Akuze looked like a gift: a lush world on the edge of Alliance space that had gone silent, a settlement standing intact with not one person left alive in it. Shepard’s patrol walked in and found nothing to fight. At first. But then, at nightfall, the ground opened. Thresher maws rose out of the earth, all teeth and tentacles, and when it was over, 50 marines were dead. Shepard was the only one who made it back to the landing zone. She took one rule from that night, because she needed it to be true: The dead have to count for something, or 50 people died for nothing.
So when, years later, an Alliance clerk told Shepard that a fallen marine named Nirali Bhatia “may save more lives in death than she did in life,” Shepard was faced with the decision — the opportunity — to make Nirali’s death count for something. Before the question ended, she was already agreeing. Hand a grieving husband his wife’s body? Or keep her for research that might save more lives down the line? Someone was going to pay for whichever answer I chose. (I knew Shepard would say yes. I also knew, thumbs hovering over the controller, that every part of me wished she wouldn’t.)
Back on the Citadel, after Tali joined the crew, Samesh Bhatia found us at the Presidium and apologized for the intrusion before he asked for anything. Samesh is a civilian, the husband of a marine, with no rank, no pull, and, by his own telling, nowhere else to turn. His wife, Nirali, was a marine in the 212. She died on Eden Prime, the colony where Shepard’s first mission in Mass Effect went hunting for a Prothean beacon and found the geth instead, attacking on orders of Saren Arterius, a rogue spectre operative. We found Ashley Williams there, at the dig site where her team had been posted, the last of her squad standing. Nirali didn’t make it off the planet, and the Alliance had refused to release her body. Samesh wanted to cremate her and give her a proper funeral. Ashley, who was in my squad on this run through Legendary Edition, had served in Nirali’s unit, which put two survivors of dead units on the Presidium, listening to a man who lost the one who didn’t make it.
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