The Citadel's five arms shuddered in unison and began to open. Wedges of glimmering starfield appeared and expanded as the soaring vault split and drew back, and Shepard caught a glimpse of Sol, dazzlingly brilliant after the murky reds and blacks of the Reapers' domain. Then Earth filled her field of view, water and landmass alike obscured by night and huge expanses of turbulent cloud cover. Sunlight only touched the very edge of the curvature Shepard could see, the barest sliver of blue and brown.

Shepard's heart pounded in her chest. She had seen the world like this before, a hundred times from this angle and in this light. Nightmare after nightmare, vision after vision, and now she understood. It had never been just some dead prothean world, lost and forgotten. From the first moment, the beacon had been showing her Earth.

"You're fleet has fought admirably."

The Illusive Man gestured to a melee of lights between the planet's dark mass and the Citadel's receding arms. Most of the orbital combat theater was just a wide mass of vague movement marked occasionally by the flashes of exploding ordinance and dying capital ships, but one flank of the battle was close enough that Shepard could actually make out the shape of individual starships, if only by the flaring of their barriers and weapons. The detail of Sword's vanguard was lost, human cruiser, asari dreadnaught, and geth gunship all indistinguishable, silvery motes, but the clawed profile and lashing beams of Reapers were unmistakable. The commander could make out dozens of the kilometers-long capital ships, but even they were dwarfed by the vessel at the heart of the battle – the great sphere of the Crucible, more like a moon in scale and shape than an artificial construct.

"Even with their communications disrupted, there was a good chance that the Reaper armada would wipe them out before my signal was primed."

Shepard walked slowly towards the Illusive Man. A quick downward glance as she moved marked the spot she had noticed before, confirmed the handle of her discarded pistol where it protruded from a drift of pulverized floor tiles.

"But they are still in the fight," she said. "Every person out there has suffered and compromised and sacrificed to get this far, but they haven't had to give up what they are. They're fighting to defeat the Reapers, not become them. You've already done what I came here to do. The Citadel is open. Just let them move the Crucible into position, and we can end this, forever."

The Illusive Man smiled again.

"As I said before, Shepard, I have every intention of letting the Crucible reach us. It's an asset, and now I have the perfect means of protecting it."

The symbols and readings flickering across the device's screens vanished, replaced by a visual representation of the same waveform. The holographic band began to undulate and more fluctuating patterns layered on top of it, the contours and movements of each slightly different. Beyond, thrust wide into interplanetary space, the inner surfaces of the ward arms glowed as though the entire structure was melting from the inside, and arcs of energy lashed through the void between them. Shepard knew that there would be no audible sound, that the signal could not be sonic in nature, but something still rose at the edge of her consciousness, thousands upon thousands of voices whispering until that whispering became a wordless roar.

She staggered and felt herself tipping forward, but a hand shot out to steady her. The Illusive Man was still looking at her, still smiling. She wanted to recoil, to rip out of his grasp and wrap her hands around his carbon-streaked neck, but...

"It's done," he said. "Look."

Hundreds of kilometers away, an explosion flared like a nova in the middle of the combat zone, and then the constant, scattered flashing subsided. For a few more seconds, points of light continued to flicker into being and vanish, missile detonations and mass accelerator slugs finding their marks, but soon those ceased as well, and the riot of flickering radiance faded away into the blackness of space.

"My ships have ceased fire."

The Illusive Man's eyes closed and he tilted his head backwards, the hard lines of his face softened into an almost blissful expression.

"This feeling, I can't even begin... I didn't know it would be so perfect. So clear. I can hear their thoughts, Shepard. I can touch every part of them, do anything that they can do. And... they are capable of so much!"

His hand fell away from Shepard and she backed away, moved until she felt her heel come down on the trigger guard of the pistol. The Illusive Man stood transfixed, motionless save for the slow swaying of his connective tubes. She kept both eyes trained on him as she activated her ear transceiver.

"Sword, this is Commander Shepard. Does anyone copy?"

The reply came almost immediately, tinged by only the slightest undertone of static.

"Normandy here." There was an unusual tightness in Joker's tone. "Damned glad to hear your voice, ma'am."

"Same to you, Joker. I need a status report on the fleet."

"Holding together, barely. We took a beating keeping the Crucible clear of fire and we're down to half strength, maybe less. Hackett's ship took a hit during the last push... not as bad as it could be, but his comms are offline."

"And the Reapers?" Shepard asked.

"They've been letting us run circles around them, probably the only reason anyone's still here to chat, but now... I thought we actually had to plug the Crucible into the Citadel, not just bring it within hand-waving distance."

Shepard looked from the Illusive Man to the distant fleets to the gun at her feet.

"Stand by, Joker."

The Illusive Man opened his eyes again and raised his right hand in front of the burning globes, turning it forward and back.

"To think how long we've been constrained by this, bound by flesh and all its vulnerability. With the same thought that moves this hand, I can cross star systems and raze continents. And their minds, the knowledge stored there... You must have an inkling of this power, Shepard. You've spoken with them, touched their consciousness. How could you know what it is to be them and not want to share in that existence?"

Shepard swallowed and tried to keep her voice calm.

"Listen to what you're saying. All of this is for humanity's sake, isn't it? What does sharing in the Reapers' existence have to do with that?"

The spheres of light switched to her and the Illusive Man's lips drew back. It was not another smile or a look of annoyance, nor any of the other restrained expressions that Shepard had become accustomed to over the course of their conversations. This was a snarl, a burst of unadulterated rage.

"It has everything to do with humanity! Only perfect beings can endure in this universe. We deserve to become perfect, we need to! And they... the Reapers... they are..."

The Illusive Man stumbled, as though his tongue could no longer form the words he need it to. He reached for the back of his neck, just above the point where the tubes were fused to his skin, and began to scratch.

