Content warning for this chapter: drugs, bad feelings, and ultra-violence.
3. EXIT
Nos Astra
As it turned out, Lawson actually had a heart buried underneath her crystalline exterior. And nerves. The woman fidgeted, wrung her hands, shifted from foot to foot.
Shepard put her hands on her hips. "Do you have to pee, or do you want to talk to her? Just get over there."
Lawson stilled, with visible effort. "No," she said. "It's better that she never knows who I am. Safer."
Her voice was remarkably even. Shepard almost believed her.
"What would you want, if you were her?"
Lawson looked down at her feet.
"Would you just want to be safe?" Shepard asked gently.
Lawson's face twisted into an expression she couldn't quite interpret. Longing, maybe. Or regret. Or love.
For a ruthless Cerberus die-hard, Miranda Lawson really was a very beautiful woman.
Miranda inhaled and straightened her spine. "I'll be right back."
Shepard grinned, and thumped her on the shoulder. "Go get 'em, tiger."
There was a long, frosty silence. Beside her, the newly recruited Thane Krios raised an eloquent eyebrow, and turned away. Probably hiding a smile. Smooth bastard.
Lawson (she was definitely back to being Lawson now) fixed her with a supremely irritated look, and stalked off.
Well, whatever. Rome wasn't built in a day. "Let's go get a drink, Krios. Give them some space."
"Of course."
It wasn't Eternity, but it was surprisingly peaceful knocking back an asari beer (Krios got water) at a little cafe table outside, while they watched the crowd ebb and flow through the transit hub. The sun shone tawny-gold through the late afternoon haze. Shepard settled back in her chair, enjoying the warmth on her face.
Downtime like this was rare lately. She'd been plowing her way through the dossiers, acquiring intel and equipment and credits wherever she could find them, eating and sleeping the bare minimum. Off-hours found her staring into black space through her skylight, going stir-crazy with impossible thoughts. So she'd stopped giving herself off-hours. Much easier to stay right here, hunkered down in the trenches, with only two things to worry about: where to aim, and when to duck.
...Even if ducking hardly seemed worth the effort anymore.
"Something troubling you, Commander?" Krios's low, rasping voice brought her back to the present.
"Huh? No, I—" Shepard began, then looked up at him and lost her train of thought.
He was handsome in an almost human way, fine-boned and straight of profile, like a classical statue. But something about him— his stillness, maybe, or the empty blackness of his eyes— struck a strange nerve deep inside her. With the full force of his attention trained on her, she felt like a bug under a glass.
Handsome, but kind of creepy. She shook it off. "—I wanted to say, thanks for coming along on this mission. And for holding steady when the parameters changed. I know you've always worked alone before."
He nodded once: a precise, fractional bow.
He was so goddamn graceful. She was just glad she'd managed to get to their table without knocking anything over.
Anyway. He was here to work. He didn't need to know that Commander Shepard secretly thought he was cool. She tried to marshal her thoughts.
"So, uh. I'd figured the three of us could ease into things, take some time to look for Lawson's sister. See how we got along as a team before diving into any heavy combat." She toyed with her bottle cap. "I hadn't exactly planned for a squad of Eclipse commandos getting in the way. Sorry about that."
Krios took a sip of his water. "It seems my initial impression of you was correct."
"Oh?" she said warily.
A hint of a smirk graced his lips. "Chaos. Destruction. A swirling storm of gunfire."
Shepard let out a startled laugh. "You're all right, Krios."
"I was happy to be of service. Operative Lawson seems relieved."
She glanced over the crowd and found her, a slim dark figure among a sea of blue bodies. She and her younger twin stood transfixed and grinning at each other. Miranda's posture was still a little stiff, but both identical faces glowed with pleasure.
Shepard felt something warm and vaguely maternal stirring in her at the sight, and squashed it back down. Cerberus was still Cerberus. These little getting-to-know-you detours for Taylor and Lawson could have been orchestrated by the Illusive Man himself, for all she knew. She couldn't afford to get comfortable.
Bullshit sessions in the cargo bay, poker nights in the crew quarters— that wasn't happening again. Not on this Normandy.
She missed it, though.
She missed Ashley. Ash had been the straight-talking, hard-drinking heart of the ship. She would have blasted right through all this Cerberus cloak-and-dagger bullshit with her foul mouth and her shotgun.
