Flame of Flesh

from Sharon Olds' For and Against Knowledge

I have never understood the spirit,
All I know is the shape it takes,
The wavering flame of flesh. Those
Who know about the spirit may tell you
Where she is, and why.

"She wasn't there." The tall, perfectly proportioned woman with long, dark hair pushed an armor fragment across the table. The hunk of gray metal held the unmistakeable shape of a breastplate. An N7 could be made out underneath the muted rainbow sheen that scored its front. The coloring intensified unevenly around the seams, the stress points, testament to the extreme temperatures, like the chunk missing at the lower right edge. She looked up to meet her employer's gaze. "Someone else got there first."

The projected figure took a long drag from his cigarette, the blue lights of his eyes on her.

She lifted her chin. "They'll need to refuel on Omega. I'm headed there now."

"It would be better," he lowered the hand that held the cigarette, "not to let Aria know we're looking."

"The informant I have in mind has never been known to work for her. He has other, more important, loyalties." She tapped a button to share her screen with the dossier on the drell. "In the meantime, I've made sure cameras and tripbeams are in place. We'll know who else visits."

"And by process of elimination, who hasn't already been. Well done, Miranda." The Illusive Man nodded his approval. "Did you add deterents?"

Miranda knew he meant mines, and had expected the question. "I've chosen a different approach."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Recruitment." Miranda crossed her arms, and shifted her weight to one leg. Her gaze rested on the breastplate again. "The Alliance and Council may have turned their backs on her, but her crew won't. Odds are some of them will look for her, and if we were responsible for injurying or killing any of them, she'd never agree to work for us. We need them. We could use them."

"The Alliance will remember her eventually." He gestured, the glowing end of his cigarette brightening with the rush of air. "They're in shock. They've not had time yet to come to terms with how significant her loss is."

"Not loss," her brown eyes met his again. "Not yet." Miranda frowned and leant forward. "After all she's done for humanity, the only thing worse than the Alliance giving up on her without a fight is that they sent her out here alone even after everything she warned about proved true. It's lunacy, like backing the lies of the Council about the Reapers, and their total lack of preparation."

"Leave the Alliance to me, and humanity's power struggle as the council's newest member. You have enough on your plate." His tone was dry. "Your lab is almost finished. Is there anything else you'll need?"

"I won't know until I see her." Miranda looked at the breastplate again. "I believe I've prepared for all foreseeable contingencies, but we need to discuss your recommended staff. It's too big a risk to have that many. We need to keep this quiet, and we need to get it right. Each new member increases the odds against either. Whoever destroyed her ship, given the testimony at the inquest about its stealth technology proving insufficient, must have been hunting her, specifically, and still are, unless they've already found her." If she was the Reapers, it's what she'd have done—win the war with one almost surgically precise blow before the galaxy even acknowledged it'd begun, and leave everyone guessing. "We need to keep this operation as small as possible."

"We don't know how much time Shepard bought us, if any." The Illusive Man looked down for a moment as he stubbed his cigarette out on the arm rest. "It may take too long with only a few people working on this."

"We don't need speed; we need Shepard." Miranda replied softly. She'd always done fine on her own. He should know by now. This would be no different. "If we don't get that right, sooner won't matter." A memory tugged at her, and she pushed it away. Now was not the time for sentiment.

Her employer regarded her for a long moment. "No one else comes close to your expertise in genetic epigenesis, Miranda, I'm not arguing that. All the same, it can be useful to have people to bounce ideas off."

"Like Manitius?" She pressed a button and gestured to the new dossier on her screen. "He spliced animal parts into some of his human subjects. That's practically medieval." She had met the man before, and remembered vividly how he looked at her and made a point of smelling his fingers—everything about him was repugnant.

"I believe it was only to save money, not something he'd have to worry about with us." Her employer leaned back. He gestured to the breastplate. "It'll be a challenge, even for you."

