The door opened. Light poured into the pitch-black penthouse from the private elevator. I saw a human silhouette before the door closed behind him.

"Lights," he said without breaking stride. Nothing happened. He reached the top of the short, broad stairway down to the living area.

"Lights," he repeated. Again, nothing.

With an irritated sigh, the man descended the stairs with his hand on the railing. He smacked his shin into his coffee table, hissed a curse, and grumbled as he reached the control panel.

"Rey'ya!" he called as he keyed for the blinds. "What did you do to the VI?"

The optical blinds shifted into transparency, revealing a spectacular view of Shalta Ward. The penthouse was located in one of the highest structures in the sector, a steel spire rising above an endlessly flowing sea of traffic.

"Rey'ya!"

"She took the night off."

He turned. I stood to his right, my gun steady at eye-level.

"She was kind enough to turn off your VI surveillance," I said. "I don't think she liked working for you, Sepulveda."

"How dare you—"

"But she wouldn't, would she?" I continued. "You're not paying her on the books. Taking advantage of a quarian on her pilgrimage is pretty low. But it isn't exactly beneath you, is it?"

"Who are you?" he asked, staring daggers into my helmet. "I want to know the name of the dead man I'm talking to."

"It's not important. What's important is what you do now."

"Oh?" He scoffed. "And what am I to do?"

"I want you to turn yourself in for the murder of Nathan Petrova."

"Spirits alive."

There was blood everywhere. Streaking the walls in thin red streamers. Pooling around the body, tinting the blue carpet a deep purple. There was a distinct metallic tang to the air that made it hard to concentrate.

The CSIs were moving back and forth through the hotel room, scanning every available surface with their omni-tools, snapping the occasional 3D holo. The look on their faces was universally detached. They couldn't do the job otherwise. I thought I'd seen enough, done enough, to give me that kind of stoicism.

The fingers biting into my palm told a different story.

"I need another smoke," Sorono groaned as he approached the body. "It's too early for this."

"Name?" I asked the nearest CSI.

"Hotel has the reservation under 'Johann Smythe,' but that and a credit will get you a cup of kava," he said as he typed out something on his omni-tool. "We should have a proper ID shortly."

"Twenty years old, tops. Expensive clothes, poorly fitted. Escort, maybe." Sorono squatted and stared at the boy's bare feet. "Whoever he was, he wasn't expecting to leave anytime soon. DNA evidence?"

"Preliminary scans say no, but talk to the medical examiner."

"Robbery?"

"Could be. No purse or other valuables. But he might not have brought any. You know how this goes."

I tried to focus elsewhere, survey the rest of the scene, but my eyes kept coming back to the body. His face was frozen in shock, eyes still wide and glassy like a doll's.

"Two wineglasses," Sorono continued, over by the shattered remains of a glass table. "Bottle's missing."

"Behind the couch," another CSI, a human, said.

"Prints on anything?"

"You kidding?"

He sighed longingly. "Someday it'll happen. Nice and clean. Open and shut. Right, Vakarian?"

I was barely listening. There was blood rushing through my ears, in time with my heartbeat. I kept coming back to the expression on his face, the blood on the walls and the table and the floor, the sheer explosive violence of it all. Perpetrated on a man, a boy, who tried to fight back. He hadn't wanted to die. But he was trapped and slaughtered like an animal, and there was an almost gleeful feeling to it I couldn't shake.

It made me angry. But so much made me angry, these days.

Sepulveda gaped at me for a moment, at a loss for words. Then he laughed, long and loud.

"No!" he said mockingly. "Really? That's what this is about?"

I said nothing and kept my pistol trained on his head. The sight of him smiling and centered in my crosshairs was a temptation I was finding it harder and harder to resist.

"Don't tell me," he said, turning his back to me and walking over to the bar in the corner. "A friend? An ex, perhaps?"

He began making a drink, acting like I wasn't even there. Shooting a man in the back wasn't something I'd be proud of, but even so, I could see myself doing it. I imagined the recoil, the muzzle jump, the look on his face, the blood spatter on the floor, the crash of glass as the bullet passed through him into a bottle of expensive whiskey...

"Maybe you knew each other," he continued. "Maybe you didn't. Maybe I did you a bad turn somewhere along the way, and this is the best way your tiny brain could conceive of getting back at me."

