PICARD LOOKED AT the black-and-white-striped Dedderac who operated the footwear emporium on the transfer deck of an Athabascid deuterium tanker.

“A Zartani?” he echoed.

“Yes,” said Guinan.

“I just came in a few minutes ago,” said the Dedderac. “But if you like, I can ask someone.”

“By all means,” said Picard.

The Dedderac called over one of his employees, a human with a shock of blond hair and a stubbly brush of beard on his chin. “Braddock,” he said, “did you wait on a Zartani today?”

The fellow nodded. “Just a few hours ago. Sold him a pair of special-supports.” He glanced at Picard. “He said his feet hurt so much he couldn’t stand it another second.”

“Did he happen to mention where he was staying?” asked the captain, repeating what he and his companion had asked so often that day already.

“Not exactly,” said Braddock.

“Not exactly?” Guinan echoed.

“He asked directions to the Emperor’s Eye. That’s a hotel not too far from here. But he was a Zartani, so I didn’t think he was actually going to stay there.”

Picard exchanged looks with his companion. “Do you know where the Emperor’s Eye is?” he asked.

Guinan nodded. “As our friend here said, it’s not far. All we have to do is—”

Suddenly, she fell silent. Her eyes, it seemed, were fixed on something behind the captain.

He turned to see what might have drawn her attention, but all he saw was a multilevel display full of children’s footwear—and a colored ball lit from within, a child’s toy used to add interest to the display.

That was it. But for some reason, Picard’s companion couldn’t seem to take her eyes off it.

“Guinan?” he said.

It was then that the captain realized she was weeping. The notion came as a shock to him. To that point, he had barely seen her display any emotion at all.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

Guinan nodded, then turned to him—with what seemed like a certain amount of effort. “Fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I said I was fine,” she told him.

Picard felt the need to probe deeper, but forced himself to respect the woman’s privacy. If she wanted to tell him what had happened, she would do so. And if she didn’t…

He put his hand on her arm. “You were telling me how to get to the Emperor’s Eye…?”

“Right,” she said. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring. “No problem.”

Picard thanked the store manager and the human called Braddock. Then, keeping a close, concerned eye on Guinan, he followed her out into the shopping area’s main thoroughfare.

Guinan brushed away a lingering tear as she led Picard in the direction of the Emperor’s Eye.

Odd, she thought, the way things work out. She had been on her guard for so long, avoiding anything that might have reawakened the feelings she had worked to submerge.

And in the end, what had brought those feelings rushing back like a river in full flood? A child’s toy. A simple Tellati child’s toy.

But it was exactly the color of sunset in a place Guinan had never really visited—at least not in the sense one usually visited places. She knew that didn’t make sense, but the entire experience was still such a confusion to her, defying her attempts to attach words to it.

It had happened when she was on a ship called the Lakul—one of two ungainly transport vessels crawling through the vault of space, each one packed to the bulkheads with her people. But it wasn’t by choice that any of them had come that way.

They were refugees, the last of their kind, stripped of everything and everyone they had held dear by a half-living blight called the Borg.

For months, Guinan and the remnants of her once-numerous species had gone from vessel to vessel, all the while mourning their planet, their loved ones, and the lives they had left behind. Their destination? A world called Earth at the heart of the Federation.

Guinan had been on Earth before, hundreds of years earlier. But since her last visit, the place had changed quite a bit—or so she had heard. It was no longer a world of soot-belching chimneys and hard-grinding engines. It had become a calmer and gentler world, regaining much of its pristine splendor.

The El-Aurians—Guinan’s people—had been told they could build new lives there on Earth. And they clung fiercely to that hope, for it was all they had left.

Then they ran into the Nexus—a twisting, blindingbright ribbon of anomalous energies floating imperiously through otherwise empty space.

How she wished they had taken some other route, or traveled at a different speed, and thereby avoided even seeing the thing. But Fate placed it directly in their path.

