14

60,063-60,064 (Kurillian calendar)

Weyoun didn't enter the Complex for two weeks. It took Eris some days to recover and be discharged from the hospital, and then there was…everything…to deal with. There may have been a time in his life that he would have used the work as an escape. Except he didn't know what work he had to do. He was almost certainly going to lose his seat in the fast approaching election. He wasn't part of the group working to integrate Kurill Prime's government into the Dominion. Everything else seemed superfluous.

But he did go back, because even if he was in a dead seat, there was a certain amount of face to be saved.

Leto didn't bring him the news until mid-morning, and once the words were out of her mouth, he didn't quite remember moving, but he found himself on the third floor of the Complex, striding into Foros's offices and throwing his door open, snapping without preamble, "Leto tells me you're resigning."

Foros looked weary and unsurprised to see him there, despite his recent absence. "That's right."

Weyoun clenched one of his hands into a fist. "You could have told me instead of having my senior aide pass it along!"

"I know." At least he had the grace to look ashamed. "It wasn't the way I wanted to tell you, but you've been…" He stopped abruptly, and Weyoun braced himself for what he knew was coming. When he spoke again, Foros's voice was much softer. "I heard about your loss. I can't tell you how sorry I am, Weyoun. To come so close…"

Weyoun felt his shoulders stiffen and knew that it looked like an attempt to not show his grief. It only made Foros look more abashed, so he said, "Thank you. It's been…very difficult." The last thing he'd come here to do was talk about himself, though it needed to be said, of course; his own staff had been tiptoeing around him all morning and what he wanted was a place where he didn't have to think about it.

Instead he was thinking about losing the comradeship of the only man in the Council that he respected, and he knew he was walking a thin line between keeping it all together and complete breakdown when he realized that he wanted to demand that Foros retain his position; to beg, actually, because he'd never felt so adrift, so lost, and there had been too many moments in the last two weeks that he'd sat and stared into space and felt his hands shaking as he wondered if he could do this at all, all the while not knowing what this even was.

He took a deep breath. "Are you sure you want to resign from the Council?" he asked. "If you're unhappy with the way things are going, you'll do more good on it than not."

"I don't think I will," Foros said. "I think I'll be a cog in a figurehead government and that I'd be part of the problem." A shadow flickered across his face. "I would urge you to do what Soltoi and I have," he said quietly, "But now isn't the time for me to ask you to take a stand. But I hope, when things are…better for you…"

Weyoun thought about laughing, but ultimately only said, "You know I won't. Even when things are…better for me."

"No." Foros sighed. "No, I know you won't."

In a low voice, Weyoun said, "You're making a mistake, Foros."

"Am I? Is it a mistake to remove myself from an agency that will force abortions on every woman on this planet?" As soon as the words left his mouth, he looked horrified, and immediately said, "Weyoun, I apologize—"

Making a curt motion with his hand, Weyoun said, "Don't. I wrote it and I've heard worse."

Foros sighed. "What I meant to say—were I better able to control my tongue—is that I can't stay on the Council and watch all of our liberties slip away one by one," he said heavily. "The Founders don't care about making us part of something. They want to conquer us. It's their imposing order on a chaotic world again. Look at the Jem'Hadar. They aren't members of something, they're slaves."

"They're our gods," Weyoun said softly. It wasn't an answer and they both knew it. "They're helping us."

"I don't believe that," Foros said simply. Weyoun's eyes snapped up to meet his and he didn't bother to ask which part of his weak justification the other man didn't believe. If Foros were smart, he'd leave it at what he'd said and stop. He must have known by this point how deeply entwined Weyoun was with the Founder and the Jem'Hadar; that saying something like that to him wasn't just foolish, it was dangerous.

Foros, though, never would have claimed that he wasn't foolish. "Haven't you ever stopped to wonder if the Jem'Hadar were the ones that destroyed out communications array?" he asked.

Weyoun kept staring at him. The truthful answer would have been 'yes'. But he'd stopped being truthful a long time ago. "No."

There was a wry look on the other man's face, as though he saw through the lie, and Foros replied, "I have. And I think Deimos did, as well."

"Deimos was a loyal servant of the Founders," Weyoun said immediately.

Foros raised his eyebrows. "I think he found something out there, Weyoun, and that he needed to die because of it." Weyoun's stare grew hard, but the other man went on, "I looked into Ground Control's findings. Deimos's aide, Seleth? He found corruption patterns on the flight recorder consistent with damage from an EM pulse. He thought the ship's own instruments caused it."

"Perhaps you should listen to him," Weyoun said.

"Perhaps." Foros didn't look like he was enjoying himself. "But then again, we all say things that we know aren't true. I got the impression that deep down, he knew that the orbital's instruments weren't capable of that kind of power." He paused again, and then said softly, "Did Seleth tell you that the ship had taken evasive maneuvers?"

"Those ships couldn't take evasive maneuvers," Weyoun scoffed, ignoring the larger implications to what Foros was saying.

"Nevertheless, he tried." Foros hesitated. "Deimos was a brave man."

Was there an implied slight there? An implication that Deimos had been braver than Weyoun ever had been? Or was that just something he'd always known, and now he was hearing echoes of it in the well-meaning comments of others? "If you're trying to convince me that the Jem'Hadar shot down Deimos's orbital, you might as well stop." Foros looked appalled that Weyoun had said the words out loud. Apparently his loyalty to the Founders hadn't completely evaporated. "There's nothing for you to achieve anymore," he said. "Kurill Prime is part of the Dominion. That isn't going to change."

