Odo went on. “I want to live as a Bajoran lives, Doctor Mora.” He seemed uncomfortable as he said it.

Mora spoke stiffly. “Well, Odo, I’m not sure if you know exactly what that entails. In fact, typical Bajorans…don’t enjoy most of the comforts that you and I do. It’s a harsh world out there, and—”

“Doctor Mora, I…do mean to leave.”

“Odo!” Mora exclaimed, feeling himself growing angry. The shape-shifter had never spoken to him so firmly before. “You aren’t ready to leave! Nowhere near it! You and I still have years of work ahead of us…many things to do…before you could even consider it!”

“But, Doctor Mora, there is no way for you to make me stay.”

Mora was stunned at what he was hearing. “Odo, are you trying to imply that you…would simply walk out, on your own?”

“You would not be able to prevent me from it,” Odo said. “But I wished to tell you before I go.”

Mora tried to steady his breathing. He was at least grateful that Odo hadn’t simply run away, but the very idea…that he somehow believed Mora would ever condone his leaving the laboratory. He raised his gaze to meet that of the shape-shifter, and Odo quickly dropped his own. He had learned humanoid expression just well enough to have picked up some affectations almost naturally, but still, he would never blend into the general population. People would always know there was something naively peculiar about him, even if he learned to perfect his humanoid form. He’d be lucky to last a week in the real world.

“Odo. You must reconsider. It would be very dangerous out there for you. If I could escort you into the outside world, I would do it, but you know I’m not permitted to leave the facility…”

“I am sorry about that, Doctor Mora. I wish you could leave, too.”

Mora saw, then, that Odo had felt even more of a prisoner here than he himself had. He could sympathize with his wanting to leave, but if there was any way to stop it from happening…

There isn’t. He’d worked with Odo long enough to know what his capabilities were…and to know that the creature could be surprisingly obstinate, when the mood struck him.

“Odo,” he finally said, “I must emphatically insist that you stay.”

To Mora’s chagrin, the shape-shifter merely shook his head from side to side, still not looking up.

“So. You would leave me. The only person who has ever shown you any kindness, the only person who cares about your well-being…”

Odo was silent, but Mora could see that he was just as determined as before. He let out a frustrated breath, feeling sick with defeat. If Odo was gone, there was nothing to keep him from collaborating with the Cardassians, or, rather, to keep him from having to acknowledge that was what he’d been doing all along. Working with Odo, he’d been able to forget the rest of it, at least for a time. He tried a different approach.

“You will find that the Cardassians out there, they will not be nearly so pleasant as those you have met inside.”

Odo was silent for a minute. “Doctor Reyar was not so pleasant,” he said.

Mora laughed sharply. “Doctor Reyar is a harakit compared to the Cardassians you are likely to meet outside the facility.”

Odo seemed to consider this. “I will be careful,” he said firmly. “I can take care of my own needs. I can travel as an animal to avoid them, if it is necessary.”

Mora’s heart sank as he saw that cautionary tales were unlikely to change Odo’s mind. He wondered, then, what the Cardassians’ reaction to him would be. Of course, Odo was not a Bajoran, and he would not register against the detection field that existed outside most of the boundaries. He would likely be able to travel wherever he wanted without stirring up the Cardassian troops…

The code, he thought, and the rest of a plan suddenly came together.

“Odo,” he said, “if you are determined to do this…I would ask that you would do one thing for me.”

Odo did not answer, only appeared wary—at least, Mora thought he looked wary. It was not always easy to tell. He went on.

“I’m not permitted to leave, as you know. I can only contact my family very sporadically, and those exchanges contain nothing of substance. I would like for you to deliver a message to them.”

“Of course, Doctor Mora,” Odo said, seeming relieved, “I would be happy to do it.”

“Thank you. I hope you will stay at least another twenty-six hours, Odo, so that I can get…get all my notes together,” he said, fumbling for an excuse. He felt a deep ache of misery as he said it, revisiting the unhappiness he had been living in almost exclusively since he had been forced to work as a collaborator. Now his most important work—a creature he had come to feel great affection for—was going to leave him. He would have no one, no respite from his loneliness. But if Odo could deliver a message to the Ikreimi village, if Keral’s claims of knowing someone in the resistance had any merit at all, maybe then, some degree of the self-loathing he had come to experience could be dialed back, at least to tolerable levels.

Odo blinked at him, slowly and deliberately, and Mora realized he was looking at a free man, a creature with nothing on his conscience and a limitless future. And for just a moment, Mora resented him so deeply that he could hardly stand to look at him.

Natima had been called to the Information Service’s headquarters in Cardassia City for her latest review with Dalak, the director of her department, and as she shifted in a stiff-backed chair in front of his small metal desk, she could tell by the tone of this encounter that he was probably going to be transferring her. There had been rumors of changes made, and he had that distracted, irritable air he acquired when he was forced to reshuffle assignments. She hoped he’d send her to Cardassia II. She had grown up in an orphanage there, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted to return. She’d made contacts in the past few years, people who had come to seem to her almost like family.

Of course, Natima wasn’t sure what it was like to have a family, so she couldn’t make the comparison with any certainty, but she had become very close to a few of the people within the rough organization that was beginning to take shape. In particular, Gaten Russol, though Natima had no romantic interest in the man. No, he was definitely more like a brother to her—or at least, her estimation of what a brother must be like. A brother that she had come to deeply trust and respect. He currently lived on Cardassia II, along with a handful of others within the nascent dissident movement that Natima was helping to organize.

It seemed that Dalak had other things in mind for Natima, however. It took her a moment to fully grasp what he had said when he uttered the words, “Terok Nor.” It was a name that was immediately familiar—and immediately repugnant.

Natima sat forward in her chair, her hands spread across the surface of the director’s desk. “No, no, Mister Dalak, you promised you would not send me to Bajor again. You said I—”

“I never promised you any such thing,” Dalak said crisply. “In fact, I am certain that I warned you this day might come. Come now, Miss Lang. It’s been years since that incident on Bajor. Decades, even.”

Decades? Could it really have been that long? Natima supposed it had. How had she suddenly come to be so old?

“Besides,” Dalak went on, “I’m not sending you to Bajor, specifically. Terok Nor is a thoroughly modern Cardassian facility, in orbit of the planet, with the strictest of security measures. You will be safe there and uniquely placed to report on the annexation from its command post.”

“Yes, of course,” Natima replied, though it wasn’t so much the issue of safety that made her loath to return to the B’hava’el system. It was the politics, the gross display of manifest destiny that she feared would someday drive her people into ruin. Could she safely keep her opinions silent in such a place? Especially with that degenerate prefect residing in the very same facility?