The worst thing about BAaT was the food. Designed to fulfill the exact caloric demand of endless hours of training, it was, in theory, the perfectly tailored meal. The 35 million credit contract for the catering apparently couldn’t pay for flavor. Processed to hell with a mouthfeel that was part wet mushroom and part raw spinach, it was clearly the result of hiring the lowest bidder. Conatix might run the show, but Good Enough for Government Work permeated every inch of Jump Zero, courtesy of the Alliance.

Worse still was the training. Being jolted awake at odd hours of the night to drill after a long day was a special kind of hell. Maybe it was that, no matter how much progress they made, it was never enough. It was endless pushing, because humanity has thousands of years of biotic training to make up for.

Or maybe the worst thing of all was the silence. Without the extranet, the rest of the galaxy may as well not exist. Sometimes news trickled in with shipments of supplies—skirmishes in the Terminus, political drama in the Citadel, whatever. Nothing that felt relevant to a station as remote as Jump Zero. Once someone smuggled them a copy of the latest Blasto movie—for weeks “Enkindle THIS!” dominated the training room.

The girl that smuggled the vid earned enough demerits to put her all the way back at Step One.

Maybe it was pointless ranking the facets of BAaT by how shittiness. Maybe the worst part was how all the shitty parts worked together, cogs in a machine of endless fuckery. It was meant to make even the most resilient student buckle on the strain; instructors liked to wax philosophical about building them up from nothing afterwards. Apparently they were forging heroes for humanity.

It’s all bullshit. Humanity isn’t even at war.

Kalyani learned to keep that opinion to herself. Her left arm still ached whenever the chill of empty, endless space knifed through the station. No matter how hard they tried, Conatix failed to keep Jump Zero consistently warm. Hell, maybe they weren’t trying. They must be saving a fortune.

Five years. After five years she’d finally clawed her way up the ladder, finally worked the program to completion. Step Nine came with a room of its own, relaxed curfews, and even the occasional extranet access. Slow, heavily monitored, extranet access—but after five years of silence, it was wonderful.

The responsibilities Step Nine came with, however, were anything but.




“Get up.”

Kalyani’s voice was a whipcrack, carving through the hum of biotics echoing throughout the training room. Dozens of exercises filled the massive room, flares of biotic blue gleaming off grey walls.

“Get up,” She barked again. The tangle of lanky limbs on the battered red mat stirred. Slowly, the boy unfolded, rising like a battered daddy long legs. Violet had blossomed across a ruddy cheek, a pale eye squeezed shut. He finally stood and raised his arms, fumbling through a mnemonic.

The shimmer of electric blue along his fingertips shot towards her, listing left. Sloppy. After years in this room, it was as easy as breathing to flare a barrier. Pale sparks shattered against her corona. The impact had knocked a shoulder back, more playful shove than actual blow.

She wanted nothing more than to let that count.

“Again,” she said instead.

“Oh come on!” His voice cracked on the last word. Fucking hell. She was beating the shit out of a fucking child. This was not one of her prouder moments. If only her mother could see her now.

“Just land a proper blow and we can stop,” Kalyani urged in a low voice.

The look he shot her said ‘fuck you’ with an eloquence words could never match. It was impressive, really.

“I’m tired,” his whine was sharp, his frustration surfacing at long last.

“Quiet,” Kalyani hissed. His complaint seemed to have gone unnoticed by instructors proper; a small mercy, that. Complaints only made things worse. Some of the staff went overboard at the merest hint of protest. “Try it again.”

For one terrible moment she thought he might refuse. He finally snapped his arms, awash in a silvery glow. Physics went strange, fraying at the edges, screaming like a bullet. It was clean, fierce, and it was worth letting it slip past her barrier. Her ribs disagreed vehemently.

“Better,” Kalyani pressed a hand against her flank. Nothing felt broken; probably bruised to hell though. Good enough. “Go get something to eat—“

“Madan.”

Shit.

That dual-toned voice never failed to kick the reptile part of her brain into overdrive. Perhaps it was xenophobic; she wished she could have been ashamed of herself. Turians were just so sharp. Every primitive instinct urged her to run whenever she found herself under those pinprick eyes. Apex predators had a way of doing that to a girl.

Needless to say, Kalyani was fucking terrified of them.

Squaring her shoulders, she looked up. That it wasn’t the Commander staring her down was only a small relief. Caelnus was still plenty intimidating. Kalyani took a step back.

“Is there any reason you’re coddling Court?”

FUCK, Kalyani thought eloquently.

“Sir?” She said intelligently.

Caelnus did not look amused. As much as Kalyani could tell, anyways. She spent most of her time avoiding the attention of the turians that had taken over the program. Reading turian mandible expressions was not her forte. Was that irritation, or indigestion?

“Coddling Court,” Caelnus repeated, as if she were simple. Irritation, then. “You let him hit you.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“No, sir—”

Not for the first time, Kalyani wished she was a better liar. Her strategy of keeping her head down and avoiding any and all trouble had gotten her this far, but it left her hilariously ill-equipped to handle scrutiny. She lost the staring contest, dropping her gaze to the mat beneath her worn boots. She fidgeted. It did precisely nothing for her credibility.