She missed Pressley, too. And Adams. Kaidan. Tali. Wrex. Her crack team of mismatched misfits and professionals, devoted to a single, shared goal.
She missed Saren. As desperate and gut-wrenching as it had been, always running two steps behind the cybernetic Spectre, trying to puzzle out his next move, to close the distance between them before the galaxy collapsed under the weight of the Reaper fleet— she'd known exactly what she was up against, and what she had to do. They had looked each other in the eyes, said their pieces, and drawn their guns.
He had been terrifying. Infuriating. Cruel. But he'd been honest.
A warm breeze blew through the terminal, carrying the sound of Lawson's laughter across the distance. Shepard picked at the label on her bottle with her fingernails.
Funny how things had changed. She was still running two steps behind, trying to put the pieces together, but now she had to watch her allies even more carefully than her enemies.
Cerberus had reached a smoky hand from the shadows of Akuze and ripped the world out from under her. But she'd survived. Her scars had healed, her heart had hardened. As she'd chased Saren across the galaxy, she'd stumbled across their paper trails, their leftover laboratories, their black ops atrocities. It had wrenched at her, but she couldn't afford to stay there and put an end to it. She'd just kicked back as hard as she could, and kept on running.
After it was all over, she'd been in no mood to celebrate. She'd walked out of the ashes of the Citadel with one arm limp and twisted, fresh scars on her face, murder on her mind. I'm coming for you next. Just wait.
Well, the Collectors came for her first. And now she owed Cerberus her life.
Shepard scowled and gouged at her beer label in earnest, peeling the wet paper away in long, jagged strips.
She owed them her ship. Her crew. Her colonists.
She owed them Joker. And Chakwas. And Garrus.
He'd have died in that hellhole without her. And for him, it would have stuck.
When she died, time seemed to— rewind. Exactly how far she went back varied from death to death. Little deaths, like stepping out before her shields fully recharged (like a moron) and getting nailed by one of Nassana Dantius's snipers (like she deserved), those only put her back about thirty seconds.
Shepard smiled, reminiscing. It'd almost been worth it, just to see Lawson's expression in the instant before everything went black. Partly horrified at the sight of Shepard's fragmented skull, partly pained at the failure of the mission. Partly revolted at the aerosolized mixture of blood and brain spraying onto her perfect face.
But mostly, Lawson had looked offended. Probably at the realization that she'd sunk years of her perfect life into resurrecting an idiot.
Little deaths meant little time skips. Bigger deaths, fiery and hellish deaths, like the Praetorian, like the YMIR— those picked her up and put her back by several minutes. Maybe four, maybe seven, it was hard to tell. Time flowed weirdly in combat.
Shepard wondered idly what it would take to rewind two years.
Probably something really spectacular.
Movement in the corner of her eye. Krios's hands shifted on top of the table. Thousands of tiny, jewel-like scales shimmered in the sunlight.
"...Perhaps Drell are not the only race that lapse into solipsism."
"What?" Shepard blinked at him. Bits of shredded beer label littered her side of the table. "Oh. Sorry. I spaced out. I'm being bad company."
"Not at all, Commander." A smile lightened his face. "I find silence refreshing. Considering how our acquaintance began, it was an unexpected pleasure."
Huh. Shepard tilted her head to one side, considering him.
Since she'd woken up, she'd been holding herself at a distance from her own life. Standoffish with her Cerberus squad, downright cold with EDI. Brusque to the crew. Like their uniforms would magically change color if she just looked away long enough.
It wasn't how she liked to operate. It wasn't like her.
She sure as hell wasn't Cerberus. But she wasn't Alliance, either, not anymore. They'd written her off. Her old team was gone. She had to accept that, and move forward.
So maybe it was time to pick up her old habits again. Make some rounds, get to know her people— Cerberus goons and all. Maybe she could let them get to know her too, a little. Maybe something good would come of it.
Maybe not. Either way, she'd survive. Either way, she had a safe harbor in Garrus.
But right here, right now, she had Thane Krios. Alien, unaffiliated. Compact and elegant, relaxed in his seat. His stillness reminded her of a coiled snake.
He practiced assassination as an art form, wandering the galaxy righting wrongs where he found them, and he asked for nothing from her in return. He wasn't even on Cerberus's payroll. I will work for you, Shepard. No charge.
And he was dying. That probably shouldn't count as a plus in her book, but, well— she was in a weird place right now.
