She huddled miserably in the dark, hiding beneath the exposed roots of a rubberwood pine, thinking to herself that she should have reached the mountains by now, anyway. She thought it would be so easy to find them—the tips of the tallest peaks were clearly visible from Ikreimi village, but here, with the trees so close overhead, she could only catch glimpses of them, and even then it appeared that they were moving farther away, not closer. She had most likely been walking in circles. Now she only wanted to go back home, but she didn’t know which direction that was, either. She had badly misjudged her own abilities, her own sense of direction. Well, how could she have known? She had scarcely ever been out of the village, not since she was a little girl, going to the city with her mother and father before the grid went up. It had seemed so easy, then, but what had she known at that age?
Jaxa was alone, frightfully alone. The old road she’d roughly paralleled all day had badly deteriorated until it finally gave way to tangled forest. Jaxa had seen no footprints; the branches and weeds grown across the path were undisturbed. It especially surprised her, considering her assumption that the alien visitor, Odo, had traveled this road. She supposed he must have come by another route. The forest appeared entirely devoid of humanoid activity, now and for a very long time past.
But with that thought, she heard something. A rustle in the low branches. Something moving toward her, something big. She froze, her eyes open wide in the darkness. She tried with all her might to see what was making the noise, but she could only see the dark gray shadows of the trees around her, and the brilliant, cold stars wheeling overhead.
Another, nearer rustle, and she thought she saw one of the shadows moving, thought she heard the sound of padding feet. A soldier? She tried her best not to breathe, holding herself in a small, tight ball, knowing it would do no good. If a soldier had come, he would have equipment that would tell him exactly where she was. She heard a sound, then, that she could not at first identify. A low, rhythmic grumbling.
It’s ahara cat.
The fear changed. The animal didn’t need sensors, it could smell her plainly. She could only hope that it had already eaten, that it hadn’t been stalking her, as harashad been known to do when food was scarce. Jaxa’s breathing grew tight with quickly mounting dread. Would it hurt when the harapounced and dragged her from beneath the tree? Or would she simply go into shock, numb to the animal’s inevitable attack? The animal growled, and Jaxa froze in fear.
But now she heard another sound. Something was running, crashing through the underbrush. Something very, very large, larger definitely than the hara. Jaxa began to cry, and then she screamed when she heard the terrible sound of the haraas it howled in furious pain. Something was attacking it. A cadge lupus? She could hear the thrashing of the foliage around her as the animals struggled, and she covered her face with her hands. The sounds were coming closer, close enough that she could see them now, two shadowy forms locked together in the moonlight.
A violent shift of shadow, and the haralet out a strangled, plaintive caterwaul, disengaging from the attacker. The other animal allowed it to run off, its crash through the brush quickly fading.
Jaxa stared at the watching shadow, frightened. She didn’t know what it was. It was massive, somewhat doglike, but it was not a cadge lupus and certainly not a tyrfox,unless it was the biggest tyrfoxJaxa had ever seen—and she had seen plenty of them around the porlipens back at Ikreimi.
The unknown animal slowly approached, and she pulled her legs as tightly to her chest as she possibly could, but she knew it was no use. It was heading straight for her, a big shadow that seemed to be…
Changing? Jaxa rubbed her eyes. Probably it was just the starlight, but suddenly there was no animal before her. There was a person. A man.
“Jaxa,” the man said, and she thought she recognized the strange pitch and quality of that voice. He came closer, and she confirmed it. The alien visitor. The man who had brought her father the code.
“Odo!” She exclaimed, so grateful to see him that she scrambled out from under the tree, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around his neck. “How did you find me?”
He pulled away, seeming to recoil from her, as though he was slightly afraid of the physical contact. She held him tight anyway, and he finally let her.
“I looked around,” he said simply. “It’s time to go back now. Your parents are waiting.”
Jaxa was only too happy to agree.
Until Doctor Cul finally showed up, the institute had been in chaos. Doctor Yopal had left abruptly, her only good-bye a hardcopy of the transfer orders, sitting atop her empty desk. Kalisi Reyar had never been replaced, which left only three Cardassian scientists, a handful of techs, and Mora Pol. Nobody seemed to have an idea of when Yopal’s replacement would be coming—if there was a replacement at all. Mora could not leave, so he didn’t, but the other three scientists seemed not to know if it was still prudent to show up every day. No one told him anything.
For five days after Yopal’s sudden departure, Mora had been slowly but obediently continuing the research into the project to which he had been assigned. Engineering had never been his forte, but redesigning hydraulic systems wasn’t so terrible—dull, but not a reach—which had given him time to implement a small plan. Alone at night, with no director to look over his shoulder, he had found his way into the institute’s long-term records—in particular, those of Kalisi Reyar. Mora had worked with Reyar long enough to have learned most of her passcodes and datastrings, and now, with no direct supervision, with the other scientists bordering on insubordination by missing shifts and not bothering with their security measures, he was able to make a genuine mess of what was left of Reyar’s research in the institute’s mainframe. A little more time, and he might be able to delete all of it permanently.
He’d been thinking, since Odo had left. It had occurred to him that Odo might not have been successful in delivering the message to his cousin, and even then, the resistance might never be able to disable the systems. But those systems were going to need maintenance someday, and when they did, nobody would be able to find the original schematics. If he could ever hack his way out to the mainframe’s relay, he’d make it so they wouldn’t be able to find Reyar at her new assignment, either. It was a small thing, his plan, but it distracted him from his unhappiness over Odo’s departure.
It was on the fifth day after Yopal had left that the institute was finally introduced to its new director, a man this time. Mora could tell immediately that the three Cardassian scientists left at the institute deeply resented being put to work under a man. It was apparent to Mora that things here were about to get a lot less efficient than they had once been—not least because of his own efforts to sabotage the record-keeping.
Mora quickly found Cul to be surprisingly friendly, even kind. One of the first issues the slightly built Cardassian man addressed when he greeted Mora was whether the Bajoran might prefer to go home.
“I would like to see my family,” Mora admitted cautiously. “But then, I would require a permit to find my way back to the institute.”
“Oh, no, Doctor Mora,” Cul said cheerfully, “I meant that perhaps you would prefer to return home permanently. This situation is less than ideal for you, being the only one of your kind here. There must be something you would prefer to do in the city of Dahkur, which would not require you to travel.”
“Oh,” Mora said, and felt a brief burst of something like fever, hot and dizzying, but wonderful, too. And then he thought of Odo. Mora still felt half certain the shape-shifter would return to the institute once he had learned how difficult it was going to be for him to get along in the outside world, and Mora could not let him come home to a Cardassian stranger.