He took a drink, savored it, and turned to face me. He was no longer amused.

"Frankly, I don't care. In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is that whatever you do to me will be returned tenfold upon you and everyone that matters to you. I have powerful friends. Very powerful. By the time they're done with you, your life would be a smoking ruin. No one would be left alive who would ever acknowledge your existence. And then they'd really go to work.

"So you have to ask yourself whether or not this is worth it, my stupid, stupid friend. Because if you don't lower that gun in the next five seconds, I will sound the silent alarm I keep on my person at all times, and there will be nowhere in this galaxy you can hide."

I waited four seconds. Then I reached inside a compartment on my armor.

"You mean this silent alarm?" I asked.

The color drained from his face faster than I'd thought human biology capable of. I took an inordinate amount of pleasure in it as I dropped the small transmission unit to the ground and casually stepped on it.

"Don't ask how I got it," I said. "It's a long and boring story, and like you said, it doesn't really matter. What matters is, I've got no friends. I've got no family. I've got nothing to lose and a gun to your head. And if you don't pull out that fancy comm of yours and call the police, and confess to the murder of Nathan Petrova, I'll put a bullet through that handsome face of yours."

"What do you think you—" he halted, mid-tirade, and his eyes widened. "You're a cop, aren't you. You're C-Sec."

I said nothing. I might not have a high opinion of the man, but he didn't get where he was by being an idiot, and underestimating another race's ability to tell when a turian is lying had gotten me into more than one bad situation. I'd already pushed my luck by trying it once.

"That's what this is, isn't it?" He seemed angry, but at the same time, strangely at ease. "Fine. How much?"

Behind the visor of my helmet, I blinked. "What?"

"How much do you want?"

"I—"

"You police and your shakedowns," he scoffed. "They get more theatrical every year. Just name your price and it'll be wired to you. There's no need to play dress-up to try and impress me."

"I told you to stay away from this, Garrus!"

I was seated, going over the information the CSIs had collected and what we'd gotten off a low-level tap on the primary suspect's extranet account, when Pallin burst into my office.

"Sir, I'm working a number of leads right now on a number of suspects—"

"Don't give me that!" His mandibles fluttered furiously. "You and I both know you only have one suspect. The rest of this 'investigation' is base deception!"

I stood and stalked over in front of him. "If that's true, it's because there's only one suspect in this case."

"One with an airtight alibi—"

"Given by his business partners, themselves under suspicion of racketeering, smuggling, human trafficking—"

"Suspicion is not the same as guilt!"

"Pallin, you can't seriously be—"

"Investigator Vakarian!"

I shut my mouth and straightened. The sound of Pallin's teeth grinding together was audible. He turned and hit the panel for the door. The entire department had been able to hear our little disagreement, but he didn't want them to hear this.

"You are very lucky your father isn't on station," he hissed. "If he were, it wouldn't be me in your office right now. And you wouldn't be a C-Sec officer anymore."

My hands clenched into fists, and I stowed them behind my back. I thought I'd gotten over caring what my father thought, of people invoking his name to chastise me. At the time, it made me see blue around the edges of my vision.

Pallin turned and looked at me, the picture of impending discipline. I didn't bother bracing myself for it.

"As of right now, you are off this case."

I let one of my hands wrap around the other and squeezed until it hurt.

"If I hear even one more word about this, I'll suspend you without pay. And if I hear another, I'll have you discharged. Is that clear?"

It was hard to unclench my jaw to speak.

"Sir."

Pallin stared hard at me for a few more seconds. Then he turned and left without another word, leaving me alone to stew in impotent anger. I wanted to put a hole in the wall—several holes in the wall—but it wouldn't do anything but make my hand hurt. I let my arms fall to my sides and tried to breathe.

The door opened. Sorono leaned against the frame, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I expected a smirk and a needling remark, but what I saw instead was inscrutable.

"So," he said carefully. "That's it, huh?"

"No."

Sepulveda blinked and frowned. "No?"

"That's not what this is."

"Then what is it?"

I took a step forward. "Call them. Now."

He stared at me like I had suddenly grown a second head.

"You really care, don't you?"

"Call them."

"You've no idea who you're messing with, boy—"

"Call them now!"

He stepped forward, closer.

"No," he said. "I won't."

He stepped closer.