"You're all right, Krios," she said again, surprised.
Maybe she could afford to get a little bit comfortable, after all.
He smiled.
There was one last item on her Illium agenda.
"I don't like it, Shepard." Garrus crossed his arms. "It sounds like that Justicar's making a lot of waves down there. Between the cops and the Eclipse sisters, everything could go to hell in an instant."
Shepard slid the ammunition block out of her SMG and squinted at it. "I know. Given my luck, I'm guessing shit's gonna start exploding the second I walk in the door."
He pointed a long, sharp finger at her. "Exactly why I should come. Without someone to yell at you, you'll walk right into the center of the blast zone."
"You are the best at yelling at me," she said mildly.
"If you'd stop trying to shield everyone with your squishy human body, I wouldn't have to do it."
She shot him an irritated look as she stole an oil rag from his work bench. "This Samara person is supposed to be a biotic powerhouse, even for an asari. If it all goes tits up and she tries to kill us, I want to have biotics guarding my back."
He made a low, annoyed-sounding rumble. "Fair enough."
She rubbed at a speck of grit on the gun's muzzle and gave her block slicer a once-over before jamming the ammo pack back home. He caught the oil rag out of the air when she threw it back to him.
"I'll take you out next time, and we can shoot everything that moves," she promised.
Garrus looked slightly cheered by that.
"And anyway, your intel was bad." She knocked a fist against her armored chest. "I'm not squishy."
He rewarded her with an amused flick of a mandible. "I might revise my opinion if you come back in one piece. Who are you taking?"
"Lawson and Krios."
"Not Jack?" He raised a plated brow. "What a shame. She's got such a way with people."
Shepard gave him her most withering look.
He leaned back against his console, unperturbed. "She'll be so disappointed to hear she's missing out on all the explosions."
"Only if you tell her, smartass." Shepard ran an eye over her SMG one last time, and snapped it into place at her side. "All right, I'm out. You're in charge. Try not to burn the ship down."
"No promises." He tilted his head. "Good luck, Shepard."
He escorted her to the battery doors, one hand brushing against her back. She smiled. It was a rather gentlemanly gesture, coming from a six and a half-foot bipedal raptor. With fangs.
"I would have picked Lawson and Krios, too," he said as she stepped out. "For what it's worth."
She looked up at him. His bandage was looking a little frayed around the edges. So was he. But he met her eyes steadily.
Old Garrus really was gone, wasn't he?
Her turian little brother had been scorched out of existence. In his place stood a battle-scarred stranger who challenged her, argued with her, offered tactical advice.
There was so much they hadn't talked about. She wanted to marvel aloud at how much he'd grown up while she wasn't looking. She wanted to let him know how important he was, to thank him for being her oasis of sanity on a ship full of spies. She wanted to tell him that he was right to be concerned for her, that she rarely even bothered with her shields anymore, that death was starting to become a comfortable habit.
Maybe she'd told him already, and that's why he was looking at her with that probing, worried intensity. It was hard to be sure. Her deaths had begun to tangle time and memory in knots.
Garrus Vakarian was dead. Long live Archangel, main gun and right hand.
She had no idea how to begin again with him. She was a soldier, after all. Fond of violence. Allergic to feelings.
She settled for slugging him one in the arm. "It's worth a lot, buddy. See you after the debrief."
Illium
The rust-red powder whispered over her nerves, struck sparks up her spine. Shepard laughed, a low, rolling sound of unrestrained pleasure.
Lawson dodged a sloppy but powerful Warp from an Eclipse vanguard, and shot her an alarmed glance. "Shepard, it's toxic. Get out of the dust!"
No way. This shit felt amazing. Her fingers were on fire. She had to test it out.
Besides. Even if she ended up dying in spasms on the floor, it's not like Lawson would remember it.
"Ashes to ashes," she murmured to herself. Her blood thrummed. She rose from her cover and flicked an experimental Throw at the Eclipse vanguard.
The asari flew across the room and hit the wall with a wet crunch. The body slid down and crumpled to the floor.
An engineer followed shortly in her wake. Two purple smears on the wall. Shepard grinned, her eyes alight with violet fire. Dust to dust.
"Shepard, I'm serious," Lawson yelled. "You may feel fine right now, but it's destroying you from the inside out!"
