Текст книги "Night of the Wolves "

Автор книги: Stephani Danelle Perry

Соавторы: Britta Dennison
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Troubled, Ro looked past Keeve to see that Bis was approaching her, his face unable to contain its excitement. Sensing that Ro was done with him, or wishing to avoid confrontation with Bis, Keeve moved on down the road, toward his own residence.

“Is it done?” Bis asked her eagerly, and Ro gave him a single nod, her head feeling heavy. This time, she did not respond when he grabbed her tightly, lifting her nearly off her feet.

“We have to celebrate,” Bis said. “Come with me, we’ll have spring wine at my friend Lino’s house.” He gestured toward a dwelling not far from where they stood.

“We did a good thing, didn’t we?” Ro said.

“We did a brilliant thing,” he said. He laughed out loud, a picture of jubilation.

“And…the people on the station…”

“What people?” Bis said, beginning to walk.

“The Bajorans,” she said. “They’ll…walk with the Prophets? Is that what you believe?”

Bis looked puzzled. “That’s right,” he said, but his voice sounded a little less excited now. He stopped walking. “Come on, Laren. Just think. We’re going to be responsible for killing Gul Dukat! Gul Dukat and Kubus Oak, all their henchmen. We’re going to destroy Terok Nor! Do you have any idea of the significance of it?”

“Yes, I know,” Ro said. “But Keeve Falor just told me—”

“Forget Keeve Falor!” Bis said, and he sounded angry now. “Just wait—once Terok Nor is really gone, once the prefect is dead—Keeve and the others will see that I was right.”

“Of course,” Ro said. She thought of the botched mission on Jo’kala, her last. She’d been so sure the others would see that she was right—but she hadn’t been.

“I left the ship in orbit,” she told him.

“That’s for the best,” Bis told her. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow, when I take you back to Jeraddo.”

Ro swallowed. Back to Jeraddo? “Right,” she said, feeling her chest tighten.

Bis’s friends Lino and Hintasi were both inside a little house with a dirt floor, one nearly identical to Bis’s, but older and smaller. It was mostly dark inside, with dirty and mildewed fabric covering the open windows. A pile of blankets was heaped in a corner, making do for a bed. There were several bottles of spring wine on the floor where Lino and Hintasi were sitting, and they saluted with a bottle as Ro entered, shouting their congratulations and pushing a bottle into her hands. She was only too happy to drink it, thinking her nerves deserved it.

She took a sip, wanting to make it last, but she found herself drinking deeply, thirsty for the effect. “I hope it was worth it,” she said, coming up for air. She sat on the floor, took another drink.

“It’s worth it,” Bis assured her. “I can’t think of a better reason to finish off the last of my father’s spring wine. The last time we drank a bottle was—”

“No, I mean—all of it. I mean—what if the Cardassians just send another prefect? What if they just build another station? What if it’s all just—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lino interrupted.

“Why is it ridiculous?” Ro asked, and as she said it, she began to think, to really think, about what she’d done. To the Cardassians, Bajor was just one little planet. Killing the prefect might not matter much to them at all. Certainly, the destruction of Terok Nor would mean a setback, but perhaps their resources were truly infinite. Perhaps there were exponentially more of them than there were Bajorans. Ro suddenly recognized that maybe Keeve Falor had been right, all those years ago when he’d sent her on the cautious reconnaissance mission; maybe gathering information about the Cardassians before fighting them was the better approach, after all.

“Come on, Laren,” Bis said, starting to sound a little upset. “Don’t you remember what you said all those years ago? About just killing the Cardassians on Valo VI? And then you did it! You shot them, all by yourself. Even though I would have been scared to death, I never would have been able to—”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Ro interupted. “I didn’t have to kill them. I could have gotten out of there before they would have seen me, I could have called for Bram, but I compromised the mission, and I killed them anyway.” She took another deep drink from the bottle. “I thought…I thought if I killed him…I’d never have another nightmare, I’d stop feeling so terrible about what happened to my father, but it made no difference. None!” She dropped the empty bottle on the dirt floor, fighting tears.

No one spoke for a moment. “Laren,” Lino finally said. “I think I understand how you feel. But those Bajorans on the station, they’ll walk with the Prophets soon, can’t you see that? And—”

“How comforting it must be for you!” Ro interrupted. “To have something to believe in, to have something to justify what we just did. What I just did!” She tried to reach for another bottle, but thought better of it. The wine had hit her fast.

