Vaughn recited the star’s mass, absolute magnitude, and spectral type before he even realized that he had spoken.

“That’s right,” the woman said, offering him an encouraging half-smile. “It’s also one of the most populated systems in the quadrant. Do you know how many planets orbit Rigel?”

This time, Vaughn did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the ersatz nature of the woman, of the fire, of the moment. He envisioned the clouds whirling down and reconstructing this scene, manufacturing everything before him out of the dust of this lonely world. This isn’t Berengaria VII,he told himself, any more than this woman is my mother.

But somehow it did not matter. Vaughn had lived much of his life in control, but today he had been unable to elude the sentiments of his past. More must be happening here, he believed, than just the re-creation of incidents from his life; he had become too sympatheticto feelings of loss and abandonment. Even now, as he attempted to reason his way through this, the moment that had been remade around him pulled at his heart.

Vaughn opened his eyes and said, “Twelve,” identifying the number of planets in the Rigel system. He peered around, trying to see more of his surroundings, but the illumination of the fire did not penetrate very far into the darkness. It doesn’t matter,Vaughn thought again. This isn’t the planet where I was raised. This isn’t my mother.

Except that she looked and sounded so much like her. “That’s right, twelve,” she said, and there was that half-smile of hers again. Vaughn smiled back. He loved these times. His mother spent so much time out in the wilderness with her work, but only occasionally did they do this, heading out to sit by a fire and stare up at the stars.

Vaughn raised his eyes and peered up at the brilliant pinpoints of light that dotted the night. He wondered only briefly how the sea of clouds could have reproduced such an effect, when in reality it perpetually separated the surface of this abandoned world from the rest of the universe. He found Rigel, and shrugged off the fact that the star should not have even been visible from the Gamma Quadrant. He looked back over at his mother, and his heart filled with his love for her. They’d been so close. Genuine or not, he felt grateful for this time, an unexpected gift.

“Elias, I need to talk with you about something.”

Oh no,he thought, feeling a terrible jolt, as though he had fallen in frigid water. No. Not this night. Of all nights, not this one.And he told her that: “No, Ma. I don’t want to talk. I just want to look at the stars with you.”

“Elias—”

“No.” Vaughn threw off his blanket and stood up. “Tell me tomorrow,” he said, knowing that, in so many ways, there would be no tomorrow.

The flames, beginning to sputter now, lighted her eyes. She sat with her hands clasped in front of her shins, hugging her knees. She regarded him with an expression of love and compassion, and he thought that she would allow him the reprieve for which he had asked. Then she said, “I have Burkhardt’s disease.”

Vaughn said nothing. He had a sudden urge to throw himself on the fire, and thought, That’s new.He did not remember wanting to immolate himself as a boy. The past had come alive for him, but with the burden of the subsequent years also alive in his mind and heart, this moment had actually worsened.

“Ma, please don’t,” he pleaded.

“I was diagnosed this week,” she said softly, the expression on her face one of empathy. She seemed concerned less with the content of her words than with their effect on Vaughn. “It’s a progressive—”

“No,” Vaughn yelled, feeling like a boy trying to make something true by wishing it so. “No,” he said again, unwilling not only to accept the reality of this moment now, but to have accepted it all those years ago. He turned and walked into the darkness, beyond the reach of the firelight.

“Elias,” he heard his mother call after him. He did not answer. He kept walking, allowing the empty blackness of this place to close around him. “Elias,” she called again, but he did not hear her follow. He could not remember—he had never been able to remember—exactly what had happened when she had first told him this. Had he bolted like this? Had she come after him?

Now he walked on, the sensation of moving in the consuming darkness strange and unsettling. His mother did not call again, and no footsteps approached behind him. She had obviously decided to leave him alone.

Just as she left me all those years ago,he thought. Alone.

Vaughn stumbled and fell forward. His hands scraped against the ground as he went down. He lay like that for a long time, prone, palms flat against the ground, elbows up at his sides. Finally, he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the sky.

There were no stars. He could not even see the clouds for the lack of light. What he did see in his mind was his mother’s face, called up from memories not just minutes old, but decades.

She left me alone,he thought again, ancient anger and frustration and sadness accompanying the memories. And then came this thought: No wonder Prynn hates me.

Vaughn laughed in the night, more a bark than anything having to do with humor. Somehow, he had never made the connection, although it must have implicitly buttressed the guilt he had felt for the last seven years. Just as his mother had been taken from him, he had taken Ruriko from Prynn. In his daughter’s life, he had been no better than a disease.

All those successful missions,he thought, and yet, when she needed me most, I failed my own daughter. I left her alone.

He remembered looking into Prynn’s eyes a day and a half ago—the white of one made crimson by injury—and then turning and walking away from her. He had not looked back, and now he wished that he had. It seemed impossible, but he had somehow left her alone again. Ch’Thane had been at the camp, of course, but Vaughn had left Prynn with no mother, no father—

No father?he asked himself. Hewas her father. Her mother had been gone for seven years now, but he had not left her.

Or had he? Vaughn had been honest with Prynn about what had happened, about his role in Ruriko’s death. He had never even considered not telling her. Prynn had been furious with him, and reasonably so, and from then on their relationship had been defined by the depth of her anger and the enormity of his guilt. They had never really spoken of it again, other than him saying how sorry he was, and her blaming him. He had sought to—

To leave her alone.This time, the thought hit him like a club to the back of the head. He had taken her mother from her, that much had always been clear, but now he realized that he had also taken her father from her. Because of his guilt and Prynn’s anger, he had essentially removed himself from her life, because that was what she had wanted—although not, he saw now, what she had needed. And perhaps that had also been the path of least resistance for him, and an opportunity to practice penance. He had always thought that Prynn had a justifiable reason to hate him, but now he also saw that she had another, because he had not really been there to help her through that terrible time.

Vaughn clamped his hands over his face, then let his arms flop onto the ground on either side of him. He had failed Prynn as a father when she had most needed him, and the thought of abandoning her again—permanently, and leaving her truly alone—crushed him. He could not let that happen. He could not.

So thinking, he fell into a restless sleep, filled with dreams of his past, and dreams that were somehow not his own.