Shar’s eyes were open and looking at her. He resembled a corpse, with empty eyes staring without seeing from a face that had lost any trace of vibrancy, his blue skin ashen. Prynn’s breath caught for an instant, but then Shar lifted a hand that had come out from beneath the blanket…slowly, tentatively, as though motioning to her with a great effort.

Prynn sprinted the few steps over to Shar. She kneeled down beside him, dropping the dermal regenerator and scooping up the tricorder beside his bedroll. She reset the device, then took Shar’s hand as she scanned him. His condition, she saw, had not changed much from earlier, although she did detect a shift toward dehydration.

Shar squeezed her hand, and she set the tricorder aside. He tried to speak with her, but his mouth made only small, smacking sounds. Prynn got him some water, then helped him lift his head so that he could drink it. He coughed with the first sip, but then managed to get the water down. When he finished drinking, Prynn eased his head back down onto the bedroll.

“Your eye,” Shar said, and she remembered the injury to her sclera.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It looks worse than it is.”

“What happened to you?” Shar wanted to know. “And to me?” Prynn told him about the crash, pointing out the demolished bow section twenty meters away. Shar looked in that direction, and then back at her. “What about Commander Vaughn?” he asked, his voice rising with concern.

“He’s fine,” she said flatly, anger welling within her. The emotion surprised her—not her negative feeling for Vaughn, but the suddenness and the unexpectedness with which it had come upon her at this moment. Why?she asked herself. Why did that happen?Because somebody had been worried about her father? Why should that make her angry?

Because he doesn’t deserve anybody’s concern,she concluded. Except that even she hoped for his continued well-being right now, since he was attempting to save four billion people. And even though she despised him, she did not wish him dead.

To Shar, Prynn conveyed Vaughn’s intention to travel on foot to the source of the pulse. She also mentioned how communication with him had failed once he had traveled too far from the camp.

“Will he have time?” Shar wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Prynn said. “And if he makes it there, will he be able to do anything? I don’t know that either. But Vaughn…” She hesitated, wanting to reassure Shar, but hating the words she was about to use. “Vaughn is good at his job.” So good,she could not prevent herself from thinking, that he sent my mother to her death.Prynn knew that the bitterness she felt would show on her face, and so she picked up the dermal regenerator and paced back over to the survival cache. She made a bit of a show of replacing the device in the locker, hoping she had successfully covered her emotions.

“If Commander Vaughn can’t stop the pulse,” Shar said behind her, “then we’re going to die.” His voice, it seemed to Prynn, carried fear and pain, but not the fear of death, and not the pain of his physical injuries. Something else occupied him, she thought.

“Shar,” she said, turning back to face him, “I’m working on repairing the shuttle’s transporter. Some of the primary circuits were destroyed in the crash, but both backups are relatively intact.” She explained Vaughn’s orders, that she should first try to fulfill the mission of stopping the pulse, and then one way or the other get Shar and herself as far away from the pulse as possible. “In a few days, Saganwill be repaired and Lieutenant Dax will send it down to rescue us.”

“If we live through the pulse,” Shar said.

“We’ll make it,” Prynn said with a sense of surety she did not feel. She noticed Shar’s face tensing. His jaw set, his eyes narrowed, and his antennae moved in a manner she could not interpret. “Shar?” she asked, taking a step toward him. He said nothing, but his gaze had left her, and now he stared up at the sky. “Are you all right? Are you in pain? Can I get—”

Shar rolled his upper body onto his left elbow, and looked over at her in a way that stopped her in mid-sentence. Color rushed into his face, patches of deep blue blooming on his cheeks and forehead, a dramatic contrast to the stark whiteness of his hair. Prynn could not tell whether he was hurt or angry. He stared at her for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Zhavey.”

“What?” She did not understand.

“My mother,” he said, and she realized that he had interpreted the word for her. Prynn had heard about the complications of Andorian biology, that they wed in groups of four, and that they even reared their children in such family units. She knew that Councillor zh’Thane was one of Shar’s parents, and she wondered if that was to whom he was now referring.

“Your mother?” Prynn asked.

“Some part of her…” he said, and trailed off. “She made this worse.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Prynn said. “Shar, I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Just before we left Deep Space 9,” he said, “she brought my bondmates to the station.”

“Oh,” Prynn said, startled by the revelation. She did not know what else to say.

“She was trying to manipulate me into returning to Andor.” His right hand balled into a fist. “And she succeeded. I agreed to visit my bondmates on Andor when we get back from the Gamma Quadrant.” Shar lifted his fist a few centimeters and then brought the meaty part of it down onto the ground.

“Shar, you don’t have to think about that now,” she told him. “Listen, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Your mother—”

“I promisedto go back,” he said, yelling the word. “And when I don’t…” He looked away from her, his gaze drifting toward the ground in front of him, but the vacant look in his eyes told Prynn that he was seeing something else, some image in his mind. “It will kill Thriss to lose me.” Shar raised his right fist again, higher this time, and then he thrust it against the ground, knuckles first. Rage hardened his normally soft features.

“Shar,” Prynn called, but already, he had brought his fist back up. He pounded the ground again, and then a third time, and he did not stop. His knuckles hammered the ground, faster and harder, and Prynn heard the awful sound of his bones breaking. “Shar,” she called again, then turned and moved back to the survival cache. She quickly dug inside for what she needed, then raced around Shar, to his back. She dropped down behind him and pushed the hypospray against the side of his neck. Her fingers brushed his flesh, and she felt the tautness of the muscles beneath.

Shar punched once more, then stopped, his arm pausing as he raised it. Prynn put a hand against his back and lowered him down onto the bedroll. She reached across his unconscious form and grabbed the tricorder there, then scanned him. When she had determined that his condition remained stable, she examined his hand. Several layers of skin had been torn away from his knuckles, and blood seeped from the wound. Bones in all of his fingers had fractured.

“So this is what they mean by ‘Andorian fury,’” she said, glad that the soporific she had given Shar would keep him asleep for at least several hours. She stood up and went once more to the medkit, to retrieve what she would need to treat Shar’s new injury. It seemed almost impossible to credit the transformation she had just witnessed. Shar, normally quiet and reserved even in social situations, had changed in an instant into somebody she barely recognized. She had not felt threatened herself in any way, but the incident had still affected her.

This is Vaughn’s fault,she thought. He had left them here. Had left herhere. Again.

Again?she asked herself. Now I don’t even know what I’m thinking.She attempted to clear her thoughts as she returned to Shar’s side.