Miranda tilted her head forward in acknowledgment, and crossed her arms again as she considered what to do with his concession. "I can't do better than bounce ideas off you, but could use someone with experience in cybernetics, if there's anyone you'd recommend. I'll select my own security, though. I've someone in mind for the job."

"Agreed." The lights of his eyes dimmed momentarily as they narrowed. "What will you do if the non-human members of her crew show up?"

Miranda gestured with her right hand, its elbow still cupped in her left palm. "That will depend on how they react to my offer."

"All the same, I'd like to have human crew members similar to all her main squadmates available." The Illusive Man crossed his legs. "It'll make the process much easier."

"Creating a decent crew, as important as that is, will likely be less of a challenge than Shepard herself." Miranda uncrossed her arms. "She's only known Cerberus as an enemy, and she is formidable." This concerned her the most.

The Illusive Man gave a small smile. "We'll have to give her reasons to think otherwise then. Let me know when you have her." The screen flickered off.

Miranda picked up the armor fragment and carried it to the back of her study. It had a pleasing heft to it, solid, smooth, compact. Placing it in a biometric scanner, Miranda adjusted the focal range to target the inner dimensions and started the process running. It would be an invaluable addition to the data she'd already collected. She considered the timeline affixed to the back wall, derived from prints of various images of virtual and actual items already scanned. These organized her efforts at coding, compiling, and rendering the biometric markers into functional 3D models. The programs she'd designed herself, reverse engineering the work of several scientists, and synthesizing in the most cutting edge research in prothestics and a few other fields. Her innovation here—extrapolation into negative space on ever smaller levels, down to the molecular. It took a massive amount of computing capacity, more resources than most universities or hospitals, and even some political entities, could command. Physical evidence like this provided important correctives to her algorhithms, refinements that at this passthrough could mean the difference between aneurysm, heart attack or health. Of course, she still had to decide what to do with the less desirable genetic markers that hadn't expressed yet in Shepard, but might, if she had to start from DNA alone. The markings on the armor weren't promising, but it was hopeful that no fragments of the Commander herself had been detected. It suggested there was a body, that she hadn't burned up in the atmosphere.

The scanner sat toward the end of the timeline, near the images of Shepard's swearing in at the Presidium; her infiltration and destruction of Cerberus sites; and the ceremony mere weeks ago. Always Miranda found herself drawn to the shots of the Commander in her black, sleek Collosal armor striding into the Presidium with assault rifle in her hands, smoke rising around her. Miranda noticed her jaw and fists had clenched and forced herself to relax and look instead at the Cerberus stills. Yes, there it was. Miranda traced the line of the unbroken N7 armor in one of the series of shots, looking for differences between that and what she found, and went over to the nearby terminal to enter the code tag to the current scan. Those captures were from video feeds, live-action, and the cross-reference, with the material in hand, should allow her to determine flex tolerances. All armor had them, even thicker suits like this, but the heat on re-entry probably altered it, rendering it more brittle, and possibly distorted enough for the algorhithms to not correct. That would need hand adjustment. It was good she had some time before they landed. The measurements could also be added to the file for creating a new, better suit for Shepard. Miranda glanced again at the image of the Commander in the Collosal armor. Something more like that would be ideal.

