone in the hall, standing amongst the ripped-apart bodies that she had been responsible for. Drunkenness pulsed her brain and a bevy of injuries tickled in the wings, waiting for the throb of alcohol to recede so that they could be let inside. Her breath was cool and static tickled her nerves.
There was one more room to go. She yanked aside the curtain and stared at the topless man inside—the sand-bearded young hoodlum she had seen earlier, she had realized, out on the street in front of M8ZE—who was standing over the terrified young girl who she had seen get dragged into this place to begin with. The impetus of this whole design.
Someone in the distance yelled "François!" but she paid it little mind. She stood in the middle of the threshold, a hand holding the curtain open, the ruddy light behind her projecting her shadow upon the small confines and its inhabitants as though she was a vengeful wraith, come to enact some nameless and righteous anger upon them.
The sandy-haired man straightened upon seeing the intruder. The light fell across his pupils, which were dilated. He was high, Tali realized.
"Fucking bitch!" the man named François blurted out, an exclamation that carried more indignance than anything else, as if he was annoyed that Tali had burst in on a private moment. He had a small pistol holstered at his waist and the human groped for it.
But just as he slid his hand into the grip of the weapon and withdrew it, Tali grabbed the barrel and twisted her arm, wrenching the gun away. There was a crunching sound as four of François' fingers shattered. He made a slight "uh" sound, the drugs muting the pain.
Tali twirled the gun so that she was holding the barrel in a better grip. "Yeah," she growled. "You're right about that."
She swung her arm, a whipcrack, and the butt of the pistol cracked across François' face. Blood and shards of teeth scythed through the air and his jaw now jutted an awkward angle. Broken.
François clasped a hand to his ruined mouth and began to squeal in an ever-increasing pitch. Tali pinned him against the wall and activated her omni-tool, pressing her left palm against the man's cheek, her fingers digging into his face as if they were trying to burrow through it.
"Ask yourself if this was worth it," Tali hissed in the man's face, knowing that he was looking at his own distorted reflection, strobing lights projecting his features in a seared convulsion. She then activated her tool's electro-gauntlet and bright white bolts unfurled from her palm and jittered off directly into François. A crazed collection of light flared and sizzled, the human's body twitching and convulsing as 100,000 volts coursed through him. His skin where the gauntlet made contact with his face was starting to blister and crack, a foul smell—something roasting—beginning to curl from beneath the quarian's palm. He was immobilized to the point where he couldn't even scream, could not even comprehend his own visage that was reflected before the quarian's cruel eyes.
The sparking and snapping of arcing electricity continued for several more seconds before Tali finally released François. He crumpled at her feet, still alive and twitching, the right side of his face blackened and scarred in a branchlike pattern.
Tali listened and breathed. The faint sound of groaning bodies wafted in from the hall. A thin haze of gunsmoke levelled in the air.
Aches ravaged her body from all directions. The gentle tug of intoxication still warped at the edges of her vision. She was most definitely bruised under her suit. She wondered if she had broken anything, but she would more than likely find that out tomorrow once the adrenaline had receded.
The quarian shuddered another breath. This had been the last room. François' gun still in hand, she walked over to where his would-be victim was laying upon the bed and slipped an arm under hers, hoisting her up.
The woman trembled as she tried to peer at Tali. She absorbed the visor and blood-splattered appearance of her savior. A quarian, of all people.
"T-Thank you," she mumbled in awe and disbelief.
Tali just shifted her eyes over for a scant moment. "When we get out, you need to go to a hospital and call the police. You'll be safe there. Do you understand?"
"I… I…"
"Do you understand?"
The woman started to nod and could not stop until Tali squeezed her tight against herself.
With the woman sagging against her, they went back out into the corridor. It was in complete shambles, with bodies lining the way, most of them still alive. Tali pushed aside some discarded plastic sheeting, kicked aside some stray wires, and ducked underneath a swinging fixture that had been dislodged from the ceiling. She helped her passenger get down the tight staircase and back out into the cool, damp night. A thin breeze wafted in. The smell of salt.
"Can you walk?" Tali asked the woman as she gently stood her upright.
The human clutched at a slipping strap of her dress, wobbled heavily on her legs, but managed a nod.
Tali turned to leave, but not before the woman called out: "Can you tell me your name?"
An alleyway drenched with crimson and azure. Red arcs of electricity fading into the tapestry of metal and glass. Her eyes looking over at her rescuer. "I know how to take care of myself," she had said. "Not that I don't appreciate the help. Who are you?"
Looking over her shoulder, Tali swept back over as she considered the question. Then she shook her head, a quiet motion. "You're better off not knowing. Go."
The woman took a halting step back, apprehensive at parting ways with the person that had rescued her. It was only when she realized that Tali's hard stare was not lessening in the slightest did she finally retreat, running down the street to safety. Somewhere where she could not be hurt anymore.
Tali watched her go, waiting to see if there was anyone left in pursuit, and took off in the opposite direction once she was satisfied that there would be no further chase tonight. Without looking, she disassembled the pistol in her hands and hurled each piece down different alleyways and into drains at the side of the road. Her knee was giving her a little bit of trouble and her own run was hampered by a slight limp, but she powered down the street anyway. Her boots clomped down the glistening road and she hurried beneath the shimmering light posts, her breath strong and powerful in her ears, the sound of sirens behind her, the emptiness of the road stretching out before her, offering no barricade to her ultimate destination.
Her pulse pounded her head. Her body felt light as a feather. There was a sense of familiarity… of freedom. Pain was now making itself more and more apparent across multiple points, but in that twilight-state of adrenaline and stress all comingled together, incredibly, a crazed smile split her face.
She ran to her hotel, laughing.
A/N: This was the longest I've spent editing a chapter in The Coma Patient thus far, mainly because I wanted to ensure that I got this last scene as good as I could possibly make it. Hopefully, I've succeeded. I tried a few things out to make the overall flow of the fight work, but I'll let you all be the judge of its effectiveness or not.
Let me know what you think! But with that said, this is definitely one of The Coma Patient's many turning points, especially for Tali and her overall arc. We'll soon see the consequences that result from her actions this night. To be continued (obviously).
Playlist:
In Bed
"I Beat Them All"
Daniel Pemberton
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
A Shooting in Hong Kong
"Distance"
Lorn
Killzone: Shadowfall (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
M8ZE (Source Music)
"Rave Eternal"
ALEX x Tokyo Rose
AKUMA III
The Rampage Begins
"Detour"
woob
AD4PTION
The Rampage Continues (Aggression Theme V1)
"Exfiltrate the Hotzone"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
The Rampage Concludes / Outro
"Safer at the Mall"
woob
AD4PTION