"I never will."

Closer.

"And you won't pull that trigger, boy."

He was nearly pressed against the barrel of the pistol now.

"Because even now, you care more about due process than about what you believe. You won't pull that trigger because that would make you more than a killer. You'd be a murderer. And you'd be no better than me."

He reached up, jabbed a finger at his eyes. "That's why you wear that helmet. Because you fear consequence. Because you know what you're doing isn't right, no matter how much you spin it. Isn't that true?"

I wasn't listening. Not to him, anyway. My own private doubts had been making themselves known since I'd suited up that night. Since I'd first discussed this little plot with Sorono. Since I'd gotten so fed up with bureaucracy and technicalities and corruption and rule of law that I'd even had these thoughts to begin with.

If I shot down an unarmed man, alone in his apartment, did that make me a murderer? Did it matter if I shot him in the back? Did it matter if he saw my face before he died? Did it matter if he knew the reason? Where was the line? What was noble about any of this?

Slowly, I lowered my weapon. Sepulveda smiled. His face was like a knife.

"Turians," he said. "You're such a predictable people."

I thought about a boy in an apartment, lured in by money and promises, being cut to shreds by someone for no other reason than they knew they could get away with it.

Was I a murderer?

Was this noble?

I raised my gun.

"No," I said.

Sepulveda stopped smiling.

I put two bullets into his skull, and left the same way I came in.

Sorono was waiting for me in the car, several blocks away, parked in an alleyway that I knew wasn't covered by the station's cameras. I pulled open the door and ducked inside.

"Take me to the docks," I said.

He turned and stared at me. I noticed his ubiquitous cigarette was absent, and there wasn't a single swirl of smoke in the air. Then he looked away and keyed the ignition, piloting the skycar into the air.

Neither of us said anything on the ride there. We'd been working together for a few years now, and known each other longer than that. If there was anything left to say, we were both alright with letting it go unsaid.

Sorono pulled up and landed in a lot outside the docking ring itself. No C-Sec checkpoints, no real traffic. Nothing but commodities, already scanned by patrolling police cruisers, passed through here. I could very quietly book passage off-station from here.

He keyed off the ignition and stared out the windshield.

"You won't be able to come back for a while," he said slowly. "Even if you did it clean. This'll make waves. Might even start a war, if we're lucky."

"Good. Let the syndicates bleed each other dry. Long as no one gets caught in the crossfire."

He shrugged. "That's why we're here, ain't it?"

"Pallin calls it 'triage.' "

"Of course he does," Sor drawled, leaning back in his seat. "Cynical old bastard."

"Pot and the kettle."

Sorono looked at me for the first time since I'd gotten in the car. "What?"

I shook my head. "Nothing."

"No, I know what it means. Just didn't know you did."

My stomach wrapped itself into a knot.

"Something a friend told me, once," I said.

He blinked, but didn't ask any more. I opened the car door.

"You know where you're going?" he asked.

"No."

"Good. Better for the both of us."

He offered his hand. I clasped it in mine. We shook.

"Take care of yourself, Garrus."

"You too, Sorono."

I stepped out and shut the door behind me. Then I headed for the service elevators leading to the bays. If I was lucky, maybe someone was headed for a trading center in the Terminus Systems. Illium, maybe.

Things turned out better than they should have. Pallin had apparently been expecting my resignation for some time, and I'd taken care to submit it nearly two weeks before I went to the penthouse. When Sepulveda turned up dead, my name never even came up.

Meanwhile, Sepulveda's so-called "friends" made a brief show of trying to find his killer, turning over the usual rocks and even shaking down a few of the dirtier cops for information. But in the end, they turned their attention to dividing up what was once Sepulveda's own personal kingdom amongst themselves, and a year out from his death, you were hard-pressed to find anyone who even remembered him, let alone gave a damn.

"You're free and clear," Sorono's message read. "If you want to come back, I doubt even Pallin would complain much."

You can come home, he was saying. You don't have to run.

But it was never about running away. Not from that, at least. Besides, I had found a mission. A cause of my own. Something that I could fight for. People who counted on me.

Maybe it wasn't in the place I thought it would be. Maybe I wasn't any less angry than I was in C-Sec. Maybe none of it was really helping me.

But it was helping others. And as a friend of mine once said, that's the only thing that really matters.