At first, their captain hadn’t thought much of the phenomenon. He considered it a curiosity, nothing more. But he changed his mind when the Lakul began to shear toward it, caught in its wildly powerful gravimetric distortion field.

Their sister ship, the Robert Fox, tried to assist the Lakul. But in extending that assistance, she was snared by the phenomenon as well.

When the Lakul’s captain realized what kind of straits they were in, he sent out a distress call. Later, they would find out that it was received by the Enterprise, an Excelsior-class starship just out of space dock, not far from Earth.

But after a while, neither Guinan nor her fellow refugees were concerned with the possibility of being rescued. In fact, it was the furthest thing from their minds.

Because by then, the Nexus had claimed them.

Guinan couldn’t have said how long she was in that odd, timeless place. Just a few hours, apparently, judging by the timing of the distress call and the Enterprise’s arrival. But it seemed like a lot more—and also, a lot less.

Then again, how does one measure bliss? How does one quantify complete and utter peace?

Guinan’s family was there, or at least she thought it was—and her friends were there as well. All the people she thought she had lost forever to the metal appendages of the Borg…they had miraculously been returned to her.

Even Jevi.

The daughter who, of all Guinan’s daughters, was most like her. The child she had borne when all the others were grown and gone.

Jevi was there in the Nexus, in all her beauty and innocence, in all her brilliance and simplicity. She was there for Guinan to see and hold and hear and smell, every bit as sweet and solid and full of giggles as the day the Borg had taken her.

Guinan knew in her heart that Jevi wasn’t real. She couldn’t be. But Guinan didn’t care in the least. She was home again. She was free from sadness and stuggle. She was a mother, loved and loving, cradling her baby in her arms.

And she never, ever wanted to leave.

In time, however, the Enterprise arrived. Her captain saw that both the Lakul and her sister ship were gradually coming apart, savaged by the terrible forces exerted by the Nexus.

Tragically, he was too late to save the Robert Fox. As he and his bridge officers watched in horror, the Nexus crushed the transport’s hull—killing all of the two hundred and seventy-five El-Aurians aboard.

But the Lakul was a little sturdier—or maybe just a little luckier. She wouldn’t yield to the Nexus until forty-seven of her passengers had been beamed from her buckling decks to the safety of the Enterprise’s sickbay.

The starship herself suffered only one casualty—a retired Starfleet captain named Kirk, who was only supposed to have been a guest on the vessel. He perished helping the Enterprise free herself from the phenomenon.

Guinan was one of the forty-seven El-Aurians who came through the ordeal alive—twice a survivor. But at first, when she was milling about in the Enterprise’s sickbay, she wished that hadn’t been the case.

That’s how much it hurt to have the joy and contentment of the Nexus ripped from her without warning. That’s how much it tore her up to lose Jevi and the others a second time.

When she left that junction of infinite possibilities, it felt as if she had abandoned a part of herself. And in her grief, she couldn’t help feeling that it was by far the best part.

The Enterprise took Guinan the rest of the way to Earth, but she wasn’t aware of the voyage. She was too disoriented, too much in shock.

The other El-Aurians were the same way. They wandered from place to place without purpose, babbling about colors no one had ever heard of and the sound of time—or so Guinan was told in years to come.

Eventually, with the help of Federation counselors on Earth, she and all the other survivors of the Lakul regained their equilibrium. They became capable of functioning and fending for themselves again.

It wasn’t easy. For years, Guinan barely spoke, barely raised her eyes to look into someone else’s.

But little by little, she reclaimed herself. She redis-covered the points of contact between herself and the real world. With patience and slow, painstaking effort, she rebuilt the Guinan she had known.

The hardest part was accepting that she would never again feel what she had felt in the Nexus, that she would never again know that unmitigated joy and contentment.

But somehow she did it. She moved on.

Then, a little less than a year ago, Guinan had felt the Nexus’s siren call again. The phenomenon was passing through the Alpha Quadrant on its thirty-nine-year loop, tugging on the invisible bonds in which it had bound her.