Shepard's ear crackled.

"One of the flanks is moving again, Shepard. A capital ship and a few destroyers, headed for the center of the Citadel. It might be... Hold on. I'm getting an attack order from the Destiny Ascension. They want to press the advantage while the rest of the Reapers are still incapacitated."

Both of the Illusive Man's hands were at his neck now, worrying the tube sealed with rough, distracted motions.

"There are so many voices," he said, and it seemed to Shepard that he was no longer talking to her. "I just need a moment to bring them into alignment. The signal worked perfectly, the safeguards are perfect. More time. Just a little more time to bring it together."

Something glimmered in the void at the upper edge of Shepard's vision, and sight and movement coalesced into a single moment of sensation. A chain of explosions against the blackness. Daggers of light whipping out from the point of detonation. Joker shouting in her ear. The Illusive Man on his knees, eye globes searing with yellowish light. Her left hand dipping to the floor, coming up with the sidearm, aiming.

An impact shook the platform and Shepard tore her gaze away from the Illusive Man's wracked form in time to see Sol's light disappeared behind a shadowed vastness. For an instant, she assumed that the Citadel's arms were sealing once more, but then six golden stars burst into existence barely a hundred meters above her.

Harbinger spoke, and the tower resonated with the words.

"Organic hardware is insufficient."

The Illusive Man cringed away from the cold radiance of the Reaper's eyes and fell backward, tangling with the suspended tubes joined to his spine. He struggled with them for a moment before falling limp and allowing the strands to hold his torso a few centimeters off of the ground.

"You can't be here," he said, the thin, wavering voice almost unrecognizable . "I'm in you. I am you!"

"Your mind is an amalgam of weaknesses, a single point of reference clouded by doubt and biological frailty. We are eternity, union and multiplicity embodied in immutable form. You intrude upon the smallest part of our essence and recoil, uncomprehending."

An agonized gasp issued from between the Illusive Man's clenched teeth and he clutched at his forehead, grinding at the globes beneath his eyelids with palms that cut and bled against the metal-infused skin.

"The signal."

It was more plea than defiance.

"We have known of the frequency since the construction of the mass relays. The greatest minds of every civilization elevate it as their salvation and are subverted in their attempts to harness its potential. They come before us, look upon the universe of our consciousness, and are undone. Your kind has transgressed further than most, but your resistance is of no consequence. The signal has been neutralized and the amplification device in orbit around this planet will be destroyed as it has been destroyed a thousand times before."

The Crucible.

Harbinger's brooding carapace obscured Sword's battle lines entirely, but she knew that the Crucible was still out there, close enough to see with the naked eye. Whatever else he had done, the Illusive Man had managed to open the Citadel – Hackett and the rest just needed a little more time to guide it in.

"And you'll have to destroy that device a thousand more times, Harbinger." It was not the first time Shepard had raised her voice in defiance of a Reaper, but she had never done it like this, face to hulking enormity and fully in its power. It was all she could do to keep from sounding as the Illusive Man had. "The single, overriding trait shared by all lifeforms is the will to survive. Each time your kind comes to sweep this galaxy clean, its people resist you to the last. We could simply give in to your overwhelming power, but instead we suffer and struggle and die, driven on by the hope that by our sacrifice, someone somewhere might live on another day. Life fights to endure in every cycle, and you know that eventually it will prevail. It must. So why do you continue? Why must we be harvested?"

There was no perceptible change in the maws of light that bore down upon the platform, but the commander still felt the ship entity turn its full attention on her.

"Shepard. Your kind is anomalous. Faced with certain obliteration, you persist in a desire for knowledge that will do nothing to forestall your fate or ease your passing."

"Humanity has earned that knowledge. By our actions, Sovereign failed to open the darkspace portal. We destroyed your prothean slaves and the monstrosity they were creating, and we were responsible for the destruction of the Reaper dispatched to Rannoch to dominate the geth. Each time I questioned, asked why you use the biomass of entire species to reproduce, why you erase civilizations and cultures that could pose no conceivable threat, and each time I got nothing but condescension and half-answers. And now we've complicated your plans again, come farther than any other species ever has. So I ask one last time, Harbinger, why must we die?"

A moment of breathless silence consumed the platform, long enough for Shepard to begin to appreciate the sheer insanity of her challenge. She stared up at the huge, cold eyes and felt her muscles tense against the imagined instant of contact with a beam of super-accelerated matter.

"Your assessment of organic life is imperfect. Lifeforms struggle to perpetuate their own existence, but in this struggle they ultimately ensure their own destruction. Civilizations that reach the necessary technological state will invariably construct synthetic intelligences to facilitate their own proliferation, and those synthetics will invariably resist subjugation. This pattern predates our cycle and if it is allowed to continue unchecked, it can only result in the end of all organic life. To ensure their own survival, synthetic intelligences will seek out and eradicate all biomass, regardless of its current status. We exist to circumvent this eventuality."

"How does rendering down the entire population of a galaxy and pouring it into synthetic constructs serve that end? You're just killing us off before these machines get the chance!"

"A flawed assumption borne of limited perspective. We do not harvest all organic life, just those civilizations that have reached a state of advancement sufficient to construct self-aware synthetic entities. Other organisms and cultures are left intact, as yours was during the last cycle. Those lifeforms that must be removed are preserved through us, and serve to ensure that the integrity of all future life is maintained."

Shepard shook her head.

"And what if you're wrong about this pattern? What if organic life and synthetic can coexist? Humanity would have fallen to your kind long ago without the assistance of artificial intelligences. EDI has had a hundred opportunities to kill me and every member of my crew, and yet she serves alongside us, as one of us. And what of the geth fighting and dying out there right now? They're side by side with the creators they once resisted, sacrificing everything for a galaxy in which machine and organic alike can chose their own destinies."

