She shook her head, her voice losing strength as she spoke. “Let the others take up arms. Let someone else do the fighting. I need you.”

“Bajor needs me.” His piercing dark eyes, framed by thick eyebrows and the hollowness of a man-child who had never eaten a full meal in his life, reflected a deep, unwavering conviction.

She regarded the tall stranger before her with his unfamiliar build and impenetrable gaze, and she knew that she could not talk him out of doing anything that he had set his mind to do. “If the Prophets will it…”

“If the Prophets will it, then Bajor will be whole again one day. But it takes more than the will of the Prophets. It takes the will, and the strength, of the people.”

Opaka clasped her hands together and then pulled them apart, to raise them up in prayer. Fasil obediently closed his eyes and prayed with his mother, and then he took one of her hands in his own. “Don’t be frightened, Mother. The Prophets will be with me.”

Opaka looked around the camp from where they stood, taking in the flattened landscape and the limping figures of exhausted people as they returned from ration lines, the faraway clanking of Cardassian mining machinery and the faint collective whimpering of hungry babies, too young to understand why they had to go to sleep with empty bellies. She knew she was doing right, could feel it in her meditations each day, could see it in the faces of those who came to listen. But with the sudden understanding that Fasil would be gone from her soon, seeing the desolation that had become their world, hearing the hungry cries of children—for the first time in her life she felt her faith flicker. She needed to believe that the Prophets still walked with them, needed it so badly…But what if…

She let the feeling go, refusing to follow it any further. She recognized it for despair, for the very thing she’d left the sanctuary to fight against. She turned instead to watch her grown son as he walked back to the place where he had made his camp, feeling her heart break a little.

Bajor would indeed be strong again one day, because of Fasil, because of all these children who had grown up under Cardassian rule, who didn’t have a simpler time to reflect back upon. Who wanted better, and would fight to get it. It was in that instant that she knew she could not afford to forget her faith again. Not with what was now at stake.

Kira Meru stared at the Bajoran woman who appeared before her, facing her in the mirror above the severely designed Cardassian dressing table. She struggled to accept what she saw there. This woman’s face lacked the scarred, rawboned quality she had come to know of her own reflection, and her hair—too shiny, too carefully arranged. If she stood, she’d see curves now, instead of bony lines. The heaviness in her eyes and in her expression, that wasn’t entirely wrong, though it was more somber now than it had ever been. It would have eased Meru’s mind considerably if she could have just made herself believe that the woman in the mirror was nother, but she knew that nothing was that simple anymore. She had to accept that this was her life now.

The place in her psyche that could definably be called her heart did a little dip as she thought of that contrast between beforeand now,but she eased out of it with remarkable facility. It surprised her, how quickly she had come to understand that there was nothing to do but accept it, that there was no sense whatever in allowing the horror of what had happened to her to reach out and pierce her very soul, that crying and curling up in a ball on the ridiculously massive and ornate bed in her quarters would do nothing to ease the agony of being torn away from her family. The only sensible choice was to forget these things, motherhood and love, and sweep herself into the mysterious cocoon of alien elegance, where her natural reactions had no appropriate place.

She touched her hair—the stranger’s hair—and moved it away from her face, examining the new earrings that Gul Dukat had given her. They were not ceremonial in nature, only decorative. Though Dukat had not specifically told her that he did not want her to wear the traditional Bajoran ear adornment, when he had given her this pair as a gift this morning it seemed to suggest that she’d better forgo her customary jewelry for now. They were beautiful, the delicate spirals of metal reflecting a shimmering array of heliotrope and deep violet as they moved, with tiny blue stones at the curlicued base. They matched the pale purple of the tunic she now wore, a far cry from the body-hugging gown she had reluctantly donned when Basso Tromac had first brought her to Terok Nor with the other comfort women.

She started as someone entered the quarters, and then relaxed somewhat when she saw it was Dukat—although she never relaxed entirely when he was with her. Dukat had been very kind, it was true, but he was still a Cardassian, and he was still the reason that she was here, instead of down on the dingy, starving surface where life had been so difficult, and yet so much happier than it was here on this stark station. But Dukat was also the reason that her family was going to be looked after from now on, her children given extra food and medicine, never to cry out in hunger or sickness in the middle of the night, ever again. He had promised her.

“Hello, sweet Meru.” The deep tone of his voice was like a heavy stone over fine gravel, but his languorous pronunciation still took the edge off some of Meru’s discomfort. She had to appreciate that he had done his best to make her at ease. He had been refreshingly honest with her, confessing that when he “rescued” her from that overzealous officer at the reception, it had actually been a charade, something that Dukat had set up in advance in order to win her trust.

He had admitted to her how much it pained him to take this time away from his own family: his wife back on Cardassia Prime, his children of whom he was so movingly proud. Meru could see immediately that this man was lonely. He had brought her here because he was just as lonely as he had unwittingly made her, and she understood that it was now her job to do anything she could do to replace his emptiness with something warm, something that he could touch. Her own children’s lives depended on it.

Meru knew that she should be revolted by him. She should have loathed him for separating her from her husband and her babies, and for making such a crude ploy to manipulate her. In truth, she was a little disgusted with herself for not hating Dukat, not recoiling from his every advance. But she didn’t hate him. She had tried to make her friend Luma Rahl understand it, but maybe there was no understanding it. Meru was through trying to justify it. She wasn’t happy, but ultimately she cared for Dukat, a little. They had been too intimate for her to do otherwise; she saw things in him that she believed no one else could have seen.

“Hello, Dukat.”

“I’ve told you, Meru, I want you to call me by my first name.”

“Yes, I know…Skrain.” Her eyes flicked down as she said it. She was still so accustomed to a person’s given name being second. Besides, she felt that his first name did not suit him. He was too polished a man to have a name that sounded so brusque, almost violent.

He sat down on the massive bed and patted the space next to him, indicating that he wanted her to come near. She stood up and moved to his side with a strange combination of reluctance and anticipation. While it pained her deeply to be unfaithful to her dear Taban, she had found in Dukat a generous and conscientious lover. In all her adult life, it had been rare for her to make love simply for its own sake, the uncertainty of home and the chaos of constant uprootings making those clandestine, stolen moments something less than thoroughly satisfying. Her couplings with Dukat were an entirely different animal from what she had come to know with her husband.