The medical bay doors hissed open again. Merimark and Leishman entered, using antigravs to carry a meter-wide, half-meter-deep oblong container. The pair set the object down gently beside Ezri’s biobed.

“One medical transport pod suitable for a Trill symbiont,” Merimark said as she glanced uneasily at the unconscious Ezri. “Ready for activation when you give the order.” Bashir recalled that Kaitlin Merimark had become one of Ezri’s closest friends among the Defiant’s current crew complement. It couldn’t be easy for her to see Ezri in her current condition.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Bashir said, then turned to Vaughn. “I’ll make a thorough investigation into Nog’s condition as soon as possible. But at the moment I’m afraid I’ve more pressing matters to attend to.”

Vaughn looked grave. “I take it you’ve come to a decision.” About Ezriwent unsaid, though the words hung in the air like smoke over the Gettysburg battlefield.

“Yes. The only decision possible.”

“I understand,” Vaughn said. “Come on, Shar. Let’s get back to work.” Shar, his facial muscles suddenly unusually tense, nodded silently. Bashir wondered how much Shar knew about Ezri’s condition. He wished he had time to brief everyone beforehand about what was about to happen, and to allow Ezri to say her own farewells to one and all. But he no longer had that kind of time. He’d squandered that time with his repeated, fruitless attempts to save Ezri and the symbiont both.

Feeling miserable, Bashir watched Vaughn and Shar exit the medical bay.

He told himself that Ezri wouldn’t have wanted any maudlin good-byes. She’d have another life soon, once they returned Dax to the Trill homeworld after the conclusion of the Gamma Quadrant mission. She’d have plenty of time then to catch up with auld acquaintances, he thought.

“‘ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,’” Bashir said quietly to no one. Then he noticed Nog’s quizzical stare.

“What’s going on, Doc?”

Bashir realized that he had been protecting Nog from the truth about Ezri. He sighed, collected his thoughts, and said, “Nog, you deserve to know what’s really about to happen to Ezri.”

The only decision possible.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Bashir really, truly wished he were dead. “Ensign Richter,” he said. “Please prepare Ezri for surgery.” Then he turned back to Nog and started to explain, as gently as possible, that Ezri was going to die very soon.

The woman I love is going to die.

In preparation for the procedure, Ezri was moved back into the small surgical bay, where she slowly drifted back to consciousness. Her eyes opened and she smiled. Despite her pallor and fever, the smile made her as radiant as Bashir had ever seen her.

And it’s the last time. The last time I will ever see that smile.

His heart pounded, auricles and ventricles transformed to hammers and anvils. Doing his best to manage his roiling emotions, Bashir explained to her what was about to happen. She listened attentively and took the news with considerably more grace than Nog had. Or Merimark. Or even Krissten, for that matter.

But Ezri’s equanimity rattled him at first. He had to remind himself that Dax had already experienced host death eight times before.

“I understand, Julian. I love you. And I trust you to do whatever you have to do…to save Dax.”

Once again, he heard Jadzia’s voice, echoing up from a well six years deep: Don’t blame yourself, Julian. You did all you could.

He desperately wished he could believe those words.

“Julian.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to be conscious when you…cut the cord. Not like Curzon. That was different.”

Bashir knew that Curzon’s symbiont had been surgically removed as well. But that had been done at the end of a very long, very satisfying life.

“I understand,” Bashir whispered, his words catching in his throat.

“I don’t want to be… emptied,like the time Verad took the symbiont…” She trailed off. Bashir noticed for the first time that her face was wet.

Julian,Jadzia confessed in the back corridors of his mind. I’m scared.

“I understand,” he repeated. He felt a single fat tear roll down his cheek. Another one jostled for position behind it. He squeezed her hand gently. She squeezed back, hard. He bent down and brushed his lips against hers, then straightened and released her hand.

“I’m ready, Julian,” she said at length.

Blinking away his tears, he donned his surgical mask and lifted an exoscalpel from the tray beside the operating table. At his nod, Krissten carefully attached the delta wave inducer to Ezri’s temple.

“Ensign Juarez is standing by to activate the artificial environment container,” Krissten said in a subdued voice. After learning about Ezri’s condition, Edgardo demanded to be allowed back on duty, insisting his leg had healed sufficiently.

Ezri mouthed a silent I love youto Bashir, then smiled.

“Good-bye, Ezri,” he said.

Her lips curled into a faint smile. Then oblivion took her.

Responding to Bashir’s nod, Krissten activated the sterile field. He gripped the exoscalpel tightly in his gloved hand, grateful that the instrument showed no signs of slipping this time. Krissten silently opened the front of Ezri’s surgical gown, exposing Ezri’s abdominal pouch. Very gently, he moved the exoscalpel’s tip across her abdomen, leaving a slender crimson line in the instrument’s wake. A moment later, the body of the symbiont began to emerge, its brown, lumpy skin glistening under the room’s bright lights.

The symbiont inched forward, fairly oozing into his hand. After it had emerged entirely from Ezri’s body, Bashir cradled it gingerly. The eyeless, limbless creature’s helpless emergence reminded him of a cesarean section he had once performed; he had to remind himself this “baby” carried within it a store of experience and knowledge at least an order of magnitude greater than his own.

“This is going to be a somewhat unusual procedure,” Bashir told Krissten as he raised the symbiont slightly higher, studying the superficial patches of necrotic tissue that had already begun to appear along the moist, amber-colored umbilicus still connected to Ezri’s abdominal pouch. “There’s already been so much neural depolarization along the entire neuro-umbilical trunk that the nerve bundles will have to be cut in a specific order to minimize the risk of neuroleptic shock for the symbiont.”

“Understood,” Krissten said, her voice muffled slightly by her surgical mask.

“Neurocortical separator, please.”

She took his exoscalpel and replaced it with the requested implement. Gently hefting the symbiont in his left hand, he touched the tip of the compact, gleaming cylinder to a point about six centimeters down the length of the umbilical cord.

Ezri’s body jerked reflexively as the separator sank its tiny polyduranium probe into the cord. “Note that I have just severed the gross motor pathway nerve bundle,” Bashir said, his voice sounding flat and tinny in his own ears. He felt detached from his actions, as though he were a first-year med student watching with his classmates while a faculty member performed surgery in a Starfleet Medical operating theater.

He knew that he couldn’t proceed without that kind of detachment.

“The separator is now locking onto the fine motor bundles,” Bashir said, pressing on. Ezri’s fingers spasmed as the second nerve-fiber bundle separated. He withdrew the separator and closed his eyes for a moment.

I’m killing her. Just as surely as if I’d tossed her out an airlock.

“Symbiont vital signs are weak but holding steady,” said Krissten. “No sign of neuroleptic shock.”

Forcing his self-recriminations aside, Bashir opened his eyes and focused on the umbilicus with renewed concentration. Next, he severed the monopolar neurons that coordinated autonomic neurophysiological exchanges between Ezri’s and Dax’s nervous systems. Then he cut the redundant autonomic glial-cell pathways. He paused for a moment to recall the correct order: major, minor, and ancillary nodes. Yes, that was right.