Caelnus’ disapproval was a tactile thing, pressing in on her until she capitulated. The mat creaked beneath her heavy feet as she turned and faced wide, terrified eyes.

“Again."

Yoroi had never known what hate was until he reached Jump Zero.

Seriously, in every day life, how much can someone actually say they hate anything? Little girls might hate to eat their peas, boys might hate pink, you might hate having to stay late after school, but please. The average person couldn't give enough of a shit about even the worst things in their life to muster the kind of consuming, fueling, burning hate that Nagamura Yoroi had learned for turians. The soldiers, the First Contact vets and the Shanxi survivors back home came the closest talked about the bird-men, the hawks, and he could relate. But for them the war was over, the enemy in memory.

Yoroi breathed his every day.

Nobody had known what to expect when they arrived. It was all very hush-hush, plenty of grand overtures about 'the future of humanity', 'pushing the limits' and 'broadening horizons', but the result was more boot camp than Brain Camp. You could almost forgive it turning out to be the sort of quasi-military bullshit it was; biotics were a future weapon, a staple of intergalactic interpersonal warfare. Of course it was the military that was funding the game, and of course the game was testing battle viability. If the uniforms and blank halls and efficiency bunking wasn't exactly marshmallows and ghost stories, you could at least see where it came from.

The turians, though. Nobody had expected them to be there. They were kids, not soldiers, though Yoroi was pretty convinced that turians didn't see much of a difference between the two.

On earth, Nagamura Yoroi had been a nobody. He was a stupid fucking teenager who'd grown peach fuzz and discovered extranet pornography ahead of the curve. He wasn't one of the real hoods--hell, he hadn't been old enough to be a real hood!--and instead filled in that awkward role of classroom cut-up. Smart enough to know he could do better than he had been and lazy enough not to bother, he was funny and friendly and muddled along just fine. He had as much brains as any fourteen year old, which was to say not a lot, but he wizened the hell up the first time one of those fucking hawks but a taloned boot on his throat and he realized he couldn't have shoved it off if he'd wanted to.

This was not supposed to be fun. They were not supposed to enjoy this. They were supposed to be tested, and pushed, and pushed further, and put back together when they broke so they could keep pushing. And they were, or at least Yoroi was.

If someone had told you who Nagamura Yoroi had been two years ago, anyone in hearing would have laughed in your face. Nice guy, wise-ass, joker? You been huffing 'zaust, man? Yoroi was one of the hard boys, the assholes. The ones that buckled down and [/i]Sir, yes Sir![/i]'d and asked How high?. If he'd ever cracked a joke, if he'd ever been a buddy or a good shoulder to cry on, it was so long ago that nobody remembered. Not after the full-contact training sessions or the stupid-powerful barriers he threw up during practice--he was the worst kind of partner, the one that tried. The instructors fucking ate it up, alien bastards, and they made it clear that he was one of the ones that 'had a future'.

Other kids had friends. Yoroi had himself, and the loose association of kids like him figuring out the pecking order and racing for the top. More than anything, he had his hate, and if hate meant being cliche then so fucking be it. Careful fighting monsters, gaze into the abyss, blah blah blah.

Anything to never feel like prey again under steel talons and pinprick pupils.

---

"Again."

Two mats away, Court was fucking up. Again.

"Half your ration says he cries like a bitch."

Al-Tariq was a shit. Most of the hard boys were, the ones that buckled down and fed into the training program. Everyone knew who they were and the mixture of disgust, fear, and hate was palpable. They were one of them, just as bad as the asshole instructors. Little turians in human clothing, earning their predator eyes. Up until recently Al-Tariq had kept lockstep with Yoroi, the up and comers of their batch, but that was last month. This month Yoroi was Step Five and Al-Tariq was dealing with it, which meant being fake-friendly until he got close enough to fuck him up. It was as obnoxious as it sounded.

"It's Madan." Yoroi tried not to roll his eyes, but not very hard. "She'll get herself sent to the med-bay before she lets that happen."

Fucking Madan.

There were a lot of reasons Yoroi didn't like Kaylani Madan, the most obvious being that she was weak. She wasn't really, but that was the problem: one of the few, the proud, the Step Nine, everyone knew Kaylani had chops. She could throw up a barrier in a heart beat, punch through all but the toughest just as easily. There were rumors saying that she'd managed to make a black hole, but those were just rumors--the upper division training couldn't be that far gone, could it? At any rate, it was obvious she outclassed even the try-hards and equally obvious that she really just wanted to pussyfoot around. It hadn't done her any good, she was still one of them to all the scrubs she babied that were too stupid or tired or hungry to see that she was trying for them, but to Yoroi she was personally offensive.

Yeah, she'd had a head start, but she was still flat better than him. Demonstrably, meaningfully, and yet here she was playing with fucking kid gloves so she didn't hurt the poor baby's feelings. Didn't she get that it was better her than the hawks?

"I'll take that bet." Al-Tariq snorted before snapping to life, fist crackling into vibrant blue that streaked towards Yoroi with mnemonic flick. He was fast and had put some oomph into it, but Yoroi was ready. It met his own swiftly-raised barrier in a flash, dissipating in a swirl of warped physics like a heat-shimmer in the stale station air.

"Fuck off."