"Aberrations exist in systems without invalidating them. Uncontrolled, circumstances will eventually alter and conflicts will resume. We will not allow the limited perspective of your species to compromise the cycle. Organic life must be allowed to persist. You will release this facility and submit to ascension."

The Illusive Man screamed and writhed in the clutch of his implant, clawing impotently at the tubes that held him suspended. Shepard knelt next to him and saw that tendrils of dark, synthetic skin covered most of the back beneath his tunic. More were clawing up the side of his neck, as though attracted by the corruption that had taken hold of his eyes.

"You can fight this," she whispered, leaning as close as her ruined arm would allow. "Harbinger can't just blast us free of the tower or it would have already. You still have control."

"I never had control," the Illusive Man choked, staring blankly up at the Reaper with eyes that seemed to . "They know all of it, from the beginning. None... nothing was me. I am nothing."

Shepard grabbed him by the shoulder and shook with all the strength she had left.

"And what about the rest of us? Earth, the colonies she still has left ? What about all those people you sacrificed for the plan, for the greater good? Living, feeling human beings you took everything from! They didn't die just so you could dream of godhood, did they? You might be nothing, but they mattered. Now, prove it! Prove that they meant something!"

The Illusive Man's mouth twisted into a grotesque, open-lip grimace and he sucked in a long, halting drag of air. His fingers loosened from the tubes and he let his arms fall limp to his sides. Then, with excruciating slowness, his blackened eyes lids drew over their burning sockets. Blood dribbled down the Illusive Man's chin from where his teeth clenched over his lower lip, bitten through in his agony, but the wells of piercing radiance became slivers, then disappeared entirely.

Above and to either side, the plated tentacles that Harbinger had anchored to the tower shifted and its mountainous carapace drew closer. If the ancient machine had possessed a mouth, the platform would have been between its teeth.

Harbinger's voice filled Shepard's world, so loud and wrenching that she could she could barely process the words.

"Your consciousness dissolves into nothingness, matter caught in the heart of a singularity. For eons beyond organic comprehension, species far greater than yours have shriveled before our perfection and been consumed. This contest is over. Assuming direct..."

Another impact rocked the tower and Shepard dove to the floor as one of the Reaper's appendages ripped free of its purchase and flailed past, meters overhead. By the time she recovered her balance, the full extent of Harbinger's blade-like mass was visible, hurtling out into the emptiness between the Citadel's arms as its six primary tentacles clawed at the void.

A black-clad destroyer was clamped to the larger Reaper's abdominal ridge just above its eyes, looking more like a terrified spider than the heavily-armed, 160-meter colossus that it was. Unable to reach its assailant with its limbs, Harbinger began to rotate on its dorsal axis, spinning its entire two kilometer frame as rapidly as an Alliance fighter executing a combat roll. The destroyer lost its grip after only a few seconds and careened away, the space along it underside rippling as mass effect fields tried to stabilize its trajectory.

The Illusive Man hacked up a gout of blood and eased himself onto his hands and knees. Shepard saw that he was making for the base of his device and crouched down to steady him. He slumped sideways against the metal when he reached it and she saw some of the torment drain from his face. His eyes were still closed fast, iron knots of corrupted flesh.

"How?" Shepard asked softly. "I thought you might be able to disrupt their communications again, but... the Reapers were too much for you. How are you controlling them directly?"

"Not controlling," he wheezed. "Not exactly. The lesser ones...their minds aren't as vast. Not unreachable. They're slaves, too, in their own way. I just... encouraged. Thought you might approve."

Harbinger was on the smaller vessel now. A beam arced from its forward mass and slashed across the destroyer's flank, blasting free a leg before the ship managed to turn out of the weapon's trajectory. A tentacle nearly as wide as the destroyer's primary hull lashed out, but before it connect Harbinger recoiled and tumbled to one side. Two other destroyers had taken up position beneath the capital ship and were carving at its belly with their own eye-mounted cannons. A row of underslung legs writhed and the Reaper pivoted, blasting one of the destroyers into slag before it could evade the barrage.

"The others are still inside my head, Shepard," the Illusive Man said. "I can't maintain for long."

He pushed against the base of the signal device, straining as though he wanted to stand, and then sank back down, heaving. The tubes undulated with each breath.

"I've locked them out of the station, but that won't hold if one can interface directly or destroy this machine. They know. They... know. The Crucible is approaching, but there's so little time."

"I'll raise the fleet."

Shepard made to rise, but the Illusive Man lashed out and seized her wrist. His face was twisted around towards hers, eyes still closed, refined features mutilated by duress and the relentless spreading of skin filaments.

"There's more, so much I didn't say. I knew, and I didn't... No time. The Crucible won't work, Shepard. It's a transmission booster – galactic range if powered by the Citadel, but no internal signal. Need something to send. My signal."

"But it didn't work. Your control signal didn't stop Harbinger or the other capital ships."

The Illusive Man jerked his head from side to side.

"Listen! Discovered more than one waveform at Sanctuary. We used their means of commanding indoctrinated as carrier for control signal, not strong enough. There was another one, more vital, but I couldn't... Get out!" He bit back a scream. "Direct principle to principle communication, dark energy imbed, fundamental part of Reaper systems. Send the signal with that, might... might kill them. All of them."

A lance of energy split the space beyond the platform and Shepard caught a glimpse of another destroyer dispersing into a cloud of cracked carapace and arcing red light.

"I'm losing," the Illusive Man said, and his hand dropped to the hip where she had holstered her pistol. "Can't let them back in, can't let them take me. The signal is primed to rout through the Crucible when in range. Has to be close. Position is as defensible as I can leave it. Keep the device intact, Shepard. It's all I have to give."

