She kept her phaser at the ready, trying to keep her senses balanced as she carefully approached the entrance of the facility. The more carefully she listened, the more she was certain she could hear someone crying. The sound was faint, fainter than her own heartbeat, but Kira knew that it was Tahna. Her resolve hardened as she crept through the unblocked doors.

It was here that she finally encountered a seated guard, but she was ready for him. She swung her leg up and around to connect with his ear before he could react—best not to use her phaser until absolutely necessary. He staggered from the blow, drawing his weapon. He was shaken, but not especially hurt. With Cardassians it was necessary to strike at just the right place, where the brittle cartilage on their faces was the most vulnerable. In the instant before he brought up his weapon, Kira leaned in and drove the heel of her hand into his mouth. She felt and heard the satisfactory crunch just above his upper lip. The Cardassian lost his disruptor as he fell, but Kira did not stop to pick it up. She scurried past him and kept going into a darkened corridor, following Tahna’s echoed groans and cries.

She walked as silently as she knew how, slipped around a corner—there, a Cardassian standing behind a computer console, and before he could even look up, she shot him in the chest with her phaser on its highest setting. He fell backward and seemed to take a very long time to hit the ground. Kira looked to see what he had been doing at the console and was immediately greeted with a grisly scene. Displayed across his viewscreen, Tahna Los hung from the ceiling of a dank corridor that must have been somewhere below her, judging from the sound of his screams, while two expressionless Cardassians were taking turns peeling back slices of flesh from his naked back. Tahna screamed in agony, and Kira threw her hands over her face, but not before she saw that the same Cardassians were carefully, painfully cauterizing the flesh back into place with a crude dermal regenerator, presumably so they could begin to cut once again, after his tender skin had artificially healed back into lumpy scar tissue.

Kira frantically pecked at the computer to try and assess Tahna’s location, but after an agonizingly long moment with no success, she decided instead to simply follow the sound of his terrible cries. She found a spiral staircase and quickly descended, discovering a dim and sweltering underground corridor with a line of three doors. Her ears were full of the sound of it now, and the echoing sound of the questions the Cardassians were putting to the hapless Tahna:

Kira Nerys—you know her. Where is she?

Had she really heard her own name? Or was her imagination just trying to amplify her own terror? It must be the latter, for their voices were muffled, in part by Tahna’s groans. He began to scream again, either determined not to tell them anything, or simply in so much pain that he couldn’t speak.

Thinking with some uncertainty that she had found the right door, she took out the lock with a quick burst of her phaser and let herself inside—to find that Tahna was not in this room at all. A nearly emaciated woman was chained to the wall by her wrists. For an instant, Kira thought she was dead, and almost turned to leave her—but the woman suddenly coughed up a bilious spew of green all down the front of the rags she was dressed in, and shuddered with the resultant coughing fit that followed. Appalled, Kira rushed to her, using her weapon to burn away the chains that bound her to the wall.

“Get out of here!” she whispered, but the corpselike figure made no move, only stared at her with confused, dead-seeming eyes.

“It’s too bright,” the woman complained, her voice husked and raw. “Shut the door.”

“You’re free, you have to go,” Kira insisted, but she could not afford the time it would take to help her, for Tahna’s strangled cries had begun again.

At the next door, Kira found her target—but there were three Cardassians in the dark, hot room, not the two she’d expected. She aimed the line of her phaser fire at the restraints that held Tahna to the ceiling, and as he fell to the ground she wasted no time in swinging the beam around to hit one of the two Cardassians who had been administering Tahna’s torture. The first one fell, but not before the other two Cardassians in the room could react. The nearest of them, the one she had not anticipated, managed to grab her, and the other relieved her of her phaser, though she kicked and screamed with all of her might.

“Tahna!” she cried. “Los!” But he lay completely still on the floor where he had fallen, apparently dead.

“You killed him,” one of the soldiers said cruelly. “He was connected to a life support system, and you put him into shock.”

“No!” she screamed.

“I told you she’d come after him,” the other Cardassian laughed to his companion. “You owe me twenty leks.” Kira could feel his groping fingers beginning to travel to places where she could not tolerate them. She screamed louder, but Tahna still did not move, and Kira bit her tongue as the Cardassians continued to hatefully explore her with their hands, tugging at her clothes. Through their sick laughter, she tasted hot salt in her mouth, unsure if it was blood or tears.

The lights flickered before they went out entirely, the Cardassians loudly expressing their angry confusion, and Kira managed to kick one of her assailants hard enough to make him lose his grip on her. The other Cardassian only held her tighter in the blind darkness—until a burst of blue light suddenly filled the chamber, and there was a loud thunkas the soldier who still held her fell to the floor, dragging Kira with him and pinning her to the floor. She struggled to free herself from the weight of his body while she heard some crashing and struggling, the other Cardassian shouting before more phaser fire lit up the room, and then, as suddenly as they had gone out, the lights were powered back up. They were dimmer than before, humming noisily, apparently driven by a crude backup system—but at least Kira could see again.

Breathless, Kira looked around the room to see that Tahna had weakly crawled to his knees. Near the doorway stood the emaciated woman Kira had freed just a few moments before, a crazed, haunted expression lighting up her eyes, and a smoking phaser—presumably Kira’s, snatched from the table where the Cardassians had left it—clutched tightly in her hand.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kira said, and helped Tahna to his feet. He leaned on her heavily, barely able to stand. The other woman reached out one terribly thin and dirty arm to steady him, and together, the two women dragged him up the spiral staircase, and outside toward freedom.

Odo could find no words. He watched his forensic analyst go over the scene of the explosion for the third time, apparently trying to find any extraneous evidence that would point to a conclusion other than what they were all thinking—that Odo had condemned the wrong men to death for the attempt on Dukat’s life. Not that it would have mattered much to the Cardassians—Bajorans were all guilty of something. Odo had found this assumption to be almost universally held by his Cardassian cohorts. But the shape-shifter had always done his best to refute this prejudice, and he worried now that he had failed.

This new explosion, which had taken place on the Promenade earlier today, had missed Dukat and his entourage by such a narrow margin that the sleeve of Dukat’s uniform had been singed, his hand badly burned; but his life had been spared yet again, thanks to one of his soldiers, who had managed to get the prefect out of the way just before the device was detonated. It was, curiously, the same soldier who had saved the prefect during the last assassination crisis, but Odo quickly surmised that it was because Dukat had specifically chosen this man to accompany him on an almost daily basis. At least, that was the conclusion that Odo wanted to be true.