Before the boy could respond, Yoroi had dissipated his barrier and stepped off the training mat. His back was straight as ever, his arms at his sides as he made his way without ceremony or hesitation towards the Commander and the now-focal training pair. The hall had grown quiet at the little confrontation, waiting to see how things panned out (and secretly happy for the break), so his request was clear as day as he snapped to attention by Caelnus' side.

"Sir! Permission to take over as Madan's training partner and show Court what a real biotic can do, sir!"

It was always a toss-up with the turians. Some days they ate that macho-crap up and others they bitch-slapped you for interrupting training. But it was the only way this was going to end well and Yoroi knew it--if Court broke he'd be punished, and Caelnus would not be gentle. He probably wouldn't ever really recover. If Madan went full Monty on him he'd end up in the med bay and Madan wouldn't look anyone in the eye for the better part of a week. And if Court had it in him to begin with while he was as exhausted and tired as the rest of them, he'd have given it.

So it was a gamble, but fuck it. Give her someone she didn't have to play soft-ball with.

His eyes didn't leave her for a moment as he waited for the call.

It was going to be one of those days.

Life in BAaT was never pleasant, but it was usually less awful. Kalyani had perfected the art of keeping her head down. It was a solid strategy. There were nearly three hundred students stuffed into these soulless walls; they caused enough trouble to keep most of the instructors busy. She’d been lucky enough to take to her biotics quickly. Excelling was dangerous, and so she bit back every protest and made herself as bland as possible. It was enough to keep her safe.

Except, of course, when it didn’t.


Court looked so scared. He’d been on Jump Zero maybe a year at the most, and he hadn’t learned to keep his mouth shut. He had all the makings of trouble—anger and a stubborn refusal to accept his lot. A few years ago, he might have gotten off with extra training and a few months of restriction. Once he’d tired of the isolation and the hunger deep in his bones, he’d have learned. Awful, yes, but effective.

Throwing him to the wolves seemed needlessly cruel. What good could come of having a child--too young to even have his implants--try and fight? It didn’t help. It was just senseless, inefficient even. Not that anyone cared. Not that she truly cared. She never said anything.

Kalyani breathed deep, the familiar tingle whispering through her skin.

And then fucking Nagamura mouthed off.

The training room flooded with whispers, little knives of viciousness and relief. Any time someone else was under the weight of turian eyes, the world got a little bit safer for the others. Kalyani turned her back on Court’s pale face, trying not to let relief flood her veins prematurely.

Kicking the shit out of a scared little kid was one thing; fighting one of the assholes that drank the BAaT kool-aid was another thing entirely. Kalyani liked those matches.

Caelnus’ mandibles flared with what seemed like interest. His head cocked to one side, unblinking stare moving between the two of them in blatant appraisal. A long, terrible moment passed. Turians didn’t smile properly; they just bared their teeth, neat little lines of razors. It was a classic threat display. Effective.

“Permission granted,” Caelnus’ flanging voice seemed to echo in the stillness of the training room, ringing with amusement.


Court shuffled off the mat, looking particularly small against the gathering crowd of students. Kalyani supposed this was a Learning Experience. It was strange being a part of this, being the whip when she’d spent what felt like forever at its mercy.

Kalyani stepped back smoothly, dark eyes focusing on Nagamura as she found her place. Cruelty seemed etched in his every raw, jagged line, like BAaT had crawled inside him and flooded his veins. He was fire and ruthless competition, the same viciousness she’d seen in her own classmates, in her own silence.

A familiar prickle began to build at the base of her skull, an electric bite flooding her senses. One moment she stood tall and rigid, posture too perfect—and then she flowed, slipping into a neutral stance, hands aloft and at the ready. She could practically feel her nerves humming, yearning to fire. The skin around her implants itched, fiery hot, ever sensitive.

Her hands snapped, one arm drawing back, the other dropping low and grasping at air, fingers arched like claws. A rush of power screamed through her, silver and cobalt blooming from her skin in a violent corona. She pushed, throwing a line of screaming blue light, sparking as gravity caved to her will.

Again. And again. It was simple to move, gathering mass effect fields, body surging with negative current. It was like it rushed to answer her, like it wanted to obey. Her heart leapt at the thrill of it, at how the nodules practically burned in her tissue, like little suns burrowed into her flesh. They answered so readily to her simple throws, watching as they shattered in sparks against flares of barriers. Learning.

Yoroi was stepping onto the faux-leather padding as soon as Caelnus gave his blessing, not bothering to watch Court disappear back into the mass of waiting students. Good that he'd gone for it--did the turian know it was better this way, or was he just looking for something more entertaining to watch? Yoroi didn't know or care. It had worked. Now it was just him in Kalyani.

Good.

He wasn't going to win this match. Say what you want about her, Madan knew her shit. You didn't get to Step Nine any other way, even taking five years to do it. Most of the time she was all limp kitten, putting in the bare minimum to pass the muster and make the hawks happy, but there were more than a few hard boys who'd found out the that when it came right down to it she was a fucking natural. Even now, watching her prime, Yoroi could tell by the way her aura _flowed_ that she was starting to get into it. He remembered his parents, his friends, the teachers at school after Conatix got through with their civilian party line--they might have gotten the kids there with promises of glory and distant horizons, but they'd gotten the signature on the permission form with fear.