"I'll step out for air in a minute," she replied, unconcerned. "Krios, soften that one up." She pointed at a yellow-armored initiate, who flailed in panic as Krios's Warp shredded her barrier. Shepard wound up as if she were swinging a bat, and Threw. The merc streaked across the docking bay like a comet.
Yes. Her heartbeat throbbed inside her head. The glow wreathing her arms pulsed in and out with the beat. Again. Another.
"Damnit, Shepard!" Beads of sweat stood out on Lawson's porcelain forehead. "It took me eight months to stitch your nervous system back together. I went nearsighted from squinting at the bloody microscalpel. I am not going to let you burn out your brain with some trashy street drug!"
"You're nearsighted?" Shepard said, with interest. "I thought you were perfect."
Hmm. Actually, now that she thought about it, her vision was going a bit fuzzy around the edges. Maybe she was nearsighted too.
Lawson made a strangled noise. "Shepard, get out of the dust!"
Shepard just waved at her and turned away. She was fine. It didn't matter. She'd just do it again if she had to.
There was a flash of movement up ahead. An Eclipse Heavy trying to creep around a side door undetected. Krios saw it too and aimed his rifle, but Shepard signaled him to hold and raised her arm. A Warp field arced from her palm.
The Heavy gurgled as she disintegrated into lavender paste.
"...Kalahira guide them," Krios murmured, lowering his gun.
Shepard's bones hummed with bloody satisfaction. As she straightened up to look for fresh targets, Lawson leapt out and tackled her.
They slammed to the ground in a tangle of knees and elbows, tumbled and rolled out from under the cloud of dust. Shepard gasped in a lungful of clean air, but the stabbing pain in her ribs made her instantly regret it. For such a slender woman, Lawson hit like a sack of bricks.
"I'm starting to see what Vakarian was talking about," the other woman grumbled, extricating herself from Shepard's limbs.
Nrrgh. Shepard put a hand to her aching head. "Huh? Garrus said something to you?"
Lawson stood up and brushed ineffectually at the red powder coating her catsuit. "He was concerned about your recent behavior."
Shepard froze. "...What?"
"Recklessness. Risk-taking. He suggested your personality might have been compromised during the Lazarus project." Lawson frowned. "I find that highly improbable. You sailed past all our memory tests and behavioral benchmarks."
Shepard's hand slipped and fell back down to the floor.
She thought he trusted her. He thought she wasn't herself anymore. He'd gone to Lawson behind her back.
Her brain felt like knives. Now her heart did too.
"...That traitor," she whispered in utter disbelief.
Krios came over and reached out a hand. He drew her to her feet.
"You're jeopardizing the mission, Shepard," Lawson said stiffly. "He was right to come to me."
She stood stock-still, flooded with rage.
This— She couldn't even—
Her skull throbbed. It took effort to speak. "I. Am. Not. Jeopardizing the mission. I just cleared this room of hostiles in less than forty-five seconds. Neither of you has taken a bullet to your shields this entire time."
"Our safety is beside the point," Lawson said. "Yours isn't."
"Horseshit," said Shepard.
Lawson sputtered. "If you get yourself killed, there's nothing left! The entire mission hangs on you. You're the only one who can stop the Reap—"
"Miranda," Shepard said heavily. Lawson stopped and stared at her. "Do you really believe that?"
Krios blinked.
Lawson looked trapped.
"The Illusive Man believes in you," she said, finally. "I trust his judgment."
Shepard raised an eyebrow.
"That's good enough," Lawson snapped. "You don't need to worry about my loyalty, Shepard. I'll do my duty."
"Why did the Illusive Man resurrect me?" Shepard said.
"What? You know why. To fight the Rea—"
Shepard cut her off. "Why did it have to be me? Why did he need my memories and personality intact? Why does he think no one else in the galaxy can possibly do this job?"
Lawson looked like she couldn't tell if Shepard was being deliberately condescending, or just an idiot. "You'd already defeated Saren and Sovereign."
"Anyone could have done that." Shepard gestured at their blood-spattered surroundings. "Anyone could do this. There are plenty of other N7s. A lot of them have better combat ratings than I do. Higher commendations. More experience leading strike teams and special operations."
"That's not—" Lawson began, fuming.
"There's more than enough evidence on the Collectors to convince people they're a threat," Shepard continued. "It wouldn't be hard to seduce an N7 over to the cause, even for Cerberus. You could have anyone you wanted. So why me?"
