"We have a problem."

Shots burst over the radio. "Got enough of our own," Tazzik says.

"Vasir got a big round right through the chest."

Tazzik mumbles "Where the fuck is Cayde" under his breath before saying, "Is she dead?"

I look down at her—face is pale enough, but her chest keeps rising and falling. "Not yet."

"She should have medigel." An explosion fizzles over the radio.

"And where do I find medigel?" Another shot rings out above my head, cracking a display rifle in two. The stall I dragged Vasir behind is little more than a thick slab of metal more appropriate in a factory than a market—mercenaries.

"Utility compartment. Left thigh."

I prop her leg up on mine. A little rectangle juts out right where Tazzik said. When I don't find a proper way to open it, I just rip it off. "Sorry."

I grab what I assume to be the medigel—a little packet labeled 'Medigel'—and tear it open. "I have it. Now what?"

"Rub it over where she got shot," Tazzik says, losing his patience. Whether it's with whoever's attacking him or me I can't tell. Maybe both?

The medigel is like, well, a gel, but it almost seems to have a mind of its own in the pouch. Shaking off the thought of sentient goo I scoop up some with my hand and slaver it over the wound in Vasir's chest. Whatever gun that sniper has, I'd be happy betting that it's designed specifically to take out big, important things. Like vehicles and mechs, and of course Spectres in highly advanced combat armour.

Another round impacts the stall, and I can feel the force of it travel through the metal and into my back. Whoever's trying to kill us, they're really trying to kill us.
With the medigel applied, it's like the bleeding wound begins to travel back in time. It doesn't suck the blood back in, but it does the next best thing by slurping it up and, if I had to hazard a guess, use the organic components of the blood to fuel its own work—whatever the work is, I'm not exactly a woman of science. The point though, is that the wound began to close, and the harsh, scraping breathing coming from Vasir's helmet slowly softened into an almost peaceful sleep.

I say almost peaceful because we're being shot at.

"Alright I think she's stabilising."

"Good. Stay with her until she can move again."

I peek my head over the stall. Bad idea, because I nearly get my head blown up. "And be sitting ducks?"

"I don't know who these people are, or how they know who we are, but if Vasir is killed, or worse, captured, we're in deep shit." Something like the wet squelch of fist in face spurts over the radio.

"Why?"

After the fifth merc got an involuntary lobotomy the whole gaggle of shoppers decided it would be a good idea to hightail it off the plateau. Either with the intent of hiding in a hole like Drakam until the whole thing blows over, or to get their buddies and teach the ace shooter a lesson who the hell knows. Right now, though? It's just me, Vasir, and said ace shooter wanting nothing more than to mount our heads on a wall.

Why do they have to play the most dangerous game with me as the target? To be the hunter—now that's the life.

"Because," Tazzik yells an obscenity before continuing, "she and her omnitool has all the information on Hyushin."

"Oh. Can't the Shadow Broker, I don't know, purge all the information off her omnitool?"

"No. He trusts her too much." There's some baggage there, but now's hardly the time.

"And what if this sniper's friends come knocking like they have with you?" I pull my own rifle from my back. It's nothing special, but it's more than my peashooter.

"You can't die. Take advantage of that."

"That's your plan? One-woman attrition?"

"I'm a little busy here."

"Yeah well, don't die. You're not as special as me."

Tazzik only responds with a roar, a following, muffled explosion, and, "I'm gonna try and make my way back to you. Cayde's disappeared, and I don't know where the bastard went."

"Doesn't sound like Cayde."

Tazzik grumbles. "You don't know him."

"I kinda know him." Another crack, another chip in the stall.

"Just stay with Vasir."

Yeah, we'll see about that. I look her over—as soon as she's up and ready for action again she could take on a platoon with what she's running. She's a big girl—she'll be fine. Now that she's not bleeding to death, anyway.
I try and take an angle against our would-be assassin, but they're homed in like a goddamn hawk. Every time I peek out by the smallest sliver there's another thunderous crack against my ears and I have to scramble up next to the limp Vasir.

"You're a real bastard," I whisper.

"I could be of some help." Shepard appears in front of me—my ghost, not the dead soldier.

I freeze. "I may have forgotten you existed."

Shepard buzzes. "I figured."

"So, how could you help?"

"Well," she begins. "Being as small as I am, I'm quite gifted at recon." The smugness oozes off her like honey from a hive.

"And you can do the whole vanishing thing."

"That's dependent on my proximity to you."

I get an idea. The stall we're cowering behind isn't all the way up at the railing. It's a few columns down, courtesy of my own brilliant foresight that a synthetic wood stall wouldn't cut it against what's most likely an anti-materiel rifle. "How far can you go out?" I ask.

"Oh, a hundred metres, maybe. Any further and I'm shucked back into real space."

"And how far away is that sniper?"

Shepard shrugs. "Two hundred metres. Give or take ten or twenty."

"Well, you can't go knock him out, but you can still get over there without being seen."