"It would change if enough people wanted it to."

Weyoun laughed. "But they don't. Whatever reasons you and Soltoi have for not wanting to be part of this, the people don't share them." He turned towards the window and clasped his hands behind his back. "Do you have any idea what it's like to grow up with nothing?" There was silence behind him, and Weyoun smiled mirthlessly. "In the gutter, you either believed that the Founders were coming back to fix everything that was wrong with your life, or you had no hope whatsoever."

For a long moment, Foros didn't speak. But finally, he asked quietly, "What about people like you?"

Without turning around, Weyoun replied, "People like me escape. But we don't forget." He turned, then, to face his old mentor. Neither of them said a word, but Foros held out a hand.

Weyoun stared at it, then took it briefly and silently. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

The Dominion suspended elections.

Weyoun couldn't decide whether he was troubled or relieved, but he didn't argue with the decision. It was, after all, a power given to the Dominion by the charter. Every member of the Council had put his or her thumbprint on that document, which Dorek'itlan brusquely reminded the group of senior senators who put a call through to the Founder to object. She was indisposed at that moment, but Dorek'itlan was authorized to inform them that it was a pro tempore suspension while Kurill Prime integrated into the Dominion. Normal election cycles would resume after that point.

So the Founder—or at least the Jem'Hadar, speaking for her—said. Weyoun didn't believe it, but later, when asked by the media mobbing the outside of the main Council chamber, Leto standing silently behind him, he smiled reassuringly and said that no, of course, this wasn't the death of their democracy. The Founders had kept a millennia-old promise to return to the Vorta, after all—this one should be much simpler.

The remark drew tension-releasing laughter from the crowd, until a wit holding a 'coder high above his head called out, "And is it going to take them as long to make good on this one?"

Weyoun paused and met the young man's eyes. There were Jem'Hadar patrolling Tira City's streets all the time now; if he wanted to, he could have several of them in here within minutes to deal with this bit of blasphemy.

But he didn't. Instead, he stepped into the crowd of media, which parted around him, until he was standing in front of the young man. The 'coder was still held aloft, and when Weyoun flicked his eyes up towards it, the man slowly lowered it to his side. "It doesn't matter," he began, "if the Founders reinstate elections or not. Surely you—" He raised his voice slightly, so that everyone in the room could hear him, "—Surely all of you know that."

"Why, Senator?" the wit asked, though his tone said that he already knew the answer.

So Weyoun didn't provide it. He was afraid that he'd summon a Jem'Hadar along with it, anyway, so with a dismissive gesture, he turned, made his way back out through the crowd, past his staring senior aide, and back into the labyrinth of hallways.

"Weyoun!" Leto's voice called out from the other end of the corridor. For a moment he considered stopping and turning around, but he already knew what she was going to say and he wasn't interested in hearing it, so he kept striding forward. There was silence, and for just a second he thought he'd won. Then a quick patter of heels on marble followed him and a hand caught at his arm with enough force to stop him. He turned to face his senior aide, taking in the emotions roiling across her face but lacking the fortitude to tease them apart.

When he didn't say anything, she pulled her hand away abruptly and breathed in sharply. "Did you mean what you said down there?" she asked.

"What does it matter?" he asked.

She clenched her fists and seemed to take his question as affirmation of her fears. "How can you expect me to support you on this? Do you realize what you're suggesting is antithetical to everything that I believe in?"

Weyoun whirled around, his nerves finally frayed to their roots, and snapped, "That's the choice you're going to have to make, Leto, isn't it? Or are you actually naïve enough to believe that you can go through life without compromising your unimpeachable morals? We have all made choices that we know are nothing to be proud of, but we do it because that is our life."

She stared at him, her eyes wide and her shoulders tensed as she appeared to barely breathe. Then she just shook her head and turned away, marching down the hall the way she'd come. Weyoun didn't watch her go.

Weyoun wasn't even at the Complex the day Foros's resignation became official. Instead, he and Eris were clearing out what would have been the nursery, dismantling furniture and boxing up everything. Eris neatly labeled the boxes, but Weyoun knew that the window had closed for them to have a child. His fingers had brushed against the hormone patch on her arm the last time they'd made love, but he hadn't commented on it.

"Does this make you senior senator?" Eris asked him once he'd flatly informed her that Foros was no longer Tira Exarchate's senator. There was a faint note of amusement in her voice.

Shrugging, he said, "I don't know. I don't know if my term has expired and I've begun my second, or if my first term has just…continued." A senator had to serve at least one full term before laying claim to the senior title in an exarchate, and while Weyoun was sure that there was an instance in Kurill Prime's long and varied political history where an exarchate's more senior senators had resigned, leaving only the most junior first-termer serving, he didn't know if the situation had arisen only to have elections suspended before the junior senator could be elected to a second term. "It would be something of a hollow victory. No one wants to gain his superiority through his colleagues resigning out of protest."

"And yet that's exactly what's happened." Eris watched him for a moment and then shrugged, reaching into the cradle and picking up a blanket her parents had sent. She didn't linger over it, folding it briskly and laying it across the top of the box. Weyoun didn't say a word. She glanced back towards him and said, "I don't think the Dominion is ever going to allow an election."

Glad that he could focus on something that didn't send shards of guilt piercing through him, he said, "I don't think so either."