"I don't know!" shouted Lawson, surprising them both. "I don't know why it had to be you, why we couldn't change anything, why we weren't allowed to install any safeguards. He insisted you be brought back exactly as you were, and allowed to do whatever you see fit!"
Shepard folded her arms, and sank back on one hip. "Cerberus murdered my entire unit on Akuze."
"What the hell does that have to do with anything? That was a rogue splinter group, we had no operational—"
"You've read my psych profiles backwards and forwards," Shepard interrupted again. Lawson seethed. "You know what all the reports said about me after that."
Lawson crossed her arms, visibly struggling for control. "Hypervigilance. Restricted emotional affect. Reduced sense of self-worth. Increased impulsiveness and aggression," she recited. "Classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor's guilt."
Shepard tilted her head. "I think they also noted that I lost any compunctions I may have had about putting myself in danger to protect my subordinates. That I do whatever it takes to carry out the mission. And that I look for unorthodox solutions to minimize loss of life."
Lawson grimaced, feeling the trap drawing closed around her. "Yes."
"...Wouldn't you say, then, that I'm acting exactly like myself?"
"You were getting high," Lawson spat.
Shepard flung out her arm, gestured at the bodies littering the perimeter. "Miranda. You know who I am. I don't do anything without a very good reason. There is too much at stake."
She stepped forward and got right in Lawson's face. Lawson's eyes narrowed, but she didn't budge.
"You brought me back exactly as I was. You know who I am, and what my limits are, better than anyone else. The only thing that's changed is now you're seeing it in person instead of on a datapad."
Lawson pressed her lips into a thin line.
Shepard stepped back. "The Illusive Man knows I hate him and everything he stands for. If I get the chance, I will kill him. He knows that, and he brought me back to fight the Reapers anyway, because he knows I will get it done."
She looked squarely into Miranda's eyes. "You believe in the Illusive Man. You can believe in me."
There was a long, fraught silence.
For half an instant, Shepard thought the operative might actually draw her gun.
Miranda let out her breath in a long sigh, and uncrossed her arms.
"Frankly, Shepard, I'm appalled." Miranda shook her head. "Did you really think that ridiculous circular logic would convince me to let you run around doing whatever you want?"
Shepard grinned. "That depends. Did it work?"
Miranda rolled her eyes and turned away.
Krios stood at her side, stoic and unreadable.
Well then. If she and Miranda weren't going to kill each other, it was time to get back to business. They had a shipping manifest to find.
"All right, people, I think we've done enough damage here. Move out."
The assassin and the operative fell into step behind her.
"Nice tackle, by the way," Shepard murmured, rubbing her sore ribs.
"I know," Miranda said.
As it turned out, Minagen X-3 was a lot less fun on the comedown. Shepard felt like someone had taken a branding iron to the back of her skull. Her sinuses were sandblasted raw.
But she wasn't the savior of the galaxy for nothing. She pushed the pain aside, shook out her arms. Counted off a beat. Then she leaned out and detonated her own Warp in a tricky one-two biotic punch.
A satisfying number of merc heads exploded in unison.
"Nice one," murmured Miranda.
Shepard grinned. Coming from her reserved and hyper-critical XO, that was a goddamn trophy.
She still didn't know how the hell she'd pulled it off with Miranda, but it felt good to have this small win under her belt. For all her lack of interpersonal graces, the woman was a formidable officer. Shepard actually kind of liked her, in a weird way. But then, she'd always had a weakness for stick-up-the-ass types.
The crack of a rifle interrupted her thoughts. Krios's bullet punctured the skull of an Eclipse engineer lurking behind a crate.
"All have gone to the sea," he whispered, and slipped the spent heat sink out into his waiting palm.
...It was such a pleasure to watch a professional at work. Shepard tried not to leer.
She ought to sit back and cool her heels for a while anyway, let her squad handle more of the action. She needed to keep the daredevil madness on a tighter leash. Partly out of respect for Miranda— she'd tortured her enough for today— but mostly out of rising guilt. Her dramatic speech earlier had been eighty-five percent bullshit.
Fulfilling the mission. Protecting civilians. Keeping her teammates alive and unharmed. Those were all paramount. She had been utterly sincere about that.
