Shepard holds onto the ledge for dear life, her frantic gaze landing on Joker as he reaches out for her.

"Commander!"

The ship suffers another blow and she's ripped away from her lifeline. She flails in microgravity, trying desperately to reach for Joker, but he's not there anymore. It's only her, now, alone in this wrecked hulk, still being pummeled with energy beams.

God, I can't die. Not like this.

She burns with searing heat as another beam causes the cockpit to explode and she's flung back. She careens into the jagged edges of the Normandy's fractured hull, her hip shattering as she—

***

"Ah!" Shepard screams as her eyes fly open and her hands shoot to her hip, but it's... fine? She lies back and sighs in relief, letting her eyes flutter closed again as she rocks gently in her bed.

Wait...

"Wake up, Commander!"

Shepard's eyes snap open again and she pushes herself up with great strain to witness the battle that rages in front of her behind the protection of a sturdy window. An army of mechs advance on soft-bodied, flesh-and-bone humans. Most of them aren't even wearing armour.

They don't stand a chance.

Blood and gore spatter the once-clean glass as muffled screams ring through the air. Whatever this place once was, it's a battlefield now.

She gazes around the room, which seems to be some kind of infirmary, although hers is the only bed that's present.

Where am I?

"Shepard, do you hear me? Get out of that bed, now! The facility's under attack."

She recognises that voice. The commanding tone, her soft Australian accent. It belongs to that woman she saw earlier. She looks up toward the sound.

"I know you," she says.

"Shepard, your scars aren't healed, but I need you to get moving. This facility is under attack."

Shepard looks down at her body to see that she's clothed in a patient's robe. But even more horrifyingly, she has scars snaking up along her arms and legs. She pulls the neck of her robe back to find that they snake across her chest, and when she touches her face, the skin is bumpy with the tracks of yet more scars.

What the hell happened to me?

Still, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and wiggles her toes, pushing herself to her feet. The cool floor shocks her awake, but she's not quite orientated yet. She's sluggish with her movements, like a reptile who's yet to venture out into the morning sun.

"You need to get dressed, Shepard. There's a pistol in the locker behind you. Quickly!" Miranda says, increasingly irate.

Shepard looks around, her eyes landing on the locker. Beside it are some clothes—plain grey trousers and a shirt. She would prefer armour, but that's not an option, so she takes the trousers and slides into them, her scars stinging as the skin stretches over her sore bones and tender flesh. Then, she opens the locker to find a pistol and ammo.

She loads the gun.

"I have the weapon."

"I'm opening the door for you. Hold on," Miranda says. A moment later, the door opens at the other end of the infirmary and Shepard follows the sound with barely a thought between her ears. She walks through the open door into a wide corridor with her head high, only for a bullet to fly past it and, snapped out of her stupor, she ducks behind a makeshift barricade of loose crates, quickly realising that she's taken her place next to an Alliance officer's corpse. She peeks through the gaps in cover to see that it's a standard LOKI mech firing at her. When it reloads, she takes her chance to pop out of cover and fire at the mech until it sparks and spasms to a jarring halt, collapsing into a heap of plastic and metal.

"Keep moving. We need to get you to the shuttles," Miranda says.

Shepard does as she commands and heads deeper into the facility. She finds herself taking the stairs to an observation room that overlooks the infirmary. Countless monitors and holographic diagrams display close-ups of organs: the heart, brain, lungs, and many more. Shepard spies a mass of loose pages, almost illegible notes scribbled on them, mathematical equations crossed out or underlined, and crude drawings of technical equipment—implants, she realises. Some are biotic, but the others she doesn't recognise. It's nothing the Alliance would sanction, she reckons. Half of these look far too invasive for any good outcome—installing them would require too much surgery for a human body to bear. She goes in to take a closer look, but a noise at the door turns her head. It's not long before sparks are flying from the edges.

"Shepard! Security mechs are closing on your position. Take cover!"

But there's none to be seen. She's got nothing but a few barrels to hide behind, and she's sure that they'll give way under fire. She's frozen in panic as her wits are slow to come to her, but when the doors come loose at the hinges and fall forward, she dives for the only cover she has, just as they slam into the cold tiled floor.

Gunfire rings out across the observation room and Shepard tucks herself even tighter into cover. It sounds like she's up against more than one mech this time, and she doubts she'll get a clear opportunity to fire. Instead, she puts the pistol down and focuses her biotic power to create a barrier, but when she does she's taken aback by the ease with which she does it. She worries that she's done something wrong, but she's done that move countless times before. She pushes down the strange feeling and peeks over cover to find three LOKI mechs bunched closely together.

Perfect.

She rises from cover and, with a rippling biotic field encompassing her sweeping arm, releases a colossal shockwave. She shrieks in surprise as it smashes glass panels and bursts the barrels, spilling their contents on the floor, before reaching the mechs and flinging them at alarming speed into the ceiling, decimating them in an instant. She looks at her scarred hands as if they're alien to her.

What the hell?

She was considered a strong biotic, a prodigy in the academy, but this level of destruction and the ease with which she does it is more on par with the ability of a seasoned asari combatant. Shepard is getting more and more confused the longer she's awake.

"Nice work, Shepard. Coast is clear," Miranda says.

Shepard ignores her growing desire to examine more of the observation room—maybe glean some understanding of her situation from the notes—but she's keenly aware that Miranda is watching her, and she gets the impression that she shouldn't invoke the woman's ire.

Instead, she walks through the doorway to yet another sleek, white-tiled corridor. She's beginning to notice a particular symbol painted on the walls and doors, though—a faint grey, elongated hexagon with another pair of lines on the shape's exterior that follows the lower sides. It seems familiar somehow. She stops to take a look, tilting her head from left to right, as if inspecting it from different angles will spark her memory.

"Don't waste time. I can't keep the mechs distracted for long," Miranda says.

"Where are we?"

"Not now, Shepard!"

Shepard sighs and shakes her head. She's getting a bad feeling about this, but she'd rather have a bad feeling and be alive than be killed by mechs. She keeps moving, guided by Miranda who directs her with stern instruction. Every so often, she comes across a grim battle unfolding behind a window, or a door that's closing, courtesy of Miranda. All she says is that Shepard can't afford to waste time saving people who are already dead. She doesn't remember the Alliance ever being so cold. Miranda even scolds her for checking nearby bodies for pulses. It's beginning to grate on her.

She continues the trek to the shuttles and arrives at a wide platform, which she quickly realises is a lift, probably designed to transfer large cargo from one level to another.

"Take the lift down one level," Miranda says, and Shepard obeys. When she lands on the next level, she continues forward to a corridor where she finds the warped chassis of dead LOKI mechs.

"What now?" Shepard asks.

"Shepard? I ca– ksshh– you... Meet me– kssshh–"

"Miranda? I can't hear you."

"Ksshh– hear me? I've– ksshh... my position– ksshh–"

Shepard can just about hear the sound of gunfire before the transmission ends.

She is alone now.