"The words of the Prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls."
In the middle of the night, ten year old Kira Nerys woke with the desperate need to urinate. Carefully, she slipped out of bed, quieter than a mouse, tiptoeing across the dirt floor of the bunkhouse where she and so many others were housed. She paused at the edge of the threshold to ensure her brothers were still sleeping. The two were curled up in bed together, both of them snoring softly. Good. She wouldn't wake them. She resolved to be quick and return before they ever knew she had gone. They would be scared if they woke up and she wasn't there. They needed her.
Once out in the open, she took a fraction of a second to scan the area for Cardassian guards. If they caught her out of her bunkhouse in the middle of the night, they'd beat her, or worse. But it was clear as far as her eyes could see, and she sprinted across the fields with her bare feet, her tangled, unwashed hair streaming like a fan out behind her. By the time she reached the wooden lean-to where the toilet was housed, a prickling of cold sweat had formed on her forehead and the back of her neck, and she picked a filthy rubber band off the ground to tie her hair back in a messy ponytail.
The stink-house, as the children called it, was a shoddy, inelegant structure, hastily constructed to cover a hole in the ground where the Bajoran refugees squatted to pee and poop. The Cardassians hadn't given much thought to their laborers' bodily functions when they built this place. Consequently, the Bajorans had been left to their own devices, digging a hole in the ground and covering it with a few nailed together scraps of plywood in order to preserve what little dignity they had left.
Kira entered the stink-house and squatted, sighing in blessed relief as the warm stream of urine was released. A few scratches on the wall, made with shreds of chalk and ash, caught her eye. She knew the children liked to amuse themselves by making crude markings on the plywood walls; in fact, she knew for a fact that both her brothers were considered ringleaders of that particular group. She herself had never done it; she considered herself too grown-up for those sorts of things.
"Prophets bless us" one read. "May the Prophets heal our souls" read another. Kira sighed. The Prophets had never seemed so far away. And she was surprised to discover that deep down, it wasn't the Prophets she wanted right now. It was…
"Mama." Kira whimpered softly, letting the darkness cover the tears that were running down her cheeks. The silence seemed to enfold her in its arms, comforting her in a way her mother would never do again. Everyone was sleeping. No one knew that under cover of the stink-house, a lonely, frightened young girl was weeping.