Chapter Text
The night was red.
Crimson light etched against the limbs of a dozen species. The blood rich heart of Omega writhed in lust to the electric pulse of Afterlife. The swell and sway of organic life the sum of still more desperate parts. Blue skin and silvered crests, sweat and tears twined indecipherable names the void black between indifferent stars. All bathed beating in the anonymous dark; lips and nail and forgotten sobriety, everything at once alive and asleep in the feverish dark.
It was no place for a child.
A small figure cut through through the hive; little feet in worn shoes. Each step measured and deliberate. Unknowing fingers brushed her; a small face in a scarlet hood.
Beneath her cowl, slate-grey eyes fixed on the Batavian silhouette leaned over in the furthest booth. He was a silhouette tilted toward the Asari peelers on display. An untouched Palaven Sunrise sat glistening at his hand, a cold blue cocktail named for the irradiated homeworld of the Turians. Quiet and cold, the code of this ill-met meeting.
She slid into the booth without a word. He didn't move his beetle-black stare from the azure bodies before him.
"The bouncers didn't give you a problem then."
“No,”
She leaned in, her weight balanced firmly on bony wrists.
“Krogans aren’t hard to bribe.”
She lifted her head. A ray of red ghosted across her rain-grey eyes beneath her hood.
"But fish are getting expensive these days. I'll need charge number for the advance."
The Batarian snorted a dry laugh, not breaking his gaze on the spectacle of bodies before him.
"What are you, an accountant? Fuck off, runner. It’s you who’ll be owing me for passage off this rock, not the other way around.”
Her reply forked at him with a spark of fire.
“That’s right. I’m a runner. So that makes me something of an expert in the commodities business, don’t it? I make it a point of being well informed.”
He snorted, breaking his glance to cast a his first glance at the small figure beside him. Small and underfed, she was little for her species. He calculated her weight, her dimensions, her value - immediately. His eyes at last lingered on her hood, trying to peer through the fabric at her alien strands of mammalian “hair”.
“Talk back like that to a benefactor where you’re going, and you might get your tongue taken out. Let me be clear: I don’t give a single fuck about your incidentals on the way here. You’ll be paid in gem, like all the rest.”
She held her gaze on him. It gave him pause, unyielding and strange against her youth; after a long silence he shifted. It was a piercing stare that weighed more than the handful of years.
"…What's your cut?"
The many-eyed alien chuckled at her naivety, eyeing her hard.
"That depends entirely on you. It’s as they say, performance-based compensation. One-time jobs only go so far…But snatch some well-heeled-regulars? That’s where’s the money is…Human girls are especially hard to come by, so curb that attitude and with some work and PR in the right circles and well… you might be fought over."
He turned to face her, setting all four of his glinting black eyes on her as his mouth split into a sharp yellow smirk. She watched the way his skin folded near his sets of eyes for the first time that evening. It was the first time he spoke with anything approaching joy.
"You would be amazed at what certain Volus would pay even for a common blue ass, let alone something exotic. Young. Fortune will undoubtedly be yours, even with my fee…That is if we can start a bidding war….You will be examined, you are aware.”
“I know.”
He smiled unfalteringly, the strobing light glancing off his offset teeth as he considered his words. She did not shift her eyes. Deep in her clothes, a blue stone pained her, its hard cut facets pressing against her chest, reminding her steady her breathing.
"Now," he remarked, bouncing both palms on the table, "What say you we drink to your new life?"
“50,000?”
“50,000.”
His eyes flicked from her unlined face to the valuable shade of her hair - their species most exotic feature.
“Red hair and youthful. Ideal in this business, Ms. 'I’m in the commodities business'." He leaned in and smiled so wide he could see the platinum caps on his teeth.
“You’re about to be the commodities business, my dear.”
His four jet-dark eyes passed again to her hair. He suddenly reached out and grasped a few strands, pinching them beneath his fingers, producing a small eyepiece and zooming in to view the color in high fidelity.
“If I find out this is dyed, you will be sorry.”
She didn’t move a millimeter, though he was inches from her face. His foul breath steamed her nose.
“It’s not. Are you finished.” she asked, more threat than question.
“Listen, and this does concern your immediate wealth, my dear. All I’m saying is that the type of people that are into this….market, well, they like what you’ve got.”
His eyes flicked darkly over her.
“...Certain well connected Salarians are particular about-” He looked back at her hair again, rolling over it from root to tip, surveying. She could practically see him counting the credits in his mind.
