There was pain in the lower parts of him as well, he realized, though it was nothing like what was going on in his chest. Shattered knee? Broken hip?Though great, the pain was too general for him to isolate to a particular region just yet. He was still too far outside himself, too adrift in his own choppy memory to dredge up any true interest in his damaged state.

   Pretty,he thought, enraptured by the sight of the conflagration.

  His attention fell away from watching the mercurial plasma dragons writhing and dancing all around in favor of listening to the strange and familiar noises now making soft counterpoint to the din of the blaze.

  “What are you doing there, you lazy batos?” said a voice he instantly recognized as his mother’s. Which was odd because he was sure he remembered her as being quite dead for quite some time.

  Or was she? Had she already succumbed to Orkett’s disease, bleeding and spasming herself into oblivion, or was that painful trial yet to come? He couldn’t sort it and, for the moment, didn’t have the energy to try.

  “I’m speaking to you, Jem,” she said again, though now he wasn’t sure if it was really her voice or just the sound of sap, superheated by the fire, popping in the flora around him.

  “Rouse yourself, boy,” said another voice, male this time and sounding as if the throat from which the words emerged had been scoured with broken glass. “Move now or die.”

  He knew this voice as well and hated it. Guldejit? Glinforkis? Troknoor? The names flitted like sand flies on the edge of his thoughts, keeping just as completely out of reach as his own name had done. Paradoxically, his hatred for their owners remained, burning nearly as hot as the flames, which, he suspected, had managed somehow to grow closer.

  “Get up,” said his mother’s voice, more insistent this time. “They’ll trample us.”

  A part of his mind told him that this was delirium, that these people and their words were just phantoms, tricks played by his concussed brain. The other part, the larger part for now, was happy to take them at face value. Spectral as they were, they were company. He hated to be alone.

   The true believer is never alone.It was a phrase from the prophecies, one he’d not understood until-

  Suddenly the circle of stones gave way to another image, another place and time. He was back in the camps, back in the days when his parents hustled him from dwelling to dwelling, from settlement to settlement, apparently without reason but truly to avoid the guns and lashes of the bad people.

  Trample him? Yes, they would. There were scores of others now, beside him and his mother, hundreds. They were borhyas, ghostly presentments of people he had once known, perhaps still knew, running, fleeing before the onslaught of something massive and deadly.

  The bad people. The outsiders.

  Their pursuit had transformed friends and relatives, teachers and vedeks and schoolyard nemeses into a herd of frightened cattle. If he lost his footing, if he stopped moving for even a moment, their flight would kill him as surely as the bad people forcing the stampede.

  His mother’s ghost held out one transparent hand, beckoning. For a moment he looked at her and marveled at the sight of her pale gray eyes in her dark oval face, her thick braids whipping back and forth as she scanned the area around them, her lips that should have been smiling but were pulled now into a grimace. How young she seemed. How long had it been since he’d seen her that way?

  “Now,” she hissed, terrified, angry. “We have to move right now.”

  Groaning from the spikes in his chest, in his legs, in his mind, he forced himself up and followed her forward. Behind them the bad people made their presence felt. He couldn’t make them out, what with running the other way, but his memory coughed up impressions. Sharp, craggy features, bodies covered in gray metallic uniforms. Each face frozen in a perpetual sneer of disgust for him and those like him.

  “Move, Bajoran scum. Move.”

  Beams of ethereal light whipped out from the guns they held, striking some of the fleeing ghosts, obliterating them, glancing off others but forcing them down to be trampled under the heels of their fellows.

  Away, he thought. We have to get away.

  As he labored his way upward, over hard and unyielding ground, he felt tongues of heat lapping greedily at his heels, snapping him back to the here and now, if only for a moment. He looked back in time to see the roiling plasma overrun what, seconds before, he had thought a safe haven.

   Core disruption?he thought, staring at it disapprovingly. Deuterium imbalance?His mind suddenly flooded with familiar concepts and equations. Gerren Kin’s first Law of Motion. Obar’s rules of gravimetrics. The chemical composition of Argelian mead. The third Song of the Prophets.

  He was a little unnerved by the rush until he realized it was just his memory returning. But there was still the disorientation, the sense of being both here and there at once. And there was that strange chorus of noises-like waves breaking on an endless sea of pebbles-echoing in from places close but unseen. He knew that noise-felt he should know it, anyway-and knew, moreover, that it filled him with a sort of dread. There was death in that sound, but it was so hard for him to focus enough to remember why.

  What was it forcing his ungainly scramble up the side of this cliff? A fire? No. No, it’s the bad people chasing us now. The explosion hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t even joined the resistance yet. Haven’t split with Father. Right now I’m just a boy.

  Some part of his mind, the adult, the scientist, knew that this trip through his past was a delusion brought on by injuries that almost certainly included a concussion, but it was a small part not yet capable of reasserting dominance. The mass of him accepted what he saw, contradictions and all.

  So, now forced to actually climb the suddenly vertical promontory, he scrambled, hand over excruciating hand, up and away from the ghosts of old oppression. His face drawn into a perpetual grimace, he moved toward the outstretched hand of the mother he hadn’t seen in a decade and who hadn’t been this young in three.

  “Hurry,” her phantom said. Fearful. Earnest. Desperate. Things she had never been in life. “Hurry or they’ll-”

  And then she was gone. Not blasted or trampled or pulled away by some as yet unseen attacker, just vanished.

   Because she was never here,he thought in another flash of clarity. Just my mind playing tricks.

  Increased exertion meant increased blood flow. Increased blood flow to his brain meant lucidity, meant he was coming back to himself. Because this isn’t Bajor and I’m not running from the Cardassians. That was long ago, before we won our independence, before the Militia, before Starfleet, before…

  Before Titan.

  It was suddenly just there, back in its normal mental cubby, filled with friends and colleagues and-

  The shuttle. He’d been piloting one of the heavy-duty shuttles, investigating-something-and something had gone wrong. Had they been attacked?

  He and his team were crashing down on-well, that was still fuzzy-whatever this place was-and they had to get out fast. The flashes of black and gold and blue and red had been the uniforms, like his own, of those others in the shuttle.

  There was a woman, at least one, with a mane of red-brown hair and eyes that were wide and dark and deep. Her face was there, but the others were still a blur. He remembered her saying something before the transporter effect took him away.

   “Something’s happened,”he remembered her nearly screaming. “I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”

  His mind was clearer now, almost his own again. The memory still wasn’t quite right, but the processes, his ability to make sense of things, was back.