Pasir walked away. “One step at a time,” he said, without looking back.

The voices of the assembled hundreds in the grounds of the Naghai Keep pealed off the walls of the ancient castle, swelling the verses of old High Bajoran as the death chant neared its conclusion. As tradition had it, the families of each of the D’jarras would speak a few lines, then pause as others picked up where they left off, but there were many who felt so strongly that they spoke the entirety of the chant, tears on their faces and throats cracking with emotion. There had been some suggestions that morning of policing the approach roads to the keep, to try to hold the numbers at the remembrance ceremony down to a minimum. Darrah Mace looked over the sloping ornamental gardens, at the throng gathered there, and realized that he had made the right choice ordering Proka to put away the barricades. Korto was united in grief, just like every city on Bajor. The ritual would give the people the closure they needed to bring the Cemba incident into sharp relief. Those who had lost someone they cared for would know that the Prophets were watching over them, and those who were afraid would have, at least for today, the unity of their neighbors around them.

Karys was holding hands with the children, their heads bowed. She’d hardly spoken to him since their conversation in the precinct, spending time on the comm trying to gather together the remnants of Jarel’s diffuse life. Her cousin had no partner, no parents or siblings of his own left to mourn him, and Karys’s mother, ever insensitive, was not sorry to see him gone. It fell to Mace’s wife to arrange his burial, but she had refused point-blank any offer of assistance. Bajin caught his eye and nodded solemnly; his son had stepped in to help Karys without any request on her part, and the boy’s quiet support made his father proud. Nell remained morose. She was still finding it hard to process, that some alien beings from light-years distant would come to Bajor to kill her uncle. Mace hated the fact that he had no explanation to offer her.

The lawman felt a heavy sense of dread pressing down upon him. In a blink of memory, he thought back to the Eledaceremony and the deaths that had brought that to pass. Changes had been wrought that day, and now the same was happening here again. The road to the future was being marked out in the blood of Bajoran men and women. The horrific image made him shudder, and with a sudden, terrible certainty, Darrah Mace knew that what was happening today would not be an end to it. He saw himself standing in the same place, his face lined with stress, and blood there on the streets, the funeral chant repeated over and over into infinity. A million deaths, and a million more, more and more and more—

The ringing of the Bell of Souls shattered his moment of dark insight, and Darrah blinked, feeling cold sweat on his neck. He forced away the images in his mind and swallowed hard. Some distance away, on the podium set up among the ornamental gardens, Kai Meressa was being helped down from the dais by Gar and Tima. She had stood for the entirety of the chant, despite her fragility. Darrah watched her descend the steps. The kai seemed unreal, like a thin papery sketch of the woman he had first seen in the flesh five years ago. It was hard to reconcile the sight of her with the vital, passionate preacher of the past. That she held on steadfastly to life was a testament to her strength of will, and even the most dissenting of voices in the Vedek Assembly did not dare to speak openly of inviting Meressa to give up her rank and retire. Truth be told, there was not a man or woman among her subordinates who had so captured the hearts of the Bajoran people as Meressa had; when she finally left them, he had no doubt it would throw the church into disarray. Darrah forced himself to look away, the specter of death pressing in on his thoughts all over again.

Vedek Arin said some words. The platitudes seemed to work on the mourners, but to Darrah they fell on stony ground. He heard the echo of Meressa’s voice in them, and wondered how much of the kai’s prose the bland little priest had sifted through to gather material for his own speech; but it was with surprise that he looked again at the podium and saw the Oralian cleric Bennek step up and draw back his hood.

The alien’s face was streaked with dark tears, and the simple power of the emotional display silenced all the Bajorans ranged around him. Cardassians were gray and dour, they were cold and passionless—that was the commonplace, trite perception of their race. The raw grief that flooded from Bennek was real and potent; it was shocking, in its own way.

He spoke, his voice crossing the gardens. “I am moved beyond my capacity to describe,” began the cleric, his gaze seeking out faces in the crowd at random. “You, our brothers and sisters of Bajor, have taken the hand of friendship from my people, and this horror has been your reward. I am filled with such depthless sorrow as I have never known. Like many of you, people who were important to me were taken, swept away in fire, and it is for them that I join you in prayer today. The souls of all those lost on Cemba Station, aboard the Lhemorand the other vessels, they were stolen from us by vengeful hearts and heartless, callous killers…” Bennek choked back a sob, and despite himself Darrah felt a prickling in his eyes as his heart tightened in empathy; but the cleric’s next words stopped the breath in his throat. “I see a path unfolding before our worlds. As Oralius blesses me and your Prophets do the same, I see it. It is a road watered by bloodshed and fear, forced upon us by those who seed darkness upon the light.” He raised his hands. “All of us, Bajoran and Cardassian…we stand upon the threshold of this path, and we must choose wisely or else we doom ourselves to the darkest of futures. We must not embrace hate and fear, even in the face of such terrible consequences. Avarice and greed will poison us. We must look to tomorrow with our eyes open and clarity in our hearts, we must listen to the powers that watch over us. I will strive to be better than I am, and I know you will do the same in the name of the Prophets.” Bennek brought his hands together. “Only in accord can we turn away from the dark road. Only in unity can Bajor and Cardassia find the way.” And with that, Bennek’s shoulders slumped, as if all the energy in the man had been spent in the flood of his outburst. “I…I weep with you,” he husked, and stepped away from the podium. Darrah saw Tima at the foot of the platform; like many of the people in the crowd, she had been profoundly moved by the cleric’s sincerity.

There were no problems as the crowd dispersed. Darrah watched with one eye, afraid that someone, some bereaved person angry at the world for their loss, would lash out; there was none. Instead, a somber stream of mourners threaded out of the gardens in clusters, supporting each other through their grief.

As they joined the departing groups, he spotted a gathering of figures and heard the snap of a raised voice. Karys shot him a sideways look, a warning, but he chose to ignore it and drifted closer. Mace saw the drifting shape of a camera drone and a news crew, and abruptly he knew who they were crowding around.

“But can we stand here and do nothing?” said Kubus Oak to the correspondent, his jaw set. “Are we to be a reactive people? Will our only reply to this atrocity be to weep and bury our dead?” Some of the people gathered around the minister made angry noises and shook their heads. “We cannot let this go unanswered! It was our failure that allowed these good people to perish. When the Prophets talk of judgment for the honest and the willing, we must hear that and ask ourselves, how would we be judged if we did nothing to bring justice to the ones who ended these innocent lives?”