"I suppose it makes sense in a way," she said. He appreciated the realism in her voice. "We can't expect to keep our current political system when we're becoming part of a much larger one." Then, she looked him hard in the eye. "But I don't believe you're happy about this."

"Really." He picked up a spanner and began dismantling the cradle. "Why shouldn't I be? I'll retain my position because of the loyalty I've shown to the Founders and the Dominion."

She helped him to pull the front side off the cradle. "Deep down you have something of a romantic streak." Before he could scoff, she continued, "It's what made you support spaceflight. It's the reason you wanted to be there at first contact. And it's the reason you want to be elected to your position, not given it."

For a moment, he stared at her, remembering that he'd once chosen hard work, uncertainty, and her over being handed a position in the Council. "Maybe," he finally muttered.

A sudden gust of wind lashed rain against the window, and both of them stared outside at the trees whipping back and forth. Then, she shrugged and moved across the room to take down the mobile hanging from the ceiling. "Maybe," she agreed. He could see in her eyes that despite her realism, she wasn't entirely happy about all of this, either.

He filled his days with work. Pointless, tedious work, work that didn't matter, work that would mean nothing when Kurill Prime was integrated into the Dominion. There were whispers that the day was coming soon, that the committee working with the Jem'Hadar was hammering out the details with unexpected alacrity, but until it happened, the planet's political systems had to maintain the semblance of effectiveness. It was like a game of pretend, like the holo-arcades, everything tangible but ultimately an illusion.

Weyoun didn't think he cared.

The monsoon passed hazily in this way, his days filled with pointlessness, his nights filled with the teetering calamity that was the grief between him and Eris. This cycle was occasionally punctuated by a communication, or occasionally a visit, from the Founder, or more often Dorek'itlan. It occurred to him somewhere towards Tenthmonth that he was beginning to pick up the Dominion's language, snippets and phrases that had an unexpected and unlooked for meaning, and when he first realized his understanding, he thought for a long time about whether he should listen at all.

The rain didn't stop, not once, all through the monsoon, not even for a few minutes, until one day it did. It felt like something maudlin and sentimental. It felt like hope.

He went home early, but on his way the wind buffeted the metro again, and the rain began, and his chest felt hard and hollow at the same time.

Eris was standing at the bedroom window when he arrived home, her arms wrapped around herself and her fingers clenching bunches of her sleeves so hard that her knuckles were bone white and bloodless. For a moment, he stood in the doorway watching her, wondering if she was going to turn around and tell him what she was upset about. Founders knew there was enough.

Some days he was astounded that their marriage had held together, but she had never taken her pain out on him, nor connected him with what had happened to their child. He tried to tell himself, now and then, that Borath had put the offending section of legislation in without Weyoun's knowledge; that that exonerated him of culpability in their son's…death. It had never worked, and he knew he'd carry the guilt with him for the rest of his life. It was enough to make him wish for something to wipe his memory clean. But if he had to choose between hiding his guilt for the duration of his time in the universe, or forgetting everything, starting over again, he'd choose the guilt. He had never needed Eris more. Even if he forgot that he needed her, it wouldn't take that need away.

A thought slipped through his mind as he stood there watching her—the thought that perhaps both of them would be cloned, that they would live again. He wondered if those future Weyouns and Erises would remember any of this.

He wondered if he wanted them to.

"Eris?" he finally said. Her throat jumped in a hard swallow, and Weyoun cautiously made his way to her side. "Is everything all right?" he asked her.

With a hard, bitter laugh, she said, "I wouldn't characterize it that way." He didn't touch her or speak. Eris had never wanted to be coddled. If she wanted to tell him, she would, whether he asked or not. So he waited, looking out the window at the downpour and the way the glow from the house lights bounced around between shards of ice on the ground and the cascading sheets of rain. Reflections and refractions winked through the darkness like soft flares behind his eyes, and then Eris turned towards him, and he nearly forgot his determination not to touch her.

He had never seen his wife cry—not when he'd broken their relationship off for his career, not when she'd miscarried, not even after their child had been taken from them. And yet now tears were glinting in her eyes, bright and angry like glass, and he knew he'd never seen her with such a combination of helpless fury and desolation on her face. "They've closed my site."

Blinking and surprised, Weyoun asked, "Your site? It's closed for the monsoon—"

"They're shutting it down permanently, as of three hours ago," she interrupted him, her tone ragged with anger. "I had no warning and I won't be given any opportunity to go in for emergency excavation."

It seemed utterly beside the point that even if that offer had been made to her, it wouldn't have been physically possible, not during the monsoon. "Who's shutting it down?" he asked.

"The university," she snapped. "The dean himself called me into a meeting."

Weyoun stared at her, then said, "He won't be the dean much longer if he doesn't reverse this decision."

With a harsh laugh, she said, "There's no one to strong-arm, Weyoun. I threatened to resign over this and he showed me where the order came from."

"Since when does Tira University take orders?" he asked.

She reached back towards the bed and picked up a padd that was sitting there. "We all take orders now," she replied, handing him the padd.

For a moment, he held her gaze, trying to understand what she was saying. Her rage was understandable; so was her helplessness. But he could see another emotion in her eyes now, one that he'd missed before—betrayal. Wordlessly, he took the padd and powered it on, and was instantly confronted with the dual-language orders from the Dominion that he'd become accustomed to seeing. At another time, he might have tried to puzzle through the Dominion script, but now he scrolled directly to the Kurillian.