Do you know what your child is capable of?


I'm not trying to alarm you, but in certain cases biotic episodes have been known to turn violent.



Yoroi had watched more than his fair share of the older students training--the instructors didn't like it, worried that some Step One jackass would lose it and breach something probably, but he'd seen some of what they were up to. He knew Madan was more than the wet blanket she pretended to be, and now he was going to feel it. Ready to dance, he settled himself in--

And she was already on him. He'd watched that glow slide right through her pale olive skin, eezo nodes jacked up and raring to go, and still he almost missed her first shot.

Almost. If there was something Yoroi was good at, it was barriers. Projection was his problem, controlling those rippling bolts of force she seemed to rattle off so easily, but his body was his turf. Like a samurai, he always thought to himself, never quite able to voice the stupid cliche aloud. Knight in shining armor. O-Yoroi. Can't beat what you can't hurt. Last moment or no his barrier was strong as anything, dissipating her torrent of strikes like water around a rock. It wouldn't hurt him, it couldn't hurt him--she might have all sorts of spin over Newtonian physics on her side of the court but her right to play with the spatial laws ended at his face.

She could do better than that. He knew it, and he was going to make her prove it.

Someone else would have taunted her. Al-Tariq would have said something shitty, called her a her something disgusting enough to make her mad, but that wasn't Yoroi's game. He didn't want to win, he wanted to win. To be so damn full of biotic fucking badassery that he could rip that taloned foot off his throat and take the leg with it. You didn't get there by being a brat--you got there by knuckling down and putting in the hours. Say what you wanted about him, Yoroi worked his ass off at BaAT and it showed.

Where Kaylani was flowing, natural, easy, Yoroi was sharp and efficient. His barriers came with a sharp clench of his right fist, his strikes with his left. His main issue in the ring was that he hadn't quite figured out how to manage one without weakening the other--focus he had plenty of, but multi-tasking? Firing without using that raw strength he had in his shield? It was tough, it took training and time he hadn't had, but that didn't mean there was nothing there. Kaylani's barrage was measured, sustainable, but each blow was weaker than his barrier by a good margin and there were enough of them to give him a good sense of how much strength he could spare. All he needed was to wait for the moment between one impact and the next--

Bingo. Kalyani was flowing-Tai-Chi, very Kung-Fu--Yoroi was Krav Maga, all sharp efficiency and vicious counterattacks. He primed-aimed-fired in the time it took him to snap forward his fist, a straight jab turned into a sledgehammer by the little eezo nodes humming under his skin. Though he didn't know it, there was one thing he and Madan were in complete agreement about.

There was nothing quite like that biotic ripple under their skin. Potential energy, literally--all potential.

It could be anything. It could do anything.

It could make Kalyani Madan wake the fuck up and try.

Kalyani had always been patient. As a girl, she’d spent months waiting for her mother to return from deployment, for her father to come home from long days at the office, for summers in the country side where she could breathe clean air once more. Jump Zero had been more of the same endless cycles of hurry up and wait that had been her whole life. If she held tight and kept herself busy, Kalyani was certain she could outlast most anything.

She could wait until Nagamura took the lead.

For only having two years under his belt, he was eerily efficient with barriers. He lacked drama or flair, and that served him well. His economy of motion was managed with an obsession that bordered on pathological. It was clean.He was an utter tool, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate his technique. It worked.

He snapped forward, a blow that she knew would break bones if it touched her. The air was charged, electric, blown aside by the screaming blue light that she lived for.

Kalyani moved directly towards it, raising a forearm to take the worst of it, palms flaring open, barrier eddying in the air, grasping wisps of the impact and tugging it into its currents. Endless swirling plasma curled around her flesh, feather light whispers stoking the heat in her skin.

Sometimes it felt like she might ignite. It was worth it, in these mad moments, everything she’d been through. Every frigid, hungry night, every petty injustice, all the bullshit—it had to be worth it.

The barrier collapsed under a quick pull of hands, condensing to a shuddering mass. Unbroken, straining at the reins, kicking against her control, itching to fly apart—she flicked an arm, like skipping a stone. She was six again, finding smooth pebbles to fling into the ocean, chalky white cliffs crowding out the world but for the lazy tide, counting jumps—un, deux, trois, quatre—maman, regarder! Quatre!

The shockwave skipped across leather mats, the ground shuddering with the impact. Kalyani cocked her head, watching the warpath of her biotics.

One, two, three, four.

He hated seeing her this way.

In a moment of clarity, right before the storm, Yoroi knew exactly what it was about Kalyani that bothered him so much. He'd seen it before but it had never been so apparent, so obvious to him. As he watched her break her barrier, draw down her hand, fill with power--all in slow motion near-death-experience bullshit--he finally got it. There was something in the way she moved, something in how her face lit up in that blue biotic glow, something about the purse of her lips that radiated a joy he would never know and a pleasure he would never feel.

Like Mozart and Salieri, he thought stupidly, remembering a movie he'd watched one night as a child with his parents. Two composers, one of them achieving so easily the beauty the other had struggled so hard to perfect. One natural, one forced.

Whatever God of Biotics might be out there fucking loved Kalyani Madan in a way it would never love Nagamura Yoroi, no matter how badly he wanted it.

