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Musilla Province, Bajor – Spring, 2328
Two days after the annexation of Bajor, Tora Naprem awakes in the middle of the night to a brusque pounding on her front door.
It’s late spring in Musilla, and the air is filled with the soft, sweet scent of alva flowers. Their petals carpet the earth in pillow-y white, and for the past week, full blossoms have been drifting in through Naprem’s bedroom window, left open in a vain attempt to cool the house. Only a month from first summer, the weather is already heady and humid, and the heat has made Naprem ill-tempered and cranky. Six of the girls in her nightly classes at the community center have come in recently sporting short summer haircuts, and Naprem has caught her Great Aunt Uru icing her feet in the evening more than once.
The knock sounds through the house like a gunshot, and Naprem sits up, crushing something in her hand by accident as she does. She looks down and finds an alva blossom in her bed, swept in on a light spring breeze in the night, its pale petals wrinkled between her fingers. She looks out into the darkness, pulls her blanket away, and dresses as quickly as she can.
She can hear her Great Aunt Onea snoring in the room next to hers, and so she goes out into the hall alone. In the dark, their small, crowded abode somehow sheds its coziness. Onea’s stacks of knick-knacks – boxes full of yarn and crochet hooks, cases filled with bone tools and dried herbs and clusters of seeds – stand in the hall like a row of jurors, staring at Naprem as she winds her way through the crowd of them.
She’s passing the kitchen when Uru’s small, sharp-fingered hand closes around her arm and jerks her back.
“Don’t,” Uru whispers. Her weathered face is creased with fear, and her hands are startlingly cold. “I’ll wake Onea, we can leave through the back.”
Naprem looks at her, then looks at the door. She knows she ought to listen – she’s a good runner, fast. She could escape this place like she’s escaped so many others, shed her scales like a slippery, twisting fish. But her great aunts are very old, their bodies worn thin with age and weak with decades of leisure. Onea has strong, sure hands, good for medicine. Uru has the sharp, precise steps of a dancer. But they aren’t runners; their calves don’t ache when the wind blows against their face like a dare. They don’t turn their heads into the breeze like it’s a rival, they don’t swim against strong river currents for the fun of it. They won’t make it.
And there’s something inside of Naprem, some kind of invisible force; something pulling her, like gravity, towards the front door.
There’s another hard knock, loud and unyielding, and Naprem gently removes Uru’s hand from her arm. The air has a strange, sour taste to it, like a prelude to lightning. Without her, Uru huddles against the kitchen table.
At 43, Naprem has been arrested no less than four times. She opens the door, feeling, with great certainty and for no particular reason, that she is about to repeat the experience.
There are three Cardassians standing on the overgrown front step of her house, looking deeply out of place, their glossy black armor dyed purple and pink by the lanterns strung along the roof and in the branches of the surrounding alva trees. The leader, broad-shouldered and menacing, frowns down at her, eyes lingering on her bare shoulders.
“Professor Tora Naprem?” he asks.
“Yes?” she answers. “How may we help you fine gentleman?”
“Are you alone?” the leader asks. The soldier on his right leers at her, tail swishing pendulously back and forth.
“No,” Naprem says, determined to stay calm.
“You live here with your two great aunts, is that correct?”
“It is. What’s this about?”
“Where are they at this time?”
“They’re asleep,” Naprem says. “As most people are at this hour. What’s this about?”
“Step aside,” the leader says.
“No,” Naprem says, shaking her head. “I don’t think I will.”
It isn’t the leader but the leering soldier who grabs her by the shoulder and shoves her back with such force that she goes sprawling head over feet. Almost before she’s hit the ground, he and the soldier on the left snatch her up, lifting her up off her toes and tossing her into a chair at the kitchen table. Uru shrieks and clutches her chest as they barrel through the house, tails whipping about as they overturn furniture and topple stacks of boxes. The leader stands in the foyer with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying the living room with an expression of polite disgust. He doesn’t so much as glance as the light switch.
“Any weapons in the house, Professor Tora?”
“No!” Uru cries, before Naprem can get her wind back enough to answer. “No, we don’t have anything like that, please, we’ve done nothing wrong…!”
There’s a shout down the hall, a short scuffle, a highpitched “how dare you!” Then, the leering soldier returns, Onea dangling on the end of his fist, dark grey hair tangled around his fingers.
“Unhand me, you--!”
“Don’t make it any worse!” Uru hisses at her.
“Oh, easy for you to say!” Onea snaps. “You’re not the one being scalped!”
