He started to approach one of the nurses, then felt woozy. Nearby, he noticed a just-vacated chair, and he moved toward it, sitting down heavily.

Just breathe, Julian. You can’t do any good for anyone else in this condition.He closed his eyes for just a moment.

He heard a noise then, and opened his eyes, focusing as a thin nurse stepped in front of him. “Sir, can you hear me?”

Bashir was perplexed by the question. “Of courseI can hear you. I was just mugged, but I’m going to be fine. I’m a doctor—”

She crouched beside him, pulling gauze and bandages out of the medkit that was slung over her shoulder. “You were unconscious,sir. Let me see that.”

Unconscious?Bashir didn’t recall having passed out. But then how could he?

“The good news is, I think you look to be in worse shape than you really are,” the nurse said, smiling grimly as she used a white cloth to wipe away some of the caked blood under his nose.

She dabbed an acrid-smelling ointment under his eye. “Thanks for the inspiration,” he said, wincing as the ointment stung him. “You’ve got a great bedside manner.”

“We’re a bit busy here, as you can see,” she said. “No time to be excessively sweet.” She removed a hypospray and tapped a combination of codes into it as he watched.

As she touched the hypo to his neck, he felt a surge of energy. Sakarnel,he thought. Not whatI’d have used, but it’ll get me back on my feet.“I’m a doctor with Starfleet. I can help you here.”

“That was just what I was thinking,” she said. “I recognized the uniform.” She pointed to his face. “None of your injuries are life-threatening, but you’ll probably have some bruises for a few days.”

“How long was I out? Has there been any word from the police about the bombs?” Bashir asked.

The nurse gave him a guarded but quizzical look. “Bombs? I don’t understand.”

Then there’s still time,Bashir thought, his pulse quickened by both hope and fear.

“They’ve now foundthree devices,”the lieutenant said, his voice competing with the static issuing from Gard’s comm device.

Gard frowned. “They’re all near the Senate Tower?”

“Yes, sir. Each was discovered within half a kilometer of the Tower.”

Gard’s mind whirled. Short-range bombs, then. Low-yield devices probably intended to saturate the area. They’ve targeted the government. And probably the Symbiosis Commission as well.

“Lieutenant, make certain the guard units at the SymCom are aware that—”

The comm device flared up into a loud hash of static, just a split second before the lights inside the command center’s turbolift blinked out. Gard fancied he could feel the blast strike him and pass entirely through his body, even though he could neither see nor hear it. Even though he was in a shielded building, he felt certain that whatever had just happened out there had passed through the thick, rad-shielded walls, at least partially.

His symbiont lurched and scrambled within him, and Gard dropped to the turbolift floor, writhing in agony. Holding his belly, he tried to calm himself, his wholeself.

We’re not going to die in the dark. We’re not going to die in the dark.He thought it again and again, repeating it like a mantra.

Gard raised his phaser and pointed it at the turbolift entrance, praying that the lift wasn’t stalled somewhere between the reinforced floors.

The beam began melting an aperture in the doors, the glowing metal and phaser burst providing a temporary brilliance.

We’re not going to die in the dark.

The door gave way. Outside he could hear people screaming and equipment tumbling and crashing.

Jirin Tambor heard a chime, and in a nanosecond, he was flooded with memories, even as he felt the energy wash over and through him as the bomb exploded.

The neurogenic radiation blasts would sever the links between the joined and the strange creatures that dwelled in their pouches.

He remembered playing in the snow with his baby brother Kal, who had made an art of falling down.

The joined would soon be in excruciating agony, and their stranglehold on the planet would be broken.

He saw his first love, Hennene, emerging from the cold wavelets of Lake Devritane, water beading on her skin, her smile radiant despite her shivers as he rushed toward her with the towel.

The unjoined would be mostly unaffected. A very few would be hurt due to the electromagnetic pulse that would accompany the radiation dispersal. But the lives of the survivors—of the majority of Trill—would be much improved by their sacrifice.

He saw Hennene lying cold on the hospital bed, the doctor standing nearby ready to tell him that their baby had also died.

The pulse would destroy most of the government’s communications capabilities, would wipe its files, drain the power from its hovercars and its weapons.

He heard the Commission doctor tell him again—emphatically this time, as if he’d been talking to a recalcitrant child—that he was not qualified to carry a symbiont, even if that denial meant certain death from the malignancy that was spreading throughout his body.

Trill society would begin again tomorrow, but he would not be there to greet it.

Hennene.He tried to speak her name aloud, but his proximity to the blast had ravaged his body too badly. Light and darkness came in equal measure, a final sunset in the depths of the night.

Dante could not have crafted a more explicit version of hell than the one that existed in this place. As a doctor, Julian Bashir was used to trauma and suffering—he had dealt with severe episodes of both during the Dominion War—but those chaotic, bloody moments had not been entirely unexpected.

Here, however, in the bedlam of Trill’s Manev Central Hospital, things seemed very different. As the overflowing triage center filled with cacophonous screams and tortured wails, Bashir and the other physicians and medics struggled against a tide of death whose source had been both surprising and invisible.

And though Bashir’s medical conscience did not want to admit his own personal fears, the worst part for him was having no way to know whether Ezri had survived the initial bioelectric attacks—or even if she was in danger at all. But as Trill society continued to collapse around him, and reports kept coming in of hundreds—or maybe thousands—more casualties, he could only respond to the unfolding crisis as best he could, while striving to avoid considering the personal loss he might have to face in the very near future.

The little boy with the spinal injury was going to live. He might even make a full recovery. No thanks,Bashir thought bitterly, to people like Doctor Torvin, who keep putting the joined patients at the head of the line whether their injuries warrant it or not.

But he also knew that dozens of joined patients here tonight were in extremely grave condition, obviously because of the bombings. And it was equally clear to him that the way to save their hosts was not to be found in the hurly-burly of Manev Central Hospital’s trauma unit.

It might, however, be found among the files relating to an incident Bashir himself had become caught up in, on a visit to Trill four years prior….

Shortly after finishing surgery on the boy, Bashir edged his way down a hallway on the hospital’s seventh floor. This upper level was relatively quiet, mainly because the staff was refusing to take the sometimes malfunctioning turbolifts, and it was too difficult to get the hover-gurneys up the stairwells. There wasn’t much on this floor that could help anyone process or treat the dying patients anyhow; it was mostly reserved for the private offices of the doctors and administrators, in addition to break rooms for the support staff.