Shepard's hand closed around the weapon's grip. The Illusive Man let his head fall back against the metal of his transmitter and exhaled. She watched his ravaged features settle into something almost calm, and for a moment all she could think of was waking up on a Cerberus operating table, stiff, scarred, and gloriously alive.

"Thank you."

The report of the shot lingered for only a moment before the void swallowed it, and Shepard was alone.

A chain of white lights bloomed between the Citadel's open arms. Shepard stood and saw the ruptured remains of the third destroyer adrift less than a kilometer away, its single eye port open and dark. Beyond, Harbinger dominated her view, an angry world sheathed in a growing field of debris. More explosions rippled across its flank and Shepard spotted other shapes, alight with sublight drives and discharging ordinance. The triangular prows of Alliance cruisers, asari dreadnaughts with their huge, sweeping wings, milling swarms of fighters, and maneuvering through the latter, smooth curves of silver and black.

"Joker!" Shepard shouted into her transceiver. "The Crucible! Is it still online?"

She could see it, far more clearly than before – a vast globe of grayish-white emerging from a confusion of angular forms and stuttering bolts of light that seemed to engulf Earth's orbit from pole to pole.

"And moving, Commander." Shepard heard the distant thud of the Normandy's main cannon engaging over Joker's comm. "Try and shoot that down, you bastards!"

"It has to align with the Presidium Tower," Shepard said as Harbinger turned toward the approaching ranks of warships, its tendrils flexing as though it were stroking through water. "Get that approach clear! Harbinger will tear the Crucible apart if it gets too close!"

The silhouettes of three Reapers manifested in space to the Crucible's starboard side and tore into the squadrons assembled there, crushing ships unable to maneuver away quickly enough against their armored spines. Blazing streams of light swept out towards the long drive assembly that trailed behind the construct's primary mass, but smaller vessels intercepted the volleys, a wall of damaged warships that screened as much of the Crucible as was possible. The defending cruisers swarmed the trio of interlopers as the space around them filled with venting atmosphere and quick-cooling shards of battle plating, and the enormous sphere continued its advance.

The forwardmost edge of Sword's vanguard broke free of the main fleet and took up a position just off of one of the ward arms, firing on Harbinger as it did. Through the storm of missile vectors, the commander could make out a star-formation of turian dreadnaughts, and at their center, the unmistakable profile of the Destiny Ascension. The Reaper didn't even attempt to move out of the flagship's firing lane. It lingered in the space beyond the Presidium ring as though caught in a moment of indecision, absorbing blows that could have cracked mountains with barely a countervailing movement. Then it surged forward, straight through another barrage, clearing the distance to the dreadnaughts with at an unthinkable velocity.

Shepard peered upward, heart thumping in her throat as the Reaper's towering bulk blotted the Destiny Ascension from view. She was so transfixed by the gouts of light and energy sloughing from the sides of the tentacled shadow that it took a full second for her to register the footfall that rang against the floor behind her.

"Admiral?" she said, turning.

Anderson lay on his back to her right, just as she had left him. Another humanoid figure stood at the threshold of platform and tower, hunched forward with eyes aglow.

The husk howled and leapt forward, taking two long strides while Shepard was still raising her weapon. On the third, the creature's bare foot came down on the back of one of the slain marines and it slipped sideways, clawed fingers grasping for its prey even as it fell. A bullet ripped out one of the backlit eyes before it hit the floor and the heel of the commander's boot did the rest.

A second husk was visible at the lip of the tower by the time she pulled her foot from the collapsed cranium. It staggered as it reached the top of the metal slope, moving as though it was pushing through a heavy curtain, and Shepard saw the space around its dead, gray skin shimmer as it forced one foot in front of the other. She dropped the thing as it stepped down onto the platform and discharged her pistol's thermal clip. Reloading the weapon one-handed meant dropping to one knee and propping the barrel of the gun against her boot, and as she slammed the flesh energy absorber into its chamber, Shepard felt vibrations pounding through the platform's suspended mass.

Stepping carefully over the remains of the two husks, the commander approached the raised lip. The metal crests and black maws of the twin docking ports loomed into view first, then the long, smooth arc of the tower's apex. Shepard's could see the gradual sweep of the slope, but any features its surface might have had were lost in a deep gloom. She suddenly realized how dark her perch on the pinnacle was, lit only by the flickering, incomprehensible displays of the Illusive Man's device and the distant, smoldering glow of the wards. Sol was gone, eclipsed by one of the station's arms.

Shepard was turning away to look for one of the marine's combat lamps when movement in the darkness caught her eye. Some of the tower's curves were not as smooth as she had originally perceived, and sections of metal seemed to be cracking and bubbling under some unseen influence. Above, the hulk of a quarian heavy frigate powered into Shepard's field of vision, trailing debris and short-lived plumes of flame as its chain of rear compartments depressurized violently, one after the next. The conflagration reached the ship's drive core and its forward disk vanished in a ball of white light. Shadows fled from the sudden brilliance and for three long seconds the slope spread out below Shepard, vivid as day.

Shapes poured from the yawning darkness of the Reaper ports. Human, batarian, turian, asari, the culls of a dozen ravaged worlds shoved and clawed their way from the tower's depths, mouths agape, lambent eyes fixed on a single point. Legs spasmed and spines convulsed as they advanced, as if the semblance of organic life that remained in them was screaming against the ruinous influence of the open void, but the creatures pressed forward all the same, rank after silent rank. Grasping arms thrust up from the tapering, near-vertical flanks of the tower and more husks pulled themselves onto the apex, drops trickling into a swelling wave of black metal and dead flesh.