She could see it from the observation ports of a half-dozen different hulks—a majestic ribbon of fiery energies, undulating through space less than three thousand kilometers from Oblivion. It was almost as if it had known where to find her.

The sight of it reopened all her wounds, reminding her of the terrible depth and breadth of her loss. And she was tempted—so terribly tempted—by the joy she had known in the Nexus’s embrace.

The effort to resist its lure left Guinan weak, withdrawn, dispirited—hardly any better off than when the Enterprise had rescued her. And when the Nexus went away again, taking that sweet, undefinable portion of her with it, her outlook didn’t improve.

If anything, it got worse.

Once again, Guinan had a hard, steep road ahead of her. But this time, she didn’t have any Federation counselors to give her a hand. All she had was herself, and the few good friends she had made in Oblivion.

They tried to bring her out of her malaise, Dahlen and the others…they tried as hard as she could ever have expected of them.

But she couldn’t feel. She couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of feeling. All she could do was move from day to day and darkness to darkness, surviving but not really living—not anymore, not the way she used to before the Nexus laid its claim to her.

And that was the state Guinan had been in when Picard sat down next to her at the bar—without even knowing who she was, as if Fate herself had taken a hand again.

And he had done for her what no one else could, because he was different from anyone else. He was the man from the future. He was the man from her past.

He was her salvation.

Guinan resisted the urge to look back at the Tellati ball. How strange, she thought again, that a child’s toy should evoke such joy and misery in her. Such memories…

Not so long ago, they would have buried her beneath the weight of longing and despair. But not with Picard at her side. With him there, she could—and would—go on.

Tain found Varitis right where he said he would be—in front of a shadowy Tyrheddan restaurant in the midst of a large, bustling shopping area.

The glinn had only one question when he arrived at Varitis’s side: “Where?”

His underling lifted his chin to point across the shopping area’s main thoroughfare. “There, Glinn. In that footwear shop across the way.”

Tain eyed the place. It had display windows, but he couldn’t see anyone inside. “You’re sure they’re in there?”

“Yes, Glinn.”

“For how long now?”

“Several minutes,” said Varitis.

Several minutes is a long time, Tain reflected. Had the visit been an unproductive one, the Cataxxans would likely have emerged a good deal sooner.

Unless they really went in to buy footwear, he thought. The glinn might have laughed if he hadn’t been so intent on snaring his quarry.

“Your orders?” asked Varitis.

“Spread out,” said Tain, “so it’s not quite so obvious that we’re surveilling the place. But be alert for the moment when the Cataxxans leave. That’s when we’ll—”

Before he could finish, he saw two figures emerge from the footwear shop. A pair of Cataxxans—a male and a female, just as Varitis had said.

At least, they appeared to be Cataxxans. But no one knew better than Tain, who had studied the arts of espionage back on Cardassia Prime, how deceiving an appearance could be.

Fortunately, he had a way to examine the Cataxxans that went deeper than how they looked. Reaching into his tunic, he found it—a flat device about the size of his palm, which he extracted and cupped in his hand. When he pressed a stud on its side, a tiny readout screen lit up.

The device was a sensor, designed to detect enemy life signs in combat situations. Tain had never been in combat but he carried it anyway, as it was useful in his line of work to know one’s friend from one’s foe.

Pointing the sensor at the Cataxxans, he studied the screen. For a moment or two, what he saw was confused by the presence of passersby. Then the thoroughfare cleared and he was able to take an unobstructed reading.

It gave the Cardassian reason to applaud his instincts.

One of the Cataxxans was actually a human—Picard, no doubt, with a skillfully altered appearance. The other was a member of a species Tain’s device couldn’t readily identify.

But, clearly, neither of them was Cataxxan.

“Stay here,” the glinn told Varitis. “Ask the store owner about his conversation with those two.”

Varitis nodded. “Certainly, Glinn.”

In the meantime, Tain and his other two underlings would follow Picard and his companion at a distance. And with a little luck, they would discover that the human was further along in the search for Demmix than they were.

