Light filtered icily through the mist of early morning, struggling to lend some meagre warmth as it climbed, painfully slow, towards its apex in the sky. It was Bula's daily ritual, to watch the Sun rise over his fields, turning dewdrops to gleaming crystal and announcing the arrival of yet another new dawn. Forty years, it had been, since he had begun to perfect this routine, and he wasn't about to let a little rheumatism, age - or even the increasing congestion in his chest - keep him away.

"Got Federation round here now." He spat over the fence. "So. Who's next, is what I'm thinking."

Beside him, the younger man shook his head. Nalor had only recently picked up the habit of accompanying Bula on his morning vigil. The elderly farmer did not mind - just as long as keeping him company didn't include nosing around in his business. "He's not Federation."

"He's Hu-Man. That's close enough."

The field of katterpods was always a little fuzzy nowadays, especially when viewed through Bula's cataracts. But he gazed upon it anyway, as he had done for forty years, noting the slightly roughened texture where the light dipped silently into shadow. People were like katterpods, he reminded himself. You had to be careful how you tended them. Neglect them too long and you would miss the harvest. They would be rotten before you knew it. Watch too closely and you might forget that you were supposed to be nurturing them. And then they would grow shrivelled and dry - hardly worth harvesting at all.

"You know you can get those removed," Bula's son had told him. The old farmer merely grunted loudly. He had not been in the mood to bother himself with a better reply and besides, it was not as if Johl would ever understand. He was still strong enough to work. He wasn't bumping into anything. And if the Prophets had seen fit to send him cataracts, who was he to argue?

"Federation got no business here," he grumbled, deliberately ignoring Nalor's quietly weary sigh. Let the young man think what he liked. Bula Torem had lived through enough hard winters - and certainly seen enough - to be allowed the stubbornness of age. So, if other people around him were a field of katterpods, then he was a solid boulder. Weathered and wind-worn, beaten and carved by the years - but at the same time, hardened. Unmovable. Strong.

The boulders in his valley had stood through storms, unshaken even as water crept beneath their surface and the moss grew heavy across their shoulders. That was exactly as Bula had always been. He would endeavour to remain that way, not to be broken by the rain, or even by the most blustering gales.

"I can help." The newcomer stood close by, outside a heavy, locked gate. He suppressed a shudder at the chill of moisture around him, so fine that it was more mist than rain. "I can formulate a vaccine, or possibly even a cure. But I need access to volunteers. Just let me in."

"No-one goes in there," the grey-clad Security man insisted with a deep chesty growl. Bashir sighed. It had been the same the last four times he'd attempted to gain entry. Stupid, to think that today would be any different.

"But there's absolutely no evidence that it would even…"

"No-one goes in there."

"Wait." A second person approached from behind the middle aged guard. It was a woman this time. Tall and thin, dark-eyed, dark skinned, but with hair so blonde it was almost white. Bashir wondered at the unusual colouring, certain that he'd never seen it in any Bajoran women before. This new stranger paused, and studied his face. "Do I know you?"

"I don't think…"

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "I do. From that old station - weren't you some kind of doctor?"

Bashir sighed, averting his gaze. "It's complicated."

"What's complicated? You're either a doctor or you're not. So which is it?"

"Yes," said another new voice. "He is." Julian turned, surprised that he hadn't noticed anyone approach.

"Keiko…"

She cast him a sharp-edged glare, in an attempt to silence further protests. But Bashir was not so easily silenced.

"I don't have a licence any more, remember? If Starfleet Medical…"

"Forget Starfleet Medical," she interrupted. "They need you here. Now. And don't think I haven't noticed - you've been moping around the camp for days."

For a moment his own glare was just as intense. But she had already cut through his final logical objection. And her argument had come too close to what he'd already been thinking himself.

The Federation had already pulled out of Mundara Village, against the protests of those already on the ground. They were preparing for something - although nobody was saying exactly what. And the Militia would not allow their own doctors to venture inside the quarantine area. But that didn't change the facts. There were people behind those walls, abandoned and isolated, waiting for assistance to come from somewhere - and most likely no longer expecting it. None of what he'd learnt at medical school had ever really left him.

Nodding quietly, he turned back to the waiting guards. "I can help."

"You don't have anything to fear from me," Julian insisted as the woman continued to bustle past.

"Fear?" Her laughter was abrupt. Unhappy. "Why would I? For all I know, you're just some wandering idiot who's lost all sense of direction. After all, nobody with any sense comes to this place. Not if they can help it."

"You're here."

Her eyes narrowed. "And what makes you think I've got any sense?"

