“I think I’ll be going now,” the woman said briskly. “I’ve finished my drink.” She stood up.

“Oh,” Quark said, filing the information away. Feminist, probably. He could work around that. “Well, please do come back.”

“Thank you, Mister Quark.” She said it with a worrisome air of finality. She fished a slip of latinum from a pocket concealed in her dress and dropped it on the table before turning to go.

Quark didn’t want it to be over, but he had no line at hand. He was reduced to telling the truth.

“Wait. It’s…lonely on the station, sometimes. Perhaps I could offer you another drink…at half price?”

She stopped for a moment, actually seemed to think about his offer before shaking her head. “No,” she said finally. “I’m hardly so lonely that I’ve been reduced to chatting all night with a Ferengi.”

Quark picked up the latinum, rubbing it absently as he watched her walk out. She’d overpaid. He had been insulted, but only slightly. And she was staying on Terok Nor. He’d see her again.

Natima, he thought, and smiled his best sales smile, even though there were no customers at hand to see it.

It was late morning; Sito Keral had overslept. His family was already gone, his wife and daughter having done him the courtesy of giving him an extra hour to sleep after a particularly late night. Keral appreciated the extra rest. He wasn’t young anymore and couldn’t function well on just a few hours sleep. But he needed to get out into the fields to join in the harvesting. In these lean times, it was imperative that every able-bodied individual in Ikreimi village divert the sum of their energies toward maintaining the municipal crops.

He quickly dressed and sat to pull on his old boots, thinking of how nice it might be to someday have a new pair. One could not acquire such goods in his village. There was a single road that led from Ikreimi into Dahkur City, where a Bajoran traveler might take a transport to any handful of locations that would offer such things as boots, factory-made clothing, agri equipment…But that was reliant on money, not only for the goods themselves, but for travel permits, to protect the bearer from the Cardassian troops who inevitably appeared when an unregistered traveler left the boundaries of the village. The soldiers did not discriminate between terrorists and civilians without authorization. For Keral, working now only to sustain his family’s most basic needs, consideration of new boots had become as distant a dream as a free and independent Bajor.

Keral plotted a course to the katterpodfields as he closed the front door behind him, hoping to avoid the attention of the others in the village who might accuse him of shirking his responsibilities. Squabbles in the village had lately been erupting into vicious and bitter conflicts. Keral did his best to settle them between others, and avoid them on his own behalf, but he was not always successful.

He had to step over a trickle of foul water that spilled from a broken pipe into the gutter as he left the house. Another project on an always-growing list. Over the splash of water, Keral could hear the beating of running feet—a child’s steps. He stopped to find the source, saw the lone figure of a smallish boy turning the corner of the street a moment later. It was one of the Sorash boys, out of breath as he approached. Keral was instantly concerned—children weren’t supposed to be unattended in the village, not since the detection grid had gone online. The systems did not detect children, which made it perfectly safe for young ones to venture into the forest—except that their parents could not go after them, not without bringing Cardassian soldiers into the village. Fences had been built, boundaries carefully marked, but still, a child without an adult escort was always cause for anxiety.

The boy came straight to Keral and started talking, the jumbled words interspersed with gasping.

“Calm down,” Keral told the boy, whose proper name he could not remember—there were three boys in the Sorash family, so close in age they were difficult to tell apart. “Where is your mother? What is it you are trying to tell me?”

“A stranger,” the boy said between breaths, “in the center of town. He says…he is looking…for you. My mother sent me to—”

“A stranger?”

The boy looked uncertain, his eyes wide. It was very unusual to receive outside visitors anymore. The Ikreimi village, situated between Dahkur city and the hill territories, was remote, surrounded entirely by forests that were off-limits to Bajoran travelers. Keral couldn’t imagine what specific business this traveler might have with him, business that would have earned him a travel permit…

Keral tensed, his gut knotting. He hadn’t thought to ask the obvious. “Is he Cardassian?”

The boy shook his head. “Not a Cardassian,” he said. “But he looks…funny.”

Keral raised his eyebrows. An alien visitor? A Bajoran with some disfigurement, perhaps—a member of the resistance?

“What does he want with me?” he asked, though he imagined that if the boy knew, he would have said so.

“He says he knows your cousin,” the boy told him.

“Pol?” Keral relaxed somewhat, for it was conceivable that his cousin, a man who worked for the Cardassians, might have the means to deliver a message to his family. Mora Pol’s family lived in the next village past Ikreimi, so this visitor, whoever he was, must have come to see Keral first, perhaps hoping the word would be passed along.

Keral followed the boy, whose name he thought might be Tem, to the center of the little town. A flagstone-lined patch, now overrun with weeds, had once functioned as a public square, but the village lacked the time or the resources to maintain the space. There were several cracked stone benches that had been erected at approximately the time of Ikreimi’s founding, many hundreds of years ago. Sitting on the nearest bench was a man with an unnatural sheen to his features—an alien, Keral surmised, though one not of a sort he could remember seeing before. His mouth and nose were roughly formed, his ears curiously simple. What struck Keral as strangest, though, was his vague resemblance to Mora Pol, the man this alien purported to know. He wore his hair pushed back, like Keral’s cousin preferred, and was dressed in a simple worksuit. Keral thought he had seen Pol wear similar clothes, before he had been prohibited from leaving the institute.

Keral bent down to Tem. “Go straight to the fields,” he instructed him, and the boy nodded, not needing to be told, scurrying back to where his mother worked.

“Hello,” Keral said to the stranger. “I’m Sito Keral, and I understand you have been looking for me.” He extended his hand as the other man rose to his feet. The alien looked at Keral’s hand for just long enough to confirm to Keral that the gesture was unfamiliar to him, but he did eventually take Keral’s forearm and shake.

“I am Odo,” he said, his voice like unpolished stone. “Doctor Mora has a message for you. Only for you.”

“I’m listening,” Keral told him.

“Not here,” Odo said. “In private.”

“All right,” Keral agreed, though to his thinking the issue was moot, since the town was nearly deserted. Everyone was harvesting. He gestured back in the direction of his house, not entirely comfortable with the prospect of inviting this strange person inside, but unable to think of an alternative.

Odo looked at everything as they walked, as though studying each tree, signpost, and cobblestone for an answer to a particular question.

“How is Pol?” Keral asked, striving to be polite.

“He is…well,” the man answered, though he did not pause in his ongoing scrutiny, moving in a jerky and almost birdlike fashion. “Doctor Mora is a very intelligent man.”

“Yes,” Keral agreed. “He was always bright. He and I…we both came up together, studied together in the same levels at school, but Mora had much more of a natural inclination toward science and mathematics than I did. It was within the realm of his D’jarra, of course, to be a scholar, but nobody expected anyone from this family to go so far.”