It was brief. Weyoun read it three times. Then, he looked up at Eris. "The Jem'Hadar need the land," he said, understanding why she looked so betrayed. The Founder had to have authorized this.

"I know it's bad luck," she said, her voice low and intense as she tried to keep her emotions in check. "I know that the Founder has no reason to care about my work or to shut it down. But whatever they need it for, why did it have to be built there?"

For a long moment, he didn't say anything. Then, finally, he replied, "I'll contact Dorek'itlan tomorrow and ask him."

She waved a hand brusquely and then swiped a hand across her face, smearing her tears away. "Don't bother." Her eyes closed tightly for a moment, and when she opened them, they were clearer, freer of tears and emotion. Drawing in a deep breath, she said, "We're servants of the Founders now."

There was a time when he might have pointed out that they'd always been servants of the Founders, but this was different, and he knew it.

Bright sunlight on his eyelids woke him, and Weyoun opened his eyes to a periwinkle sky free of clouds, one arm cramped from holding Eris while they'd slept. He turned his head slightly to look at her, his own face impassive as he got his first glance of her in sunlight that he'd had for eight months. Some women would have aged. Not Eris. She seemed to have developed a talent for compartmentalization over the preceding months. Who could blame her?

The chime of an urgent interface message reached his ears from several rooms over and he stifled a sigh, then carefully disentangled himself from Eris. She just rolled over, and though he suspected that she was awake, he allowed her the subterfuge.

It didn't surprise him that the message was demanding his presence at the Complex, nor did it surprise him that the Dominion's emblem was at the bottom of the message. The time had come, apparently, for the culmination of everything he'd worked to do over the preceding year.

Borath was waiting in the conference room when Weyoun entered.

His gut told him to turn around and leave, but of course he did no such thing. He'd been called here to meet with the Founder, and her summons trumped his personal feelings.

Neither of them said a word to each other, waiting in silence for the Founder's and Dorek'itlan's inevitable arrivals. As they stood there, Weyoun realized detachedly that he'd never hated anyone quite as much as he despised Borath. With sudden clarity, he understood that the two of them were very alike, that it was like his own reflection on a warped piece of ancient glass.

The Founder arrived then, her footsteps a mere whisper across the floor. Dorek'itlan's much heavier tread was right behind her, as always. She looked between them, and if she noticed the animosity in the room, she didn't show it. Weyoun doubted that she cared.

"I'm here to discuss a matter which I have previously spoken to both of you about," she said.

Borath rested his fingertips on the table. "The DNA profiles?"

She glanced at him and smiled slightly. "Yes. The time has come to move forward with a genetic database for your people. I want them done in one week."

Her tone brooked no argument, and besides, one didn't argue with a god, but Weyoun found himself saying, with his head bowed deferentially, "Founder, with all due respect, a week from today will be the last day of the Effulgence Festival."

The Founder's smooth, plasticine face didn't betray the slightest hint of curiosity, but she still asked, "And what, exactly, is that?"

Weyoun risked a glance upwards. She was staring, unblinking, at him. He looked back at his shoes and said, "It's a festival, Founder. We celebrate it at the end of the monsoon."

"It's a holiday celebrating the gods' return to us," Borath chimed in.

At that, the Founder raised her eyebrows. "Is it?" There was something like entertainment in her tone, and Weyoun realized that she was amused by all of them—by their rituals, which she saw as petty and meaningless, by their culture, which she saw as unnecessary. By their very lives, which in her eyes were small and limited. And that, he knew, was her place as a god.

"I see no better time to obey your gods than the end of the festival celebrating us," she went on. "You will give the order that there are to be planet-wide DNA samples taken one week from today. Choose the facilities. The Jem'Hadar will provide the manpower and whatever security you need."

Borath hesitated, then said, "Temporary profiling centers will have to be set up. We don't have the facilities to accommodate that number of people in such a short period of time."

"I will put a detachment of Jem'Hadar at your disposal," she said, looking between them as though deciding which one of them she meant. Then, her gaze settled on Weyoun. "They will obey your orders."

Weyoun bowed his head, recognizing the magnitude of what had just happened. "As you wish, Founder," he said.

She nodded slightly, then said, "Any questions that arise may be directed to First Dorek'itlan." When both of them murmured their understanding, she gave them that slight smile, devoid of any warmth, as though the expression was unnatural to her. Weyoun thought, not for the first time, that it probably was.

Then, without another word, she turned and exited, Dorek'itlan behind her. The task she'd left them with was enormous, and they had a mere week to make preparations for it.

After a long moment, Weyoun sighed. "We need to find a way to get the gutter-scum to the sampling facilities," he said into the vacuum that the Founder always seemed to leave behind her when she left a room.

Borath glanced at him, haughty, as always. "I think that's the least of our concerns at the moment. Somehow I doubt that the Founders care about gutter-scum DNA."

A long-buried part of him—a part of him, Weyoun had assumed, that was long dead—uncoiled at the other man's words. "I think they do," he said coolly. "I think the Founders are interested in anyone that will serve them well."

"Like you," Borath said, sounding vaguely amused. Weyoun just raised an eyebrow in response. "My apologies, Senator. I tend to forget your humble origins. And I suppose you're right, as evidenced by the Founder putting the Jem'Hadar under your…worthy command."