Bashir found that he was smiling, almost as if to spite his will, a soft chuckle taking shape at the base of his throat. The tall Bajoran took only moments to catch on. Her eyes sparkled, mouth opening to a shy but genuine echo of his own barely voluntary amusement.

"At least tell me your name," Bashir said.

She paused, watching him with wide, dark eyes. "Jaliya." Her smile broadened. "Jaliya Tal."

He returned the expression. "And I'm Julian."

There was a tug on his sleeve, and he looked down to find the upturned face of a young girl. Her skin had a slightly more pinkish cast than some of the others', and the ridges around her eyes and along the side of her neck were less pronounced by far. But it was her hair that was most striking - the usual Cardassian black fringed with a touch of warm auburn.

"I got no teeth at the front - see?" she said, and grinned.

With a quizzical glance back up at Jaliya, Bashir nodded. "I do see. Has it been that way for long?"

The girl could not have been older than Molly O'Brien - he guessed about six. Maybe even five. She had crept through the front door - it seemed - and neither of them had even seen her until then. And just as she said, there was a broad gap at the front of her gums where two of her teeth were noticeably missing.

"They fell out," she announced loudly. "Day 'fore yesterday. But I didn't cry or nuffing."

"Did too," accused an older boy who watched from nearby. She glared at him and stuck out her tongue.

"Teyanha," the Bajoran woman scolded. But there was no real anger left behind her words. "I told you to wait inside. And leave the gentleman be - he's had a long journey. Isn't that right?"

"Not so long that I wouldn't enjoy the company." Bashir's unexpected honesty surprised even himself. "So - Teyanha, is it? What else can you tell me?"

The Cardassian was not about to give up so easily. Not after all he'd risked to get this far. He had lost his wife years ago - in the final months of the Occupation. He'd lost his commission in the very same week that the Dominion had appropriated his home. But then, at the moment when he was close to believing that there was nothing left in his life but despair, there had been that sudden discovery. A flicker of hope - even less than a flicker - but he held to it all the same.

He'd had no more than the smallest opportunity to sneak undetected from Cardassian space. Luckily, he still had friends who shared his opinion of the new regime - and who believed that others would come to share it too. So he'd crept away in the silence of a misty night, slunk through the city like a scavenging vole. He'd even managed to procure a ship from one of his former barrack-mates. It was nothing special - with barely space inside for him to stand fully upright - but at least it was sturdy enough to get him to this point.

He'd cheated all the way, lied to authorities on both worlds, bribed and begged and very nearly sold the clothes from his back. He'd done things he would not have considered six years ago. Certainly not for any other purpose but this.

A near-invisible beacon. A word in the Central Archives. The slimmest of chances that maybe - just maybe - he had not entirely lost his son.

"His name was Aruvel."

"Aruvel…" The man at the local bar paused, turning the word slowly over on his tongue. It sounded foreign, hearing it said from the mouth of a Bajoran barkeep. But the boy had been little more than a baby when his father first came to this world. If he was alive, it was doubtful that he would even remember the place of his birth.

They would find somewhere new. Away from Bajor. Away from Cardassia. Where nobody cared who they were or what they had done to get there. And the boy would grow and flourish, and they would be a family again.

Whatever else, he could not allow himself to doubt the possibility that it could happen that way.

The bartender was quiet for a moment, and studied his grey-faced customer with his eyes just slightly narrowed. Somehow, hearing the boy's name spoken by another only caused the pain of his loss to return anew. And the eyes of the Cardassian's son had been almost exactly that same deep, granite brown.

The baby had stared, fascinated by the sunbeams that flickered and played with the edges of the leaves above him. He pointed upwards with one chubby grey hand.

"That's right," said the child's mother. "Pretty, isn't it?"

But his father was not watching the leaves. His eyes only ever had room for the faces of his wife and baby boy.

He remembered tears, a tearing agony in his throat and chest, and the hot, painful stench of burning…

The Cardassian sighed, toying with the glass in front of him, and the bartender paused when he saw the hurt come back to his eyes. "You think you can find him?"

"I have no choice," was the Cardassian's response. His host nodded with an expression of understanding.

Surprising, the visitor thought. We used to be enemies. He chuckled dryly as another memory drifted to the surface. "You know, Aruvel used to say such peculiar things. He barely even knew how to pronounce his own name, if you could believe it. When he was just two years old, the boy himself was the one who shortened it to…"

"What's he doing here?" A long growl came from behind, slightly slurred. There was a sound of a barstool screeching across the floor.

"He's drinking, Amon. Same as everyone who comes this way." The bartender shot a warning glance at the speaker.

This new voice belonged to a thin-limbed man, with lank, greasy hair hanging in darkened clumps around his ears, and a face that looked like it had been chewed by vermin. "I don't drink with the likes of him!"

