The meeting limped to adjournment, and Kalem escorted his guests to the door as they hesitantly left for their own homes. Jaro Essa lingered behind, as he sometimes did, and as Kalem turned to him, he saw that the old major was sporting a slight smile. News about the resistance, perhaps? Jaro had never actually fought in the resistance himself—by the time a genuine resistance movement began to take shape, he felt that he was too aged to be of any use to the fighters—but he made it his business to keep up with what they were doing, and to pass word back and forth between cells when he could.

“I wanted to let you know,” Jaro told Kalem confidentially, “that I heard from a very reputable source that the resistance cell outside of where Korto used to be is still operational.”

Kalem nodded, his dark mood improving slightly. “The kai’s son is still alive?”

“Yes,” Jaro confirmed. His voice lowered even more. “I wanted to tell you before I announced it to the others. I wasn’t sure if we should spread word among the people, or if it was better to keep this news confidential.”

“Thank you,” Kalem said, and he heard himself sigh with some relief. “Let’s keep the spread of this information restricted to a few key individuals…”

Jaro nodded. A little bit of good news went a very long way, and the health of Kai Opaka’s son was better news that Kalem might have hoped for tonight. If Kai Opaka’s son were to be killed, it would be devastating for the morale of Bajor. It was bad enough that the legendary fighter Li Nalas was dead, along with scores of resistance cells scattered across the planet. If Opaka Fasil were to be killed, something inside of Kalem—and more than a few others, he suspected—would wither and die. Bajor desperately needed heroes right now, even if their deeds were symbolic rather than actual. In times as dark as these, any hero would do.

It was late, and Keral was exhausted, but he didn’t want to go to bed until he’d made some headway on Mora’s code. He’d spent the entire day in the fields, and now that the sun was down, he was crouched at the family’s dining table with a sputtering candle, struggling to work out some kind of plausible key for the cipher brought to him by the alien visitor.

The numbers were easy; it was the words that had him confounded. Did each letter stand in for a numeral? Were the words themselves relevant? They had to be, otherwise Keral wasn’t sure if the numbers made any sense. If he was right about the number parts, he had bits and pieces of what mightbe a message…or it might be gibberish. He clutched at the thinning hair on his head, wishing he could just somehow force himself to understand. Couldn’t you have made it any simpler, Pol?

Keral heard a rustling behind him, and turned to find his eleven-year-old daughter approaching, her steps light. Jaxa’s blond hair had come loose from her braid, tumbling about her shoulders and making her look very much as she had when she was a little girl. It put a lump in Keral’s throat to recognize how quickly his daughter was growing up, especially when faced with how impossibly clever she was becoming. Some of the things she came up with—Keral could scarcely believe she was his own child. She was more like the Mora side that way, Keral’s mother’s side. They were all a clever people, many of them learned. How Keral wished he could do more for Jaxa than this primitive village—she could have gone so far!

“Jaxa,” he whispered. “Why aren’t you in bed? It’s another early morning tomorrow.”

“I know, Pa. That’s why I’m up. You need to sleep, too. Could I help?”

Keral chuckled. “I doubt it, though I wish someone could. Of course…you might be better suited to figure this out than I am.”

Jaxa peered over his shoulder at the sheets of paper he’d spread across the chipped wooden table. “What is this stuff, Pa?”

“I’m not sure, honey,” he admitted. “Maybe it’s nothing. You know the funny man I brought to the harvest yesterday? It’s from him. He says he knows my cousin, a man you’ve never met—a very smart man.”

“Mora Pol—he’s a scientist,” Jaxa said, picking up one of the scraps of paper.

“That’s right,” Keral confirmed. “I’ve told you about him before.”

Jaxa traced a finger along one of the lines on the paper she was looking at. “‘Sensors towers,’” she read. “‘Aircraft?’ ‘Coded engine signature.’”

He smiled. “It’s a lot of gibberish, I know.”

“Mora made the detection grid?” She looked at him, frowning. “The towers…?”

Keral answered carefully. “He has to work with the Cardassians, honey. He has to do it in order to stay alive. It isn’t his fault…” Keral trailed off, thinking.

“Maybe he’s given you an override code,” Jaxa suggested.

Keral started to nod, feeling a surge of excitement. He shuffled through the pieces of paper, snatched up the one with the numbers that followed the reference to a traveler’s array. He read the sequence, remembering something Pol had once told him, about programming…

“It’s a backdoor password,” he said. “He always built them into his programs, in case he needed to get back in.”

His excitement faltered. “Except…how am I supposed to use something like that?”

Jaxa was still looking at the same sheet of paper. “Someone would have to take the code to the resistance,” she said.

“Mora remembered that I knew Kohn Biran,” Keral said. He felt like he had to catch his breath, suddenly. If it was true, if it was an override code of some sort, probably with instructions on how to approach…His cousin had passed a huge responsibility on to him. Could he do this? Crack the code, and get it to Kohn Biran? Keral had a rudimentary idea of where the Dahkur resistance had gone. They had taken to the mountains after the grid had gone online, the low range visible beyond the western forest. Of course, this was assuming they hadn’t all been killed.

He held out his hand for Jaxa to give him the scrap of paper. “You go to bed,” he instructed her gently. “And thank you for helping me. Right now, we both need some sleep.”

Even as he said it, he knew sleep would be impossible. His cousin, he realized, was counting on him to do this thing, which indicated that Pol believed Keral was capable. He hoped that Pol’s faith would be enough to see him through, for Keral wasn’t sure if he had any for himself.

Alone in her quarters, Natima’s voice trembled ever so slightly as she introduced herself, setting forth her credentials to the man on the screen. The channel was hardened, but if the station’s prefect learned her business, her intentions, she would be as good as dead. She chose her words carefully, using phrases she’d worked out with Russol as she presented herself to Tozhat’s newest exarch, a man named Yoriv Skyl. Skyl had recently come to replace Kotan Pa’Dar, the man who had been exarch when Natima had lived in the surface settlement, years before.

Natima had never been formally introduced to Kotan Pa’Dar, though she had seen him in those years when she was on Bajor, at the occasional press conference, and once she had passed him on the streets between the habitat domes of the settlement. She had also seen him on Cardassia Prime, since he had returned from Bajor. Pa’Dar’s wife and young son had been killed in a terrorist attack, and he had resigned from his post shortly afterward. There were many dissidents who were convinced that Pa’Dar was one of them, that he attended some of the off-planet meetings under an assumed identity, but it had never been confirmed. It was Natima’s understanding that Yoriv Skyl, the man who had replaced him here on Bajor, was a close acquaintance of Pa’Dar’s. She hoped that meant that Skyl could also be sympathetic to the cause, but his expression was giving her nothing.

Skyl was a heavyset man, slightly younger than Natima, but with close ties to the Detapa Council, Cardassia’s civilian government. Russol knew him in some capacity, though not well enough to be sure of his political leanings. Still, after speaking with Pa’Dar, Russol agreed with Natima that the evidence for Skyl’s receptiveness was strong enough that Natima should contact him.