He watched the matting erupt in blue columns, spikes of energy that rippled the air and left little pockets of empty behind them from all the matter they'd displaced. This, he realized, was the difference--it was like realizing there was a third dimension he could move in, that the world wasn't straight back-and-forth. A shockwave, a literal wave of coruscating energy that rippled from below. How was he supposed to block that? He hadn't expected his own strike to do nothing, and in the wake of it his barrier was weaker than ever. Had she planned it this way? Did she know what would happen?

It was all he could do to mount a proper defense. To his credit, he met it head on without hesitation--both hands curled, snapping into fists that flared his barrier to life, but too little, too late. He caught the initial impact on his forearms, braced against it, but when he tried to contain the roll from trois to quatre he just....couldn't.

The drive into his diaphragm was a truck, a speeding car. Impact at God-only-knew how many Newtons of force, straight up into his ribs and sternum. It was enough to lift him into the air by more feet than a few, his guard still up and his teeth still grit in concentration, but when he tried to stick the landing all that impact hit his shattered ribs and he collapsed to his knees like a rag doll. Had they kept the mats red so it was harder to see the blood? It wasn't working--his was bright against the leather, a spatter through grit teeth as he tried not to be sick.

He couldn't breath. He couldn't breathe. His lizard brain was panicking, wanting to gasp, to pant, to suck wind no matter how much it burned, but the measured breath he drew in and that disgusting little groan he managed on the tail end was all he'd allow himself. She'd beaten him and he knew it--no way he was putting up a fight after that--but he'd be damned if he couldn't at least look the bitch in the eye.

It wasn't a smile. It wasn't pride. But he'd made her try--he'd seen what it looked like to be at the top. He just wished it hadn't looked the way he always wanted it to.

It happened almost too quickly to process. Her shockwave slammed into an immovable wall, heat spilling off the casual abuse of physics. One moment he’d stood firm—the next, Nagamura had been knocked back. Something cracked, leather creaked, and the familiar thud of limbs on cheap pleather seemed to echo in the training room.

All she could hear was the thunder of her heartbeat. The world narrowed to the adrenaline coursing in her veins, the way her skin felt like it was stretched too tight over her frame, the whispers of charge clinging to the metal drilled through her skull. Her fingers flexed of their own volition, straining to channel once more. It would be so easy. It would feel so good.

“Jesus,” someone muttered. Her fingers stilled and snuffed out the flickers of her corona.

Her senses opened, and the world came screaming into terrible focus. Whispers and an awful clap of hands, the shifting of the mat under heavy footsteps, two heavy fingers dropping to her shoulder, squeezing, as if the arc of blood on the mat were praise worthy.

The world blurred at the edges even as light went impossibly sharp. Kalyani winced, a hand snaking behind her right ear to press sharply against an implant, as if she could drive it deeper into her head. The relief was slight, but it was enough to let her take a ragged breath.

“A real biotic,” Caelnus’ mocking warble filled the dead air. Her translator missed whatever his quiet rasping trill and clicks meant, but the intent was clear. It took almost everything to keep her hands still by her side. What an asshole.

Nagamura kept looking at her.

It wasn’t the wounded puppy Court gave her, or the usual frustration and fear she saw in her victims. Nagamura's gaze pierced through her, lightning that lashed tight about her spine and forced her to look, damn it. It refused to let her fall back into apathy. You did this, now look. There was no option but to meet his gaze and see the slash of red down his chin, shallow breaths that came with crushed ribs, and endless, simmering rage.

"Shit." The word was more air than substance, dissolving in a breath. She wasn’t even sure she’d said it.

"Get up," The turian's hand finally left her shoulder as he took long, swaggering steps forward. A familiar panic rose in her throat, followed close by bile. There could be no round two.

"We've gone over time," Kalyani said blandly. Trembling fingers laced behind her back, knuckles whitening around each other. "They're late for the galley."

Caelnus fixed her with an unblinking stare, pinpricks of acid green boring into her own dark eyes. Her pulse went shallow, thrumming with the need to run and make herself small. Kalyani nodded her head towards the throng of students, holding her breath. She could see Caelnus’ calculation, weighing the importance of breaking one versus throwing off the schedules for dozens.

For once, the distinctly Turian anal-retentive obsession with order worked out in her favor.

“That they are,” Caelnus’ agreement sounded airy, almost polite. It was unsettling. He looked down at Nagamura and Kalyani was amazed that he’d somehow managed to make his mandibles twitch in contempt. “Get to medical.”

At first he kept watching Kalyani because he'd wanted to see her. Now he kept his gaze fixed because he wasn't sure if he would survive whatever he might do if he looked at that fucking turian. He could barely hear the creature over his own heartbeat, hot and heavy in his ears, and it was for the best. Could someone die from hate? Just burn themselves out with it from the inside, spontaneous combustion?

Apparently not. He was certainly trying.

The shuffling of students making their awkward way out of the room filled the air as he tried to get his breath back, finally letting his eyes close and his shoulders shake. This wasn't his first injury and it wouldn't be his last--it wasn't anything medigel couldn't fix in an hour or two--but it hurt. Insides were not meant to be jagged, and with every breath it felt like his expanding lungs rasped on something sharp and intrusive. Had he, a niggling little thought in the back of his head wormed its way in, hoped that she would kill him? That maybe this would be it?

