Shepard was dreaming. She knew she was, which she far preferred to not knowing. She was dreaming that she was walking along the promenade on the Citadel, looking at the lake. It was dark, which told her that she was either dreaming of the Battle of the Citadel, or the Battle of London. She'd never known the Citadel to be dark otherwise. The lake was placid, and there were no fires. London, then, after she reached the beam.

"Shepard."

So, this was a voices dream, then. She preferred the silent dreams. Voices lingered longer than images.

"Good to see you."

Whose voice was that? It was annoyingly familiar. The tiniest hint of status, the natural cadence of non-autotranslated English, a little bit of gravel …

"I must say I expected you sooner."

The Illusive Man. Sure enough, now that she'd pinned the voice, there he was, standing in the middle of the walkway, about fifty meters ahead of her. She kept walking. These sorts of dreams were always a toss-up. She didn't think this was how things had gone after she'd reached the beam, but she still couldn't quite remember. Based on experience, if this didn't turn out to be a replay of whatever happened after the beam, he'd either turn into some form of Reaper thrall as she approached, and they'd tussle until she woke up, or he'd just keep talking – her brain would pick and choose from whatever she remembered him saying. She didn't usually say anything herself.

As she approached, he turned and fell into step beside her, walking leisurely along the lake. They crossed a bridge and went back up the other side. Shepard was now puzzled. He hadn't said anything further yet, hadn't turned into a husk, and seemed to just be … following her lead. She hadn't consciously been choosing her path, but now she did, turning off the main walkways and heading into the embassies, ending up in the café the diplomats ate lunch in. She sat down at a table, and to her surprise, the Illusive Man sat down across from her.

She stared at him, thoroughly unnerved. He smiled, then leaned forward, putting his hands on the table, and met her gaze squarely. "I'm sure you have questions, Shepard. I'd be disappointed if you didn't."

He took his hands off the table and leaned back. Suddenly, he had a lit cigar, and there was an ashtray and a glass of whiskey on the table. This didn't surprise her: she didn't think she'd ever seen the Illusive Man without whiskey and a cigar, so it was entirely natural for her brain to supply the missing images. But he wasn't chattering at her about dubiously ethical missions or her 'duty to humanity' or whatever it was he used to chatter about. No, he just sat back, took a drag from the cigar, and blew the smoke out in front of him. As if he had all the time in the world.

"Or haven't you noticed?" He tapped the cherry off his cigar. "Well. You're a busy woman. You've got a lot to think about. That's understandable." He placed the cigar in the ashtray, picked up the whiskey glass, swirled it around once, then downed the contents.

He put the glass back on the table and stood up. "Have a good night, Shepard." He picked the cigar up, took another drag, and walked away, trailing the smoke behind him.

She blinked, and when her eyes opened, she was staring at the sliding colours of FTL travel over her skylight, and she could hear Garrus snoring beside her.

Shepard was pouring cereal into a bowl when Liara came out of her quarters the next morning. The asari smiled at Shepard and went to the fridge, getting the protein drink that typically made up her breakfast. "Good morning."

"Morning. Sleep well?"

"Yes, quite. You?"

"Decent. Viatrix slept nearly five hours straight."

"That's great!" Liara beamed, filling a glass with the bright green drink before putting the bottle back in the fridge. "Is she still updeck with Garrus?"

"Mm hmm." Shepard mixed milk powder into cold water and added it to her bowl, then pulled a spoon out of the cutlery drawer and leaned back against the counter to eat. "They'll be down in an hour or so. She gets a bath this morning and it's his turn."

Liara nodded and took a drink from her glass. "When you have a few minutes to spare, I received a package from Miranda overnight, when we passed the Antar communications relay."

"Of course. I've got time now, in fact, why don't we make it a breakfast meeting."

Liara nodded, swallowed, and moved around the corner into her office, Shepard right behind her with her cereal in her hand.

/EYESONLY CODE ZETA-TER017842
ORIGIN: MIRROR
DESTINATION: SERAPH
SENT: 218710201331SET
RECEIVED: 218710210134SET

ATTACHMENTS: 871020S23mp9, 871019H152mp9

/PLAY FILE 871020S23mp9

The audio quality was poor, and the video even worse. Still, Shepard and Liara could make out Miranda's hair framing her face, and the hard set of her jawline. She looked determined, as always, but there was more than a small hint of unpleasantness in the creases around her eyes – if those were creases, anyway, and not video feed glitches.

"Things are not good on Earth," Miranda said. Her voice was gravelly from static, and her eyes didn't stop scanning whatever was on the screen just below the camera. "The Alliance is still enforcing martial law, and a lot of the citizenry is chafing to the point where we're starting to see riots. The United North American States have just pulled a government together, the Chinese People's Federation is starting to get water infrastructure moving at last, and the European Union still doesn't even exist – though Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have set up provisional governments."

She glanced up at the camera. "Of course, that's only the bits of the world I can keep tabs on. I'm hearing rumours that it's a lot worse in eastern Europe and western Africa, in particular – not to mention the entire Brazilian megametropolis can be seen burning from space.

She looked back down and began typing something. "Part of it is, of course, that everyone's fucking exhausted, including the Alliance, and people without military training start to resent the people with military training for being in control when said people with military training are too tired to be nice anymore. But a bigger part of it is just that everyone's still terrified. The Reapers may not be killing anyone actively, but we didn't see them coming the first time, and not everyone has access to the ultraclassified information we do about what happened."

She paused, tilted her head slightly, and looking wryly into the camera. "Not to say that we have any of that information, of course, because no one's got a clue except maybe you."