“.... genetic rarities. Don’t be shocked if they ask you for a sample of that. Don’t you dare give it away for free.”
A long silence lingered, stretching on, until subtly she broke. The Batavian watched her pull her arms into a cross at her chest. Her eyes went to a better place as the music beat in the conspiracy between them.
He turned his head, caught the eye of the bartender adjacent to them, one of his kin that he knew only too well, and nodded very quickly. Across the distance, practiced hands began to move with the finespun effort to fix the second drink with just a slip of something more.
The trafficker interlaced his fingers, drinking her in as she sat still as stone, determined to keep her glance clean of his.
"So what’s your sad story? Running not paying the debts like they promised?”
She continued to glare at the dancers. The beat dropped low and tense. She an asari dripping in glittering stones climb into an enormous cocktail glass. A tall turian woman stood beside her, statuesque and beautiful, wearing only paint and a jeweled mask cut from rows of clinking obsidian. She watched the turian pour champagne down the asari's breasts before a crowd of stone-faced salarians, wordlessly offering up tips for more while one dutifully took notes, his hand a whir of up and down. A small group of male turian officers on shore leave lurked off to the side, mesmerized in barely concealed flushes of blue.
Her drink seemed to appear on the table. The Batarian wrapped his fingers wryly around his glass without breaking his tensed stare with the young human, his lips still dancing in that awful smile. At last she said, her eyes lost in the sapphire blue glass,
“I’m tired of wanting things I can’t have.”
He chuckled acidly, raising his glass as he drank, watching her minutely.
“To a new day."
She rolled his words in her mind, looking past the bar, beyond the writhing dance floor, through the window, past the atmosphere less haze, all the way to a far-flung yellow star.
She tilted her glass and drank.
Her small face flushed first with extreme heat, then quickly were overcome with paralyzing cold. She wavered in her seat, hands sluggishly reaching to steady herself amidst the spinning, blurred vestiges of her already fading faculties. The drug acted instantly. Mercilessly.
He moved with fluid quickness not expected for his size, catching her before she collapsed on the glass. Her kind bruised quickly, he thought with a stab of panic as he looked back to the bartender, nodding as slithered away from his post. Her flesh was worth more unmarked.
Reality returned in a supine fog.
She needed only to taste the air to know she was no longer in Afterlife. Daring not to open her eyes, she listened without movement, drawing a map with her mind.
Oily fabric beneath her. All around the harmonic purr of a corvette-class engine. The thick, oily scent of organic filth and reconstituted oxygen. A shifting ruddy light gliding over her left eyelid from what could only be a small observation window. She sensed no bindings. They had expected her to have a lower tolerance. If death was not nearly a certainly, she could have smiled at that.
A satisfied, bragging alien voice, seven meters away, the vibrations of his words cut by what sounded like a thin steel plate wall. He was pacing, distracted, excitedly recounting the details of his quarry to a voice in the comm unit housed the next partition. She lay still, mastering herself through breath, each lungful cleansing her gut of fear and her mind of doubt.
This is it. She heard herself say, the stone still hidden in her breast just above her sternum.
Focus. Quiet...quiet your mind. Breathe.
Count.
…Ten.
The beating drum of her heart rendered to a controlled metronome. She focused, listening to the whisper of her blood. This would call for a very specific rhythm.
Nine...
Her eyelashes parted a millimeter. She followed the position of her captor through the wall in the eye of her mind.
Eight….
She made the movement in a soundless slip of skin and sheet.
Seven….Six….
"You're going to lose your mind Kharn. I know, I know, I can't believe it either...
Five….
“Yes, as Human as they come…small… pure as Noverian snow…Red hair...”
Four…
“No, no it’s clearly real - yes, you idiot I know they are practically bred-out. That’s the point-“
Three…
“-oOf course it’s a couple of Salarians, who else? ...A couple of politicians and a doctor…there were a few Volus in the mix, there always are…”
Two.
“- you fucking kidding me? You think I would waste this on some krogan? Those smooth-brained monsters render her unusable!-“
One.
“ Listen…it’s taken care of. We’re going to be very rich my friend. Very, very rich… get your laundry ready. If this goes right, were going to start a bidding war you haven’t see since - "
But when he rounded the corner, his yellow smile slid off straight off his face.
The cage was empty.
"Let me call you back."
He rapped his omnitool off almost violently, snapping off the transmission. The warm orange haze of its given light died.