But when she'd stood in the center of the swirling red dust, breathing in deep, it hadn't been part of some genius plan to keep her squad out of the line of fire. She'd just wanted to have some fun, and didn't give a fuck if it killed her.
It wouldn't affect the mission one bit, after all. She had a free pass to screw around. All it cost her was her life.
So was she being irresponsible? Not really. Avoidant? Maybe. There was a lot to avoid. Cerberus. The Collectors. The Reapers. The Alliance.
Kaidan Alenko. Liara T'soni. Tali'Zorah vas Neema.
And now, she remembered with a sickening lurch, she had one more name to add to the list. Garrus Vakarian. The confrontation with Miranda had distracted her so much she'd almost forgotten how it started. Goddamnit.
In the distance, an Eclipse engineer slid around the wall and crouched down to fiddle with something behind a crate. Shepard reloaded her Carnifex and lined up a shot.
How dare he go behind her back to Cerberus?
Concerned about your behavior. Jeopardizing the mission.
Yeah, okay, fine. It wasn't unreasonable if he thought she might be crazy. She felt crazy, and she wasn't doing a great job keeping a lid on it. But he should have talked to her. He should have trusted her to listen. Not snuck around her back to pour poison in the ear of Operative fucking Lawson, Cerberus loyalist number one.
Accusations of instability were very, very serious. Shepard could be relieved of command. Confined to quarters. Forcibly medicated.
By Cerberus.
Shepard swallowed.
The engineer moved. Shepard squeezed the trigger, once, twice. Both went wide. Fuck.
How could he do this to her?
The merc stumbled and ran for cover. Shepard dragged biotic energy up through her raw, shaky nerves, and Threw. It was weak, barely enough to stagger the woman, but it worked. Krios's sniper round finished her off.
She'd thought he believed in her.
Even if there are wires holding parts of you together now, even if you've changed, I know it's still you.
She'd always believed in him.
When she lay wide awake at night in her too-big bed staring out into the blackness of space, surrounded by spy cameras, dependent on the good graces of a Cerberus AI to keep her room supplied with oxygen, it was him she thought about to keep the demons at bay. Her best and last friend. His warm, steady presence down in the battery radiated safety through the entire ship. But now—
Now—
Enemies everywhere.
She took a deep, rattling breath. She had to stay alive this time. She couldn't risk doing it over again. She couldn't risk this fragile truce with Miranda. It was barely more than a whisper. It was the only meaningful alliance she had left.
She had to stay alive to protect her mind. She had to be certain she would remember his betrayal, and repay it a thousandfold.
Absorbed in her thoughts, Shepard stepped through a side door and nearly tripped over a young, frightened-looking asari in Eclipse armor.
"Fucking christ!" Shepard yanked at her gun.
"I'm not one of them!" the asari yelped.
Miranda trained her pistol on the asari's forehead. "Your armor says otherwise."
"I haven't even fired my gun yet, I'm new, I'm not like them, I—"
Shepard put her hand to her head. For fuck's sake. She didn't have any spare brainpower to care about this. "Get out. Now."
"What? I mean— yes, ma'am. Thank you!" She scrambled past them and out the door.
"You showed her mercy," Krios said, surprised.
Miranda radiated distaste. "She's Eclipse. She didn't deserve it."
"It wasn't mercy," Shepard said flatly. "If people shoot at me, they die. If they're not shooting at me, then they're not my problem. Move out."
They continued their slow, methodical sweep through the Eclipse hideout. Krios watched her, his black eyes unreadable.
Shepard frowned at him. "What?"
"You're asleep," he said.
"What?" she said again. Had her translator glitched?
"Asleep. Disconnected." He made an abstract gesture with his hands. "Drell philosophers believe that the mind and body are independent entities. The mind is the judge that weighs evidence, decides the moral course of action. The body acts."
"Acts how? According to what?"
"Instinct. Impulse."
She raised an eyebrow. This had better not be his elaborately polite way of calling her an idiot.
"If the mind and body are connected, they work together, each informing the other. If not..." He brushed his fingers over the top of his rifle. "If the mind is asleep, the body does what it knows best. A body trained in combat follows its training."
"Why do you think I'm disconnected?"
"I couldn't speculate as to what caused it," he said, looking at her carefully. "But I know the signs very well. My mind has been disconnected for a long time."
Miranda made a skeptical noise, but refrained from further comment.
Shepard called a halt to hack into a bank terminal. Time to relieve Eclipse of some of their unwanted credits. Krios stood guard at her back.