She looked down again and typed for a couple seconds before continuing. "The organization that's targeting you is called Minos, as far as I can tell, and they—" here she made a disgusted grunt—"seem to consist mainly of the dregs of Cerberus lowlifes, who have buddied up with a bunch of unhappy xenophobes among the civilian population… Though I suppose that particular overlap was probably pretty wide to begin with. They're sowing discontent and blaming it on the foreign folks that are still on Earth – not that there are many left, which honestly makes it even easier. Anyway, they want you dead because … because you're at the center of it all, I suppose. That's the best guess I've got so far. You unified us all, they don't want anyone unified, so there's your big red X."

She stopped typing, shifted her weight back, put her hands on her hips and stared straight into the camera. "I got a particularly good clip of some of their operatives last night, from somewhere in southeastern Asia. I've attached it. Looks like they've decided on 'team colours', as it were, so now you can know what you're looking for. I'm hearing chatter that they want to move the head of their operations to Omega now that the relays are open. Which is batty if you ask me, seeing as Omega's the melting pot of the galaxy. Less military breathing down your throat, I suppose, but xenophobia's going to get you shot in an alley on Omega. Oh well. I guess if they get themselves killed, it's one less problem for us."

She shook her head and went back to typing. "That's all I've got for now. Talk in a week. Mirror out."

The clip froze on its final frame, and Shepard and Liara stood in silence for a moment. Shepard rolled her shoulder and cracked her neck; Liara exhaled sharply and narrowed her eyes.

"They sound like rebels without a cause to me," Shepard said, "trying to control anything they can. I'm an easy target."

Liara chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. "I wonder what happened to the low-grade Cerberus employees after the Reapers died. Didn't they all have to go in for the implants?"

Shepard looked over at her. "You're right. The Reaper implants. Those don't leave a brain in great shape, based on the look of most of the ones I killed. Halfway to husks."

Liara didn't reply, only set the next clip to play.

/PLAY FILE 871019H152mp9

This video feed was silent, and of even worse quality than Miranda's. Looked like an old news drone, based on the logo Shepard thought she recognised in the lower-right corner of the screen. Miranda had probably hacked into it, still broadcasting anything it saw to the ether, zooming around recording anything its algorithms deemed newsworthy.

In this case, it was just over a half dozen men and women, all human by the looks of them, wearing dark browns and dirty yellows, a bright stripe of red painted along the crest of their helmets along with a circle around the crown. A circle with a vertical line through the center, if you looked at it from above, which the drone did several times. They were all filthy, which was no surprise, as they were all fighting through dense jungle. Most of their gear was paramilitary; some of them didn't have full sets – looked like they'd traded pieces to other members of the unit. A multitude of skin colours were represented, Shepard noted with ironic amusement: nothing like the threat of offplanet races to make you forget you used to hate people based on their skin colour. Surely tentacles and back humps were far more threatening.

The clip wasn't long, less than thirty seconds in fact: the unit was cutting through brush, fighting their way towards something or other. One of them looked up and saw the drone, then called over their shoulder to the person in the back – the leader of the unit, Shepard guessed, based on the extra red stripe on his collar. The others paused as the leader came up to inspect the drone, looking it over, looking into its lens. Then the man shook his head, waved it off, said something to the other men and women around him, then walked off. The others followed, and the clip ended.

Shepard squinted. There was an odd feeling in her gut. She was distinctly more uncomfortable after watching this clip than she thought she should be. Yes, these people worked for an organization that wanted her dead, but really, a lot of people had wanted her dead for a few years now, that really wasn't news.

She played the clip again, watched carefully. Her instincts weren't usually wrong. She studied the people carefully. Most of them she couldn't get a clear look at: the video was too grainy, the colours too muted, and most of them didn't look at the camera. The woman who spotted the drone seemed youngish, had black hair, and seemed scrawny. She didn't do anything that made Shepard feel nervous. No one else in the squad did anything odd or untoward, beyond one of the other women spitting into the brush. No, it wasn't any of them, and she didn't see anything strange in the environment around them. It had to be the leader, then, that was pinging her radar. She stared at him as he came up through his unit, got up in front of the drone, looked it over, then looked into its lens. She went back three seconds, then went frame by frame.

The man had a strong jawline and an even stronger nose, one that looked like it might have been broken and poorly re-set. He had paint on his cheeks and forehead, obscuring the cut of his eyebrows and making it hard to tell if he had any facial hair. His eyes, even muted from the drone's poor video feed, were very light-coloured, and his eye movements were quick and focused. All of his movement was quick and focused. She backed up to a frame where he was presenting his profile to the camera, and studied it: that strong jawline again, maybe the hint of a beard on the underside of his jaw where the paint didn't reach, and an earlobe that looked like it had seen better days peeking out underneath his helmet.

This was the problem, for sure. Her gut was churning. This person looked familiar. She exhaled, backed the clip up five seconds, and played it at half speed. This time, she let herself watch without thinking, just let her eyes drift over the screen as the man walked up, looked at the drone, looked at the camera—

Her heart dropped into her stomach like a lead weight, and she felt even sicker. It was the jawline for sure. Deep-cover espionage could only change so much about a person's features, and bone structure wasn't usually on the list. The nose was wrong, the eyes were the wrong colour, but the jawline was unmistakable, and the way he studied the problem, the way he glanced over it and took everything in in heartbeats—

She couldn't be sure, though. It could just be a striking resemblance.

She opened her mouth to speak and found it was dry. She closed it again, swallowed, then turned to Liara. "When's our next fly-by of a comms relay?"

"Five o'clock this afternoon, I think."

"Can we get an incredibly secure message to a specific Alliance ship?"

"Of course, if we have the comm codes for them, and if they have the codes to open it."

"I need to send this to my mother."