"And you're not." The answering voice was calm and level. "You're all the way over there - at the other side of the room. So why make such a fuss?"

"Either he goes, or I go."

The bartender snorted. "Not hard to guess which one of you won't be missed."

"It's all right." Raising his hand in what he hoped would be a placatory gesture, the Cardassian swallowed his last mouthful of ale, and hauled himself to his feet. "I was just about finished, anyway."

"Who are you?" demanded a middle-aged farmer. He stood alone in the field close by his house, using something hard-edged and metallic to create deep furrows in the soil. Muscles shifted beneath his arms, and a determinedly hard expression was set onto his face. "And what're you doing on my land?"

The unfamiliar farming implement did not seem to be able to fire discharges, or even projectiles for that matter. But Julian was certain that it could break bones if swung with enough accumulating force.

A second man appeared from around the corner of the building, shuffling closer with his legs a little splayed as though saddle-sore. A grey knitted vest hung loosely over this stranger's shoulders. His mouth sunk into a hollow face, more distinctively lined than his companion's, and topped with a tangled carpet of wiry grey hair. But two resembled each other in every other way - like two halves of the same battered coin.

"What's that you got there?" the older man grumbled, barely acknowledging the presence of his son.

"It's a vaccine," Bashir told him. "Against the Mundara plague."

"Didn't think there was any vaccine," the younger one scoffed.

"There wasn't," replied Bashir. A soft, exasperated sigh was threaded inextricably through his voice. Déjà vu, he thought. Why did so many of these visits always turn out the same? "There is now."

They continued to watch, eyes narrowed in suspicion. "I know you," said the elder one after a lengthy silence. "Federation type. Got no business in our valley, and even less on our farm. Gar'n outta here."

There was better luck to be had at the next place Bashir came to, but not by much.

"You're with that place up the hill," said a woman in a moss-green dress, with a tangle of feathery red hair. "I seen you there."

"Gotta watch them," her husband added. "Dangerous, having those kids round here."

Rifling through the contents of his bag, Julian pulled out a handful of small vials, each with a dose of the vaccine he'd discovered at Mundara.

"How dangerous could they be?" He found that he was unable to stop the question. "They're children."

"Little Cardassians grow up to be big Cardassians," commented the man. His son and daughter watched in silence at the table.

Fourteen years old, Bashir thought. The girl was could not have been more than fourteen - her brother still younger. At that age, Kira Nerys had already killed. She'd spent her childhood learning how to hate with cold ferocity - the kind that was needed to sneak into a person's home, to set down explosives, and tear a family to the ground until their bones lay scorched and broken in the rubble. He asked himself warily how many others were still learning the same harsh lesson.

The Security officer keyed in a code with a series of soft accompanying chimes. He stepped back as the gate slid open, and indicated the uncovered space beyond. "Welcome to your tomb."

Bashir forced a smile which felt more like a sarcastic grimace.

"Thank you." Hiding a quiet shudder, he stepped over the border and listened to the door shut tightly, inexorably, behind him. "…Very much."

He turned, discovering a need to confirm with his own eyes that he was indeed as trapped as he suddenly felt. And then he looked around him to study the waiting scene. His tomb.

A new image met his eyes - dominated by dusty shades of brown and yellow, with possibly even a hint of grey at the edges. A courtyard. Buildings framed the border at either side, but no matter how far he levelled his searching gaze, he could find no sign of an open window - or even the soft glow of light from within. A cluster of dry grass, driven onward by the breeze, brushed silently against his feet and tumbled past until it came to settle against the high surrounding fence.

"Who are you?"

Distracted by the somersaulting greenery, Bashir had failed to notice the appearance of a bone-thin, sickly man, whose staring round eyes were already sunken deep into his skull. The stranger approached from a distant exit, shoulders hunched as though in pain. His movements were as cautious as those of a white-haired centenarian, although with little likelihood that he had reached very far beyond thirty.

And suddenly, Bashir found himself struggling to remember how to speak. "Well, I… er… came to - help?"

He hadn't intended the rising inflection at the end of his answer. When he spoke again, he was far more deliberate, working to cover every trace of uncertainty. "That is, I'm here to help you."

"Oh?" The stranger coughed sharply. Fluid bubbled inside his chest. "How?"

"Mahton," scolded a second new voice from nearby. This speaker was far older, but his steps were noticeably more assured than those of his companion. And he was dressed in the ankle length robes of a Bajoran cleric. Eyes narrow, lips pursed - tight and thoughtful - he studied the face of the man now standing before him. Bashir returned his gaze, but remained where he was and quietly allowed himself to be studied.