“I want to be alone for a while,” she announced, and pushed herself up off the floor. She stormed out of the little house, a strange, buried part of her almost wishing that Bis would follow her, but he let her go.

21

Kira fought down the panic that threatened to overtake her—for it appeared that something had gone very wrong. The Bajoran scientist who had briefed the Shakaar about this operation had neglected to mention anything about the burning wreckage that was currently at the base of the pit. He had indicated that the Bajorans would be corralled by the Cardassian guards, but instead, Kira was confronted with a brace of panicking people, pushing at the slowly moving queue that spread out across the entire perimeter of the pit, the line of Bajorans undulating in an upward direction. But Kira needed to bring them all in together, and she did not know how four people could possibly round up all these hysterical wretches in one central location. Hysterical and terrible in their weakness, their sickness, their injuries and too-thin bodies. There were no Cardassians to be seen, but she heard phaser fire and screams coming from some of the upper tunnels. Gallitep was a nightmare, worse than she’d imagined.

She caught the eye of a man who seemed to have a recognizable degree of lucidity, and she moved closer to him. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “Help is here. I need someone to help me gather everyone together in a central location. Can you do that?”

The man, who Nerys quickly realized could not be more than a few years older than she was, cleared his throat with difficulty. “I can try,” he croaked. “Someone needs to tell them to calm down, or people are going to start shoving each other off the paths and we’ll all wind up down there.” He nodded toward the pit, where the flames from the crashed building were finally dying down, its three broken and twisted legs crookedly awry, but the smoke was thick, and many people were beginning to hack and cough.

Nerys began to shout, her eyes streaming from the chemical smoke below. “People, people! Please, try to calm down!” Her voice was lost over the crying and shouting, and the man did his best to shout along with her, until the people nearest them began at last to still.

“We’ve come to help!” Kira shouted, though she didn’t know if her voice could be heard. Above her, she could see Gantt, attempting to calm down another small group that surrounded him on an even narrower road than the one where she stood. She hoped Shakaar was with him. She couldn’t see Lupaza anywhere.

“We need to get these people together in one place,” Kira told the man urgently. “Is there any way—”

“One of the larger tunnels,” the man replied. “The one I just came from goes back far enough to get everyone inside.”

“Let’s do it,” Kira said. The smoke was getting even thicker now.

“They may be reluctant,” he warned her, beginning to cough. “It was in one of the tunnels that the accident happened a few years ago—the one that caused so many to become sick.”

“We’ll have to convince them,” Kira said, and began to beckon to those closest to her, while the young man led them back in the direction of the tunnel. Kira saw the signs of protest, but she was firm. “Please!” she insisted. “You have to listen to me! We’re going to get you out of here, but you have to trust me, just follow him—” She pointed to her nameless assistant, and wormed her way through the people to get to Gantt, to tell him what was happening.

“Gantt!” she screamed, and after a few more shouts he finally saw her through the smoke, and looked down in her direction. She could not get to him without walking the full rotation of the circular road, at least a kellipate. “Get them down here! This way! If you see any of the others, tell them—there’s a big tunnel down here where we can herd them all together and transport them out!”

“Transport us out?” someone cried, and many more people began to talk at once, shouting back and forth in an excited, squabbling rumble, through the coughing and choking from the smoke. “Are we being transported out?” “Where are we going?” “Who is taking us there?” “Where are the Cardassians?”

“We’re taking you someplace safe!” Kira shouted, and repeated the words again and again until they began to spread throughout the crowd, hopefully to those on the other side of the pit. Kira could no longer see them through the haze, though it seemed to be clearing—either that, or she was getting used to it.

The process of herding everyone into the tunnel was slow and painstaking, and many people continued to resist, trying to move in the opposite direction and holding up progress, but Kira had help from others who apparently felt that the chance to get out, no matter how slim, trumped their fear of some kind of trick. By the time Kira entered the black, sweltering tunnel behind the enormous crowd of people, she began to have second thoughts. Not only was it hot and dark in here, but the smoke had made it almost impossible to breathe. By the time everyone could get to the tunnel, many of them might suffocate.

But there was no time to reformulate the plan; there were a hundred things or more that could go wrong. Kira still had no idea what had happened to Shakaar and Lupaza, nor any of the others who had been transported after her, although she thought she could hear phaser fire above her. She saw no guards, and feared they might have all been transported into the offices above, only to come back at any moment—or worse, bring in reinforcements to put a stop to the escape. Worse yet, there was the possibility that Mobara and Furel, who were back at the Institute of Science, had been caught at the industrial transporter. Then they would all be trapped here with no other means of getting out.

