"Julian." The hand on his shoulder was a step away from painful, shaking him back to awareness. The pressure sent a constant signal to his muscles, strong enough to give him cause to squirm.

"What?" he mumbled, frowning tightly. He had been dreaming of another time, another world - and of a boy whose family had allowed him a gift he imagined could even have been real. The chance to grow at his natural pace, without the alterations they had once thought so essential.

"Wake up." The voice was a woman's - soft and whispered, but at the same time gently insistent.

"Was I asleep?"

"For over seven hours." It was Dax, he realised - with a softly musical laugh laced into her reply. "We're almost there."

Almost…? His eyes watered as he rubbed them with the back of one hand. Almost, where?

"Oh." The re-emergence of his memory was somewhat delayed, each moment slowly regaining its shape. Pushing away the stiffness of waking, Bashir flexed both shoulders and grunted as his knotted muscles cracked almost silently into place. He blinked at the viewscreen. Of course.

They must have been travelling at a consistent pace, although long enough for unchanging pressures to bring an ache to the stiffened vertebrae of his neck.

His first glimpse of their destination was of a sloping tower of thick, gleaming metal - its colour like that of dark polished bronze. Moonlight from an overhead satellite reflected from its smooth and semi-moist surface. He imagined perhaps that he could make out the texture of beaded rain - but with no hint that the surface of the facility would ever be marred by rust.

Piloting the Rubicon to a small docking port near its entrance, Dax concentrated on each minute adjustment and brought it to a place where the curve of the outer wall had flattened. She smiled to herself at the sound of surfaces connecting.

Bashir soon discovered that his chest was clenching - tighter, and tighter still as the remaining distance closed. Each of his breaths was restricted to a shallow gasp. The docking bay was an open mouth - dark jaws gaping to draw them inward. "Are you…?" He fought to keep his voice steady against the added pressure of Dax's blue eyes now fixed in his direction. "Are you sure this is… right?"

A frown came to Jadzia's thin, dark brows. "What do you mean?"

What did he mean? Opening his mouth to reply, Bashir discovered almost too quickly that no voice was emerging. Not even the habitual stammer that usually accompanied his moments of wordless uncertainty. With a shake of his head, he dismissed the Commander's query and moved reluctantly to the runabout's exit.

Side by side, the pair came to a spacious lobby, supported by thick, strong columns, and with potted trees placed at intervals along both edges. The furniture was arranged in a symmetrical pattern, seeming to point the way to an empty desk at one end of the room. It sat beneath the slender, curving threads where an iron sculpture cast textured shadows on the wall behind.

Confronted by this unfamiliar scene, Bashir concentrated instead on the simple in and out of air through his nose. He slowed his own breathing to keep pace with the beat of each cautious step. Even as their footfalls seemed to taunt and mock, he kept his eyes on his own and Dax's reflected images in the polished, sterile floor.

He sensed that Jadzia was still matching his pace, her presence at his side a well-met reminder. She had once scolded him for despairing - accused him of arrogance for believing that a solution was nowhere to be found - and even now, the sting of her words remained. He could not give her a reason to doubt him again. And he knew only one way to avoid her disdain.

Succeed.

The night was met with tense anticipation. Bashir had no doubt that those in charge must have positioned hidden security devices in the upper corners of his room. But the shift from light to darkness at least gave to him his first illusion that he had parted from the scrutiny of others. Tossing irritably until his face was half buried in the pillow, he scowled at the shadows of radiating, half-dim lights. But the shadows gave him no answers, and he lacked the will to track down and disable whatever surveillance equipment had been stealthily concealed behind the walls.

"But you must have some idea of how this kind of mutation works." He had spoken to Doctor Nikos with a far milder degree of frustration than he felt.

"Of course." With a contemplative frown upon her face, the small, green eyed doctor turned a fraction in her chair and stroked the surface of her upper lip with the tip of one finger. "Living cells are exposed to a foreign catalyst - most commonly to harmful radiation - and in their attempt at self-repair, they occasionally mis-write their own genetic code."

Bashir nodded. "And as a result, DNA is scrambled. Sometimes incomplete."

"And you think that's what is happening in your case?"

"Not precisely. But it has to be something similar if what I've been told is even part way true."