"You are Human," the old man concluded.

Bashir responded with an affirmative nod. "And I meant what I said. I can help - I… er… I do know something about medicine. And since it doesn't seem that Humans can be affected..."

"Federation send you?" scoffed Mahton, his tone more than a little accusatory.

"Actually, I volunteered."

This provoked a bitter laugh from the depths of the younger Bajoran's chest, which sounded more like a dog choking. "You volunteered? For this? Sorry, but we already have all the babbling idiots we need around here."

"Mahton."

The elderly stranger glared sternly. "I'd say we can use any offer of help we can get." His voice was soft, deep and clear. And then he smiled. "Do excuse my more sceptical colleague. My name is Taenor - Taenor Lahn. And this young man is Mahton."

"Although I doubt you'll have to remember that for very much longer," Mahton rasped. Whatever else he might have said was smothered by another fit of bubbling coughs.

Unable to scrub the offending words from the wall, Jaliya saw little choice but to paint over them instead. She secretly wished the task could have fallen to anyone rather than herself. She had never liked hooking herself to the narrow scaffolding, with only one hand free to steady herself against the nearest wall. Logically, of course, it was every bit as safe as being on the ground. Her chance of falling was close to zero, but even this reminder did nothing to lessen her instinctive unease.

And whoever had painted those words must have deliberately placed them too high to reach from the ground. Either they were taller than she had imagined anyone could ever be, or there had been strategy involved - planning and forethought. She wished she could make herself believe that it had been a simple whim. Clenching her teeth until they ground against each other, she cursed the vandals even more.

It did not help that this place already had a reputation. Before the Occupation, the isolated building had housed one of the wealthiest families in the valley. Much of their fortune had been accumulated over the span of the previous two centuries - from speculation and export, but supplemented for several generations by a sizable distillery of fine spring wine.

There had been rumours. People whispered that descendants of this same family had been feeding information to the Cardassians, although none of their accusations were ever entirely proven. The louder and more superstitious farmers had recently begun to say that the place was haunted - tainted with the ghosts of those who had been betrayed by a careless word and a surreptitious exchange of Latinum. There were those who believed that it should have been torn down years ago.

A sound in the distance cut short her wandering thoughts, like the crack of stone against stone - or possibly a snapping twig. She jerked towards it, frowning quietly, but shook her head. It's getting to you, she thought. Probably some animal out searching for a meal.

"Having the creepies," her brother had called this restless agitation of hers - even when he was still a child and she was barely half his size. Jaliya's frown deepened. Strange. She hadn't thought about Keros in such a long time.

Too long. The memory left her feeling vaguely guilty. He should not have been so easy to forget.

There it was again. Sharper and louder this time, although it may have been her suddenly hyper-tuned senses making it that way. "Are you sure that's just an animal?" she whispered, and set her paintbrush back down beside her feet.

She trembled a little on her way back to the ground, always so much better at climbing up than she was at getting down. Every time she set her feet down on the narrow beams, her arms and legs grew still more weak and numb. And years later, she still remembered the shouts of children as they called her from the roots of that thick, splay fingered tree.

The others had been quick and nimble, easily managing to scramble down the trunk. But halfway up, little Tal was clinging, arms wrapped so tightly around one of the lower branches that she imagined it swallowing her whole. Perhaps the bark would grow around her until she could no longer be separated from its grasp. And people would tell stories about how - once upon a time - a pale and dark-eyed child had lived nearby.

The Girl Who was Eaten by a Tree.

But finally, there had been Keros. His strong arms prised her away, even as the skin of the old tree was cutting into her own. And when she discovered that her legs were just as useless on the ground, he lifted her in those strong, sure arms and carried her all the way back to camp. Later that night, he held her close, rocking her slowly, stroking her hair and shoulders. And she sobbed and shuddered until exhaustion overtook her and she was stolen away by a heavy, dreamless sleep.

"Hello?"

Even now, her rebellious limbs were not faring much better. But she had learnt with time to push through the fear. Steadying a little with each proceeding step, she forced herself down the uneven slope and past the forest border.

"Hello?" she called again. But there was nothing to see but the usual scattered layers of foliage, punctuated occasionally by slender, upright trees.

You've had a rough day, she reminded herself. You were right the first time. If you heard anything, it was just the noise of some foraging animal. With a sigh, she returned her attention to the building, already anticipating an awkward climb back up.

Something snapped, close behind her back. With a start, Jaliya Tal span around to face whatever had made the unexpected sound.

A shadow stepped into her line of sight, but there was no time to take its likeness. The trespasser raised his hand, too quickly for her to react. He was holding something hard and jagged.

An explosion of pain. Colours flashed. Then darkness.