Proka repeated what he was hearing. “Kendra…The monastery is gone, totally obliterated. Most of the residents got out, but many are missing and presumed dead. The shrine was buried…” He blanched. “They’re saying…They’re saying that the Orb of Truth was destroyed.”

Gar Osen’s face flashed through Darrah’s thoughts. “I shouldn’t have taken him back there.”

“He might have made it out,” Proka offered, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“I shouldn’t have left him.” Darrah went hot with anger.

“I shouldn’t have left any of them!”He wrenched the controls around, sweeping though a bank of wood smoke, and threw the flyer toward the residential districts along the hillside road. His house stood out among the others, among the buildings with their broken windows and wind-ravaged roofs. The lawman’s heart leapt; the buildings showed only the signs of shock damage and none of the awful effects of the firestorms and plasma strikes.

Darrah put the flyer down on the ash-coated road and threw off his safety restraints.

“Boss, what are you doing?” said Proka.

“Get out of here,” Darrah snapped at him, and he vaulted out of the hatch toward the ruined fascia of his home.

The oval front door was halfway down the entrance hall, where it had been blown off its hinges. There were fans of glass radiating out from every window facing toward the ruined city. He saw streaks of blood, still fresh on the wall, and Darrah’s throat tightened, silencing him. He had come across sights of violence and destruction over and over throughout his career, in crime scenes all across Korto, but the calm and professional detachment that he fell into there was lost to him. This was hishome, it was the sight of an atrocity that had bled in from the city, a crime on a scale so large it was beyond him to deal with it.

He couldn’t bring himself to call out the names of his wife and children; he was too afraid to do it, for fear that his only reply would be silence. The blood! The blood on the wall, whose is it?Karys’s, Bajin’s, or Nell’s? Was one of them up ahead in a room, or sprawled out in the yard, knifed by a piece of flying debris?

“Hello!” He shouted it out, finding the strength to push the word out of his trembling lips. “Who’s there?”

He entered the kitchen just as Nell called back to him. In the shambles of the room they were all there, frozen in a tableau. Every detail of the moment etched into Darrah’s mind like acid burning steel, fixing the image: Nell, an adhesive bandage covering her cheek, red dots spotting across the shoulder of her white cotton dress, the streaking of dirty tears down her perfect little face; Bajin, shocked into silence at the far door, two bags stuffed with clothes in his arms, his expression ragged with fear; and then Karys.

His wife exploded toward him, and she hit Mace hard across the cheek, the slap stinging him with the force of the impact. He recoiled, not so much from the attack as from the look of pure fury on her face. Karys swore at him and threw another swipe, but he caught her wrist. She spat and tore away from his grip, shoving him back with the heel of her free hand. “Bastard!”The word was caustic.

“Karys, you’re all right, I—”

“Shut up!” she bellowed. “Don’t speak to me! Don’t say anything, you don’t have the right to say anything to us!” Karys gathered up Nell, as the girl started to cry. “You left us here alone!”

Mace swallowed a gasp of breath. “I had to…The minister’s family, we had to get them to safety…” The words sounded weak in his ears. “No, it’s just…I didn’t know this was going to happen.” He cast around at the destruction. “I never would have—”

His wife cut him off with a savage glare. “You left us here, Darrah Mace.” Ice gripped his heart. “You put your job before your family, like you did before, like you always do!”

“I didn’t know this was coming!” he shouted back at her. “You have to believe me!”

She was retreating away from him, taking Nell and moving to Bajin and the bags. Mace read the intentions in her expression before she said another word, and he shook his head. Karys nodded tearfully, denying him. “Yes, Mace, oh yes. We can’t stay here anymore. We’re leaving.”

He took a desperate step toward her. “Where can you go?” he cried. “The city is in chaos, there are thousands of frightened people out on the streets! You think it will be any better in Ashalla with your mother?”

“I’m not going to Ashalla,” she snapped back at him.

“I told you before, I can’t live here. Ships will be leaving.” Karys was guiding the children to the door, and Mace felt his heart tearing open as Nell and Bajin followed their mother, casting sad and piteous looks toward him.

“I’ll come with you,” he said desperately.

“No,” she shot back. “You’ve let us down too many times. I’m leaving, Mace. I’m going to the Valo colony.”

Everything Mace had been terrified of losing he had found safe, only to have it snatched from him. “Karys, please!”The pleading became a shout that made the children flinch.

On the threshold of the broken doorway, his wife threw a harsh glare at the wounded city beyond. “You care more about Korto than us, you always have. Now you can keep it.”

They left him there, mute among the ruins.

17

When the central tower of the Naghai Keep had been constructed, the level below the battlements was known simply as the upper hall. An open space, studded with pillars supporting the roof and the ramparts above, in the days of the Republics it had been where the lord of the castle held his court, the high arched windows that ringed the room allowing him to look out over the region and see the breadth of his realm. In the centuries since that time, the upper hall had been used for many other things, but today it had turned back to some echo of its original purpose. In a mirror of the layout in Ashalla’s Chamber of Ministers, a triad of tables were set out across the room, and Lale Usbor sat in the spot where Jas Holza’s great-great-great-grandfather had once held domain. Several of the chairs were empty, in memorial to the men and women who had perished in the attacks.

The windows had been replaced only days earlier, and in some places the old polished wood of the floors was still scored where shock wave damage had ripped the aged surface. There was nowhere outside the keep where one could look and not see the devastation wrought in the aftermath of the Tzenkethi incursion. Behind Lale was the main mass of Korto, the proud spires and glittering domes broken and wounded. Here and there floater platforms from Cardassian military engineering squads dithered over sites of importance: the power station, the water purification plant, the central hospice. It had been raining earlier in the day, and the smell of dead fires was heavy in the air. The rainfall sluiced down in streaks of gray, tainted by the ashes that had been thrown into the sky. It would be months before the atmosphere worked the effluent from the attack out of its system; for now, each time it rained, it was a fresh reminder of the assault on their world.

Jas studied the city and felt within for some kind of emotional reaction to the wrecked vista; he could bring back only a cold fury, a detachment to the sight he saw before him. In the weeks since the attack, the deadness had grown worse. In moments of privacy, he had been able to conjure some flashes of emotion when Lonnic Tomo’s face was there in his thoughts, but for the most part Jas was consumed by a dark, numbing anger. He saw the same feeling reflected in the faces of other ministers, those of them who weren’t too afraid to step outside of their homes, or who flocked like whipped children to the sides of Kell and the Cardassians when they arrived with repair crews and emergency relief supplies, pathetic in their gratitude. They were a microcosm of Bajor as a whole. The people were torn between two polar sentiments: a fierce mixture of furious anger and dull shock at the murderous lethality of the attacks; and, in lesser numbers, a gratefulness toward the Cardassians who had put themselves in harm’s way in order to destroy the Tzenkethi invaders. Resentment was on every street, the hard need for retribution burning in the eyes of every man and woman.