Weyoun didn't respond, but Borath seemed to have lost interest in the needling, anyway. Instead, he'd picked a padd up from the table—the second padd that he'd always been working on—and added something to it. Weyoun, irritation and exasperation and emotion overtaking him, snapped, "What are you constantly doing on that?" When Borath just blinked at him, seemingly stymied by the question, Weyoun gritted his teeth, took several steps forward, and snatched the padd out of the other man's hands.

It was a schematic. Borath grabbed for the padd but Weyoun took a step backwards without raising his eyes. The schematic showed a building that was taken up mostly by long halls, one after another, with the walls of each one lined with what looked like tanks. Another part of the building consisted of smaller rooms that seemed to be filled with medical equipment, and a bank of small rooms ringing the outer wall of the front of it appeared to be nothing more than barebones hotel rooms. He swiped to another page that showed a detail of one of the tanks from the long halls and narrowed his eyes at it. It contained not only the plans for the apparatus itself, but a schematic representation of a male Vorta.

"It's a cloning facility," Borath said, sounding resigned. "The first one will be built on Vrilla."

"The first one," Weyoun repeated.

"Don't be obtuse. Surely you know these will be built throughout Dominion space."

"Just another bit of immortality for you," Weyoun sniffed. Borath smiled coldly in response, and Weyoun held the padd out to him. "Explain this to me."

Taking it back, Borath replied, "The science would take me entirely too long—"

"You know what I meant. What are these rooms?"

Borath pointed to the long halls. "This is the storage area for gestating clones—have you ever been to a cloning clinic?" When Weyoun shook his head mutely, Borath gave him a patronizing smile. "These cloning vats are an…upgraded version, shall we say, of the type we currently use. They'll be capable of accelerated gestation and of longer storage without degradation of neural tissue. The Dominion has developed some truly remarkable methods for genetic engineering of their own. Not as advanced as ours, of course, but I've been able to make improvements on their own technology." When Weyoun continued to stare flatly at him, the other man's self-satisfied smile faded marginally. "Once a clone has been selected for activation, it will be brought to one of these rooms," he indicated the smaller, equipment-filled rooms, "and from there, assuming all goes well, they'll be moved to a recovery room."

"I see you've thoughtfully included windows for those."

With a thin smile, Borath said, "In my experience, newly activated adult clones need a few days to…get their bearings."

If he wanted a reaction, Weyoun wouldn't give it to him. Did Borath think he was surprised that illegal research had been occurring at Yelar? Still, his stomach twisted a little at this bald confession and at the thought of adult clones being little more than infants in bodies that they didn't know how to use. Was that how it would be for all of them? Or had Borath's research yielded better results? "I hope your recovery rooms are comfortable," he said, curling his lip slightly in contempt.

"They don't need to be comfortable. But they'll be quiet. All the walls will be sound-proofed—according to all of Soura Station's reports, installations in space can be quite loud." He looked at the padd, an almost fond expression on his face. "We can't have our newly activated clones driven mad by artificial gravity generators, can we?"

Weyoun thought back to the flight recorder on Deimos's doomed ship; to the pervasive hum that had filled it and crowded out all other background noise, then pushed the memory away. It, in itself, was background noise. "There was something in the clone's head on your schematic of the vat itself," he said.

"Ah. Yes." Borath swiped to that image and pointed to it—a cylinder only a millimeter or two thick and a few centimeters long, set into the base of the skull. "This is a synaptic storage rod. All Vorta clones will have them. They'll be capable of uploading all synaptic data to a central database. We'll build relay nodes throughout Dominion space, of course, but in the event that a clone is outside of it or the upload function isn't working properly, all that data can be stored on this rod until connection is re-established."

Though he thought he already knew the answer, he asked anyway, "And if a clone dies without uploading the data?"

"Well, then we hope to be able to recover the body and extract the rod."

Borath's pronouns didn't escape Weyoun's notice, and he wondered if Borath had come to terms with the fact that he would be one of those clones that he was discussing so cavalierly. It was an odd thing to imagine one's personality being transferred to another body, for one's consciousness to be stored somewhere until the moment it was required. A vision of room on room of floating, lifeless cadavers—pre-cadavers? Fetuses?—flitted through his head, and he shuddered.

Though Borath seemed to notice the gesture, his only response was a slight twitch around his lips; the beginning of an unpleasant smile. Weyoun straightened his shoulders and looked down his nose at the other man. "And do you think you'll be cloned, Borath?"

"Most assuredly." The twitch turned into a small smile. "Is there something you'd like to ask me?"

Weyoun didn't really want to give him the satisfaction, but he said anyway, "People like Eris and me. Will the Dominion have any use for us?"

"After the assistance you've given the Founder?" Borath said lazily. "I have no doubt she'll find further use for you. And as for Eris, she's an intelligent woman. She'd be an asset to any organization."

With a nod, Weyoun turned to go, but was stopped by Borath's voice. "By the way, Weyoun," he said, "how is Eris?"

Weyoun gave him a cold stare and left the room without answering.