The same doubt showed again in Nikos' light green eyes - the same reluctance to accept what her equipment was still only partially able to quantify, and even less to confirm. Once again, Bashir was reminded that not one person, except for him, had met the man from whom he had received his most vital information. But he could not allow himself to doubt its truth. Not now.

He sighed. "All right," he said. "I'm here. Do whatever tests you think are necessary. But at least give me the means to contact Doctor Larkin on subspace."

With nothing left to interrupt his thoughts save for the footsteps of orderlies patrolling the corridors outside, no other person was present to see him tuck his arms and legs tucked around himself and curl atop the narrow bed. Every breath shuddered, but he hid his face behind two splay fingered hands. All the control he'd fought to hold onto throughout the day broke from him and scattered to nothing, like smoke in the wind.

Perhaps Athena's initial assessments had not been so far from the truth, after all. Perhaps he did belong in these tiny quarters - as much as Jack, or any of the others he had encountered since his arrival. He would not be falling apart as he was, had he not been as meticulously constructed as his father had intended him to be.

"No messages today," the Bolian woman had answered Bashir's first query with the coming of a cool, bright dawn. He had eaten nothing through the course of that morning. Hunger was elusive, and even the thought of breakfast was more than he could bring himself to desire. With a sigh, he strengthened the grip of two barely steady hands around his elbows - until the tight, blunt pressure was enough to hurt the bones of his upper arms.

It was not Doctor Nikos, or even Larkin, or any of the inmates, whose face occupied his thoughts as he sat aloof from all others in the common area and gazed through the window to the colours beyond. Was this the road taken by those thoughts of old men as they looked out over some impersonal, unfamiliar yard - knowing that the last porch on which they would ever sit was far too likely not to be their own?

The opposite side revealed a small indoor garden, artificially lit although its resemblance to natural sunlight was almost indistinguishable. A slow moving beetle perched laboriously on the upper branches of one tall, exotic fern - which wavered with every shift in its centre of gravity. Colourful patterns moved across the surface of the insect's outer casing - thick and hard enough to weigh down every slender leaf. It lifted one leg, brought it forward with meticulous caution, and toppled down into the lower canopy.

Bashir's gaze broke away as soon as the creature was no longer within his sight. He had hoped that it would succeed in recovering its balance - although in truth, he had only half been watching its struggles. "I hope you're happy," he muttered, picturing another man's face in the semi-reflective pane. A bare sketch, pale and distant - blue eyes aimed his way with as little true concern as one might follow the progress of an ant on a wall.

Well? The words ran through Julian's head as clearly as if the man himself were standing over him - speaking them aloud. Are you going to sit in that chair until you putrefy? Or are you going to get up and do something? I didn't tell you all of this for nothing, you know.

Then what do you want from me? Bashir returned the challenge - but the phantom Sloan gave him no reply. Even as he turned aside, the image seemed to follow him, mocking all the way.

"Boo!"

The piercing dark eyes of another man stared intently into Bashir's. Jack had leapt up to crouch on the nearest previously vacant space, as though on the topmost bar of a climbing frame. He cackled gleefully at the other's startled reaction.

"Still here, then?" he challenged, biting his fingernails and glancing briefly around him. "I've heard of you. What'd they do, mm? Find you out? Did they peek all the way into your deepest, darkest secrets? Didn't take them very long now, did it? You used to be one of those Starfleet guys."

"I don't have to listen to this." Bashir staggered to his feet and shrugged one shoulder as if it shake off an unwanted pest. But however far he tried to go, the way was shut beyond the outer force field at the exit. The momentum of his attempted escape had diminished to nothing after only three short steps. He grimaced, but hid all the consequences of ill-considered movement before the others had a chance to see - but scowled when he saw that Jack had continued to dog his heels.

"They won't let you go," the other man promised, fiercely intelligent eyes sparkling brightly as they peered into Bashir's. "You're one of the crazy ones now, Mister Starfleet Guy. They'll tell you anything to keep you in line. But no-one's about to listen to a word of what you have you say."

He dropped his voice to a slow, controlled hiss, and leaned forward - still grinning - until he was close enough for Bashir to flinch from the heat and moisture in his breath. "They don't believe you."