It was the weekend, so most of the professors were gone. Reoh was only working because he didn’t have much else to do but grade papers, so he put his heart into it. He was turning away to call security to chase the cadets from the dangerous geophysics building, when his eye caught sight of Starsa’s long, burnished‑gold hair flying through the air.

Starsa skimmed her antigrav board away, then turned, pausing for a moment, her teeth biting into her lip as she judged the building.

Reoh called out, “No!”but she couldn’t hear him. She probably couldn’t even see him through the tinted glass.

His hands gripped the windowsill as she began her run. Balancing beautifully, her board ran straight toward the windows, turning at the last moment as she swooped up the side of the building. Somewhere near the fifth floor, the gyros cut out, flipping the top edge of the board away from the wall.

Starsa tried to turn it into a loop, but she was so high that it was actually a dive. Her foot slipped out of the notch and the grav board twisted out from under her. She fell past the board, catching it with one hand as the safeties quickly sank them toward the ground.

Starsa let out a yell, trying to grab hold of the board with both hands to let it carry her down. Nev Reoh was pressed against the window, and he could see the white skin of her fingers as they slipped off one by one.

“Aahh!”she screamed as she fell the last two stories.

Reoh would have leaped out the window after her if he could. He pressed up against the plasteel, trying to see if she was dead. But her continued screams echoed against the wall of the geophysics building, assuring him that she was alive.

By the time he got to the ground floor, medics had beamed to the site. Reoh had to shove through a loose group of off‑duty cadets to see Starsa. She was white, even her lips, and her eyes were glazed from the contents of the hypospray that had just been administered to her neck. He could understand why. Her bare leg was tattered and twisted in an odd angle in two places.

Starsa didn’t like the clear brace the doctors had insisted she wear on her leg for a couple of weeks. They explained that her physiology required extra care to ensure that the bone healed properly. Meanwhile, she couldn’t bend her knee, and the thing threw off her balance when she tried to do a loop‑the‑loop on her antigrav board.

“Starsa!” someone screamed at her, making her lose her balance. “Stop that!”

She hopped off her board, with the brace making her hobble a few feet forward before she came to a complete stop. “What?”

Reoh came running towards her, clutching a bundle of padds in one arm. “What are you doing?” He looked around at the others. “How could you let her ride her board with a cast on?”

The other cadets shrugged and mumbled, fading away in the face of an angry professor. Reoh acted like he had forgotten he was an authority figure now. “You know you aren’t supposed to grav board for another ten days. At least not until that leg is healed.”

“I’m fine,” she told him, not at all impressed with his new rank. “You spoiled the fun.”

“What’s gotten into you lately, Starsa? You never used to be thisreckless–”

Starsa flipped her board over and jumped on, banking it in the air. “Everyone should learn to relax a little, Nev. That includes you.”

Without a farewell, she swerved and skimmed off, over the tops of some Triskel bushes imported from Ventax II. She knew Reoh was just concerned about her. He had spent hours accompanying her through the medical regeneration, and she had been grateful for the company.

But to Starsa, it felt like she was back in her first year in the Academy instead of finishing her last. Back then, everyone was acting all repressed and gloomy over the flying accident in the Saturn fields that had killed Joshua Albert. Now, the year she would graduate, aside from the grief over Titus’s death and the disappearance of the crew on Voyager, there were the growing fears about the rise of the Dominion. It was like a shadow cast over Starfleet itself, making everyone frightened.

Starsa banked and returned to the small square she had just sailed through. The signal for a general announcement was on the air. She jumped off and ran a few steps, next to the cadets gathered in front of the screen. Usually Admiral Brand or one of the Academy officials appeared, but this time Admiral Leyton was in the midst of announcing:

“. . . a joint strike force, consisting of the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order, was ambushed near the Founders’ homeworld in the Omarion Nebula.” Leyton took a deep breath, the lines in his forehead deepening. “The Federation did not participate in this secret strike force against the Dominion, and Starfleet sent no ships until the Defiantwas called to the Gamma Quadrant to rescue the two sole survivors. The destruction of both the Cardassian and Romulan elite forces will surely be a factor in galactic politics in the coming months.”

Admiral Leyton’s blue eyes stared out of the screen as if he wanted to say more, but he simply shifted and the screen returned to the blue Starfleet symbol.

“Well, theregoes all the fun,” Starsa blurted out.

“Be quiet, Starsa!” one of the other cadets ordered. “This is serious.”

A few of the younger cadets were looking at her, so she shrugged and gave them a wry smile. They didn’t smile back, obviously too intimidated by the hushed voices of the other senior cadets.

“Lighten up,” Starsa muttered, jumping back on her grav board, feeling unusually irritated with the world.

Jayme returned from a relaxing vacation with Moll during the midwinter break to find several communiques from Nev Reoh, asking her to contact him. She went straight to his office in the geophysics building.

“Hey,” she said, first thing, “you should get hold of Enor if you want to send anything back to your family on Bajor. She’s going to replace an assistant on the Federation science team at DS9 for a few weeks, monitoring the wormhole.”

Reoh shook his head. “I don’t have any family on Bajor.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jayme said. “You went back for six months that one time, didn’t you?”

“It’s required. Part of being Bajoran means you have to see the holy sites.” He shrugged. “It also made it real to me, to know for certain that we had gotten our world back.”

Jayme remembered how happy he had been last semester when the Bajorans signed a peace treaty with the Cardassians. “Now they’ve got the Jem ‘Hadar breathing down their necks, not to mention all those Klingon birds‑of‑prey flying through their system. I guess that’s what Admiral Leyton meant when he said the failed strike force would change galactic politics.”

Nev Reoh nodded, looking down at his hands.

“So what did you want?” Jayme asked.

“Nothing so important,” Reoh told her, downplaying everything, as usual.

“I have to study, Reoh. What is it?”

“You know that virus that sometimes switches a paragraph from your old personal logs with someone else’s?”

“Yeah, that’s happened since my first year, every few months or so. More often lately. Some glitch, they say, in the Academy computer system.”

“I think I found out what it really is,” he told her.

“Oh? Then maybe you should tell programming–”

“It’s Starsa.”

Jayme’s mouth twisted. “No . . .”

“Yes. I didn’t think about it until this odd sentence appeared in one of my old logs. Then I realized that my logs didn’t start skipping until my third year. The same year I was in the same quad as Starsa.”

“That’s not enough reason to blame her! I know she’s a lunatic sometimes, but that would take . . .”

“A lot of effort, to have kept it up for almost four years.” Reoh called up the skipped paragraph he had found. “Read this.”