“If it makes no difference to you,” he said, “I…would prefer to remain here, if I could.”

Cul was surprised, but he nodded. “Certainly, Doctor Mora. I didn’t realize you were so committed. I admire you for your allegiance to the Cardassian cause.”

“Yes, sir,” Mora said, ashamed.

“If only there were more Bajorans like you,” Cul went on, and started to speak of his future plans for the institute, but Mora had stopped listening. It occurred to him then that he’d finally been offered the chance to leave, to stop collaborating—the thing he had wanted for so long—and he hadn’t taken it. His heart sank, realizing that he had probably made a mistake, but it was too late to change it. He had a feeling that Cul would be unlikely to offer again.

And Odo left me, he thought, but then thought of his small plan, his project, and felt some measure of reassurance. He remembered Daul Mirosha, the last Bajoran who had worked here, and how he had given up his life to liberate the Gallitep mining camp. Mora knew he could never do anything so heroic and dangerous as that, but perhaps, with less supervision, with more freedom under the new director…perhaps he could make a few more changes, implement a few more small plans. Perhaps it was time to set his fear aside and take advantage of his position at the institute. He’d earned it, after all.

10

The little girl tried to make conversation as Odo made his way back to where he remembered the village to be, but Odo did not seem to know the right things to say to her, and he knew that she thought him odd. It made him anxious to return to the village, to hand her off to her parents and escape the curious nature of her comments.

“If only I hadn’t lost my way,” she said wistfully, looking out at the tops of the trees, outlined in the misty blue of the approaching morning.

“But you did lose your way,” Odo told her matter-of-factly.

The girl seemed annoyed. “Now who is going to take this message to the resistance?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” Odo said, “but your father was very afraid for your safety. Someone else will have to do it.”

“Why don’t the sensors detect you?”

“They probably do. But they don’t react to me, because I’m not Bajoran.”

She scrutinized him. “You look kind of like a Bajoran.”

Odo cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You should not have taken such a risk,” he told her.

Jaxa snorted angrily. “Sometimes risks are worth taking,” she told him.

Odo had no reply. He supposed she might be right. The idea was often implied, in the Cardassian histories he’d read, but he had no personal experience in the matter.

The sun was casting its brilliance across the day, and Jaxa seemed to grow even bolder in her queries now that it was not quite so dark. She changed the subject. “That big animal in the forest. The thing that chased the haraaway from me. What was it? Where did it go?”

“It was me,” Odo said, wishing she hadn’t asked. While he hadn’t made any effort to explain or demonstrate his nature to the people he’d met, he had no plans to hide it, either; he’d simply hoped to avoid the conversation. But she had asked.

“I knew it!” Jaxa said, excited. “How did you do that?”

“My unique nature allows for it.” It was his standard reply, the one he and Mora had given to the various Cardassians who had come to view him at the institute.

“Oh,” Jaxa said, seeming puzzled by the answer. “Well…what kind of animal was it?”

“A riding hound, native to Cardassia Prime.” He replied as promptly as he would have to any question from Doctor Mora. “I learned it from studying three-dimensional motion images in the database at the Bajoran Institute of Science.”

Jaxa frowned. “Could you be other animals, too?” she wondered.

“Yes,” Odo said, again wishing she hadn’t asked. He did not like the idea of changing his form on demand for her, or anyone else. It made him feel uncomfortable, especially since he wasn’t sure how to go about refusing. It had only just begun to occur to him that he couldrefuse, if he wanted to, but he had never done so before, and he didn’t know what kind of reaction a refusal would produce. He preferred an atmosphere of agreeable serenity, if it was possible to maintain it.

Jaxa tripped on a piece of root jutting above the surface of the dirt path, and Odo quickly caught her by the elbow before she stumbled. As she regained her footing, her face tilted to the sky. “Look!” she exclaimed, and Odo raised his head to see a crooked line, soaring through the clouds. “It’s a sinoraptor,” she said.

“A sinoraptor,” Odo repeated, watching the thing in the sky.

“A bird,” Jaxa said.

Odo knew what birds were; egg-laying animals that could fly—or at least, some of them could. He recognized that he had seen birds go by as he was coming through the forest to the Ikreimi village from the institute, but he hadn’t paid them much attention.

“Could you be a bird?” Jaxa asked him.

“I don’t know,” Odo said. “I’ve never tried it before.”

“If you can be anything you want,” Jaxa asked, “how come you’re a person all the time? I only saw you be a person at the village.”

Odo grunted before he replied. “I suppose it’s because I have the most practice being a humanoid,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s what Doctor Mora wanted me to be more than anything else.”

“Oh,” Jaxa said. “But…what do youwant to be more than anything else?”

He looked up at the sky, watching the sinoraptor as it came closer, considering her question. “I don’t know yet,” he finally answered. “What do you want to be more than anything else?”

Jaxa already knew the answer. “A soldier,” she said. “To fight the Cardassians and make them go away.”

Odo was curious and surprised, but not terribly. He knew there was conflict between the Bajorans and the Cardassians, though he did not fully understand how it had come about. It did interest him, however, to recognize that a child would already know to be angry at the Cardassians. He supposed the conflict might have run deeper than he originally suspected, and acknowledged to himself that Doctor Mora may have been right—he still had a great deal to learn before he could ever truly “fit in.”

It’s not that I don’t trust her,Quark reassured himself as he struggled with the locking mechanism behind the door panel. It’s just that if Thrax has been listening to her transmissions, and if she already knew that I was selling black-market goods…Everyone made mistakes, it was a fact. An innocent slip of the tongue, and he could lose all that he’d worked for.

The door slid open, allowing him to ignore the meandering, unpleasant train of thought that had been plaguing him since his affair with Natima had begun, that had induced him to visit her empty quarters. She was on Bajor for the day, on business, visiting some grand high muckity-muck, so there was no reason for him to be ashamed of his minor break-and-sweep; she’d never even know that he’d been in her rooms.

Her quarters were quiet and spare, generic, lifeless without her. Quark produced a device from the pocket of his waistcoat and began to sweep for listening devices, but the readout quickly confirmed that her rooms were clean. He went through her desk, found hard copies of statistics and a box of isolinear rods labeled with boring, work-related titles. Nothing with his name on it, anywhere.

She said it had nothing to do with me, he told himself, and felt that flicker of unpleasantness once more, which he’d positively identified as guilt. But then, when he’d asked her about it, the night after Thrax had interrogated her, it seemed to Quark that perhaps she had protested just a little too much. She was hiding something. Quark had decided he’d better hack into her computer, just to be sure.