The bastard's shot at us enough times I know the delay between each shot like the beating of my heart Only problem is the delay's short enough I can't orient myself for a shot. Rolling to the next stall over? Well, that shouldn't be a problem.
'Shouldn't' being the operative word. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

Bracing myself for an eviscerated spine and/or brain I bait another shot. When it misses, I bound over the top of the stall with a final look at Vasir and roll behind the next stall up. A second shot snags the end of my cloak and sends it billowing out like I'm a superhero.

I repeat the experience two more times, losing another chunk of fabric in the process, but I'm closer to the edge of the marketplace now and no worse for wear.

"Damn, I'm getting good."

A shot rips through the bottom of the stall and turns my leg the other way around with an accompanying performance from my spraying blood. I bleat out an uncouth expletive and drop on my side, my head perfectly lined up with the new hole in the stall.

"You prick," I say. My head gets blown off.

I pop back into existence next to the railing overlooking the plummeting drop into lower sections of Omega, a stall thicker than the one I died behind covering me.

"Wow," Shepard says. "That was easier than whatever you were doing."

"You're flippant at the worst times, you know that?"

She ignores me. "I can zip over there without him seeing. Watch."

Shepard vanishes. Ten seconds later she reappears halfway across the divide, zipping under walkways and shuttle stations. Another crack and I'm reminded why I shouldn't be poking my head out so brazenly.

"How're we looking?"

Shepard's voice buzzes in my ear. "Something disorienting is about to happen."

"Excuse-"

I'm cut off by a video feed appearing inside my helmet. Shepard's, presumably, if the whizzing through buildings and up elevator shafts is any indication.

"Oh," I say. "You've got good control."

"I'd hope so. This is basically the same as walking."

She flies up a set of stairs and comes out to the top floor of an unfinished hotel. Or whatever constitutes as a temporary place to sleep on Omega. Our shooter's holed up in a little dugout with dusty concrete pillars flanking him on either side. His rifle rests on an unfurnished ledge, and the top half of his face is covered in a cybernetic mask.

"This is our guy."

"Looks like a cosplayer."

"Yeah well, he's already killed you once."

"Point," I duck out of cover for a split second, baiting another shot, and in the delay I bring my rifle up and take my own. "Taken."

In Shepard's feed my shot plinks off the shooter's ledge. Near miss. He yanks his rifle into his arms and ducks out of the room. "He's relocating," Shepard says.

Shepard follows him, and as he moves throughout the floor a little waypoint appears on top of him. How handy. With free reign to align my shot I take my sweet time tracking him with the scope through the walls. He's going for a stairwell.

Right at the threshold of the stairwell I take my shot. He doesn't react.

"Oh, you bitch." Turns out my sniper rifle doesn't have the stopping power to go through that much material and find its way to the other side.

"He's going up."

"Of course he is."

As helpful as the waypoint is, it doesn't do much help when I can't shoot the man who's been successfully shooting me and Vasir for a good ten minutes already. I scurry over to the plateau's ledge and peer over. Yeah, the drop's still as sheer as it was the first time I looked, before this whole thing kicked off.

"How big of a drop could I survive, you think?"

Shepard doesn't even pause in her pursuit to say, "What?"

"It's a simple question."

Our sniper rockets up another set of stairs and barges through onto the top floor. Great.

"I don't know," Shepard says. "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," I say under my breath. I get a running start, and with an unnatural boost I catapult over the railing into the divide between the marketplace and the bustling club life.

For a moment—one, blissful moment—I'm an eagle soaring through the night sky ready to hunt its ill-fated prey, and return to the next to barf out dinner for my children. Wait, do eagles even do that? Regardless, my feet are running on air and my arms are wings. And then, they're not. And then I'm plummeting down a 200 foot drop towards the flat steel of the roof of a walkway, surreptitiously decorated by thin spires used for who-the-fuck knows what. I rush through the stale air that's probably mugged some poor sod and reach my arms out to grab hold of a fast approaching spire apex.

The sound I make when I collide with the spire is something along the lines of splat mixed in with an expletive. I've clutched one arm around the pole after smashing my face and chest against the cold steel, knocking the breath out of my lungs like Houdini's manslaughterer decided to punch me in the gut, too. The fingers of my dangling arm are splayed backwards ninety degrees, give or take a few, and the throbbing pain that shoots up into my brain reminds me of a night of drinking you're supposed to forget. A groan slithers its way out of my mouth, and I suck the spittle back into my mouth lest I want the inside of my mask to fill up.

"May have, uh, broken a few things."

"I heard," Shepard says in full monotone. "Now, get the hell down from there unless you want another bullet through your brain."

True to her word, our gunman's setting up again. How does he see through that mask? There aren't any eyeholes to speak of—actually, I don't even know if my mask has eyeholes. Oh well, it probably does.

"Elanus!"

"Right, right."

I begin to scamper down the spire a few feet at a time, but by the time the cyborg's eyeing through the scope again I'm only halfway down. "Shit," I say to myself, squeeze my eyes shut, and begin sliding down the rest of the way like an old timey firefighter.