The logistics of what the Founder had asked them to do were not difficult. With the Jem'Hadar at his disposal, row upon row of pre-fabricated, duraplastic buildings were erected. He watched some of the equipment being brought in one day and speculated that the manufacture of such specialized items had to have been going on for months. Certainly, they'd known that they'd wanted to conduct this operation here—the Dominion had demanded the closure of Eris's site months ago and wasted no time in paving over it. Looking at the seemingly endless line of identical buildings, he tried to picture it as it had been. He'd never, of course, had her keen eye when it came to anthropological and archaeological remains. What to him looked like a ditch full of dirt and rocks was a midden, or a fire pit, or a prehistoric industrial site. Once she'd pointed out the remains of a Copper Age round house and he'd shrugged, unable to see anything. She had pointed out dark spots in the earth and said, "Those are postholes. You can see the entire outline of this building."

"You can," he'd corrected her.

All of which was to say, he didn't have the imagination now to remember the site that she'd devoted so many years to. All he could see was a Dominion staging ground. He didn't tell her what they'd done, or even that he'd been there. He assumed she knew.

Time didn't seem to work properly that week; an hour would drag forever and suddenly it would be time to go home; whole days seemed to be over in the blink of an eye while others were endless. He was alone in his office the whole time, despite the Effulgence Festival. Eris had said she preferred not to attend, anyway. It gave him an opportunity to use the skimmer—the metro was notoriously unreliable during the festival.

On the penultimate day of the festival, he found himself simply standing in his office, his arms folded across his chest, staring out the window over the city that had always, for better or worse, been his home. He could have spent hours or minutes that way; he wasn't sure.

The office's main door opened and then clicked shut quietly, but Weyoun didn't turn around to face whoever had come in. Once she'd traversed the office, he recognized the sound of her footsteps, anyway.

"Working during the Effulgence Festival?" Leto asked him quietly, once she'd reached his side at the window.

For a moment, Weyoun continued staring out at Tira City, but then he pressed his lips together, sighed, and turned towards her. "Not really," he said. "Just thinking."

Leto's expression was one of quiet understanding. "Not the sort of thinking you can do at home?"

For just a harrowing split second, Weyoun almost opened his mouth and unburdened himself; almost told her about his lost child, sacrificed for the Founders' plans for the Vorta, about how he'd felt little pieces of himself slipping away for the past year and a half, until he wasn't sure how much of a soul he had left, or if he'd even had one to begin with. About how, creeping around the edges of his certitude, were doubts—doubts about his part in what the Founder was doing, doubts about what she was doing. Doubts about the Founder herself.

Then the moment slipped away. He hadn't wanted to say any of it out loud, anyway. And he never wanted to think the last part, ever again.

Instead, he gave himself a shake and said, "Leto, I owe you an apology for my behavior—" He'd owed her the apology for months but they'd swept the incident at the press conference away.

She shook her head and held up a hand. "No. Don't. You were right. And even if you hadn't been, you're a senator, and I'm only an aide. It's not my place to tell you if you're wrong."

He furrowed his brow and thought about telling her that she'd been one of the few people who he'd reliably counted on to tell him when he was wrong, and that it always had been part of her job description.

Her own brow knit slightly, she said, "Weyoun. Are you all right?"

Turning his head towards her and giving her an easy smile, he said, "Of course." It was obvious she didn't believe him. Well, he hadn't been trying that hard for the lie. His gaze drifted back towards the window. "Do you think it matters how we live?" he asked suddenly.

"In terms of what?" she asked cautiously.

He shrugged. "In terms of…when we die."

Leto was silent for a long moment. Then, she said wryly, "I've gotten the impression that the Founders probably won't be welcoming us into paradise."

Weyoun's lips twisted into a smile. "No, I don't think they will be." He paused and watched a hawk swoop between buildings. "Paradise is for gods."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her glance towards him, but she didn't say anything. Eventually, as she turned to go, she said, "I used to think it mattered." When he looked towards her questioningly, she just shrugged and said, "How we live, and how we die." She hesitated. "The Founders' return has changed…everything." Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, she added wryly, "Not the sort of thinking I can do at home." Then, she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "You should go home, Weyoun. Eris is probably looking forward to seeing you."

There was a compression in his chest at that. She was—she always had been, and he'd betrayed her, and he had his whole life to regret that.

On his way home, he abruptly, without thinking about it, swerved the skimmer off the main road and onto a rutted lane leading to the top of the Athoun bluffs. The area had once been slated for development as a park. He'd killed the legislation, for some reason or another that had seemed important at the time. So it had remained as it was, and as Weyoun stopped the skimmer at a spot that the vehicle's sensors told him was inadvisably irregular and stepped out into the knee-high grass, he wondered if it wasn't better that way. Certainly his younger self hadn't been thinking of it in those terms, but standing there alone, the skimmer's engine creaking as it cooled, he was happy that it had been left in its natural state.

A light breeze ruffled his hair as he looked out over the Tiran plain. In the dark it would be cold; now, in the merely fading light, it was cool in a pleasant sort of way. Eris would have the windows open and the scent of damas would have suffused the house. In a minute or two he'd get back in the skimmer and join her there, but for the moment, all he did was stand and watch as the wind gently stirred the grass below.

Shuttles flew overhead, taking off and landing from the shuttleport, their wings cutting the air, lights flashing a coded warning of air speed and height and engines humming a clotted roar as they churned the air. The sky was an endless, perfect violet dome, and he imagined the stars that he couldn't see, the worlds that the Founders had visited. The worlds that they were going to take the Vorta to.

Tira City twinkled and flashed in the gloaming, a beautiful, hideous testament to everything the Vorta had accomplished, divine guidance or not—a gem, a carbuncle, the height and depths of their civilization and their world. He realized why he'd never left, suddenly. He loved it, and always had, despite its many faults.