That he couldn't immediately consider the notion ridiculous was not a good sign.

Still, he wasn't dead. He was still on Jump Zero, still in BaAt, still lying on the fucking matting like any other of the pathetic wastes that filled these halls. The ones that didn't have it, that would never be strong enough to fight back. That's what he wanted, after all, why he put himself through all this. If he was every going to be strong enough to beat those fucking turians, he needed this.

Caelnus would have killed him. Kalyani could have, but didn't and she probably couldn't have taken the turian. So where the fuck did that leave him?

"Get up."

His words, this time, hissed through bloody teeth as he fought back that awful prickling in his eyes. Absolutely not. He was not about to fucking cry. He was still alive, and he was not going to give that fucking hawk the satisfaction. One leg at a time he curled, planted, worked his forearms down to the mat. Pushed.

Stood.

His chest screamed. He couldn't breathe. It hurt, but he was a raw nerve, now--everything hurt. Already he could feel the pressure behind his eyes, that throb that meant he was in for the worst of it for the next few hours regardless of his chest--why hadn't they put some kind of dampener on these damn implants? Something that wouldn't let them push so hard? There had been days when Yoroi felt the blood vessels burst, dripping down his nose. Once it had even come from his eyes, leaking like hot tears, unbidden. It was everything he could do to keep from screaming out of, what? Pain? Fury? Either?

But he looked Caelnus in the eye and spat out a 'Yes, Sir'. And he started towards the med bay.

He was burning and he knew it. The human body, the human brain couldn't stand that kind of emotion long term and he was already getting that awful hollow feeling in his chest, like space was just blowing through him. But Yoroi wasn't about to lose it in front of Caelnus, not after that, and so he put one foot in front of the other. Slowly, steadily, each step labor. More than anything he wanted to blow away, to catch that space wind and just dissolve into whatever cold emptiness was out there, spread so far apart as to be a statistical irrelevancy. He was passing Kalyani and something slipped out, dribbled past his lips like the blood he had to wipe off with the back of his wrist.

"We're gonna die here... aren't we?"

...where the fuck did that come from?

He would figure it out later. He would think later, process later, pick up the pieces later and move on, or whatever it was assholes like him did when shit like this happened to them. Right now, he needed the med bay.

One foot in front of the other.

It was her third migraine in as many days.

If Step Nine came with any benefits, it was that they indulged her a few hours of rest when her brain turned traitor. Curled in on herself, Kalyani did her best to block out the relentless hum of the station, blankets strewn across every emergency light, and tried to ride it out. Stars exploded behind her eyes, supernova that burned along every nerve, colliding with the dull ache at the base of her skull. She drove her eyes against the point of her knees; she had to resist the mad urge to rip them out with her thumbs.

It would pass. It would pass, it would pass, itwouldpassitwouldpassitwouldpass.

The door to her compartment ground open. Her nails sank into the scar tissue surrounding cool metal. The sting did little to lessen the explosion of noise screaming along her raw nerves. Light streamed in from the corridor, piercing every crack in her armor, until it flooded her senses as readily as if she'd opened her eyes. Kalyani shuddered.

"Madan--" The voice stopped for a brief moment. "Madan--we're mustering with Vyrnnus in observation. Are you--"

"Yeah--yes, I'm--let's go."


There were four of them now, the Step Nines. There'd been five last week. Coccetti had managed to piss off an instructor and slammed with enough demerits to drop her two steps. They lived in eternal limbo, trying desperately not to fall as they grasped for another step that didn't exist. In years past, they'd seen Step Nines age out and disappear on shuttles. Kalyani had been a Step Nine for five months, eighteen for nearly four. There were no more shuttles.

There was very little chatter as they idled in the gleaming compartment. Brooks and Wheelock gossiped at the massive window, ignoring the endless sprawl of space. An omnitool hummed, casting an orange glow across a haphazard collection of seats. Sat on a red, faded couch, Kalyani pressed a hand to her eyes and did her best to ignore the rolling waves of nausea. The warm line of Coty's arm pressed against hers felt like it was all that was keeping her together.

"Attention on deck!"

Somehow, Kalyani found herself at attention. Her body moved without instruction, conditioned to obey. Anything to avoid another hour of training, of shouting, of whatever punishment amused them most. The world was blurry, her vision stubbornly refusing to unify. But her spine was straight and she managed not to puke on her boots.

The Commander was terrifying, even among turians. His authority was absolute--even the sadists like Caelnus were quick to defer to Vyrnnus. It was no mystery why. He commanded a room simply by entering it, like he owned every inch of space. Somehow, Kalyani knew he'd killed more people than she'd ever known.

"At ease," The discordance in his voice was more pronounced than in other turians. Perhaps it was a product of the avian equivalent of two packs a day for twenty years, or whatever had left one side of his face so mangled. All Kalyani knew was that it made her skin crawl.

Vyrnnus strolled through the massive compartment, hands folded in the small of his back, the perfect picture of supremacy. They watched in silence--even Brooks, the very worst of them, didn't dare speak. He paused at the massive window, beady eyes surveying the heavens, as if deep in thought.

