The Shakaar cell lived together somewhat communally, though there were a few smaller units within it that took care of their own business. For the most part, the resistance fighters ate together, bathed together, slept together, and divided their chores up among themselves. It had taken some getting used to, but Kira mostly liked it. It made her feel part of something bigger than herself—something important.

“Nerys!” called a woman’s voice, echoing faintly from somewhere down below. Must have been Lupaza, for most of the other women in the cell still referred to her as “you” or “kid” or “little girl.” Most of the men did, too, actually, though they were somewhat kinder than the women. Kira resented it a bit, but she knew they were only toughening her up for what lay ahead. As it was, she’d been on scant few combat missions. Mostly she ran errands, bringing food and power cells to those fighters who were in the field, or relaying information back and forth from one cell to another. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but she was eager to prove her mettle, for she knew she had it in her to be as good a fighter as anyone.

In fact it was Lupaza, calling her name from the base of the hillside, her hands cupped around her mouth.

“What is it?” Kira called down to her friend. “Shakaar sent me up to check the comm relay!” She edged lower to better hear the older woman’s reply.

“Oh, come down, Nerys, he only sent you up there to get you out of the camp. You were asking too many questions, he said.”

Kira was incensed. “I wasn’t either!” she shouted, and began to scoot down the rocky slope, steadying herself against the bigger rocks as she inched lower, trying to avoid causing a slide. “Are you sure?” she asked. “He really just had me go up here to get me out of the way?”

Lupaza nodded. “Yes, he did. He’s—”

“He’s a lugfish!” Kira yelled, sliding the rest of the way down the hill on a bed of moving gravel. “I could have been killed up here! And for what?”

“Never mind, Nerys. Now come on, let’s talk about something fun for a change. Like what you want to do for your birthday! It’s your fourteenth, you ought to do something special, with your family, maybe.”

Kira shrugged. Her fourteenth birthday was supposed to be an event. Since it signified the passage of her ih’tanu,it meant that she was an adult—officially. Of course, Kira felt as though she had already been an adult for some time. A lot of people her age felt that way these days, probably a big part of the reason many girls’ ih’tanubirthdays came and went without comment.

“Did you have an ih’tanuceremony?” Kira asked her friend.

“Of course I did,” Lupaza said. “Everyone in my village had them. Elaborate celebrations…lots of dancing, food…”

“Did your parents announce your betrothal?” It was an old custom, falling out of practice even before the Cardassians came, but Lupaza had grown up in a very rural region, where some of the old ways had still been observed—possibly were still being observed even now.

“Yes, they did,” Lupaza said softly.

“To Furel?”

Lupaza laughed, though it didn’t sound happy. “No,” she said. “I met Furel much later. The boy I was matched with…he went away, before we would have married. He and his entire family—his father went to work for the Cardassians. I never saw him again.”

“Oh,” Kira said, wishing she hadn’t asked. “I—I didn’t know that…”

Lupaza smiled, artificially bright. “Now, how could you have known? No matter, it was a long time ago, before I got so old.”

Kira laughed. “You’re not so old, Lupaza. How old are you? Thirty?”

Lupaza snorted. “I wishI was thirty,” she said. “Now, what shall we do? I’ll walk you into Dahkur, if you want to speak to your father about it.”

Kira shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “But probably I’ll tell him not to make a fuss.”

“Whatever you want,” Lupaza said softly. “We have to do our best to stick to our traditions, though. We don’t want to forget who we are.”

“ I’llnever forget,” Kira said firmly. “No matter what the Cardassians do to me, I’ll never forget who I am, and where I come from…and that they don’t belong here.” It emboldened her to say these words, especially knowing that she was finally doing something about it.

It was on that note that Shakaar came around a shallow bend in the canyon from the side where the caves were. “Nerys! I thought I told you to adjust the comm signal,” he said sternly.

“Oh, drop it, Edon, I told her you were just trying to get rid of her.”

“That isn’t true!” Shakaar protested, his handsome features pulled into an amusingly rehearsed approximation of indignity.

“I can tell you’re lying,” Kira taunted, and he didn’t get angry, or even argue. She was beginning to feel more a part of the cell every day now, even enough to poke fun at its leader. He wasn’t that much older than she, after all, only just in his twenties.

“Come on, Nerys,” Lupaza beckoned. “You can help me with the washing.”

Washing the clothes was a chore that she would have grumbled about back home, with her father and brothers, but here, doing the washing was different. Here, it was part of the struggle to survive, and to win back Bajor from those who had wrongly claimed it. Kira would happily do washing every single day if she thought it could play a part, no matter how small, in driving off the Cardassians.

“Scratch that,” Shakaar said. “I just got a call.” He took something ungainly from his pocket, a piece of equipment that Mobara had built from some scrap. The thing squawked twice in Shakaar’s hand. “Come back to camp. Dakhana must have found something down in the valley, she’s calling for backup. Grab your phasers, let’s get down there.”

“Me, too?” Kira asked.

Shakaar didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” he said.

Kira beamed, fishing her phaser from out of her pack and holstering it in the pocket of her tunic.

“You ready?” Lupaza asked her as they scrambled down the canyon.

“Always,” Kira said, trying to mean it. For although sometimes there was fear that preceded these missions, Kira had never in her life felt the kind of exhilaration and triumph that came with their conclusion. She had waited her entire life to feel that she was making a difference, to do something that might lead her closer to some facsimile of happiness; and, though she certainly wouldn’t consider herself a happy person—not in the sense of being carefree—she was closer to it now than she had ever been before. Fighting the Cardassians, she had decided, was what the Prophets had meant for her to do.

Her head high, she marched forth with her comrades, sure she was ready for anything.

Dukat had always loathed these quarterly debriefing sessions with Legate Kell, but they had become even more unbearable in the past year, during which there had been a noticeable spike in Bajoran terrorist activity. Dukat knew that Kell had been telling anyone who would listen that it was mostly the fault of the prefect’s policies, but he was usually more subtle when speaking directly to Dukat about it.

They went through the polite formalities, both men ensconced in their own private offices, separated by much more than time and space. Kell looked old these days, Dukat thought, and wondered what the aging legate thought of the face on his screen. It had been a long and trying year.

“Gul,”the legate addressed him, signaling the end of the pleasantries, such as they were. “May I ask what, if anything, you have been doing to put a cap on the insurgency?”

Dukat was prepared. “We’ve had some notable successes. Our latest worry is that in many provinces, the terrorists have taken to moving so far into the forests that we can’t locate them, short of burning the forests down—a tack, by the way, which has been performed with some success in a few areas. But it’s a tremendous waste of precious resources, especially in the forests that feature nyawood—a rare and valuable commodity on some worlds, as you know. We’ve barely begun to tap that market.”