A metro hissed by in the distance, a light snaking past in the twilight, and he turned away from the city and climbed back into the skimmer.

There was a stillness in the air on the day that the DNA samples were to be taken. No wind, just hotter-than-normal air that seemed to settle around the house, stifling birdsong and stifling, as absurd as it seemed, conversation. Eris and Weyoun barely said a word to each other as they rose and dressed.

The odd silence was finally broken by Eris asking, "How long do you think it will take?"

Weyoun watched her dress, feeling the familiar squirm of guilt—guilt that went beyond guilt and into profound shame if he didn't cut it off—as his eyes fell on her flat stomach with its still-visible stretch marks. At her expectant silence, he replied, "I can't imagine it will be long. The Dominion needs a few vials of blood for the DNA mapping. The synaptic transfer may take longer."

She pulled on a jacket. "I hope it doesn't take all day. I want to start surveying my new site this afternoon."

"The Dominion has proven itself to be efficient." Weyoun shrugged.

Her only response to that was to raise her eyebrows.

The train ride to the sampling facilities seemed long. Or perhaps it seemed short. He couldn't decide once the metro stopped and they disembarked with a horde of other Vorta, caught in their flow through the station, down the stairs, and out into the open.

The temporary facilities looked flat and uninviting. Lines of Vorta stretched out the doors of some of them—though not, if he was counting correctly, his. He turned to Eris and watched her for a moment. She just looked impatient—impatient about having to go through what amounted to a medical procedure and impatient about the industrial nature of it.

"I'll see you later," Weyoun said, feeling cold as the words left his mouth. There was a terrible, creeping feeling in him that…that…he didn't know, and it felt ridiculous to think that he wouldn't. But those words flashed through his mind anyway, ridiculous or not. Before he could give voice to this maudlin feeling, he turned away to walk towards the sampling facility he'd been assigned to. Then he stopped and stood still for a moment, staring into the sunlit distance. Everyone else milling around, the Vorta and Jem'Hadar, faded from his vision, as though they didn't matter—as though they weren't there at all—and yet despite the fact that he couldn't see her, he remained acutely aware of Eris walking away from him. Light flared in his eyes and blinded him until abruptly, he whirled around and strode to catch up with his wife, who didn't seem to know he was there until he grabbed her arm.

The defensive look on her face vanished when she saw it was just him. "What?" she asked him. "Is something wrong?"

"No." He took her hands, holding them tightly, and she returned the pressure. She was so beautiful; just as beautiful now as the day he'd first seen her eleven years ago, when she'd walked past the Complex canteen and he'd known that he needed to speak with her; and he wished for a brief stupid second that he could just stare at her and take in the bright blue-lavender of her eyes, the curve of her ears, the way she exuded elegance. Everything had changed so much in eleven years; this was a new world they were living in and everything was different. And yet this one thing, the two of them, was the same. "I just…I forgot to tell you that I love you," he finally said.

She looked, for a second, surprised. Why wouldn't she? He wasn't in the habit of rushing back and stopping her in the street to tell her something like that. Then, with a gentle smile, she said, "I love you too."

What he wanted was to feel his weird fear melt away, but it didn't, and so he kept clasping her hands. "You know that no matter what, I always will, don't you?" He was good with words, so why was everything coming out so inadequately? "Nothing in the world—the universe—will ever change that."

A shadow crossed her face and she furrowed her brow. "Weyoun—"

"I just want to make sure that you know." After a second, he kissed her forehead and released her hands.

Her brow stayed crinkled. His behavior was odd and obviously so, and she could see it. But instead of questioning him about it, she only said quietly, "Of course I know. I could love you for lifetimes, myself."

And despite the taboo on public affection, he leaned forward and kissed her lingeringly, trying not to feel absurdly that it was some kind of ending. She put her arms around his neck and in a gesture that was more vulnerable than he'd ever seen her, she buried her face in the crook of his neck, her cold nose pressed against his collar bone. The two of them stood that way for a long moment, the sun beating on his back, before he pulled away.

They held each other's eyes for another minute, but they both needed to be at the sampling facilities, and so he smiled wryly and said, "Have a nice day in the trenches."

She returned the smile, her troubled expression receding to somewhere behind her eyes, where only he could still spot it. "Likewise."

Then, with a nod, he turned away again. This time he didn't look back.

Within a few minutes he was at his assigned building in the long line of them set up to house the DNA sampling operation. Jem'Hadar were everywhere; watching the metro, stationed outside the entrances to the buildings. Weyoun felt a surge of hatred for them that he forced down. He'd already known that they'd be doing most of the work today. Borath had told him. Besides a small team of Vorta scientists, of which he, of course, was one, there weren't enough people he could train to do the delicate work. "But you can train the Jem'Hadar?" Weyoun had asked, slightly incredulous.

The other man had shrugged and just said, "The Jem'Hadar learn quickly."

That, Weyoun had no doubt about. It was one of the things that made them dangerous. For the first time, he stopped to wonder how the Founders controlled the Jem'Hadar. Could such violent, intelligent beings be controlled by faith alone? Could men really be sent to fight and die and not question orders on its strength?

The Founders didn't trust the Vorta's faith—not, that is, unless it was encoded in their DNA. Maybe someday they wouldn't trust the Jem'Hadar's, either.

