"What?" Curious despite his misgivings, Jake leaned over to see. His shadow mingled with the other's, casting the water even darker. "What is it?"
The other boy stretched out, chest against the rock, so he could reach all the way down, the water swirling to the pit of his arm. Jake could see when he had caught whatever it was, from the sudden tensing of his muscles and the black spark of delight in his eyes.
Sitting back on his haunches, the other boy held up the prize. For a moment, Jake thought the wetly shining thing was just a rock, a flattish one wide as his companion's outstretched fingertips. Then he saw the stubby clawed legs poking out from the corners. A face like a crabby old man's, annoyed at his bald head being exposed to the sun, protruded from under the shell, then drew back in deep suspicion. When the scaly eyelids came partway down, it looked kind of like his friend Nog's uncle, the Ferengi innkeeper back aboard the station.
"Cool. . . ." The other boy examined the turtle as if he had never seen one before. Jake was surprised at that—the creek was full of them, either scooting about on the bottom or basking on the lower rocks in the shallows. "This could be . . . interesting. . . ."
Jake felt the sick feeling in his gut again, as though he were helpless to keep himself from falling into the dark eyes that looked over the turtle shell at him. Whatever happened next—like the things that had happened already—he knew he would be part of it. That his hands would be right next to the other boy's. That he would even hold, if the other let him, the little knife with the blade that jumped out when a button was pushed.
In the field beyond the creek, the barn cat had caught some small, blind thing that it had greedily torn open with its teeth and claws. The sweat on Jake's shoulders chilled, as though the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. At the horizon of his vision, he'd always before been able to see, if he stared hard enough, where this world became nothing but a wall inside another world. Now this" bright earth's shadows gathered there.
He brought his gaze back to the two smaller pieces of darkness before him. The eyes regarded him; then the other boy smiled in wicked conspiracy.
"This'll be fun." The other boy reached into the pocket of his jeans and fetched out the little folding knife. "You know it will."
Jake squeezed his eyes shut, against the reflection of his own face that bounced off the sudden snap of metal in the other's hand. It didn't do any good to keep whispering to himself that nothing here was real.
But he went on saying it, anyway.
A section of bulkhead, the curved wall between the gridded floor and the overhead light panels, considered its position. There's really no need for this—if the bulkhead had possessed any vocal apparatus, it might have spoken the words aloud, just to hear them echo down the station's empty corridor. The bulkhead would have been able to hear that, as part of its surface, indistinguishable from the rest, served as a crude tympanic membrane, carrying the sounds of voices and footsteps—if there had been any—to the intelligence concealed within. He must be already gone, thought the bulkhead; it rippled like flowing water for a moment, then peeled away from the insensate metal beneath and recoalesced into the form of Deep Space Nine's chief of security.
Odo looked around the angle of the nearest corner, to where the passageway split into the farther reaches of the station. Now that he had resumed the humanoid appearance by which most of DS9's personnel recognized him, he could visually scan the area. Before, any transformation of his matter into an optic sensor might have given away his carefully maintained disguise.
There was no sign of the individual he had been tracking. In Odo's memory was a complete dossier on one Ahrmant Wyoss, an itinerant freight handler who had been catching occasional pickup work in the station's main docking pylon. Despite the range of computerized equipment on the dock, from overhead-tracking forklifts that could shift multi-ton reactor cores to tweezerlike micromanipulators capable of extracting the black specks of monocloned seed stock from radiation-resistant transport gel, there was still a need for the kind of sheer muscle mass that could break open a wooden packing crate from one of the low-tech trading worlds. Wyoss possessed that much, along with a heavily brooding face that to Odo indicated a chronic overindulgence in central-nervous-system depressants. That Wyoss also had enough rudimentary intelligence left to elude a tracker tinged Odo's thoughts with unease; it didn't fit with the profile he had mentally constructed of the suspect.
From behind him came the sound of a small object hitting the floor. Not startled, but in his customary state of hyperalertness, Odo turned quickly and spotted the source, a small plastoid box with a pair of dangling probe wires and a digital readout on one side. It was a sign of how thoroughly Ahrmant Wyoss had filled his thoughts, that he had forgotten the device he had brought along. He had hidden it, tucking it into a ceiling crevice, before flowing into his own molecule-thick concealment over the bulkhead segment.
He turned the device over in his hand; the numbers on the readout still corresponded to Wyoss's credit/access code. Chief of Operations O'Brien had cobbled together the device as a favor for Odo, part of the relationship of mutual back-scratching the two of them had worked out. Odo had exceeded his authority, by perhaps only a small bit, in leaning on a band of petty thieves who had been pilfering from some of the chief's outlying storage lockers, and O'Brien had in turn designed and put together this handy little gizmo. And kept quiet about it.
Odo meditatively ran his thumb across the points of the probe wires. By a strict interpretation of DS9's regulations, the device was illegal; without a written order from the station's commander, the equivalent of a planetside court order, accessing any record of an individual's financial dealings, no matter how small, was forbidden. The moral qualms Odo felt—it was his job to enforce the laws, not break them—were small, in proportion to the device's limited function: all it could do was extract the access codes and corresponding names from the data banks of the station's holosuites, giving him a record of who had used each one, and when. That had been useful in establishing a pattern of behavior for Wyoss; the suspect had spent an inordinate amount of time immersed in the artificial worlds created by one or another of the holosuites that had been installed along this passageway.
That habit alone served as an identifying quirk for Wyoss; this bank of holosuites was several levels away from the main action of the Promenade. Whenever the suspect had emerged from the detailed sensory experience for which he had programmed the suite, he'd had to trudge a long way to knock back a few synthales at Quark's emporium. That datum was still being turned over at the back of Odo's thoughts, an analogue to his slow fidgeting with the device in his hand.
An obsessive need for privacy? Odo considered that possibility, and discarded it as before. A thug like Ahrmant Wyoss wouldn't care what other people thought of his recreational activities. And besides, the interior of a holosuite, no matter what busily teeming sector its door might exit onto, was already as private as technology could devise. The only place more private would be the inside of one's own skull. Which was, of course, part of the holosuites' attraction. For himself, Odo couldn't see much of a point in that; there was rarely a moment of his life when he didn't feel essentially alone, a creature of unknown origin, separated from all others.