People in the back of the tunnel were coughing and crying. “I can’t breathe!” shouted a woman. “Get us out of here, please!”

Standing at the mouth of the tunnel, Kira recognized Lupaza coming closer with more people. “Lupaza!” Kira cried out. “We have to get these people out of here, quickly! It’s going to take too much time to get everyone together, we’ll have to begin transporting them now!”

Lupaza turned to regard the long rope of people still advancing toward the tunnel through the thinning smoke, listened to those at the back of the cavern who cried out in the claustrophobic darkness, and gave a quick nod. She pressed her comm device.

“Mobara, it’s Lupaza! I’m here with Nerys—we have to start transporting people out right away.”

“How many would you estimate are with you?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Can’t you just lock on to our signals and get as many out as you can?”

“I think so,”he said. “I hope so,”he added. “I don’t know the first thing about what this transporter beam is capable of, but I’ll widen it to its full distance capacity and see where that gets us.”

Kira shut her eyes tightly and felt a distinctive pins-and-needles sensation in her limbs and torso. When she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else; somewhere in the Dahkur woods—and she was surrounded by dozens of bewildered-looking people, malnourished, injured, coughing, and crying—and then muttering and exclaiming their amazement over what had just happened.

“Wait!” someone standing near Kira cried out. “Where’s Tynara?”

“Tynara will be here!” Kira shouted. “Please, remain calm, everyone. Just stay here with me, the rest will be here soon.” She hoped it was true.

Many people had now fallen to their knees, shouting with joy, others were crying, though Kira couldn’t tell if it was from fear or jubilation. Some still appeared to be in a daze, rubbing their faces in confusion or simply staring up at the trees as if they’d forgotten what trees looked like. Many were calling out for missing family and friends, searching for people who were not here yet—and who might not ever come, Kira thought, for even if Shakaar and the others made it with the rest of the survivors, plenty of Bajorans must have died today, either as a result of the accident that had caused the fire, or from having been too close to fleeing Cardassian guards who haunted the upper reaches of the mine.

After what seemed like a very long time, Gantt and Shakaar arrived with a smaller group of people.

“Did we get everyone out?” Kira pressed Shakaar.

“As many as we could see,” he told her, his tone hasty and dismissive, looking among the faces for the rest of his cell. Kira recognized others from the Shakaar cell in the growing, noisy crowd, Dakahna and Ornak and the young couple from outside Tamulna who had just joined the cell, but two were still missing, and Shakaar was trying to get clear word from Mobara regarding what had happened to them.

“Edon,” Lupaza prompted him, “we need to get these people to safety.”

Kira interrupted. “The scientist,” she said. “What about him? Mobara is supposed to…”

“Nerys,” Lupaza said gently, “the scientist is gone. He was in the structure when it fell from the suspension bridge above us.”

Kira shook her head. “But…” she said, “you can’t be sure…”

Gantt put his hand on her shoulder. “He’s gone,” he told her. “Now, we’ve got to get these people out of here. We’d better let Mobara know to get him and Furel back to the camp, and we’ve got to get these people somewhere safe.”

Swallowing hard, Kira nodded.

Valo II had grown dark, the people in the tents and rotted wood huts and eroding brick houses all gone to sleep. Ro knew that somewhere, Bis was probably looking for her by now.

Ro made her way to the landing field on Valo II, where the Ferengi freighter lay scattered in pieces. But she knew the comm was still functional, the comm that Bis and his friends had used to formulate their careful plan—the plan that she was now about to sabotage.

She managed to contact DaiMon Gart quite easily; Ro still recalled the comm code she’d seen on his bar tab. His face appeared on the tiny screen alongside the aural device. “DaiMon Gart,” she shouted, hoping the universal translator was still working.

“Who are you?”the Ferengi DaiMon said gruffly.

“I’m a…terrorist, DaiMon Gart. I wanted to let you know that…I put a bomb on your ship.”

The Ferengi’s eyes suddenly went wide with fear, and he began to shriek. “What?”he cried. “Why would you have done such a thing? I’m an honest man! Is this about the ion coil assemblies? Because they were in perfectly good shape when I sold them, I assure you!”

