He walked around the house later, when everyone was asleep, making sure that all the doors and windows were secure. The next morning, he took the skimmer out to the gate and checked the metal fences for some distance in either direction. Perhaps he should think about the security fields again. But they couldn’t stay locked in here forever. That was no way to live and, besides, if it was Hulya they wanted, they would find a way inside somehow.
Gheta’s presence restored some balance. She had a way of handling Arani that made the older woman feel her grievances had been heard and turned out to be not so bad after all. As spring advanced, and the weather improved, they had other problems to contend with. One day they found that sections of the fence had been torn down. Not long after, graffiti began to appear on some of the estate buildings. Equipment was damaged too—a big blow ever since Rugal had decided not to rely on going into Littleport for parts. They fixed the broken sections of the fence and cleared off the other damage, and they talked about putting the security fields back up. Arani was all for it; Gheta thought it would use too much power. Hulya was in a stage of agreeing enthusiastically with whatever Gheta said. As for Rugal, he resented the idea of being imprisoned in that way. Since the day he had been separated from Migdal, he had been told where and how he had to live—first by Starfleet, then by the Obsidian Order, then by the military, and now some bigots on a backwater planet wanted to do the same. They could forget it.
Not long after they had mended the fences, a skimmer drove all the way through the estate up to the wall built around their enclave. It remained there a few hours, and then went away again. When Rugal told Gheta, she was shaken—and she was not easily shaken. “I’m afraid they’re going to attack. Maybe I was wrong about the security fields. It might be safer that way—”
Rugal shook his head. “I’m not giving them the satisfaction. I’ll go down to Littleport first, talk to whoever’s calling themselves the authorities, ask what they intend to do about protecting us. It’ll make my point, at the least—”
“Don’t!” Gheta said quickly. “It would be all the excuse they need.”
They came to him in the end. He got back to the house one afternoon to see a skimmer standing outside. When he went into the kitchen, there were three humans sitting there with Arani. Gheta and Hulya were nowhere to be seen. He recognized one of the humans as the teacher that he and Hulya had met the time they had gone into Littleport. The other two he did not know, but one of them was in uniform.
“I’m pleased the neighbors have finally decided to drop by,” Rugal said to Arani as he got himself some tea, in as measured a tone as he could manage. “But something tells me this isn’t a courtesy call. Doctor Anders,” he said, “it’s nice to see you again. How can I help you?”
“There’s no easy way to put this,” she said, “but we’ve come to collect Hulya.”
Rugal heard a faint ringing sound in his ears. “Oh yes?”
“My colleagues and I—this is Mr. Greene from Littleport’s organizing committee, and Mr. Townley, from our police—we don’t think that it’s in Hulya’s best interests to remain here.”
Rugal leaned back in his chair and drank some tea. “Have you asked Hulya what she thinks about that?”
Anders looked unhappy. “She was here when we arrived, but she became hysterical and ran upstairs. Your other friend—”
“Her name is Gheta.”
“Yes—she went after her.”
Greene spoke. “Does she often have tantrums like that?”
“Not as many as she used to,” Rugal replied.
“She shouldn’t be having them at all.” Greene was clear to whom he was attributing blame. “It’s a sign of considerable distress.”
“Hulya spent a year in an internment camp, and then found her mother’s body after she was murdered,” Rugal replied quietly. “If she wasn’t distressed by that, we should be worried. She’s been much better in recent months.” He got up from his chair. “Until today.” He walked over to the kitchen door and called upstairs. “Hulya, I’m home. There are some people here who’d like to talk to you. Do you want to talk to them?”
There was a pause and then she shouted back. “No!”
Rugal turned to his visitors. “You heard her. She doesn’t want to see you. And I won’t force her.”
Anders said, “We’re only here because we’re concerned about Hulya. I taught her; I knew her mother and father. They wouldn’t be happy that she’s here by herself—”
“Is she by herself? There’s me, there’s Gheta, there’s Arani—”
“What I meant was—”
“I know what you meant,” Rugal replied coldly. He went on in a more conciliatory tone of voice. “We’re not holding her hostage. Hulya stays here because she feels safe here.”
“With all respect, she’s a very troubled little girl who doesn’t know her own mind.”
“And with all respect to you, she’s much less disturbed than when I found her.”
Townley pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m done listening to this,” he said. “We’re well within our rights to remove this child. So we’re going to remove her.”
Rugal placed himself in the middle of the doorway and folded his arms. “You’ll have to get past me first.”
Townley shrugged. “Fine.”
He was a big man, purposeful, and sure he was doing the right thing. They scuffled for a while, and then Townley pushed hard. Rugal overbalanced, and Townley was past him in an instant, and taking the stairs two at a time. Rugal sprinted after him; Greene and Anders followed behind. Townley checked the bedrooms one by one until he found the one where Hulya was sitting on the bed with Gheta. He held out his hand to Hulya and said, “Come on now. It’s all right. We’re going now.”
Hulya, panicked, looked at Rugal. “You’re not going anywhere if you don’t want to,” he said to her.
