Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [68]
So! Zetha thought, reading it in his too-small eyes. I am more important than I know. But why? If everything I know must be abandoned for a moment’s bad timing, I will know why. Whatever he wants, I must do it. Or at least let him think I will, for Aemetha’s sake.
“My life for hers,” she said, drawing her insubstantial person up to her full insignificant height.
He did laugh then, a small chuckle in the back of his throat.
“You consider that an equal trade? Aemetha is of good family. You are nothing.”
“True.” Zetha shrugged. “But you can’t do math without a zero.”
His eyes narrowed again, this time with appreciation. He crooked a finger at her. “Come with me.”
She followed him to the hovercar. As she stepped between the guards and climbed through the hatch into the comfortable rear seat, she noticed that the windows were blacked out. She thought she knew where he was taking her, but she would never be sure.
Every night, she dreamed it. Dreamed she was back in the barracks with the other ghilik, rows and rows of them, all training for the same purpose-to be the Tal Shiar’s cannon fodder, the ones sent on suicide missions, their lives post-training often measured in days. Infiltrators, agitators, saboteurs, poisoners, assassins. Every day lived was a triumph, but every day lived only brought one closer to the day when one would have to kill, and then most likely be killed.
And every night that she dreamed it there was the risk, for all her training, that she would cry out in her sleep and reveal it.
If she’d cried out on the merchant ship on the way across the Zone, no one paid her any heed. None of them spoke Romulan, and she was bunked in one of the remoter areas of the ship. She had woken with a start as usual in the containment room at SI, no doubt with Tuvok watching through the mirror wall, and again at the Crushers’ residence, and again last night, her first night on Albatross, but no sound had escaped her lips. This second night, the sound of her own voice woke her.
To find Sisko watching her in the dark.
She had the upper bunk on one side, he the lower on the other. He couldn’t see as well in the dark as she could, and didn’t realize she knew he was watching her. Tuvok was taking a turn at the helm; Selar was asleep in the other upper bunk across from her, unperturbed by any exterior noise, her breathing so soft and so regular she might not have been there at all. But Sisko’s deep brown human eyes, all but unblinking, were looking right into Zetha’s.
She stirred to let him know she was awake. We’ll see, she thought, if he will say anything.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Did I wake you?” she answered without answering.
“You must have been having a nightmare,” he said. “You were shouting.”
“What did I say?”
“Just sounds. I couldn’t make it out.”
“It’s gone now,” she lied. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”
She rolled over to face the bulkhead, her back to him. Vulnerable, perhaps, but effectively terminating the conversation. She heard him grunt and roll over as well, but not before she realized: It was not Tuvok she needed to be careful of, but Sisko. Perhaps Selar as well-that concentrated Vulcan silence could disguise many things-but definitely Sisko. Winning his trust was now more important than ever.
Tenjin V was a mostly humanoid world whose position unfortunately placed it sometimes in Federation space, sometimes within the Zone. Settled during one of the Federation’s more ambitious expansionist phases by colonists from a nearby system whose sun was failing, it had the advantages of being a fortified outpost on the fringes of the Neutral Zone, a trading hub for several nearby worlds, and was a good source of borite and high-grade gadolinium. However, there were also disadvantages.
“When the maps were drawn at the end of