Uhura got up from her desk and surveyed the grounds below her window. As she’d anticipated, the fog had burned off and the day was radiant. Cretak’s messenger had had enough faith in her to allow herself to be brought indoors for the preliminaries, but now it was time for a change of venue.

“It’s a beautiful day, and I need some air,” Uhura said. “Walk with me.”

The young woman hesitated. Did she think she was going to be imprisoned, even executed, once she had delivered the core of her message?

“Sometimes the walls have ears,” Uhura suggested.

“Indeed,” the Romulan said, and instinctively pulled the hood of her travel cloak up over her own.

“You know my name,” Uhura began after they’d walked in silence for a while. “May I know yours?”

“Zetha,” she replied at once.

“Zetha,” Uhura repeated. “That’s your family name?”

“It is my name,” the young woman said tautly. “I was born in Ki Baratan. I have no family.”

And that, Uhura realized, was all she would get out of her. But it told her a great deal. Romulan society was built on kinship lines. A Romulan without family had no identity, and legally did not exist.

“I see,” Uhura said. They were in a remote part of the grounds few frequented. A pity really, since it was some of Boothby’s best work. Dewdrops sparkled on the glossy leaves of the gardenias, and a maze garden of carefully trimmed yews and azaleas beckoned to them, but Uhura deliberately kept them out in the open, amid the groundcovers and low-growing flowerbeds, so that Zetha could see they were not being followed.

Which was not to say they couldn’t have been monitored from across the quadrangle or across the sector, Uhura thought, mindful of some of the equipment her field agents and their Romulan counterparts had at their disposal, which could listen through fortress walls or starship bulkheads or photograph the rank pips on a subcommander’s uniform from a system away as he strolled the streets of the Capital on market day, but the gesture was necessary.

And if the occasional passing cadet noticed the two in conversation, they made nothing of it. Tomed had happened decades before any of these youngsters was born. Even the battle simulators were no longer programmed for Romulan scenarios, which Uhura personally thought was a mistake. On any Federation planet, someone like Zetha would be taken for a Vulcan, no questions asked.

Out of the corner of her eye, Uhura watched her young charge react to the weather and her surroundings. San Francisco had rewarded them with one of its better sunny days, and the girl had lowered the hood of her cloak and turned her face up to the sun like a flower, breathing deeply of the warm, scented air. But even then she did not relax. She watched and listened, absorbing everything.

No, not a child playing dress-up, Uhura decided, studying the grimness of the mouth, the stubborn set of the chin, but a child who never had time to be a child. It had occurred to her from the outset, code words or no, that Zetha might not have been sent by Cretak at all. What she learned about her in the next few hours would be vital in deciding that.

She had already noted several things. Zetha lacked the pronounced upswept brow ridges that so many Romulans, including Cretak, possessed. But there were as many Romulans, Uhura thought, mindful of Charvanek and Tal and the smarmy, double-dealing Nanclus, who did not. She also wore her hair longer than the rather unflattering unisex pageboy that the Romulan military, at least, seemed to favor. Her movements were quick, wary, catlike, as if she were accustomed to always being on guard; the impression, to Uhura’s experienced eye, was that this was not just a result of training, it was hard-won and from life.

She would submit her young charge to a more formal debriefing after this, but for now, a walk in the garden would win her confidence and make it easier for her to talk.

“So it’s about an illness,” Uhura said carefully. “Something that resembles the Gnawing, which once killed half your people. How did your…employer…get this information?”

“Our own doctors cannot analyze this, cousin,” Taymor told Cretak, his breath coming short. “Or else they will not. You know the situation.”

“Of course,” Cretak said. “If your governor decides to spend the medical budget on new uniforms for his personal guard, he tells the people that suffering is good for the soul. In the larger scheme the Praetor buys warbirds, and our medical technology remains primitive. To suggest he do otherwise is deemed disloyal. You do not look well, cousin.”

“I am not, Kimora. Those who contract this die within days. I’m at the country house, and I’ve sent the servants away. I wanted to tell you while I was still coherent. I have already sent you the evidence, in the diplomatic pouch so it will not be scanned or irradiated. You’ll get it on the next incoming courier. It’s all I can do.”

Cretak struggled to keep her distress from showing on her face. In childhood she and Taymor had been as close as siblings. To think that she would never see him again…she placed her hand on the screen beside the image of his face, as if that would offer him comfort.

“Who else, Taymor? Kaitek, the children—?”

“So far, no. I am apparently the only one from my family so affected. Which is why I say this smacks of something unnatural. The Gnawing is legend, two thousand years old and, with what we know now, curable. But this…this is evil…” Taymor was overcome by a paroxysm of coughing. There were flecks of green on his lips when he could speak again. “All my love, cousin. Farewell…”

Cretak stared at the blank screen in despair.

“She did not tell me that, Lady,” Zetha replied, remembering her dignity and turning her face away from the sun and back toward her questioner. “Only sent me to tell you what she knows.”

“So I’m to accept her word, from your mouth, that an ancient illness which once killed almost half the Romulan people has been reawakened in a form that kills everyone it affects, and which may be artificially created?”

“Not my word, Lady,” Zetha reached her small hands inside her cloak and took a chain from around her neck, “but this.”

“Hold out your hand,” Cretak had said abruptly, holding something in both of her own.

Instinct said don’t,but Zetha did anyway. The object in question was a locket on an intricate chain, a death locket. She had seen such in the display windows of the pawn-shops on Jenorex Street when times were hard, cleverly disguised as medallions bearing a family crest, but with a secret compartment in the back to hold some relic of the deceased, most likely a lock of hair, sometimes braided like a bracelet. Some of these lockets were quite ornate, crusted with gemstones, others unadorned but intricately wrought, their value in the workmanship. This was one of the latter.

“Put it on,” Cretak instructed her in the same cool tone. “Be careful with it.”

Poisoned?Zetha wondered. Or, more likely, wired, fitted with a small transceiver that will record my every sound, every move.Nevertheless, something about the strength of this woman, her self-confidence, made her obey. Where with the Lord she had questioned everything, with Cretak she obeyed.

“It stays with you until you arrive where I am sending you. You give it to one person and one person only. No subordinates, no intermediaries, no helpful fellow travelers. If anything happens to keep you from this person, that object goes with you, day and night, until death do you part. If you open it you will die, and I will instruct you in what to say when you deliver it so that it is not opened too soon. If you are in harm’s way and know you are about to die, you destroy it, and I will tell you how. Any questions?”