“I don’t want to go with him.” she said. She jumped up from her bed, slipped past Townley, and threw her arms around Rugal. “I want to stay here. Rugal, I want to stay here.” He could feel tremors of distress passing through her small body. He put his arms around her, circling her entirely. “I’m not going!” she said.
Townley moved forward and firmly took hold of their entwined arms, trying to force them apart. Rugal held on grimly. “I’m not going anywhere!” Hulya shouted. She started kicking at Townley’s legs. “You’re not taking me anywhere!”
“Hulya, darling!” Anders called from the landing. “We’re here to look after you!”
“You can’t want to stay here!” said Greene. “Not with this lot! Hulya, they killed your mum!”
Hearing that, Rugal was racked suddenly with guilt. He thought, What if he’s right, what if she’s better with her own kind? That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s what my people do...
His arms went limp. Hulya, feeling his resolve weaken, gripped on even more tightly. She started shrieking—at Townley, at Anders, at Greene. “It wasn’t them! It wasn’t them! It was people like you! It was men like you! Just like you!” Then, to Rugal, she cried, “You promised! You promised you wouldn’t leave me! You promised!”
Shocked into action, Rugal renewed his hold. “Get off,” he said through gritted teeth to Townley. “Get away from her.”
“Richard,” Anders called through the door. She was shaken and upset. “Leave it!”
Townley still had one hand around Rugal’s upper arm, another around Hulya’s wrist. Anders called out again. “Richard! We should leave it!”
Hulya, sensing victory, hissed, “Let go or I’ll bite.”
“I’d take her at her word on that one if I were you,” Rugal said. “Richard.”
Townley, unwillingly, backed down. He released his hold on them both and went out to join Anders and Greene on the landing. Gheta followed him out and closed the door. Rugal heard them talking and heard Gheta ask them firmly to leave. Brave girl. He heard them all go back downstairs and, not long after, caught the sound of
the skimmer leaving. Soon the house was quiet again, except for the weeping child in his arms, whom he was holding and would not let go, exactly as he wished Migdal had done all those long years ago.
When at last Hulya was asleep, Rugal went downstairs, where Gheta made him some tea and Arani pushed a chair under him. He drank the tea and then put his arms down on the table and rested his head on them. His words came out thick and jumbled. “I thought it was Cardassians—us, I mean—at her mother’s farm. I just assumed... But of course it was humans, wasn’t it? That’s why she felt safe with me. That’s why she came onto Cardassian land in the first place. Away from humans. Will I ever learn that we’re not all bad?”
Gheta said, “They turned a blind eye while we were being killed. If Hulya had been Cardassian, they wouldn’t have cared. But then they ran out of enemies and turned on themselves.” She knelt down next to Rugal and put her arm around his shoulders. “That’s why you’ll get to keep her, Rugal. Because they didn’t protect her at all.”
• • •
A few days later he and Gheta went down to Littleport, where they had agreed to meet Anders and Greene. Not Townley. Rugal never wanted to see Townley again. He let Gheta do most of the talking. “None of us mean you any harm,” Gheta said. “We’ve all suffered, and we’re all angry. I understand that. But you can’t want to carry on this way, killing each other, letting people kill us. You’ve seen what happens now—you can’t control it. It’s not only us who get killed. You do too.”
Listening to her, Rugal felt proud of her: how well she spoke, how calm she sounded. Being around humans frightened her as much as it frightened Hulya. Yet she had agreed to come here with him the moment he had asked.
Both Anders and Greene had the decency to look ashamed. Anders said, “All I want—all I ever wanted—is for Hulya to be where she feels safe, to be with people that she trusts.”
“She is,” Rugal said. “There’s something you need to understand,” he went on, wearily. “I was brought up on Bajor, by Bajorans.” How often had he said this in his life? Never before had it seemed to matter so much. “They were my parents, the only ones I ever knew. Then my biological father turned up alive, and a Starfleet officer decided it was better for me to go back to Cardassia with him. But it wasn’t. It was a great wrong, and it did me great harm. I don’t want Hulya to forget she’s human, and I’m the last person on this world to want to make her think she’s Cardassian. But she’s safe and happy, and she wants to be with us. That’s where she should stay.”
Greene agreed that he would talk to the organizing committee. Anders wasn’t quite finished, however; she was worried about schooling, about how they were taking care of Hulya’s education. Rugal told her to come out to the house to discuss it. “And tell that policeman of yours,” Rugal said on the way out, “that if he’s serious about keeping the peace, he’ll have to protect us as well as you.”
Greene gave a wry smile and offered Rugal his hand. “Why not come and say that to the committee?”
Rugal shook his hand. “Perhaps I will,” he said. But in the skimmer on the way back to the house, he told Gheta that he thought she should do it instead. “We’ll see,” she said. “That was enough humanity for me for one day.” They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Gheta said, “Was that true, what you said? About growing up on Bajor?”
“Yes, it was true.”
She stretched her legs out before her and whistled. “That was a stroke of luck.”
