The vision she'd had before, when the person with her had still been in the guise of the government functionary, came once again into her head. A vision of a darkness that could swallow whole worlds and everybody on them, Bajor included.
She thrust the vision away, unwilling to admit that it could be true.
"Do you really think intelligent creatures are going to fall for this?" She gazed at McHogue, willing the contempt she felt to strike him like one of the fists she held at her side. "Once people find out that there's nothing but death and madness at the end, you'll be walking around your precious Moagitty by yourself."
"I'm hardly worried about that. You speak from ignorance, Major; what you know about the possibilities here is nothing, no more than the small unpleasantness you encountered back on DS9." McHogue nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps you should have a little talk with someone more experienced. Someone you might trust . . ."
He pressed the control at the side of one of the holosuites; the door slid open. Inside, a figure knelt at the center of the chamber. The head was bent so far forward that Kira couldn't see the face.
"Go ahead," said McHogue, smiling. "It wasn't that long ago that you and this person talked with each other."
Slowly, Kira stepped into the holosuite. Around her, the grid of sensory projectors formed a dead cage. The kneeling figure didn't move as she approached. Only when Kira stood immediately before—a face radiant with belief looked up at her, and she recognized the acolyte from the capital's temple.
The acolyte's gaze pierced Kira and focused on a vision far beyond the physical limits of the holosuite. Kira reached down and touched the side of the acolyte's face.
"I saw her," murmured the acolyte.
"Who did you see?" But she already knew what the answer would be.
The acolyte's voice was a whisper of reverence, as though a revelation greater than the world's limits had been witnessed.
"The Kai . . ."
She knew that McHogue stood somewhere behind them. Stood at the door, watching. And smiling.
In her living quarters, she lay on her bed and gazed up at the ceiling. For a long while, she had seen faces there, conjured from recent memory; a face rapt and transcendent, focused upon an unseen image, and another, that rendered judgment upon everything before it with a twist of one corner of its mouth.
On the shuttle back to the station, Kira had picked apart the events of this brief journey. A few hours spent in another world, McHogue's world. The sky no longer guarded a Bajor that she could recognize. All had changed, or was about to.
Change—the word brought a flare of resentment inside her skull. Nearly an entire shift had passed since she'd returned to the station, and the memory of the cheap magic by which McHogue had appeared in front of her was still irritating to think about. It meant nothing—or so she wanted to believe. A distracting of her attention, an opportunity seized when she had closed her eyes, McHogue stepping into the place of the functionary that had been standing there. DS9 had a shapeshifter aboard that was certainly more impressive—you could watch Odo change from one thing to another.
She clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes narrowing as she gazed harder at the ceiling. What ticked her off, she decided, was not the efficacy of McHogue's full-body sleight of hand, but the fact that he had attempted it at all. There was a commingling in the man's character of inflated boasting that verged on mysticism and a child's glitter-eyed cruelty. It infuriated her to think of one who had befriended her, such as the temple's acolyte, lost in thrall to such a mind and its creations.
Another emotion stirred inside her, that she had tried to extinguish but had failed. What if it's true? A simple question, but one whose answer meant everything. The whispered fervor in the acolyte's words, the vision that could be seen in the window of her eyes . . .
A fake, as fraudulent as all the rest of it. Not on the acolyte's part, but McHogue's. He had devoted his life to trickery, for the sake of putting his hand into other people's pockets, just as the acolyte and the others carrying forth the temple's work had devoted themselves to seeing the truth.
And illusion had won, had proved itself to be the more powerful force.
An interesting philosophical problem, one that Kira could have imagined herself discussing in another life with the Kai. If lies were so mighty, at what point did they become omnipotent? When would the Great Liar McHogue declare himself to be the truth? And if he did so, would he be wrong . . .
Kira pressed her hand over her eyes, as though trying to shove down the voices that had risen clamoring inside her head. Sisko should never have taken me off full duty, shethought. The inaction, the inability to get her hands on the controls, a weapon, anything with which she could have put up a struggle, had left an empty space inside, that torments of useless reasoning had rushed to fill. It was why she had known there had never been any place for her inside the temples of her world's faith, among those who contemplated eternity through the quieting of their souls. What those of her fellow Bajorans possessed could never be hers, as much as she envied them; the constant restlessness that she had been born with, and that had been sharpened by the years of fighting in the resistance, made it impossible.
The storm inside had already been building when the shuttle had left the surface of the planet. Through one of the small craft's viewports, she had been able to look back and see clouds just as furious swirling in Bajor's upper atmosphere, as though a season of hurricanes had begun to prematurely gather its force. That was what the world behind her brow had felt like, as though it were a mirror of Bajor itself.
She sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling the muscles tensing across her shoulders and down into her arms. Her fingertips dug into the thin mattress.
You want to do it all by yourself—McHogue's words were a bitter echo among her thoughts. The fiery angel, the avenging sword . . .
"I can't stay in here any longer." That was her own voice. And a bad sign, speaking to herself, with no one else around to hear. Much more of this—of nothing—and she knew she wouldn't be far from going crazy. She fastened the collar of her uniform, stood up, and hit the control panel for the door.
She had no taste for company, which precluded going down to the Promenade and listening to Quark moan about his financial troubles. From what she had observed of his competitor's booming business in Moagitty, the bar's tables and booths would be even more deserted, the Ferengi's mournful expression setting deeper into his face. It was hard to imagine how a sight like that could do anything to lift her mood.
The station's corridors were empty and silent except for the echoes of her footsteps. She paid no attention to where her wanderings took her. Only when a crackle of energy barred her path—then she was abruptly brought back from her brooding thoughts to present time.
"Entry to this sector is restricted." The voice of the station's computer spoke above her. "Per orders of Security Chief Odo."
Kira looked down the corridor before her. She saw the row of holosuite entrances with their small control panels darkened and inactive, except for one halfway down. It came as no surprise that her seemingly random course had brought her here. Beneath the storm inside her head, there was another part that wordlessly pursued its own intentions.
"This is Major Kira Nerys," she spoke aloud. She waited a moment for the computer to match up her voice patterns with the ID files in its data banks. There was no telling what would happen next, but it was worth a shot.