He pushed those thoughts aside, with no more effort than closing the lid on a box of old-fashioned still photographs and family data recordings. He had trained himself to do as much, to attend to the job at hand, whatever it might be. Everybody, he supposed, did the same; the fact that the box he carried around, tucked away in a dark corner of remembrance, held nothing but empty brooding made no difference.
Ahrmant Wyoss was somewhere else aboard the station; the sooner the suspect was located, the better. There were three corpses lying in the morgue connected to the station's central infirmary; each of them had been ripped open, from throat to bipedal lower extremities, by a honed pryblade, the folding tool that the loading docks' freight-handlers used to slice through heavy cables and lever apart stuck container seals. Odo had seen one of the pylon crew draw the razor-edged tool out of his overalls' back pocket and flick it to full extension in his hand faster than eye could follow or thought anticipate. Two of the corpses in the morgue had been the frenzied product of one of Wyoss's coworkers, who had slit his own throat before Odo could apprehend him. The third and latest murder had been committed more discreetly, with no clue left behind, other than the rousing of the security chief's even sharper instincts, every time he had seen Wyoss skulking through the station's corridors. Something in the eyes, or rather behind them, like a worm uncoiling around the pit of a small fruit . . . That, plus the rather more concrete datum of Wyoss's pryblade being missing from the locker where he kept his other tools when he wasn't working.
Stop wasting time, Odo scolded himself. Something had kept him loitering here, long after he had ascertained that Wyoss was not in this sector. Another suspicion, as though a sense beyond sight or hearing had caught the trace of some other crime being committed.
The holosuite closest to him was one of the new ones that had been shipped on board the station and powered up. It provided him a measure of grim satisfaction to think of someone cutting into Quark's territory of salacious entertainment; the Ferengi was no doubt already fuming about this competition and how unfair it was to him. The notion of Quark's discomfiture was almost satisfying enough to outweigh the tiresome necessity of investigating and keeping an eye on the owners of the new holosuites.
At the moment, this one was occupied; he had already used O'Brien's clever device to determine that someone other than Wyoss had entered the suite, before he'd taken up his disguised surveillance. Odo reinserted the probe wires beneath the edge of the door's control panel, to obtain the exact credit/access code.
On the device's small readout panel, the numbers shifted, held for a moment, then changed to letters. One by one, they spelled out the name SISKO.
That's odd, mused the security chief. Why would the station's commander come this far to use a holosuite, when there were the closer ones above Quark's bar.
Another letter appeared on the readout. The initial J. The access code had been that for Benjamin Sisko's son, Jake.
Odo gazed at the small mystery for a few seconds longer, then switched off the device and stowed it in his uniform pocket. A wordless concern still nagged at him, but there was no time to puzzle over it now. He turned and strode quickly toward the corridors' hub.
Just for a moment, he had felt as if someone else was there with him, another presence more human than the one with which he shared this little world. Jake looked over his shoulder, expecting—or rather, hoping—to see a door open in the horizon. Maybe his father would step across the water-smoothed rocks turning back to gray metal, reach down and take his hand as the stream thinned and disappeared, and pull him back into the narrow spaces and skyless ceilings of the real world.
He saw no one behind him; the feeling passed, replaced by the certainty of how alone he was, with no one but the other boy for company. The boy who existed nowhere else but here.
Reluctantly, Jake brought his gaze back around to his companion. The other boy's dark, lank hair fell across his brow as he studied the turtle in his hand. He poked at the side of the shell with the knifepoint, as though trying to find a hidden latch. Jake felt a hollowness at the base of his gut, a souring wad of spit beneath his tongue.
There had been a time before the other boy had shown up in this world. Now there were times when Jake wished he could go back to then, to be alone here again. And other times, when the sick, dizzy feeling inside himself grew so large that it threatened to swallow him up, when he was crazily glad that the other boy had come. That was when he knew that the things the other said were only echoes of things that had already been spoken in some dark sector of his own heart.
"You want to?" As if he had read Jake's thoughts, the other boy held the knife out to him.
Jake shook his head. "I'll just watch. This time."
The other boy's unpleasant, knowing smile broke, then disappeared as he focused his attention back to the turtle. The stumpy, scaly legs kicked in futile struggle.
He had already started remembering, and couldn't stop. To when he had first become aware of the other boy's presence here. Jake hadn't even seen him, but had found his handiwork. In the woods farther down the creek's length, the trees whose wild profusion of branches broke this world's sunlight into scattered coins. There, in the damp-smelling shadows, Jake had found a space of bare earth scraped out of the tangled roots and dead leaves. Empty except for something that lay beneath a swarm of flies, their avid buzzing like the sound of the electronic currents beneath the surfaces of this world. He'd prodded the object with his toe, the flies dispersing then settling back down upon it, and caught a glimpse of the small animal opened from beneath its small chin to between its hind legs. A cat, or what had been one, with enough of its gray tabby fur unmarked to show that it wasn't the orange prowler from the barn. Jake had stepped back from it in disgust, and had almost tripped over one of the cords, pieces of dirty frayed rope he hadn't noticed before, that looped around the trunks of the nearest trees and pulled the dead thing into a spread-eagled X on the ground.
That had been the first sign, the emblem of the other boy's arrival here. Since then, Jake had seen more things. But never without feeling sick in his gut afterward, so that now he pushed away the little knife when it was offered to him, despite the other's sneer.
He closed his eyes when he heard a tiny sound, the whisper the knife made when it cut through something soft and yielding. Not for the first time, he wished everything around him was a dream, a real dream, the kind from which he could wake when it got too scary.
She turned in the cramped space, knowing that her chance for sleep was coming to an end. Major Kira Nerys knew she could have used a lot more of it, to ease the fatigue in her bones and the mental weariness that had seemed to gather like silt behind her eyes.
There was another reason for keeping her eyes squinted shut against the flashing lights, for trying to ignore the metal-on-metal sounds that rattled down the freight shuttle's interior, and the voices of the crew members. With enough effort, she could hold on to the last fading edge of the dream that had visited her, the small comfort for which she had been grateful, as though it had been her long-dead father's kiss upon her brow. A vision of green fields rolling to a domed and spired city just in sight at the horizon; she had drifted above as though on a bed of soft winds, reaching a hand down to touch the surface of Bajor, as though her homeworld was the face of a lover whose sleep she watched in her own . . .