It was not the happy ending, but it was a start. The people of Littleport still sent an occasional Cardassian their way, rather than have them in their town, and there was a spate of damage to their fences at the start of summer, but the vandalism had died down well before the longest day. Gheta went to meetings of the organizing committee every so often; one time she came back and reported that she’d overheard someone describe them as “our Cardassians.”
“Like pets,” Arani said with a sigh. But at least we aren’t in cages, Rugal thought.
By the time the longest day had passed, five more Cardassians—three adults, two children—had drifted their way and they had had to turn a storeroom into another house. Incredibly, too, the fields were full of tall wavering wheat. Not long after they harvested it, Rugal received a communication from Ellen Smith. The Lotos was on its way back to Ithic.
“You’re not dead then,” Ellen said.
“Impossible to kill.”
“We’ll be with you soon.”
“Typical. You’ve missed all the hard work.”
She laughed. She laughed easily, Rugal remembered, one of the things he had liked about her. “Did you find your friend, Rugal?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not so bad. I found someone else.”
“Tell me all about it when you see me. Are you coming with us?”
“I’m not sure that I need to...”
“Come to Manea to see us at least. For old time’s sake.”
“I’ll do that. How is everyone?”
“Much the same. Bringing peace and justice and the Federation way. Oh, Roche is a changed man ever since Bajor joined the Federation. Won’t hear anything said against Starfleet.”
“We’ll have to have words about that... Did you say Bajor has joined the Federation?”
“Rugal! Half a year ago! Old news. What have you been doing there? You used to obsess over newscasts.”
“I’ve been busy.” Rugal thought for a moment. Something had occurred to him, and an idea was taking shape in his mind. “Ellen, I might come with you after all, but I’ll be bringing someone with me, and it all depends on whether she wants to come. Is that all right?”
“Fine, we’ll find room, always do. Come to Manea anyway. Six days’ time.”
“We’ll be there.”
He explained to Hulya what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, why it mattered. He said he wouldn’t do it if she didn’t want to come along. She thought about it for a while, staring out the window across the fields at their improbable achievement, their home. “Will we come back here?”
“Of course we will.”
“Then I think we should give it a try.” She smiled at him. “We’re good at getting things to work, aren’t we?”
He kissed the tip of his finger and pressed it gently against her cheek. “We most certainly are.”
Twelve
Sitting at his kitchen table, Miles Edward O’Brien was, in quietly heroic fashion, watching his daughter make a mess of her math homework. It hurt like hell to see quadratic equations mangled so cruelly, but their sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain. It would be worth it when Molly finally figured out the whole business.
Beautiful girl, he thought, watching his daughter. This was their second year on Cardassia Prime, and in the past few weeks, if you’d asked, Miles would finally have said that it had been a good decision. The kids were settled, Keiko’s work was getting serious professional recognition, and the land around the base at Andak was miraculously starting to turn green. Best of all, nobody had tried to blow them up in well over a year. Life had settled into a routine; things were as peaceful as you could possibly expect on Cardassia Prime. So long as the government stood. The Federation was putting a lot of effort into making sure of that, but in recent years Cardassian governments had been about as stable as a one-legged Talorian...
“Da,” said Molly plaintively, “when can I give up?”
“Give it a little longer, sweetheart.”
“But it’s agony.” She had picked up the word from somewhere and was using it all the time. He gave her most recent effort a quick look.
“Trust me,” he said, marking where she had gone wrong, “this hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
She looked mutinous, but she carried on. How long till adolescence? They grew up so quickly these days. Perhaps childhood—the peaceful life—was drawing to an end.
The communicator buzzed quietly. Miles ca
lled out, “O’Brien.”
“Jack at security. There’s someone at the gate asking to see you.”
“Me? Not Keiko?”
“He’s asking for you specifically.”
Miles and Molly exchanged puzzled looks. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. What’s his name?”
“He says it’s Proka Rugal.”
“Don’t think I know anyone by that name. Bajoran, is he?”
“Cardassian.” There was a pause during which a muffled exchange took place. “He says you might remember him as Rugal Pa’Dar. And that he still can’t stand zabu stew.”
Everything fell into place. The Cardassian boy who had stayed with them that time on the station, the one who had been brought up by Bajorans and had liked the Cardassian food that Keiko had made about as much as Miles had. “My God,” said Miles. “Yes, send him over, Jack, send him over right away.”
He stood up from the table. Molly looked at him hopefully. “Can I stop now?”
“No.”
Miles went to the doorway to watch for his visitor. He’d thought of him from time to time, when news came out of Cardassian space—invariably bad news—of sickness, and the fall of governments, and the outbreak of war. He had never been sure the captain had made the right decision sending the boy back to live among strangers, but he’d worried it was his own prejudice against Cardassians that made him think that way.
Heading across the compound was a young Cardassian man that Miles recognized as the same very serious boy he had met—what was it? Eight years ago. The young man—Rugal—was holding hands with a human girl of about thirteen who had an apprehensive look on her face. Rugal leaned down to say something to her so tenderly that Miles’s father’s heart melted. When the pair reached the house, Rugal offered Miles his hand and Miles pulled him into a hug. “So glad to see you again. Glad you made it.” He glanced down at the girl. “Who’s this one, Rugal?”
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