"You might have noticed," he began, "That the curriculum has changed. We're implementing a new, ah, let's call it a capstone project."

--

She was going to kill the asshole who'd brought her to Jump Zero. She was going to find a fucking way off this station and track the asshole down and rip him to fucking shreds. He'd pay for every fucking year she'd spent here, for every swallowed protest, for every broken bone. The Alliance will have need of good biotics, he'd said, and her mother had squeezed her shoulder, so fucking proud.

The datapad exploded against the bulkhead. Wires and metal went flying. The dismembered skeleton of the datapad crumpled to the ground, leaving only a gouge against her wall. Breathing heavily, Kalyani pushed loose hair off her face, and tried to calm down. She had to think. Had to think--

Instead she screamed, launching the frame of her cot into the opposite wall with a flare of blue light. The crash was deeply unsatisfying, only serving to aggravate the pounding in her head. Kalyani swore. She paced.

A fucking capstone project, Vyrnnus called it, like writing a fucking paper or making a poster.

Breaking another person was not a fucking project. It was fucking bullshit--who the fuck among them was going to need to withstand torture in their future? He'd been so full of shit, banging on about learning best through experience, about emerging stronger, better, about how they'd get to go home afterwards.

Just one more project, he'd smiled, and then you're done You have your assignments. Get to it. Someone must have thought it funny, assigning her to rip Nagamura to shreds.

One more project.

God, she just wanted to see Earth again.

--


Time was meaningless out here. Jump Zero had synced their clocks with Arcturus Station, but this deep in the void, they could have as easily chosen anywhere else. The station mimicked day and night cycles well enough, brightening lights and dimming them accordingly. Eighteen on, six off, in endless refrain.

The station was still dark. Kalyani's boots clicked as she followed familiar corridors. The stillness of the station had been unnerving once; Earth had been so crowded, even when her parents had managed to take leave to the countryside. The quiet had frightened her when she'd first arrived. Now she could scarcely imagine anything else.

The corridor terminated in a lift, which carried her down towards the heart of BAaT. Kalyani smoothed out the crisp blue fabric of her uniform. After five years in the same red fatigues, her skin didn't look like her own anymore. Her knuckles whitened, nails curving crescents into the flesh of her palms.

It started today. Four students, four mentors to break them. Brooks had laughingly proposed a race. Kalyani was horrified when the others agreed--and yet, she'd said nothing.

Lights flickered to life abruptly as artifical day dawned throughout the station. The training room beckoned.

Earth.

Medigel was an amazing thing. Though BaAt wasn't exactly outfitted with the battlefield-grade stuff with it's 'take four bullets in the chest and keep going' level anesthetics, as the gloved hands smeared the stuff over Yoroi's chest the relief was palpable. With as little idea of what the stuff actually was as ninety percent of the other students, he couldn't help wonder if it was some strange organism that dissolved into the meat of him, felt around in his muscles for the aches and pains and soothed them. It seemed awfully targeted for something so generally applied, as if guided to the parts of him that weren't whole, and he couldn't help thinking of it like some form of bonding amoeba. As its cool, tingling numbness spread bone-deep to his ribs and the station medics began to press them back into place, Yoroi's mind wandered. Had he, he wondered, had a more significant injury? He wasn't sure that he wouldn't have died had both of the rolling biotic spikes punched through him.

It didn't matter. He lived through it, and he would live through it again.

Or would he? He'd meant it, when he asked Madan if they would die here. A stupid thing to say, really, the instructors had it in their best interests to keep them alive, but it wouldn't be the first time. Accidents happened, and how many were actually accidents as opposed to 'accidents' called such after the fact was questionable at best. But Yoroi was beginning to feel that he really might die here--that one day he would either kill those fucking hawks or be killed by them. That he couldn't think of it any other way was both telling and frighting to him, as was his acceptance of both of these facts. What was there left to say? They'd taken something from him, some deep sense of security, and he wanted it back. What would it even be like, now, to be in control of himself? To run his own life? To be a civilian again?

That he couldn't picture it, as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath against the slowly dissipating searing in his chest, was telling.

---

No one could look at him.

As he made his way back into the lounge some hours after he entered the medical wing, not a one of the students would meet his eyes. That was fine--he didn't need them. What would they have done? Apologized? Lied to him and pretend it had been a good fight? He didn't have anything to say to them, and they nothing to him. He felt as alone as he ever had, and for the first time he found himself wondering if Madan felt like this.

Step Nine. Instructor level, high enough up in the rankings to warrant your own room. Instructors' privileges, the right to command students. What would it be like, with eyes constantly on your back? Was it like this? He could feel them, as he made to take a seat at one of the tables, burning holes in his back and whispering. His wrist still had the red medical tag on it, the one that said he wasn't allowed to participate in training for the remainder of the calendar day, and he toyed with it as he closed his eyes and tried to ignore what he could hear of the murmuring about the room.

Fucking dumbass...
Did you see that? How does someone survive that?
He'll bring the instructors down on all of us, you want and see...
Hope he--

His nose was bleeding.