Her gaze returned to the Cerberus stills. The Illusive Man had not provided very good reasons for why Shepard had attacked those sites when he provided the footage, and she had not pressed. The freedom he gave Cerberus' cells sometimes backfired, he'd said, acceptable risks, given the payouts. He'd expected she'd understand, and she had let him, but it was carelessness, in her estimation. If a Spectre, an N7, shows up to clean up your mess, you have gotten sloppy, and need to re-examine your operations. Would he claim they'd needed to bend the rules to advance humanity? Play to her sympathies? Isn't that what her father had done? She scowled. One should keep better control. She walked toward the door, reviewing the images of the timeline again, noting the new ones from yesterday's work. Her scowl deepened as she reviewed the compilation on Elysium. She'd uncovered a rarer image, one forgotten among the many that had become famous from that action. It didn't show Shepard's incredible acrobatics or agility, her determination or tactics, like most of those that appeared in the history vids, tactical training manuals, or recruitment materials. Miranda understood why those were the most-loved images. The woman was a bloody icon, a testament to what humanity was capable of, overcoming all who stood in their way or tried to demean, enslave, or destroy them. No, this was a still of Shepard taken during the siege. It showed her by a fire, hugging her knees, smudged with blood or dirt, one hand still clenching her pistol, looking surprisingly small and as young as she'd actually been. Had it been before any of the now classic offenses she had made that day, or after? The raw vulnerability of the shot bothered Miranda, but it was compelling too. Something about Shepard's eyes, maybe the way the light reflected off her irises, or the inscrutable almost frozen expression on her face. She wasn't sure why it bothered her so much, maybe the reminder that there was more to Shepard than her public image or the intel she had collected. Maybe it was the nagging sense that even with all the data she'd collected, and would still collect, that she might still miss something vital, maybe even the true essence of the woman. What made her who she was? How had this young, lost-looking Lieutenant rallied Elysium and turned back an overwhelming force of the most brutal species known to humanity? Sentiment, Miranda reminded herself, is weakness, and speculation a waste of time. She swept them away. This was a job for science, unflinching calculation, and unwavering determination. They stood on a razor's edge. They needed Shepard, or this war was already lost. These images were merely tools to ensure they didn't lose the woman who had proven again and again she could accomplish the impossible.

"Shepard! Shepard!" Yelling made more dust trickle down from the stone and plasticrete above Liara into the darkness illuminated only by the faint blue sheen of her biotics. It was all she could manage.

"You gonna shout the rocks down?" Wrex's deep rumble sounded behind her. "Because I got nothing left, and by the looks of it, neither do you."

As if in agreement, the faint blue light around her dimmed and went out. "We can't just do nothing!" Liara turned toward him with some difficulty in the cramped space. "She could be hurt! She could be …." She stopped to pant, which turned into a cough, as she choked on the dust that filled the air.

"What we're gonna be if we don't get help." The battlemaster held his side. He was panting too. The whole mass above them radiated heat, and Liara knew he was injured. Half the lights on his armor were out. The thing that Saren had become had clawed open his side, when he'd bent over it to check if it was dead. Only medigel and pressure was keeping the wound from gushing blood.

It could have been her. It'd almost been her, and that would've been the end, since she had neither the tough shell or thick armor of the krogan. She shivered as shock set in. It had gotten Shepard too, when she'd drawn it off him, and her armor wasn't nearly as thick. Shepard! Liara tried to summon her biotics and tasted blood in her mouth. As much as she wished to do more, she knew she was too exhausted to shift the mass above them. Even trying risked bringing it all crashing the rest of the way down on them. Her body tugged at her to rest, to lie down. She lowered herself onto one elbow and concentrated on slow shallow breaths.

"Hey, don't do that. Stay awake," Wrex ordered. "Liara!"

"I'm so tired." She told him.

"I know, but Shepard needs you, remember?" The battlemaster coughed.

"I don't know where she is," Liara complained. "She was behind me." It was confusing to try to sort out what had happened. There'd been that frantic deathmatch, and then Shepard had shouted, and the whole sky had darkened, and then, and then, what? It was so hard to remember.

"So, what's it like, melding with a human?" Wrex's gravelly voice formed a nice backdrop to the calm descending on her.

"It's like dancing in a fire, chaotic, terrifying, dangerous, exciting all at once," Liara whispered, remembering the first time, and the night before. "There's so much urgency in them, like they're living everything at once, feeling everything all the time." Her body was too tired, stiff, and sore, to more than momentarily ache at the memory of Shepard's touch, the taste of her mind, but it did push the calm away. If she tried, she could still feel her, taste her.

