They were walking toward the periphery of the city, through the warehouse district, back toward the Paldar sector, where Miras had once lived.

“You will find out when we get there,” the soldier told her.

“Am I in trouble? I told you, my name is Miras Vara. I…misfiled an object at the Ministry of Science. I am a criminal, a fugitive. Aren’t you going to arrest me?”

Sa’kat turned to her. “No,” he said. “I will not be arresting you—Astraea.”

She was confused. “But—we can’t go back to Paldar. I’ll be—Why am I not under arrest? I don’t understand any of this!”

“No,” Sa’kat said, “I imagine you don’t. You probably knew little or nothing about Oralius when you began having your dreams, am I correct?”

“That’s right,” she said, and the mention of the name Oralius confirmed to her what she had begun to understand—that this man was somehow connected to her dreams, to the Hebitian woman, the mask and the book.

“It is not an accident that we have met.”

His proclamation did nothing to clarify her confusion. “Are you…are you taking me to the book?”

“You’ll find out when we get there,” he said again, and she was surprised to see that he was smiling.

“Glinn Sa’kat,” she said carefully, “are you an Oralian? Is that what this is about?”

He walked a little slower, seeming to consider. “You know, I suppose I never considered myself to be an Oralian. There are no more Oralians, not really.”

They came upon an old sidewalk, out of the city’s edge and back to where she could set her feet on syncrete again. The hard surface, while somewhat punishing to the soles of her feet, was a relief to her ankles after walking in the unsturdy gravel and sand. They’d reached the dead industrial zone, haunted by shadows and hot, dry winds.

Sa’kat went on. “The last people to walk the Way disappeared many years ago. Central Command tried to round them up and exterminate them, ship them to Bajor and the surrounding colonies, where they were never heard from again. But they didn’t get everyone. There were still a few left behind. They weren’t killed, they simply…went underground. And then they stopped practicing altogether.”

“And you—you were one of those?” It surprised her, since he appeared to be so young—not much older than she was, by her estimation, though it was not always easy to tell with soldiers. Something in their hardened expressions seemed to make them ageless.

Sa’kat shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was not. But my parents were.”

Ah. “The Way is not dead, only…”

“Only sleeping,” he finished. “Waiting. Waiting for you.” He began to walk quickly again, and she scrambled to keep up.

“But why me?” she protested. “As you say, I knew nothing of Oralius when I began to have those dreams, when I saw the woman by the creek. She showed me a mask! She said her name was Astraea—”

Sa’kat stopped walking. “You sawher?”

“Yes. Who…who is she?”

“She is—or was—a guide, for Oralius.”

Miras shook her head, still not understanding. “Oralius, who was he? Why did people follow him?”

“Not him,” Sa’kat corrected her. “Oralius, though She has no corporeal form, is usually referred to in the feminine, at least in the sect favored by my parents.”

“No corporeal form? Like a…a ghost?”

Sa’kat laughed. “A ghost, a spirit, if you like. She follows no linear time, and She does not inhabit a body, like you or I. She is always with us, but She needs a guide, a spiritual vessel, to channel Her. We have been without a guide for nearly a century. After the death of the last guide, it was written that Her Way would collapse, until the emergence of the next guide.”

“The next guide,” Miras repeated. She was beginning to understand now. She was beginning to understand that Sa’kat believed shewas that guide. Although she was not certain if she believed it herself.

“How can you be so sure that this is—”

“I can’t be sure,” he said, cutting her off. He resumed walking. “Nobody can be sure of anything, can they? But there are those things that we believe strongly enough, that we would be willing to take serious risk for them. That is the definition of faith, Astraea.”

“Faith,” she echoed, quite without realizing that she had spoken it aloud.

They had passed through the rusting dead zone and were beginning to come into the portion of the city that was inhabited. There were a few pedestrians milling around up ahead of them on the sidewalk, along with the occasional soldier, dressed identically to Sa’kat, patrolling the sector.

His voice dropped to a confidential tone. “I will tell you more of this when we arrive. You will be safe there. I have many contacts, in all facets of society, who will do whatever it takes to keep you from harm’s reach.”

Miras was overwhelmed. “And you will show me the book?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is almost time to begin.”

He smiled at her then, and she saw powerful feelings in his gaze: awe and fear, amusement, and a shining brightness that she could not name.

“It is time for us to be reborn,” he said, and for the first time since she’d dreamed of the Hebitian woman, since her life had effectively been hijacked by the Orb, she felt as if things might work out, after all.

OCCUPATION YEAR TWENTY-SIX 2353 (Terran Calendar)

14

Nerys was crying as she made her way to the shrine nearest to her father’s house, and she wiped her eyes with shame. She was no longer a child, she was ten years old, and there was no excuse for tears—not even after what had happened. Some people had to endure worse, much worse. And anyway, why should she cry when the Cardassians had let her go? She was safe, she could go back home to her father and her brothers—but that was just it, wasn’t it? She was safe, but Petra Chan wasn’t.

Nerys entered the shrine, looking hopefully for Prylar Istani. Her brothers and her uncle and cousins had all just dismissed her tears. They told her to stop behaving like this when really they should all just be grateful that they were together, while her father had been sympathetic but strangely distant. Nerys couldn’t forget the look on Chan’s face when the Cardassians had taken her away. How could she ever forget such a thing? It positively haunted her, and though she’d always lived with the aliens’ presence, had even encountered a few very unpleasant soldiers in her short life, the day that they had come to Dahkur and taken away a dozen teenage girls in the village was perhaps the most stark and terrifying event Nerys had ever witnessed.

Nerys did not encounter Prylar Istani right away; instead, she found Vedek Porta tending the shrine. She tried not to let disappointment show in her voice when she greeted him, for though she respected the old man, she certainly could not speak to him about what had happened—and how she felt about it.

“Nerys, I’d take it you’re looking for Istani Reyla,” Vedek Porta said knowingly.

“Oh…” Nerys began, not wishing to be unkind, but the old priest merely inclined his head and went for the vestibule at the back of the shrine, where he soon emerged with Prylar Istani, dressed in her traditional orange robes. Vedek Porta left them alone, and Istani stretched out her arms.

“Nerys!” the kind-faced woman greeted her. “You’ve been crying. Come. Sit with me and tell me what troubles you.”

Nerys sat gratefully on the bare floor facing the woman who had been a friend to the Kira family since before Nerys was born. Nerys felt as though she could confide almost anything to Istani, who always listened without judging—unlike her brothers—and with the feminine understanding that Nerys’s father seemed unable to grasp.

“It’s just…the other day, when the Cardassians came…”

Istani’s face darkened, and she squeezed Nerys’s hand. “Yes, Nerys. It was a terrible day.”