“No…it’s not…it’s…look, DaiMon Gart, you have to eject your cargo, now, or it’s going to react with the bomb and you’ll never see another…ion coil assembly…or anything else…ever again!”

The man stopped screaming, and looked suspicious. “Eject my cargo? Are you mad? Do you have any idea how much latinum I’m going to be making with this run?”

“Which is more important to you, DaiMon—latinum, or your life?”

The Ferengi considered for what Ro thought was an absurdly long time before finally making his decision. “My life,”he said grudgingly.

“Then you’re going to have to eject your cargo, DaiMon. I’m sorry. If you don’t believe me, you can send someone back there to confirm that there’s a device in the bay, but I’m not sure I’d advise tampering with it. The men who built it were a bit on the amateur side.”

The DaiMon appeared to consider this for a moment. “I believe you,”he said. “You’ve got an…honest face.”He said the last part with clear revulsion. He muttered to himself for a moment, looking over his control panel. “Yes,”he said, “you’re telling the truth, aren’t you? My scans show an object of unidentified origin and composition in the cargo bay…”He looked positively miserable. “Why would you do this to me?”he cried.

“Hey, I’m saving your life right now!” Ro pointed out, but it seemed of little consolation to the Ferengi.

“Fine,”he practically sobbed, and began to mutter to himself again, though it sounded quite distinctly mournful this time. With an exaggerated and deliberate gesture, he stabbed at a control panel on his sensor array. Ro sighed with relief, and left the comm without so much as a good-bye to the Ferengi.

She wandered away from the landing field and walked aimlessly around the perimeter of the village, finding the copse of trees where she had once taken a little walk with Bis, to hide from Bram. She remembered hoping that he would kiss her. It was so foolish, she recognized now, not just the thoughts she’d had as a younger girl, but that she’d been so easily convinced to take part in such a dangerous and costly plan by the promise of…what? Love? She almost laughed out loud at it now. Even after all she’d shared with him, all of herself that she’d given him, Bis had just been expecting her to go back to Jeraddo, go back to Jo’kala, without a second thought of him.

Where would she go now? She could not very well wait for Bis to take her to Jeraddo; he’d be so angry with her when he learned what she had done that he would be sure to…She didn’t know what he would do, but she had no intention of finding out. She didn’t want to go back to Bajor, anyway. The way she saw it, she had only one choice.

Before she’d gone to the moon of that gas giant, she’d known that there was much more to the universe, that it was crammed with people who took no notice of the simple dichotomy between Cardassian and Bajoran. But it had never occurred to her that she might somehow be part of that other universe, a universe where she might be regarded as something beyond the identity she’d somehow stumbled into. Orphan, pickpocket, resistance fighter—she didn’t want to be any of those things anymore. She just wanted to be Ro Laren. The trouble was, she didn’t know who Ro Laren could be.

She took one last look at the copse of pathetic little trees, thought that she would miss the majestic forests of Jo’kala, and then she squeezed the comm device that was still in her pocket, the device she’d neglected to give back to Bis. She felt a strange whirring deep in the very essense of her body’s composition as she was transported into the pilot seat of the shuttle, one of the last warp vessels on Valo II. It was a shame that she had to take it from them, but she could think of no other way. The defeat she saw on her world, the petty squabbles and the justification of such heinous acts in the name of liberation—maybe now she could go to a place where she could really make a difference. Maybe now she could find out who she really was, and what she really wanted.

“How can this be?” Kalisi Reyar was shouting, and Mora could hear every word as he poked his head out of his laboratory.

“It’s a very good question,” Yopal answered her. “I don’t understand how you could let a thing like this happen, Doctor Reyar.”

“It was a security measure!” Reyar answered, her voice high and angry. “I assumed the system here was safe! Why would I risk copying my research, leaving it where anyone could get hold of it, could steal it from me—”

“Protecting your work from terrorists should have taken precedence over your concerns regarding provenance for your achievements.” Yopal’s voice had gone cold.

“How was I to know that a terrorist was working right alongside us?”

Mora turned to Odo’s tank, where the shape-shifter was apparently regenerating. “Odo,” he said, keeping his voice authoritative, though the conversation down the hall had him very frightened.

After a moment, the shape-shifter writhed and twisted into partially humanoid form, his features glassy and liquid. “What is it, Doctor Mora?”

“Odo, did you…happen to…notice anything unusual happening in the laboratory last night?” His voice had dropped, the worry showing through.