"Heh, heh, maybe that's just Shepard." The battlemaster jolted her from her pleasant revery. "Judging from the way you anticipated each other's moves so much today, I'm guessing you two joined last night?"

Liara blinked. "That was … private." She sat up. This wasn't something to hide, not from Wrex, not after all they'd been through together today. She wasn't ashamed of it, but proud to be so intimately connected with Shepard, to claim her as her first. "Yes, yes we did."

The deep rumble of Wrex's laugh brought warmth to Liara's cheeks. "Good for you! It means you know what she'd want you to do right now."

Liara swiveled her head to meet the battlemaster's gaze, or at least, where she thought it would be. What did he…? Oh. She did know. "To stay alive," she said softly. She thought she saw him nod his head.

Miranda didn't know which was worse, the smells or the sights. Her long legs took her quickly through the maze of offal and scrap, her face hardening at the sight of children playing among the technological and alien refuse in barefeet and tatters—almost guaranteed to contract some of the most agonizing and fatal parastic infections or communicable diseases, ones that shouldn't even exist anymore, since they'd been wiped out centuries ago on civilized planets. The way the humans on Omega lived differed from how humans lived in the rest of the Terminus System by kind and by degree. Here they lived in servitude to corruption, exploited by aliens, mere pawns in other species' economies. Here they lived in the worst kinds of conditions, including slavery, and not just the enslavement of poverty and powerlessness like in some of the colonies, but in actual servitude. Mean though conditions could be in the colonies, given how the galactic systems were engineered to keep them at a disadvantage, at least their lives were their own, their direction theirs to choose, to make or to waste.

She was aware of the calculating glances from behind scrap metal doors and from the dark alleyways. The contingent of stone-faced, heavily armed men keeping pace behind her kept them from slowing her progress. Too often she'd been forced to deal with humans and non-humans alike who wanted to use her for their own ends. There seemed no monopoly on which would misjudge her for her form, and incorrectly assume that such slender armor did not denote what it usually does, just because of her species. It was a gamble though, increased visibility for expediency, one that she knew hadn't paid off when a turian swayed out from one of the alleyways. Miranda stopped. She counted a good number of possible accomplices crouched on rooftops, many turian, some batarian. She made the signal for the men with her to scatter and reconvene separately at their base.

"Hold on," the turian, a female, spoke. "No one forms a gang or brings action to Omega without Aria getting a cut."

Miranda considered her opponent. "We're neither a gang nor bringing action."

"I take it that's only for show then?" the turian drawled, pointing to the Cerberus symbol on Miranda's left lapel.

"No, it's a message." Miranda watched the movement on her periphery. Any moment now. "You can tell Aria that my business does not concern her." With a white flash, the thugs behind and beside her suddenly lifted off the ground and slamed back into it, their guns going off and dropping to the ground. A push from an unexpected direction knocked Miranda to a knee, and she gritted her teeth and countered. Since when did turians have biotics?! Miranda recognized the irony of her misjudgment but did not enjoy it, as the thugs recovered too quickly and encircled her, guns drawn at point-blank range. Her barrier would protect her, but further resistance now would guarantee the confrontation would turn lethal, and it would mean starting a war with Aria and the short-term loss of an important base of operations exactly when they needed it most. Better to let Aria underestimate her, and Cerberus. She lifted her hands to indicate surrender.

The turian's flanges flared. "You can tell her yourself."

Liara splashed water on her face, and kept her hands there, covering it. She needed to not dissolve into tears. This was not the time, but it had been so real, the memory her arrival at Illium had interrupted. Over the intercom she heard the announcement for her outgoing flight, checked herself in the mirror, and turned the water off. The busy restroom was crowded, but she couldn't shake the sense that someone was watching her. In the mirror it seemed lots of people were staring at her. She pushed through the line and out the door. As she wove through the bustle at the Illium Spaceport, she tried to hone in on who could be following her. A sea of blue, purple and gray faces swam before her.