Tain smiled to himself. Maybe the “Cataxxans” had obtained the last bit of information they needed in that footwear shop and were going to meet Demmix at that very moment. Wouldn’t that be a pleasant development?

For him, at least. For everyone else involved, it could turn out most un pleasant.

Tain was still waiting for the right moment to start following Picard and his companion when he saw something that made his gut clench. It wasn’t much—just a nuance of movement in the crowd that someone else would likely have missed.

It forced a curse from him.

“Glinn?” one of his men said.

“Quiet!” he snapped.

There—he saw it again. Tain was dead certain of it now.

The place was crawling with plainclothes security personnel. And they were homing in on Picard and his companion as if they were aware of the fugitives’ true identities.

Tain shook his head in disgust. This is bad, he thought. This is very bad.

If the authorities nabbed Picard and the female, they wouldn’t be able to lead the Cardassians to Demmix. All Tain’s work to this point would be for nothing.

But what could he do about it? Set up a diversion so the captain could escape?

Too risky, the glinn decided. And besides, even if Picard did elude security, there was no guarantee that Tain would find him again before he located Demmix.

The Cardassian’s teeth ground together. No diversion, then. No intervention at all.

As much as it galled him, he had no choice but to accept the situation—and hope he would eventually find a way to turn it to his advantage.

Guinan was still reeling from her experience in the footwear emporium, or she would have noticed it moments earlier.

Crowds had a certain sound to them—raucous, subdued, or any of a hundred flavors in between. And not every part of a crowd sounded like every other.

When she and Picard walked into the shop, the crowd of merchants on both sides of the thoroughfare had sounded exactly as she would have expected—a mix of purposefulness and pleasure, with accents of happiness or remorse over deals that had either been cut or abandoned.

But it sounded different now. There were dead spots in the crowd, places where people were simply watching and not speaking. And no sooner had Guinan realized this than the dead spots began to migrate.

Not randomly, either. They were converging on a single point. And the point they were converging on was Guinan herself.

Security officers, she told herself, feeling ice water trickle down her spine. She and her companion had been discovered somehow, despite their disguises.

“Picard,” she breathed.

He looked at her. “Yes?”

“Don’t look now, but we’re surrounded.”

His brow lowered. “By whom?”

“Security,” she said. Then she added, “I think,” because she couldn’t be completely sure, and because her talents weren’t as sharp as they used to be.

“Just keep walking,” Picard told her.

Guinan could almost hear him add: I’ll think of something.

And despite the severity of their circumstances, despite the odds stacked against them, Guinan had a feeling that Picard would think of something.

After all, he was the man who had saved her life more than four hundred years ago. If he could get the better of those time-traveling snakes in San Francisco, he could get them out of this mess as well.

Guinan looked to him, wondering what her companion was going to do next—wondering what kind of rabbit he was going to pull out of his hat.

But Picard didn’t produce any rabbits. All he did, suddenly and without warning, was take off like one—cutting a path among the assembled merchants without so much as a backward look.

Guinan didn’t understand. It looked to her as if her friend was abandoning her.

No, she thought. That can’t be it. It was just a ruse, designed to fool the security officers.

But she was too smart to believe in it. She knew Picard. She knew he wouldn’t let her down.

Then a couple of figures closed in on her, phasers in their fists. Even if they weren’t in uniform, it was obvious that they were security officers.

“Don’t move!” one of them barked.

Okay, Guinan thought, it’s time, Picard. Show these guys what you’ve got.

But her companion wasn’t stopping. As she watched, he became more and more a part of the crowd. By the time the ripples of what was happening to her began to spread through the shopping area, Picard was gone altogether.

Guinan swallowed back her shock and disappointment. It hadn’t been a ruse after all. Picard had really run away, leaving her there to face the music by herself.

A couple of other armed figures joined the first two, blocking Guinan’s escape on all sides. “Hands up!” one of them snapped at her. “Stay where you are!”

It wasn’t necessary. She wasn’t going anywhere.