Odo’s features solidified. His eyes were devoid of expression, but his hesitation suggested he was afraid to answer.

“Never mind,” Mora told him. “Odo, if you saw anything, you must not repeat it to anyone, do you understand? If anyone asks, you didn’t see anything happen here last night.”

“I…saw nothing,” Odo said, and Mora didn’t know if he was telling the truth, or only following Mora’s instructions. Either way, it would have to do. Mora left Odo in his tank and headed for where Yopal and Reyar were still arguing.

“Good morning, Doctors,” Mora said with convincing neutrality.

“Doctor Mora!” Yopal exclaimed when she saw him. “A terrible thing has happened! Doctor Reyar’s research has been stolen!”

Mora took a step back. “You don’t say!”

“It was your friend Daul!” Reyar shouted. “I suppose you heard what he did—he sabotaged the work camp he’d been assigned to! And then he stole my research!”

“You don’t say,” Mora said again, his voice growing faint now. “I…I hadn’t heard.” Daul? So he was behind this?

“It’s all over the comnet, Mora!”

“I…don’t have access to the Cardassian comnet,” Mora said. His personal laboratory computer was programmed to block him from the Cardassian channel.

“Yes,” Yopal sighed. “Unfortunately, it does seem that our Doctor Daul is responsible for wreaking quite a bit of havoc. Last night, the main computer server at Gallitep was sabotaged—destroyed. Nearly all the Bajoran prisoners escaped, several guards were killed in the accident—and Doctor Daul was killed, as well.”

Mora heard himself gasp, and then quickly shut his mouth. “How…terrible,” he said.

“On top of all of that unpleasantness, Doctor Reyar’s research has been destroyed, the permanent files on her computer corrupted,” Yopal went on. “Apparently, Daul was working in conjunction with a group of terrorists. Our transporter was accessed last night, and Daul’s passcode was the last one used. The security cams have all been wiped, as have all the last transporter coordinates. Only Daul could have orchestrated something like this. I knew it was foolish to allow him to use the transporters.”

“What did you know of this?” Reyar asked Mora accusingly. “What did Daul say to you?”

“Nothing!” Mora insisted, feeling like a terrible coward. He couldn’t believe Daul had the wherewithal—the courage—to pull off a thing so spectacularly dangerous. “I…haven’t spoken to Daul in almost a week. I assure you, if he’d said anything regarding sabotage—or theft—I would have reported him!”

Yopal turned to Reyar. “I’m sure our Doctor Mora knew absolutely nothing of this.”

Mora did his best to conceal a sigh of relief.

Reyar went on. “I’ll have to start practically from the beginning!” she complained.

“That’s enough, Doctor Reyar. We should think of the forty-seven brave Cardassians who lost their lives trying to protect Gallitep.”

Reyar was undaunted. “It was my life’s work, and now it’s all gone!”

“Well, at any rate, you’ll be able to recall most of it, of course,” Yopal said calmly.

Mora distinctly read uncertainty in Reyar’s eyes before she answered. “Yes, of course.”

Yopal went on. “You’ll just need someone to act as a scribe. And Doctor Mora is going to help you do that.”

Mora thought about what Reyar had been working on—the anti-aircraft device, something to shoot down terrorist raiders. He felt oddly triumphant on Daul’s behalf, through his fear and guilt—and it quickly occurred to him that maybe he could do something as well—nothing so grand, but something nonetheless.

So,he thought, I’m going to be helping Doctor Reyar salvage her research, am I?Well, he intended to make it very difficult for her; he decided it right then and there.

“Meanwhile, Mora, there is something else I’d like to discuss with you,” Yopal said, and her artificial smile looked more forced than ever. “I’ve decided that it might be more…comfortable for you if I make a little…place for you to stay, here at the institute. That way, you won’t have to be bothered with traveling such a long distance back to the village. You see, we Cardassians all live at the nearby settlement, but you’ve got such a lengthy commute from the village…”

“I’m to live here?” Mora said, surprised. It immediately dawned on him what was happening—he was no longer permitted to leave.

“Yes, I think that would be best, don’t you?”

Mora nodded, for there was nothing else left to do. He supposed he should be grateful, after what had happened with Daul, that they weren’t simply sending him straight to a work camp. He was the last Bajoran here, and he’d better not forget it. The Cardassians obviously weren’t going to.