"Mommy, Mommy, look!" A young asari tugged on her mother's hand and pointed at Liara. "Look!" She practically bounced up and down.

The mother met Liara's gaze. "I'm so sorry, she's a big fan. She saw you in the news vids about the Battle of the Citadel, and it's practically all she's talked about since, wanting to grow up to be just like you."

"Oh," Liara blinked rapidly, "that's okay." She started to walk away. Nobody should have to grow up to be just like her.

"Excuse me, but Dr. T'Soni, would you mind very much giving her an autograph?" The mother reached out to her. "It's not only her, you know. My family, we're all very proud of how you represented our people in the fight against Saren. It would mean a great deal to all of us, a memory to share for decades."

Others had stopped and a crowd started to form.

Liara halted. Her, they meant her?! All her life she'd been surrounded by admiring crowds, for her mother, for Shepard. People who wanted to use her to get close to either of them had always been a feature of her life. They were both gone now, though, so no one could hope to gain anything by seeking her out and flattering her now. Her throat threatened to close. They had both been so gracious about these things. How did they know what to say? All these people staring at her was overwhelming. She remembered how she'd gotten through the first class she'd had to teach. It'd been a large hall, and there too many eyes had been on her, her, expecting something great. She turned and focused on one person, the child. "Um, hello, what's your name?"

The child's eyes got huge. Liara was afraid she'd done the wrong thing. "Sssbssb."

"I'm afraid I can't tell what you said," Liara said gently. She knelt down. Overhead she heard them announce final boarding for her flight.

"Shobee!" The young one blurted out and then covered her mouth, turning purple in embarassment.

Liara bit her lip, trying not to smile. "Shobee is a lovely name. What would you like me to autograph?"

The child's eyes got big again. She looked at her mother, who smiled reassuringly at her. "Um, um," the child's eyes darted around, "This!" She stuck out her arm, with its white sleeve.

Liara nodded solemnly. "Do you have a pen I could use?"

The child's face fell, and her lip quivered. She shook her head.

A silvery-purple asari to their left held out something to the child. "Here." Several other hands offered various writing implements. The child grabbed one, and beaming, held it and her arm out to Liara again.

Liara met Shobee's eyes and smiled back at her. She took the pen and wrote, as neatly as she could on the narrow, curved and somewhat wiggly surface, "To our future hero, Shobee, from her admirer, Dr. Liara T'Soni." Glancing up, she saw hosts of omni-tools all filming the moment, and felt an intense need to get out of the crowd. Had it been like this for her mother, when her mother was younger? It was hard to imagine her mother being younger or ever not being sure of everything. Liara stood and fought down a sense of panic as lots of people reached out to touch her. "Excuse me, I have a flight to catch."

"Of course, thank you, thank you so much," Shobee's mother turned from her to kneel by her grinning child, who still stared up at her.

The farther down the corridors Liara went, the more people seemed to press in from all sides. The staring no longer bothered her, but the touching, people brushing against her, that was too much. Was everyone on Illium at the spaceport?! Overhead the loudspeaker announced that her flight had left. Liara stopped in her tracks and conceded defeat. She'd have to stay on Illium tonight, which meant she'd have to go back through the crowds. No one was going to think her a hero if she hid in the bathroom until the wee hours, although she was tempted to do that.

"You look like you could use an escape. Hop in."

Liara turned to see an older asari in a blue dress sitting in a luggage cart. She let out a sigh of relief. "You don't know how much."

"I have an idea." The gravelly voiced, slender matriarch shifted the cart into gear as Liara took the seat next to her. "Fame's a real bitch."

A/N: Hello, hello-it's summer break, which means new chapters of Haunted and Broken coming up. It's the battle for the body in this tale, and the beginning of some epic love stories in the other. My M.O. is to respect your head canon while weaving in mine and some AU twists that give it greater depth and life. I can hardly wait to share what I hope you will find are (for some of you, long-anticipated) treats! Happy summer!