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“No one man can control the river. No one man can claim the riches of our world for strangers. We do not want you here. You must leave.”

“That’s our intention, ma’am,” Sisko said. “But the vaccine your husband spoke about-“

“You mean the potions he was always concocting in my kitchen?” Boralesh’s voice was laced with sarcasm. “None of them ever improved upon what the gods have already given us. Hilopon is our mothersoil, our life’s blood. It cannot be made better. And it will not be taken away from us.”

“But you wouldn’t mind if we took one of-Cinchona, did you say?- one of the potions with us?”

The woman shrugged. “These things are nothing to me.” Something seemed to penetrate her drug-induced fog, and she frowned. “The children… I must not leave them alone for long….”

With that she drifted out of the cave, and they let her go.

“We should follow her,” Sisko said after she had gone. His anxiety was not feigned now. “If Thamnos was right, if we’re all infected, we do need to get ahold of whatever it was he was working on, however crude.”

“I submit we have more urgent things to deal with now, Lieutenant,” Tuvok said tautly, preparing to take the case full of datachips with them, indicating the dead Thamnos crumpled against one wall. “Speed is of the essence. If we are discovered here…”

“Agreed,” Sisko said. He was already disengaging the Romulan transmitter, and selecting which Rigelian artifacts he would take with him. The more evidence they had of the connection between Thamnos and the Romulans, the better. “But it might not hurt to see what Boralesh has in her kitchen.”

“I doubt it is anything more than what we have found here,” Selar suggested, gathering several jars of hilopon just in case. “And if the vaccine is indicative of its ‘creator,’ it may be as ineffectual as the raw materials it is derived from. Further, something Zetha and I were working on just before we came here…”

It wasn’t as if the others had forgotten Zetha, but in the wake of Thamnos’s bizarre revelations, the suddenness of his death, and the eerie apparition that was Boralesh, their focus had been elsewhere. At the mention of her name, Zetha whimpered quietly. All eyes turned to her, and those eyes held questions.

She had sunk to the floor in the half-dark, and huddled there as if she didn’t know what else to do. She looked up at Tuvok, tears streaming down her face.

“When you asked if I was Tal Shiar, I told you no. It was the truth. They took me off the streets, threatened to kill Godmother if I didn’t go with them. I was trained, but I never took the oath. All ghilik have to take the oath before they’re sent on their mission. I had made up my mind I would not take the oath, but I could find no means to escape. If Cretak hadn’t taken me away from them, they would have had to kill me.”

Tuvok was solemn. “Is this, now, the entire truth?”

“Yes!”

“You might have told us this from the beginning.”

“Would you have trusted me if I had? I wanted-I needed you to trust me. The only way I could think of was to tell you only part of the truth.”

Concerned with getting back to the ship before the sun rose, Tuvok said: “We will speak further on this later.”

“No,” Zetha whimpered. “There can be no ‘later.’ I have killed all of you. Leave me here! Seal up the cave when you go. Leave me with this… murderer, this eater of souls! I will not be the cause of any more death!”

“There is no evidence that you have caused any deaths,” Selar began.

“Thamnos said I was!” Zetha cried. ” ‘Sample 173’ he said, and Sisko believes him. How can it not be true? The datachips… they gave me the injections, said they were nutritional supplements… I never had enough to eat when I was little….”

“Hey, I never meant that!” Sisko said. Her accusation struck him so hard, he winced. He wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. He went to her, crouched down and took her hand as if he were talking to Jake. “It was a diversion, to distract Thamnos, like what you and Tuvok did with Jarquin. You didn’t really think-? My God, little girl, how awful it