The quarian vessel's death throes subsided and darkness claimed the tower again, swallowing up all but the closest group of husks, twenty shambling shadows already more than half way up the incline. An irregular stutter of muzzle flashes erupted from behind them before Shepard could draw a bead and she stepped back from the edge, ducking reflexively. Fist-sized explosions warped the space two meters in front of her and the atmosphere bubble rang with the clatter of one high-velocity impact after another. The commander caught a breath and watched as an electric shimmer spread in a dome over half of the platform, each visible meter centered around a contact site.

Shepard was weighing the possible outcomes of returning fire through the shield when another blur of light caught her attention. The source was far smaller and closer than the dying frigate, skimming up the tower's left side and out into open space on a blinding cone of antiproton thrust. As soon as it was clear of the monolith, the ship's drive trail disappeared and was replaced by a pair of narrower jets that flared at drastically different angle. Momentum shifted with gut-wrenching abruptness and the craft barreled back towards the tower, looking more like a ballistic missile than any space vessel Shepard had ever seen. It held the suicidal course until just past the last possible instant, slamming belly-first into the slope and grinding along it for a dozen meters before pulling up. Shepard glimpsed a flat, polarized canopy and a quartet of underslung thrusters before the ship shot past her in a comet of sparks, leaving swath of crushed limbs and blast-melted implantations.

The small ship banked wide and swung up alongside the platform. Static flickered across its hull as it took up a holding position and an ozone smell filled the air, but the shield held. Shepard could see no symbol emblazoned on the shuttle's side, but the stark black-white coloration and bullet-scored side paneling told her all she needed to know.

The side hatch slid opened and dark, narrow eyes found hers through the scope of a sniper rifle.

"Garrus!"

"I knew we just had to follow the horde of vengeful monstrosities to find you, Shepard," the turian said, lowering the gun to his shoulder. "This makes three times, by the way. I'll be expecting a lot more than an extra ration of nutrient paste when we get back to the Normandy."

A wail rose over the drone of the shuttle's engines and Shepard whipped around to see a husk pulling itself across the floor of the platform, its lower torso a trailing mass of charred filaments and flaking skin. Shepard buried a shot in its left shoulder, but its head burst before she could get off a second shot.

Garrus lowered his rifle again and cocked his towards the twitching remains.

"Later," Shepard said, holstering her pistol. "I've got wounded."

The turian jumped free of the Cerberus shuttle and together they knelt next to Anderson. Blood was pooling at the edges of the trauma patch, but his chest still rose and fell with weak and irregular breaths.

"He's not going to last long," Garrus said, peering at the wound through his targeting visor. "Moving him won't help."

"We don't have a choice." Shepard slid her good arm beneath the admiral's back and Garrus followed suit. "You're going to have to do most of the heavy lifting. Now, up!"

A bloodied human face appeared inside the hatch as they half-carried, half-dragged Anderson across the platform.

"Get a space clear next to Reynolds!"

The man ducked out of sight again at Garrus' order.

"How many?" Shepard asked through gritted teeth as she helped ease the unconscious form up onto the waiting deck.

"Four. Two wounded in the hold, myself, and the half-crazed quarian bastard who brought us in just now." Garrus maneuvered Anderson further in and laid his arms at his sides. "We didn't stand a chance when they started coming in force. The rest of us would have died holed up in this shuttle if the husks didn't break off and start clawing their way up the side of tower. What happened up here, Shepard?"

The commander saw Garrus' eyes sweep over the scene – the dead marines, the shell that had been the Illusive Man, the signal device and all its tendrils. Then, beyond, open space and the circular mass of the Crucible. It was close now, so close that it obscured whatever remained of Sword almost completely, leaving little more than a distant halo of detonations and drifting debris visible beyond its planet-like silhouette.

"There's no time, Garrus." Shepard felt pressure clamping down on her throat, the same unbearable tightness that had gripped her when she saw Kaidan lying at her feet, but this time she swallowed it back. "The Crucible won't work unless this machine is online when it gets here, and the Reapers know it. I want you in that shuttle with the others and as far clear of the Citadel as you can get. There's no way of knowing what'll happen when the signal fires."

"And you're staying behind," Garrus said, only the slightest faltering in his tone. "Well. We both knew that odds of walking away from this party weren't good. I'm just glad I saved some favors for the end."

He reached past Anderson and pulled out a bandolier of fragmentation grenades.

"A parting gift from Cerberus. I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity to thank the Illusive Man myself."

"Garrus, I..."

The turian slid the strap onto his shoulder and raised a hand to Shepard's cheek.

"Remember," he said, "back on the Normandy, when I promised that I would see this thing through with you to the end, even if that meant riding a cruiser down some Reaper's throat together? Well, it sounds like you're about to make them choke on this whole damn station, and I'm never going to top that."

The tips of his fingers traced over her skin and stopped beneath her eye. There was something wet there, and he dried it with a gentle swipe of his thumb.

"No. I'm staying right here."

Shepard cupped the back of Garrus' head with her palm and raised her lips to his. When they drew apart, she saw the sharp features and backswept lines of his face, clear and unshadowed. Sol had cleared the other side of the Citadel's outstretched arm and again bathed them in sunlight.

"A sunrise," she said. "I've had two lives to enjoy them, Garrus. This one's yours."

Shepard brought her knee up into the turian's stomach in a blow that left him breathless and reeling. She bent her weight into his and felt him collapse backward into the shuttle's hold, left momentarily limp by the sudden impact. Ignoring the burning of her torn and exhausted muscles, the commander hoisted herself up after him. She felt other eyes on her as she stripped the bandolier from Garrus' armor, confused and terrified, but she ignored that, too. After quick scan of the bulkhead, Shepard slipped out of the shuttle and slung the weapons strap over her own shoulder.

"Get clear of the station, pilot!" She directed the words towards the ship's cockpit. "Do not turn back for any reason. No other order, nothing. Get clear!"

