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“Didn’t I just answer that?” she said impatiently, and Tuvok noted a tension in her muscles, a barely controlled hostility. “No family name means no family. If what I know about Vulcans is true, you should understand that.”

Bravado, Tuvok noted. Hiding what? He sat back in his chair and softened his approach. “Perhaps you should tell me what you know about Vulcans,” he said, as if he were addressing one of his daughters.

“I’ve heard things,” she said diffidently. “Rumors. We of the Sundered talk of our distant siblings often, even though you choose not to acknowledge us.”

It was at this point that Tuvok began to wonder who was interrogating whom, and he knew he would get no further on that topic.

“How were you raised, then, if you have no family?”

“What’s the first thing you remember?” Tahir used to ask her, whispering in the dark while they waited for a contact who might or might not show up.

“A voice,” she would say. “Screaming at me. Or, no, the first thing I remember is the hands.”

“Hands-?” he would prompt her, his breath warm on her face, his own hand brushing her cheek.

“Yes. Grabbing me by the hair. Then the voice…”

The feeling of her hair being pulled out by the roots, to the accompaniment of shrieks, her own and those of the creature doing the pulling. “I’ll snatch you bald-headed! Ruined my life, demon spawn!”

Slam! The eye-smarting pulling stopped, if only because the claw-like hands had released her and flung her against the wall. She skidded on the slick tile floor, trying for purchase, to gain her feet and run. Not far; she knew from past experience that the door was locked. There must be earlier memories, then, interchangeable with this one.

Smack! The impact of an open hand against her jaw. She hadn’t seen it coming, so at least had not clenched with fear. No teeth chipped this time. She dropped and rolled, barely clear of the boot-toed feet kicking at her shins. But she’d forgotten about the ugly divan in the middle of the room, and found her small body trapped against it; it was too low for her to crawl under it. The kicks came faster then, striking anywhere soft. Zetha curled into a ball, feeling the blows against her ribs, her spine, knowing there would be fresh bruises over the old ones, the familiar ache in every muscle that by now seemed more normal than not.

“Get up!” the woman said at last, breathless from the effort. “On your feet and out of my sight!”

Mother, grandmother, caretaker? Old, young? Was she even Romulan? Or was it she, not the absent paternal parent, who had polluted the “pure” bloodline with her alien genes? Try as she might, Zetha could never see the face, only the clawing, hurting hands and the tiny booted feet. The voice might have been Romulan, might not; the accent was colonial pretending to be citified. But who or what she was or had been, no knowing. Because a time came when the screaming stopped, and the hands and little booted feet went away.

After that, what seemed a very long time when it was dark and I was hungry, Zetha thought. It was probably only a single night, but to a child it would seem longer. Two women in healers’ uniforms came and took me away. I didn’t know if the one with the claws and the little booted feet had abandoned me or if someone had reported her. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive, and never cared.

But tell all that to the Vulcan? Never. What was it the Lord used to say? Dazzle them with details. When I think of what I could tell him, about what goes on in back alleys and abandoned buildings and in catacombs deep below ground, of splinter groups and Vulcan runes and mutters of reunification… but no. I never told the Lord. Why should I tell him? Hold back. Make him work for it.

“I was brought up in… a House. I don’t have a better word for it. A place where the unwanted are fed and clothed and trained to do tasks that are considered worthy of them.”

“An orphanage or foster home,” Tuvok suggested. “Run by the state?”

Zetha shrugged. “A place where the unacceptable