The queue of Vorta waiting to be processed through the synaptic mapping and DNA sampling procedure moved more quickly than Weyoun thought it would, and almost before he knew it, he was being directed to one of the rooms set up for the procedure. A Jem'Hadar pointed him towards a chair, where he sat and subjected himself to the ministrations of the Jem'Hadar conducting the procedure.

The Jem'Hadar—a Sixth, by the look of things—inserted an IV into his arm, and Weyoun watched as his vein filled four vials-full of his blood. After detaching the IV from his arm, the alien dispassionately picked up a swab from the table. "I require a sample of the cells from the inside of your mouth," the Jem'Hadar said.

Weyoun dutifully opened his mouth, gagged when the swab was swiped across his cheek, and then clamped his lips shut again, swallowing against the reflex. He was about to get up when the Jem'Hadar grasped a cable and pulled it forward. Though he hadn't seen one in person, he recognized a synaptic mapper, and seeing it in the hands of a Jem'Hadar made his stomach lurch.

"I assumed a Vorta would be doing this procedure," Weyoun said, uneasily eyeing the five-pronged electrode that would be inserted into his neck, just at the bottom of his skull.

The Jem'Hadar's expression didn't change. "I have been trained in the use of this machine."

"Yes," Weyoun murmured. "Yes, I suppose you have been."

It was unpleasant. At the end of the mapping his mind felt as though it had been turned over and forcibly sifted through, as though some impersonal outsider had rifled through his memories and emotions and everything that made him who he was. He supposed in a way, that was exactly what had happened.

When it was over, his legs didn't quite want to support him, as though the synaptic mapping had rewired his brain momentarily. But he found his feet, and the Jem'Hadar directed him down a corridor, telling him a recovery area had been set up through the very last door. It seemed uncharacteristic of the Jem'Hadar to care about something like a recovery area, but perhaps that had been the Vorta supervisors' decision.

On his way down the corridor, which seemed to lengthen and shorten by degrees, he was surprised and nearly felled by a door opening. Borath came out of it, looking just as surprised to see Weyoun as Weyoun was to see him. He actually caught Weyoun as he stumbled, remarking, "Ah, well, some people don't take to the synaptic mapping as well as others."

At least he had the memory of choking the other man.

Borath let go of him and glanced over his shoulder, towards the door to the recovery area. Then, looking back towards Weyoun, he said, "It will pass. It's unpleasant at first, but give it a few minutes."

"You've had this done to you?" Weyoun asked.

With a chilly smile, Borath replied, "Of course." He regarded Weyoun for a second, and an odd look flashed through his eyes, before he stepped away. "Go ahead. We don't expect this to take much more than a few hours."

Weyoun wasn't much in the mood to take orders, or even suggestions from Borath, but he continued on down the corridor, eventually reaching the door and pulling it open.

It didn't occur to him until after he'd shut it that he'd never heard Borath walk away.

Most likely, the synaptic mapping was responsible, but time passed hazily in the recovery room. Truth be told, it wasn't much of a recovery room. It was completely sealed in, with no windows or doors except the one he'd come through. There were no chairs and only one water cooler, which ran out of water long before Weyoun had even gotten there. No one came to refill it.

The room gradually filled more and more, until eventually it seemed that every Vorta that had been processed through this facility was packed into it. And then a cold, hard clarity hit Weyoun. Everyone that had been processed through this facility was in this room. And it wasn't for recovery.

There was a clang, which silenced everyone in the room except for a young child, who continued wailing. Underneath his cries came a new sound, a hissing, as of pressurized air—or, Weyoun realized, feeling his heart all but stop beating—gas. A faint odor began permeating the air, sweet, but with a harsh tang beneath it; like nothing he'd ever smelled before.

After the first inhale of it sent pain spiraling out from his chest, he tried to hold his breath, knowing that whatever was pouring into the room was something terrible. A woman standing in the middle of the room collapsed, blotches of purple staining her face as her eyes bulged and she gasped for air, and to Weyoun it seemed as though she was falling in slow motion as dark tendrils floated at the edges of his vision.

Then his lungs throbbed with pain and oxygen deprivation, and his body betrayed him and sucked in a breath of air. But instead of relief, he felt only more choked as he gasped futilely. Vorta all around him were crumpling into heaps on the floor—the man next to him was slumped against the wall, his chest still, his eyes open and staring vacantly, and those purple blotches spread over his cheeks.

Had he suspected, deep down, that it would come to this? That the extermination wouldn't stop with their unborn children, but would eventually encompass their entire race? They would be cloned—why wait for all of them to die their natural deaths? Why not hasten the process and start anew with Vorta genetically tailored to be what they needed to be?

And their memories…how clever, the memory extraction had come before this. There would be no memory for any Vorta, ever, of how their gods had betrayed them. Maybe; maybe they weren't gods at all, because nothing he'd ever been taught said gods were cruel—he didn't know what to think and knew that it didn't matter, and his thoughts were butting up against each other in a confused tangle as his body choked on the poison in the air.

Spots danced in his vision and suddenly the world was askew; everything was tilted on his side, and he thought confusedly that it was because he'd fallen over; his head was pressed against the hard floor and hardly anyone was moving anymore. A film covered his eyes and he wasn't breathing and in the last few moments of his life he didn't care about position or power or rejected faith, but thought of Eris, and how beautiful her eyes were, and that if he was cloned his DNA wouldn't allow him to see her beauty ever again.

His heart gave one last agonized pump and stopped.