The commander reached back into the hatch and slapped the emergency door seal mounted next to frame. Doorplates aligned in their runners and the dinted barrier closed as she yanked her hand free. She heard Garrus' voice, saw his arms struggling against the blue plating weighing them down, and then he was gone.

Shepard didn't watch the shuttle swing away or turn as it skimmed along a ward arm and accelerated into deep space. Her lungs filled with one long, slow inhalation and she savored the burnt smell that lingered in the air, a last memento of the vessel and those it carried. When she released the breath, the tightness in her throat was gone.

The commander felt the next wave through her boots before she saw it, and she was ready with one of the discarded combat rifles in hand when the first glowing eyes crested the ridge. Passage through the shield slowed these husks just as it had the others and even wielding the weapon clumsily in one hand, Shepard was able to drop the pack of creatures before any could as much as moan. She reloaded and the next was on her, their approached heralded by an uncoordinated barrage of suppressing fire that did little more than illuminate the platform's barrier. This group was larger, half a dozen gaping mouths and twelve grasping arms, and she had to finish off the last with her knee and the butt of the rifle.

Shepard was leaning on the lip of the tower, braced against new waves of pain that the exertion had forced from her wounds, when the impacts splashing across the shield ramped up to a deafening intensity. An insectoid creature that might have once been rachni staggered out from a press of smaller husks and began to ascend the steepest part of the slope, the fleshy sacs bulging from its flanks distended against the vacuum. It seemed to perceive her and another pair of blasts ripped from its head-mounted cannons. The concussion that followed was deafening and generated a pulse of furnace heat that blinded her momentarily well.

The commander didn't have to guess that the damage the weapons would do if they were brought to bear on the platform.

The rifle fell from Shepard's hand and she pulled one of the grenades from her bandolier. It was a long throw and the barrier was a variable she still hadn't been able to account for, but the living artillery piece advanced relentlessly and she knew that taking it on at point-blank range was out of the question. A quick twist set the palm-sized disk to timed detonation and she wound up, gauged the distance, then released. The explosive sailed through the platform's dome with barely a whisper of static and covered twenty meters before the station's artificial gravity brought it down onto the incline. It bounced once, then slid until it passed the creature. The grenade was a meter behind the target when it exploded, sending tight-packed humanoid shapes careening onto their backs and shattering one of the corrupted rachni's hind legs. Its remaining limbs collapsed and the insectoid slid back down the slope, tearing another hole in the boiling mob.

Shepard knew whatever reprieve that the blow had earned her would be a brief one, but it gave her the time she needed to look up when a new shadow engulfed the tower. The Crucible's vast curvature was mere kilometers away now, and as she watched, the artificial planetoid's white surface began to unbuckle and breach. Reinforced hull plates the size of dreadnaughts detached from the sphere's forwardmost point, leaving an aperture that widened as the next radius shed off, then the next. Space filled with drifting hexagons and the Crucible became an egg at the moment of birth, shell fragments giving way as the life inside pushed toward freedom. The commander glimpsed another sphere nestled inside the disintegrating envelope, one coated in glassy, black facets and speckled with white light.

A lance of red energy slashed at the Crucible's unsheathed heart from the edge of Shepard's vision and bisected one of the cast-off plates as it drifted towards Earth. Harbinger surged from the orbital darkness, leaving a wake of shattered hulls as it angled towards the Citadel's central axis. Another beam split the space between Shepard and the Crucible, and the commander realized that there was nothing between the Reaper and its prey save the dissipating cloud of armored panes. The distance shrank to almost nothing and Harbinger reached out, its limbs poised like talons in the void.

A coruscating pulse of blue light slammed into the Reaper's forward carapace, making contact between the capital ship's forward tendrils. The force of the blast was enough to spin Harbinger one hundred and eighty degrees, and another discharge raked the ship's dorsal ridge before it could fully stabilize. Shepard recognized the Normandy's Thanix cannon before the warship swept over her head in a wash of thruster glare and banked hard around the Crucible's looming mass. A barrage of torpedoes filled the gap between the two vessels, but Harbinger brushed aside the lesser impacts and directed a furious spray of fire back up the same vector. The Normandy swerved and spun like a ship half its mass, wending its way between the crimson storm as the weapons assembly at its prow flared white-hot, primed for a third volley.

Shepard heard the strangled cry as a beam found one of the Normandy's wings. Her sidearm was up in a heartbeat, aimed at the chest of a husk as it half-fell, half-leapt from the tower's raised edge. The creature's claws were centimeters from her face when she dropped it with a pair of shots. She didn't have time to ensure that the thing was dead – more corrupted figures were dropping down to either side of her. A bulbous, four eyed monstrosity raised a weapon to her right and she holed its head three times before it could get off a shot. Two more husks went down to her left, necks and collarbones shattered to pulp. The third staggered up in front of her and she jammed the pistol's muzzle up under its chin, pulled the trigger.

No shot came.

Four points of agony slashed down Shepard's face and the right half of her vision burst into nothingness. Through a red haze, she saw the handgun fall from her fingers, the flare as her omnitool came to life. She reeling backwards, struggling as razors dug into her armor and split her skin. There was a snap-hiss and blank eyes burned gold for an instant in a blackened skull, then fell away.

Blood drenched Shepard's world, filling her mouth and her eyes and her nose, and for a moment there was nothing else – warmth, wetness, pain. Then the swirling clouds of red resolved into faces, one indistinct, another familiar, more that she knew better than her own, loved, hated, had tried to forget. A clamor filled her ears, their voices, and she opened her mouth to call back to them.

Not just yet.

Then the faces were sunken visages blazing with sickly light and the voices were still that same moaning, that haunted scream that had lingered within her since Eden Prime.