"In many ways, it is easier to sleep," he murmured over his shoulder. "Your body becomes an instrument for the will of others. A loaded gun to be aimed and fired."
Her fingers flickered over the haptic keyboard, nailing segments of code into place. "...I'm not sure if I like this philosophy."
"It is relevant to my profession," he said. "And perhaps to yours."
"Aim and fire, huh?" She frowned down at her hands. "It'd sure be nice if that was all I had to think about."
"Undoubtedly true."
The terminal beeped. Six thousand credits for thirty seconds of work. Not bad.
She closed out the account, wiped all traces of her presence. "Do you suppose that's why the Justicars have their code? So they don't have to think?"
"Hmm," he said, and he sounded so much like Garrus for an instant that she stiffened with rage.
Keep it together. She had to stay alive so she would remember what he'd done. She had to come back in one piece so she could rip him apart for betraying her.
Later, they found the Eclipse sister's voicelog. The little asari gloated about popping a volus open like a grape.
Miranda arched an I-told-you-so eyebrow. Shepard ignored her, and transferred a copy of the recording to her omnitool. The asari hadn't shot at her. She had more important things to do.
She had to stay alive.
So then, of course, they walked right into a gunship.
Her biotics were shot to hell from overuse, her reflexes sluggish from a combination of dust hangover and emotional turmoil, and her shields fried from all the hits she'd been too slow to avoid.
Total shitshow. Shepard fired her pistol blindly around cover and hoped that Joker wasn't watching the feed from her helmet cam. He was probably the one person left in the universe who still thought she was kind of cool.
The gunship streaked overhead. For an instant of wild optimism she thought it might actually keep on flying, and leave.
Ah. No. It was dropping in a whole pack of FENRIS mechs to run her down on foot. Just to be extra helpful.
"Shepard!" shouted Miranda as she scrambled behind cover. "Fall back! They're going to be all over you in a second!"
"Fall back where?" She was pinned down in the middle of the bridge, behind a narrow stack shipping containers. Trust her to pick the least defensible position in the entire fucking shipyard. The gunship had already swooped back to the other side, so now she got to pick whether she would die over there with bullets, or over here with dogs.
Krios was better placed. He aimed, fired and reloaded in a steady rhythm, taking down one mech, then another, then another— until the gunship rose up humming like a hive of wasps, and a storm of bullets forced the assassin back down into cover.
The mechs were fast and strong and armored, and there were still way too many of them. The mob surrounded her, red eyes glaring, motors whining. She fired at them until her pistol began to smoke, struck out with biotically infused knees and elbows, crunched circuits and faceplates with her fists. Her amp screamed at the back of her skull.
Metal jaws clamped around her calf. She kicked and thrashed, grabbed desperately onto a container, her fingernails screeching against the steel. The dog hunkered down and began to pull.
"Commander!" Krios shouted, and blasted one more away with a Warp. "Hold on."
The gunship paused to reload. Its engine was deafening, a swarm of buzzing locusts. Miranda leapt out of cover and sprinted towards her, firing a Warp with one hand and her pistol in the other.
Miranda's bullets thudded into its armored body, but the dog bit down harder and kept pulling, dragging Shepard agonizing inch by inch out from the safety of her cover. She clawed at the ground, kicked at the dog's face, mustered up a desperate, wobbling Warp. She had to stay alive.
Krios's rifle round cleaved the mech's head in two. It fell and was immediately pushed aside by another, tugging at her ankle. She let go of her container, rammed the muzzle of her SMG against its faceplate and dumped bullets into its head, but the underpowered gun took too long to penetrate the mech's armored skull. It dragged her all the way out into the middle of the bridge before it collapsed, leaving her flat on her back, staring up at the belly of the gunship.
Internal mechanisms whirred and chunked into position. The gunship opened fire.
A stream of bullets drummed into the ground, beating a trail up to her body. It tore through her thigh, ripped across her abdomen, trailed up her chest, shredded her throat.
Remember, she thought fiercely, as her blood steamed in the cold open air, gushing from the wounds in her neck. Her head went dark. She was already dead but the swarm kept crawling upwards, digesting her.
Remember she screamed as her jaw shattered, the delicate bones of her cheeks and nose caved in, her eyes split open and bled down her face. You have to remember, so you can come back and kill him.