He swiped over his lip with a thumb, snagging the crawl of red on the calloused skin and observing it for a moment. Not long ago he'd been practically spitting the stuff, but somehow it was more terrifying to see it now than it had been then, all the claustrophobia of the station hitting him at once. He wondered if this was what panic attacks were like, if this was one of them, these moments where the world seemed to blot out and all he could see was the red of his blood. Some kids got migraines--Yoroi got nosebleeds. Bad ones, sometimes, the kind that didn't stop. What if it didn't stop? What if he'd blown something this time? A little pop, somewhere in his head, trying so hard he just couldn't--

His shoulder jerked forward as someone knocked into it in passing, an elbow jarring him forward roughly enough that he had to catch himself on the table. Looking over his shoulder to see Al-Tariq pointedly not looking at him while he walked over to chat up one of the younger girls in the program, Yoroi found himself surprisingly dispassionate about the matter. Yesterday, this morning, he'd have jumped up and made a show out of it. Pulled rank, reminded him who was who in their little biotic food chain. Now...

Now he just didn't have the energy.

He had bigger fish to fry.

---

He woke to the same sound as ever, that piercing klaxon that sounded the shift from dark to light. Would he ever get used to it? Some of the others had, waking up beforehand and killing time until the inevitable, but for whatever reason Yoroi was always one of the few that woke up to it. His body resisted acclimation, a circadian rebel, in tune with some time-schedule from a world far enough away that it was meaningless to him. There was only the ship now, only the training. The students. The turians.

Yoroi got up and followed the rest to breakfast, back straight and head held high. If they wanted to see him broken, they would have to try harder than that.

Sometimes it felt like the station was consuming her. After five years in its depths, she could often think of little else. Kalyani could map its sleek metal corridors better than her own flesh. It plagued her dreams, endless red mats and frigid bunks, blotting out the comfort of her life before. Jump Zero had crawled inside her, burrowed into her very marrow and sunk its teeth into the pulp. Inch by inch, day by day, it had devoured her, leaving nothing but an awful hollow.

What would happen when there was nothing left to take?

The bell over the 1MC had summoned students to the galley, leaving the training room gloriously empty. Missing meals was stupid at best, deadly at worst, but the thought of food was enough to make Kalyani nauseous. Better that she burn out than puke on her boots in front of the students. At least she could ride out the agony of her nodules going cold in the privacy of her room, away from the scores of ever-watching, ever-hateful eyes.

A light flickered overhead. The electric whine shattered the stillness of the room. Without students, the room seemed impossibly large. Heavy bags and blocks were stacked neatly to one side, awaiting another day of telekinetic abuse. The barres lining a wall looked less cold, like they could be almost used for art, as if there were room for softness here.

Biotics were the closest thing to art that Jump Zero would ever know. Kalyani took a steadying breath and willed the world to fall away. All that mattered was the rush as she flared a barrier, moving through her mnemonics.

If there was anywhere in this station she could center herself, it was here. It should have been easy to sink into the familiar rhythm of her biotics and lose herself. She should have been able to breathe without trouble, to steady herself. The station had taken everything else from her, but they’d never been able to strip the joy from the eezo burning in her veins before. Biotics had always been her haven.

We’re gonna die here, aren’t we?

She kept coming back to that fucking question. No matter how she tried to ignore it, it burned in the deepest corners of her brain. The pulses of her implants did little to silence the whisper. It needed an answer. It would accept nothing less.

Her concentration faltered and her barrier stuttered before extinguishing in a flicker of silver light. Kalyani swore, brows knitted together in frustration.

Again danced mockingly through her head. She obeyed, but her thoughts refused to clear, and the barrier once again dissipated.

That Kalyani didn’t scream was a blessing.

“Well, you look like shit.”

The voice that shattered the quiet was thoroughly unwelcome. Smooth and crisp, it made Kalyani stiffen. For several moments she refused to look at him. Her heart beat so violently she thought her ribs might break under the pressure.

“Your input is appreciated, Brooks,” Kalyani managed to say in a bland voice. She finally turned to face him. They were of a height, but he somehow managed to look like a proper Instructor, clad in blue. Maybe it was the sharp gleam in his pale eyes when practise turned vicious, the way he always seemed coiled to strike.

“I live to serve,” the laughter in his voice made Kalyani’s skin crawl. She stepped back as he approached, hands in his pockets, as if that made him less dangerous. “Come on, Madan, cheer up. It’s not all bad; might even be fun, if you let it.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Kalyani pursed her lips as Brooks drew even with her, desperate to hold her ground.

“Well, at the very least, don’t go about embarrassing the rest of us, yeah? This whole wounded puppy thing doesn’t exactly command respect,” Brooks spoke casually, sounding almost friendly. He shrugged his shoulders. “You should probably get your shit together. Have you even started yet?”

“Perhaps you should worry about yourself,” Kalyani managed to look him in the eye, even as her pulse fluttered anxiously. Her voice sounded much more even than she felt. Brooks snorted dismissively.

“Right, fuck me for trying to help then. Don’t come crying to me when you fuck it all up.”

“I’ll be sure to remember that.”

Bells rang over the 1MC, heralding the end of the meal period and the pending muster. Kalyani turned away from Brooks, lips pursed into a thin line.

Muster, Kalyani realised, would be awful in a way it had never been before. Last week, she’d at least been a student at Step Nine, had been able to hide in a sea of faces.

Today, she would have to stand on the other side of the whip.

No more hiding.