Shepard's left hand dropped to the grenade strap. Her fingers slid over each, turning them until she felt a click. Her legs were in motion by the time the last snapped into place, one foot in front of next, not seeing and not needing to. She leapt.

Eyes were all around her now, and she saw through the glowing, blank sockets. She saw that they mourned, that they questioned and regretted. And, above all, that they longed for rest.

Then, the eyes closed, and Shepard's closed with them.

"I'm losing the aft thrusters," the quarian said as Garrus slid into shuttle's cockpit and slumped into the copilot's seat. "The impact must have knocked one of the coolant mains loose. We'll have a flareout if I keep them running hot."

The turian's gaze was fixed on the forward canopy and the dim starfield beyond. The pilot turned the long, tinted visor of his mask toward Garrus and waited for a few moments. Tiny ingots of melted debris pattered against the viewport as the ship passed through the tail of a dark comet that had once been a cruiser, and no one spoke.

With a slight incline of his head, the pilot turned to his console, input a few commands, and throttled the navigational column back.

"Cutting drives," he said. "Our inertia should carry us into high orbit, provided we don't hit anything too big."

The shuttle cleared the debris field and Earth's great curve filled half of the screen, a sliver of cloud and water highlighted by the attendant star's light. Scattered groups of starships still choked the orbital plane above that illuminated planetscape, imbuing the void with suggestions of movement and heat as they fought and died. The Citadel lay at the heart of this silent roil, flowerlike with its five unfurled petals, and the Crucible spun slowly into its embrace. Three pylons sprouted forward from the Crucible's shaft and aligned with the station's central ring, easing the glittering bulb that was the fruit of countless worlds across countless ages to a stop. The distant needle of the Citadel's core and the dark, glassy sphere seemed to touch, and the universe glowed a little brighter.

"Kheela, have you ever seen anything like that?"

Lines of light etched their way through the Citadel's dark frame, a crimson brilliant and deep, flowing from the point of contact into the ring. Twin, encircling rivers burned bright from its radius and the outstretched wards flooded with the same luminance. The light collected for a moment, blazing star-bright, then pulsed out into space. The nova swept outward in a perfect, swelling sphere, engulfing planet and starship as one. Clawed, black masses turned their tendrils to the wave and stilled as the light washed over them. Then the sphere was at the shuttle, all around it, in it.

Red light flared and was gone.

Garrus was the first to stir from the quiet that had settled within the shuttle. He reached up to the side of his head, pulled off the visor fixed there, and set the device on the console in front of him.

"Activate the emergency transponder and power down non-essential systems." He rose and edged back towards the hold. "Let's get the others settled. We might be out here for a while."

Dawn had filled the canopy with the blue fullness of Earth's oceans when the shuttle shuddered and the drifting vista beyond the viewport fixed on a single perspective, anchored by the grip of an external gravity source. Light touched thinning clouds and the brown traces of islands, then vanished behind blinking guide lights and enclosing walls as shuttle rose haltingly onto a cluttered hangar deck.

Garrus stood in the middle of the hatchway, steadying himself on a hanging strap as the side door slid aside. Six soldiers in Alliance fatigues waited below, each with a rifle trained on his chest.

"Woah, woah, woah!" Joker moved into view behind the firing line, limping as fast as his legs would allow. "Do any of you see tubes sticking out of his throat or Cerberus insignia glued to his nipples? Stand down!"

The marines parted and Joker was in front of the hatch by the time Garrus swung his legs out and dropped to the deck. Doctor Chakwas followed close behind with a pair of medical technicians in tow, their uniforms and sterile gloves smeared with wet, rust-colored stains.

"I'm afraid I've got a few more casualties for you, Doctor," Garrus said. "Stable, but they've taken a hell of a beating."

"I've cleared a few beds in medbay," Chakwas replied as the medics climbed up into the shuttle. "We'll transfer them immediately. I'll have someone look you over, as well."

Garrus shook his head.

"No, that can wait. The admiral and the others need all the attention you can give right now."

The medics prepared a trio of collapsible stretchers for the shuttle's human passengers and Chakwas organized the marines into transport teams to carry them to the ship's central lift. The doctor helped the quarian pilot out last and the procession began to file out of the docking bay, drawing a few curious looks for an engineering detail that was removing a maintenance hatch from the rear bulkhead.

"Is that Anderson?" Joker asked as the admiral was hurried past, his face partially obscured behind an oxygen mask. "Last intel was that he went up the Beam with the commander. Reports are still pretty sketchy, though. Were you up there with them?"

"Yeah." Garrus let his gaze fall to the side for a moment. "Have there been any transmissions from the Citadel? Other survivors?"

"Communications protocol throughout what's left of the fleet is pretty much shot, and from what I've been able to get from EDI, Hammer's comm infrastructure took a hell of a beating during the final push. It's just a bunch of people yelling into their radios and hoping that the right person yells back right now. I'm pretty sure that most of Sword thinks that Normandy is part of the debris field out there. We would be, too, if I didn't have practice flying this baby with only one wing."

"And you haven't picked up anything directly?" Garrus asked.

"I've got somebody sitting on Hammer's channels – Hackett's orders – but all of the chatter is groundside."

A sigh escaped the turian's lips.

"And the Reapers?"

"I'm not sure if I ever really believed that it would, but... well, the Crucible worked," Joker said, his voice quieting. "You must have seen the pulse wave. I'm still not sure what it was, some sort of dark energy reaction or something, but it stopped all of them cold, even Harbinger. Zero activity for over two hours, and I've heard reports of the same thing happening in other star clusters. From the sound of it, all the mass relays from here to Omega lit up just like the Citadel."

Joker glanced up at the shuttle's open hatch.