“Gul Dukat, I have something to show you!” Basso burst into the conference room with the isolinear recording in hand, and the prefect looked up from the long table where he was seated with his visitors, a damage assessment team from sciences.

“Basso! I believe I’ve asked you numerous times not to—”

“It’s about Gallitep, sir.”

Dukat immediately stopped what he was doing and excused himself from his visitors. The sabotage of the camp took precedence over all else; Dukat was eager to amplify the blame laid on Darhe’el for the disaster, no small task. Gul Darhe’el had been away from Gallitep when the mass escape and near total destruction of the camp had taken place; at worst, he was guilty of poor timing, although he hadspecifically asked for that Bajoran scientist, the one who’d acted on behalf of the terrorists. Dukat had gone out of his way to say as much in every report heading back to Cardassia Prime. If there was anything Basso could tell him that might be useful in his quest to see Darhe’el disgraced, Dukat was eager to hear it.

Leaving the conference room, he walked briskly back to his office, the Bajoran at his heels. When the door had closed behind them, he nodded for Basso to continue.

The Bajoran was breathless—from excitement or exertion, Dukat didn’t know. “I reviewed all the security rods from the day of the disaster, as you asked me, and I found one that has something you need to see.”

“Very good,” Dukat said, and sat down at his office desk.

Basso quickly plugged the recording into a nearby monitor and found the sequence he was looking for. Dukat squinted to view the footage. “Enhance,” Basso told the computer, and the focus pulled in on a group of people edging along one of the narrow roads that lined the open-pit mine.

“There,” Basso told him, pointing to the screen. “That’s Shakaar Edon, the leader of a cell just out of Dahkur.”

Dukat nodded. “So, we know who is responsible for Gallitep. But this doesn’t get us any closer to—”

“No, no, sir, there’s more.” Basso progressed the recording a few steps further, to show another crowd shot on a road further below the first point. “Enhance,” he said again, and pointed to the slender red-haired figure that appeared onscreen. He didn’t need to say more.

“Nerys,” Dukat breathed.

Kira mostly felt triumphant, for she’d just taken part in one of the biggest missions in the history of the Shakaar cell. She’d personally had a hand in liberating the worst camp on all of Bajor. She felt dizzied from all the praise that was being heaped on her, from not only Lupaza, but Dakhana, Mobara—even Shakaar himself had commended her courage and clear thinking.

The Shakaar cell had taken proper time and measure to grieve as well as celebrate, for two members of the group had not made it back. Mobara had been unable to get a lock on two of the communicators, and made the assumption that they had been destroyed. Ornak later confirmed that Matram Tryst had blown himself up, taking at least twenty Cardassian guards with him—along with Par Lusa. Par had been only eighteen years old, and Matram not much older than that. But they’d known the risks…just as Kira did.

She couldn’t stop thinking about one small thing, certainly small against the overwhelming sense of victory that had accompanied the sight of all those Bajorans suddenly appearing in the forest of Dahkur, many of them so near to death that Kira knew they would not have made it for one more day inside that camp. They could go home now, and those who were sick could at least live out their last moments in freedom, hopefully with their families or loved ones. But there was one Bajoran who wouldn’t ever see his loved ones again—the scientist who had made it all possible. And that small thing kept at her, throughout the celebration, throughout the glowing aftermath of Gallitep’s liberation.

She had gone to sit outside the cave, watching Bajor’s moons as they very slowly crept from behind the mountains in the west, one after the other. The closest moon was a deep orange, tinted by the haze in the atmosphere. She wondered what it had looked like in the days before the Cardassians’ various mining and manufacturing interests had tainted the air with billowing clouds of pollution. People said the moons were once the color of fusionstone, nearly white sometimes on summer nights. Kira absently drew circles in the dust with a stick, briefly calling to mind thoughts of her mother, the artist, and wondering why she’d never had any talent of her own.

“Nerys,” called a gentle voice—Lupaza, of course, emerging from the cave.

“I’m here,” Kira answered her, setting down the stick.

“What are you thinking about?”

Kira shrugged. “Nothing,” she said unconvincingly.

Lupaza pursed her lips. “You’re not still thinking about that scientist, are you?”

“No,” Kira said. “Yes. A little bit.”

Lupaza squatted on her heels. “Nerys,” she said. “You need to understand something right now. That man—he was a collaborator. It’s true that in the end, he did what he could to compensate for the evil he’d been responsible for, but…it’s only right that he ultimately gave his life for the struggle. Do you understand?”