“May I ask—?” Tuvok began.

“There’s a big old Draken multipod astern, coming up to starboard,” Sisko explained. “She’s going to pass within a couple of kilometers of us, and we’re going to let her. When the seventh pod is parallel to us, we’re going to match her course and speed. We’re small enough, if we’re quiet enough, to play shadow until we’re out of range of Tenjin’s sensors.”

“And avoid any potential challenge from Romulan-allied vessels in the sector,” Tuvok surmised. “Very inventive.”

Sisko caught himself shrugging like Zetha. “Just common sense.”

“In summary,” Uhura had said before Sisko shut down the holos to rig for silent running prior to crossing over into the Zone, “we know what this bug looks like—and, apparently, what it sounds like—and we have a fair idea who created it. We still have no idea how it has spread across this much space, and so quickly, even into controlled environments. But we go forward.

“Once we’ve acquired the live R-fever from Starbase 23, Dr. Crusher will compare it with the neoform and possibly tease out the differences. Albatross,you will continue your research from space on the worlds you pass, and on the ground where possible. Set course for Quirinus.”

“Quirinus,” Sisko said, trying the name out on his tongue. His mouth had gone suddenly dry at the thought that they really were inside the Zone now. The danger was almost palpable, like a change in the temperature or the humidity in the creaky old ship, and he found himself sweating. Maybe if he kept talking, he could talk his fears away. “Sounds Romulan.”

“The inhabitants are Romulan in appearance,” Tuvok replied. “However, Quirinus’s location within the Zone precludes it from seeking membership in the Empire without violating treaty. In some respects, its citizens have become more Romulan than Romulans. And there is not inconsiderable resentment toward humans and the Federation.”

“This ought to be fun!” Sisko said wryly.

“It will be challenging,” Tuvok admitted. “Selar and I will have to perfect our Romulan personae well before we arrive.”

Part of that included learning to use an honor blade. Tuvok, adapted by training to any form of weaponry, had mastered the nuances before they left Earth. Selar, whose most powerful weapon had heretofore been a laser scalpel, was less apt. Eager to repay Selar for her trust, Zetha made herself useful.

“It is not a weapon,” she instructed Selar, “but a natural extension of your hand, an extension of your soul. It is given you by your family when you reach adulthood at the age of seven, and you keep it with you from then on. A true Romulan feels naked without it.”

Selar weighed the pretty but deadly-sharp object in her hand and considered this. She seemed to slip into a light trance for a moment, as if calling upon some ancient race memory that might help her become one with something she really would prefer to lock away in a display case and admire for its beauty, not its killing skills.

“I am a healer,” she said at last. “Perhaps understanding too well how much damage even such a small blade can do to internal organs is what restrains me.”

“Then you must free yourself of that knowledge whenever the blade is in your hand,” Tuvok suggested. “Nowhere is it written that you must use the blade, wife, merely that you know how.”

It was the first time he had called her that, and the layers of pretext it suggested—and necessitated—seemed to galvanize her.

“Indeed…husband,” she said carefully, then turned to Zetha. “Show me again.”

And Zetha, who had never owned an honor blade because there was no family to give it to her, nevertheless showed Selar everything she had learned by watching others, true Romulans, challenge each other even in the most refined venues, often over the most trivial things. It was not at all uncommon for two senators to be dining in one of the most opulent restaurants in Ki Baratan and fall to insults over the choice of wine. Lurking in the alleys, she had witnessed the outcome often enough.

“I’ve never seen anyone killed with an honor blade,” she told Selar now, thinking: Not entirely trueeven as she said it. There had been weapons training in the barracks, though the Lord had pointed out that the weapons they were given—which were taken away and locked up again at the end of each training session—were not true honor blades, because ghilikcould never truly be honorable.

She had wondered at the time why at least some of them hadn’t turned on him and filleted him like the dead fish he was. Already some of their number were starting to disappear. Sent on special missions, they were told, but they all knew. Special indeed. So special that no one ever returned. Zetha would count the empty bunks each night and wonder when it would be her turn.

“Interesting,” Selar was saying now, as Zetha hid her thoughts behind tales of old ones, women, adolescents up and down the castes and classes and hierarchies of Romulan society drawing knives in challenge. “How often do they kill each other?”

Zetha shrugged. “Rarely. Mostly it’s bluster. You shout insults, I shout insults back, I pull my knife, you pull yours, we glare at each other, attract everyone’s attention. Sometimes we inflict superficial wounds, so we can show off the scars later.” She searched for a metaphor. “Like two h’vartin an alley. Lots of yowling and claws and fur standing on end, but they rarely actually fight.”

With a skeptical eyebrow, Selar said. “Show me again.”

And she did. Selar was tall and possessed of a long-limbed grace; freed of her philosophical constraints, she learned quickly. In exchange for what might prove a life-saving lesson on Quirinus, she perfected Zetha’s cover identity by lasering off her freckles.

“I don’t look like me,” Zetha said to the face in the mirror, wondering if it was the freckles that had marked her as non-Romulan.

Without them, might she pass? Well, for Quirinus, anyway. Ironic that there were Vulcans who looked like Selar and Vulcans who looked like Tuvok, Romulans with brow ridges and without, and variations in both races to encompass ever possible color of skin and eye and texture of hair, and no one on Tenjin had questioned her supposed Vulcan ancestry, yet on Romulus there was something about her that other Romulans could see and judge that she was not one of them. Would she ever know what it was? Since she would probably never see Romulus again, did it matter?

“I have preserved their exact pattern in your medical chart,” Selar told her, sensing her concern. “Once we leave Quirinus, I can restore them. Or you can remain without them until we complete our mission and then have them back just as they were.”

Zetha said nothing. Why did such a minor change disturb her when so many major changes hadn’t? What if she died without her true face?

“They are, after all, a part of you,” Selar said mildly. Zetha suppressed a sudden wave of what a human might call hero worship. She found herself wondering how old Selar was, whether she, like most Vulcans, had been betrothed as a child, whether she had children.

In Ki Baratan, she had often searched the crowds on the streets for males and females of a certain age, imagining any one of them might have engendered her. The little monster with the booted feet was not even part of her consideration.

She thought she had gotten out of the habit by now, but she’d been wrong. The face that looked back at her in the mirror was not only naked without its characteristic sprinkling of extra pigmentation (“As if when the gods were making you they got distracted and forgot to stir the batter properly before putting you in the oven to bake!” Aemetha used to say), but the look in the green eyes was vulnerable. She had never had a mother; why crave one now? She had Selar’s trust, and she had found ways to make herself useful. What more did she want?