"Get to cover," Shepard says, and when I get to the ground—the roof of a walkway—I dive behind a metal box. Air regulation, maybe?

Said dive leads to my broken fingers smashing into the metal floor. I hold them tight to my chest, moaning through the pain. "Can't you come heal me?"

"Too risky. He could see me."

"Oh, it's too risky for you, is it?"

"I can't come fix you, but I can distract him."

I stop squirming. A shot rocks the box I'm laying behind. "How?"

"Like I said I'm great for recon, but I'm also great for being a nuisance. Plus, I'm sure I have a zap in here somewhere."

"Well, don't die."

Shepard chuckles. "Wouldn't dream of it."

The feed cuts off, but over the comms there's the quick scurry of a pistol being drawn. That's my queue.

I flip over the box, heedless of the incessant pulsing in my fingers and chest and start sprinting across the top of the walkway. Shuttles and skycars careen overhead, and one or two are flying so low they manage to rattle the walkway like it's a suspension bridge. The club district paints a heady stream of fluorescent light across the world when I start getting close to it—already there's a party, probably filled to the brim with drugs, happening on the ground level under a sign that reads Sponsored by the Blue Suns.

A party sponsored by a mercenary company. Now I have seen it all.

Another scuffle peeps over the comms. "How are we doing?"

"A little busy!"

"Got it."

With one hand I scramble up to the ground level of the club district. The waypoint marks the cyborg at the tippy top of the building I'm standing under. Wonder if there's an elevator I can use?

I rush past a cornucopia of partygoers dressed to the nines in the most bedazzling neon lycra and hyper-revealing clothes into the foyer of the building, the bass-boosted music dimming only slightly when the front doors swing closed again. It's all locked down—still under construction—but there's still a turian passed out on a leather couch with a huge bottle tightly gripped in his hands, close to his chest like a baby.

When there are no elevators to kindly offer an express trip up to the top floor I barge into the stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. "You good?" I ask Shepard.

"Just get here!"

By the time I've ascended the final staircase I'm somehow more invigorated than I was before I started. Sure, fingers are still broken and it hurts to expel air from my lungs, but I'm paradoxically ready to tango with a rhinoceros.

"I'm here."

Shepard doesn't respond.

I pull out my pistol. "Shepard?"

The waypoint's gone. Oh, fuck.

I sprint through the unfinished halls of the top floor, one arm hanging limply from my side, swinging like a swingset whenever I swerve around corners, the other rigid like a log with pistol in hand.

"Shepard," I scream out.

I turn another corner and get a fist in the cheek for my troubles.

I sway on my feet before bringing the pistol up. I get a single shot off before it's kicked out of my hand and I'm shoved to the ground, face first. The wheeze that shoots out of my mouth belongs more on a dog's chew toy than a human woman. A foot falls onto my broken fingers. The howl the pain rips out of me is unbecoming of someone with the title of 'Guardian', if I have to be honest.

The cyborg flips me over, rears his clenched fist back for a punch, but instead of his gauntleted hand dropping on my face like hammer on anvil it meets my own, other unbroken hand and doesn't budge. For a split second we both freeze. His fist has little more force than that of a feather's. I smile underneath my helmet, pull him down to me and headbutt him right in his big, dumb, cyborg eyemask.

He collapses backwards with a grunt, little pieces of metal breaking off and showering me and the floor. I get to my feet and tackle him, ignoring the pain in my fingers. "What did you do to Shepard?" I'm squishing his face against the concrete floor, and he sputters a string of unintelligible garbles.

"What did you do?" I repeat.

"He did nothing."

I look up, and there's Shepard with a scratch on her shell.

"Oh," I say. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I had to keep quiet."

My grip on the cyborg loosens thanks to the incorrigible pain of my fingers, but I figure he's down for the count. "You could have helped. Maybe hit him on the head, like on the Citadel."

Shepard hushes quiet. "I was scared."

My anger deflates at her admission. "It's okay you floating light-"

Sword.

Sword through my abdomen.

Someone's screaming through clenched teeth and I'm confident that someone is me. I keel over on the ground clutching the wound. The wet schlick as the blade's extracted from my lower torso is the final deathknell, along with the gurgle that begins somewhere in the back of my throat.

Who the fuck uses a sword?

I can now firmly say I don't wish a sword in the intestines of my worst enemy, which may very well be the cyborg sprinting away in my increasingly hazy vision. Either way, the world turns dark and then I'm staring out the ex-sniper's nest towards the marketplace.

"Any way to track him?"

Shepard shrugs. "I could hack into the shoddy security systems these clubs have, but no promises. I think we have a bigger issue, though."

An unmarked dropship swoops down to the abandoned plateau. Soldiers in full body gear jump out, then, with great haste, return to the ship's bowels, a limp body in one of the soldier's arms.

Before I can radio Tazzik he radios me. "We have a problem."

"Yeah, we do."

"These aren't any regular mercs. This is Cerberus."

I curse myself before saying, "Well, Cerberus just took Vasir."