His eyes flicked back and forth over the void where his retirement had been as a growing dread crept into his veins.
He knew he set her down here, drugged and unmoving. His four eyes blazed, searching, brows furrowed, nostrils flared – he whipped his head this way and that, yet he remained rooted to where he stood in the darkened room.
The girl had vanished.
He blinked all of his eyes and shook his head trying to knock sense into it. He looked again and yet his eyes did not betray him. He crossed the room, his boots rapping, his expression contorted into and in a flash he stormed to the cot, reaching.
THWACK.
Blinding pain – the ceiling rushing away – falling and clatter. He boomed to the ground, leg crumpled and his head smashed into the brushed steel floor with a clang. Stunned, he tried to stand but only one leg worked - in numb shock, he looked down to blood flowing from his leg. He couldn't move, he couldn't move - and like an animal he let out a scream in bloodcurdling fear ripening to agony as he realized he couldn’t move his leg below the knee to stand, blood pouring in a geyser out of his ankle.
He turned his head in abject horror. Beneath the platform of the cot came a small voice, but all he could see was the flash of a knife and a gunbarrel in his eyes.
"Wait – NO!"
Her finger fired.
At point blank range, the Stiletto X detonated the back of his skull in a firework of gore. The blown-out remainder of his head hit the floor like a dropped stone, painting the deck in a splay crimson.
She tucked the still hot gun into her waist, ignoring the sear to clawing her through a warm tide of Batarian blood.
In a flurry of movement, she flipped his still pliant corpse over, grabbed his arm, and ripped off his omnitool. Her small hands snaked to search him deftly, lifting identification, credits, a picture of a mistress, a small vial of contraband drugs, a ring. All valuable, all useful.
From a hidden pocket, she extracted a small nondescript hacking device and unfolded it until its metal prongs were revealed, marrying it to a data port tucked into his omnitool.
The jail broken omnitool fit her small forearm poorly, but it worked. She crossed the room, rounding the partition to his personal counsel – working as fast as her hands could move she cobbled together a rudimentary bio-scan of the remaining partitions of the tiny vessel. Only two more slavers, Batarians again, in the cockpit. In normal circumstances, they would have heard the gunshot. Fatefully, the traffickers had sound-proofed their holding cells to silence the screaming.
The girl leaned back and glanced out of the window, and watched the rust-colored leviathan of Omega sliding away as the ship took relative altitude. Pulling her hood back over her hair, she scanned the ship's simple layout once more, took a sharp breath, wiped the blood from her trigger finger on her clothes, raised her pistol, and walked briskly out the bulkhead doors that opened to the next cycle of her life.
The slavers were dead before they turned around, two point-blank shots and a cockpit full of blood. She kicked the pilot out of his seat, his body collapsing wetly to the floor. She took the ship’s controls in her hands, still warm from his touch. The metal beneath her fingers hummed to life, hot and full of promise. She had flown before, but this time, felt different. This time was different.
She turn the ship away from Omega, vowing naively never to return, plotting a frenzied course out of the Attican Traverse as fast as she couldn’t. She thought for certain for the hundredth time she would die as she blasted the ship through the mass relay, barely knowing the controls.
She held on tight, unable to hold back a burning flood of tears when FTL field before her seemed to pause into infinity. All at once, in a flare of fire, it swept over her as the ship jumped past light itself in a baptism of blinding white, then perfect black.
She flew to Sol on stolen wings, her system, marked by the rings of Saturn and the small sun that shone on the closest thing she could call a home.
It was already April. Her birthday was coming soon. She was almost 17.
By the time the hour struck her seventeenth year, she would eject the bodies and guide the ship to the first Alliance base she could find to her only remaining option. Nothing would stop her.
Not this time.
She decided in that moment, as the star fields blurred in the endlessness before her, she would take back the name she left behind. The batarian was right, she thought. It was a new beginning after all.
Shepard sank deeper into a seat not built for her anatomy, barely feeling it. She took a moment to acknowledge the scent of stinging blood; accepting it. Sitting with it. She stared at the blood beneath her, caught in questions on the calculus of progress.
At last she owned her eyes to the expanse of space before her, searching infinity for a candle. Though she could not see it with her eyes, and her mind grasped at broken ends of slipping logic, at last the only answer came sure and certain as the beating of her heart.
Somewhere a new day was breaking, and with it, a familiar sun soaring in dawn.