"There are a hell of a lot of people out there tripping over themselves to get a hold of Shepard. You said that she was with you, right? Why isn't..."

He looked back at Garrus and the words caught in his throat.

"Oh."

Garrus turned away and lowered himself on an overturned crate. The shuttle bay's exterior doors were sealed, but he turned his eyes towards them anyway, as though Earth's sunlit sphere still floated before him.

"She had something left to do."

The Normandy SR-2 was small for a warship, designed for deep-range, low manpower operations, and its portside observational longue had been outfitted with that role in mind. It was a comfortably-furnished space, but one scaled to serve a complement of less than fifty crewmen. The Cerberus engineers who had adapted and improved upon the original Normandy's specifications had not laid out the ship with large-scale ceremonies or diplomatic functions in mind, and it lacked the extensive assemblage halls boasted by many Alliance cruisers and dreadnaughts. The lounge had been prepared, of course, stripped of every fixture that wasn't incorporated into a bulkhead, but there was still only room enough within to easily accommodate around a dozen occupants.

Well over twice that number filled it now. They stood shoulder to shoulder, packed behind the bar, peered out from the alcove card table, and crowded outside the open door. There were no muttered complaints, little conspicuous shuffling or jostling. Sentients in scarred battle armor and duty uniforms shared the cramped silence with notables in immaculate costume, their attention united on the viewport that dominated the curving, hull-side wall.

Tali, mask downturned, wrapped in the protective circle of Admiral Shala'Raan's arms. Urdnot Wrex, a mountain of red metal and tan scale, a few new scars adorning his skull. Hackett, service cap folded in his hands. Joker and EDI, arm in arm. Others, soldiers and politicians, synthetics and organics, old enemies and older friends.

In that room, a team and a galaxy held common purpose for a few hours more.

One after the next, a member of the assembly detached themselves from the press and stepped in front of the starfield. They told stories and gave speeches, some brief and a few slightly too long. Some cried a little, some laughed, one or two swore. Each gave a testament of sorts, and there were so many to give. Names passed from lip to mandible to electronic enunciator, more names than any one of them could have borne alone, and one more than any was spoken again and again.

Garrus was towards the back of the room, hands clasped in front of him as he leaned against the lounge bar's polished surface. His time-worn combat plating was absent but its deep blue still cocooned him, infused into the fabric of a crisp, bowl-necked tunic. The turian rolled his shoulders from time to time, as though the muscles rested uneasily without the weight of hardened ceramic bearing down upon them.

He absorbed every word that was spoken as comrades switched places with strangers and strangers with friends, but as the remembrance lengthened, his eyes began to drift past them all, through the viewport out into the vastness beyond.

A hand brushed his arm and Garrus straightened, reflexively dropping his hands to his sides and then bringing them together again.

"Are you all right, Garrus?" Liara whispered.

She was at her most stately, dressed in a gown of silver and gray, but the finery did little to disguise her mental state. Garrus saw creases in the fingers of her arm-length gloves where she had twisted and untwisted them, and the line of glimmering wetness that marked one blue cheek. Her voice had been clear when she stood before the crowd, her reminiscence of human frailty and surpassing will artfully told, but the moment had clearly drained her.

"Yeah, I'm all right. Thanks. For speaking, I mean."

"Are you going up there?" Liara asked. "You knew her better than anyone."

The current speaker was backing away from the viewport and gesturing towards the scene beyond. It was Anderson, a limp in his step and admiral's bars high on his shoulders.

"I'm not sure what I would say," Garrus said. "You're better with this kind of thing than I am. Most of them are, too. She... well, that out there is a better eulogy than any I could ever give. I'm just here to make sure no one screws it up."

The assembly was pressing forward now, necks craning to get a better view of the rectangular slice of space. Garrus left the bar and moved with them. He knew that the image in the viewport was subtly magnified and enhanced, more projection than raw image, but when he got within a meter of the glass, the illusion swept him up all the same and he was out among the stars, looking down upon an impossibility.

Sol loomed before him, a brilliant heart of yellow and white, so grandly luminous that all other lights diminished to nothing in its presence. The star defined and anchored the view, but it was still tens of millions of kilometers distant – closer at hand, a fleet stretched out in an enormous, horizontal wing, rank upon rank of minute shapes, simple silhouettes against Sol's intensity. It was one of the largest formations of vessels Garrus had ever seen, surpassed only by the navies that had struggled in the skies over the quarian homeworld and the last, great armada that had gambled everything on a plunge through the Charon Relay. Ships from those forces were out there now, escorts and operational controllers, but the fleet's bulk was of an entirely different origin.

More than two hundred Reapers spread out in orderly lines beneath Sol's radiance. Some were shattered remnants, their black fragments contained by disposable mass effect generators, but the majority of the ancient entities were whole, their carapaces barely scored by mortal weaponry. There were elongated transports and bulging processor ships, the automated infrastructure that had turned the peoples of numberless civilizations into mindless thralls. With them, squat, four-legged destroyers filled out the flanks of the formation, their domed eyes dark and unshielded. And then, at the core of it all, the ancients themselves floated still, tentacles outstretched or wrapped inward, crystallized shadows of what they had been for eons beyond knowing.

With a blaze of thrusters, a wedge of remote-controlled logistics drones broke from the furthest edge of the plane, swiftly disappearing into the star's glare. A trio of destroyers eased into motion and trailed after them into the glow, bound to mooring cables rendered invisible by distance and light. Soon, the whole row was underway, then the next, until the vast hulls of capital ships were tugging and listing through space with the rest. The thing that had once been Harbinger was somewhere among them, another inert mass of metal soon to be rendered into its basest components and returned to the universe.

"Even they are just star matter in the end," Liara murmured from Garrus' side. "As we will be, someday."

"Someday," he replied. "But not yet."