Naprem sits up, the shape of the chair painting her back in a bruise she can already feel. “Let her go!" she tells the leering soldier. “She has nothing to do with this.”
The leering soldier scoffs, but tosses Onea towards the kitchen table. She smacks her brittle doctor’s hands down on the surface of the wood, barely retaining her balance, glaring around at them.
“Waking an old lady up in the middle of the night,” she snarls. “How undignified, you all should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Stop!” Uru pulls her sister aside, wrapping her thin arms around her tight. “Naprem,” she says, “please, just— please—”
“This isn’t necessary,” Naprem says to the leader, working to keep her voice calm and reasonable when all she wants to do is scream. “Just tell me why you’re here. I’ll go peacefully.”
The second soldier returns from the back of the house with a pile of books Naprem recognizes as hers. He tosses them down on the floor, and like alva blossoms they go cascading over the carpet, hopping and skipping, tripping over one another, landing splayed open with their pages fanned out. Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age, The Celestial Templar: Radical Reinterpretations of Religious Texts, and her signed copy of To Have and Have Not: On Liberty Without the D’jarra.
“Tora Naprem,” the leader says. “We have orders to arrest you on the behalf of the Bajoran Occupational Government.”
“I imagine you do,” Naprem says, coolly. “What are the charges?”
“You have the right to refuse to answer questions,” says the leader, ignoring her, “but such refusal may be construed as a sign of guilt.”
“This isn’t Cardassia,” Naprem says. “Cardassian jurisprudence has no place here.”
The leader looks at her, sharply, eyes glowing with something close to satisfaction.
“As of two days ago, Bajor is an annexed territory functioning in partnership with the Cardassian Union. Its land and its citizens are now under our jurisdiction. Surely,” he says, “you know that.”
“I refuse to submit myself to you or any other Cardassian,” Naprem says, anger a hard, solid stone in her chest. “If I am to be prosecuted, it will be by my own people.”
“Naprem!” Uru cries. She looks to the Cardassians fearfully. “She doesn’t mean that, we’ll cooperate, please – my niece can say wild things. She can’t help it, it’s her nature, please. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“I mean plenty by it,” Naprem snaps, refusing to duck her eyes or bow her head. “They’re going to take me no matter what you say, Auntie. Better to be dragged out with my pride and my wits about me than with nothing at all.”
“Tora Naprem,” the leader says, with evident delight, leaning in to gauge her reaction. “You are charged with disrupting the peace, spreading radical ideologies, plotting against the Occupational Government, and otherwise inciting rebellion and discord. How do you plead?”
“Oh, guilty, very guilty,” Naprem says through her teeth. “Though I know you wouldn’t ask if you thought any different.”
“You feel no remorse for committing these acts of anarchism and extremist agitation?”
“None at all,” Naprem snarls.
The leader grins down at her then, showing all his sharp teeth.
“Take them,” he says to his men, and like that, Naprem’s ripped up out of her chair like a weed by the roots, hauled out through the front door with her feet still bare. The Cardassians drag her and she kicks and flails, putting her feet down hard until they force her forward, stumbling, her bare feet scraping against the cobblestones. Outside, the night air is pleasantly cool and fragrant, so that when the leering soldier backhands her, it tenderly kisses the mark his hand leaves behind, cooling the burn of blood in her cheek and her lower lip where her tooth breaks the skin.
On the road, a transport ship is waiting, four more Cardassians manning it. They force her into the back, restraining her hands and her feet in front of her, which seems arrogant more than anything. One Cardassian stands aside with a data pad, carefully keying in information as the leader hauls her aunts down into the street.
“Bastards,” Onea snarls as they cuff her and shove her in beside Naprem. “Scaly, godless bastards.”
“I knew this would happen someday,” Uru mutters, shaking her head as they force her into the seat across from Naprem. “I knew you’d get us mixed up in your trouble someday.”
“Professor Tora,” the Cardassian with the data pad says, gruffly. “Your age and marital status, please.”
“Forty-three, and I decline to state,” Naprem says, hoping to send them on a wild goose chase. Her jaw aches from being struck, making it hard to talk.
“Any other living family?” the Cardassian asks.
Her heart leaps in her chest - she thinks of her mother in the mountains of East Province. “I decline to state.”
The Cardassian looks up from his data PADD, narrows his eyes and shakes his head, vaguely.
“You cannot decline to state,” he says.
Naprem gives him a look, anger mixing with disbelief - has no one ever refused such a request? “I do.”
“You cannot!” the Cardassian says.
Naprem narrows her eyes and dares him to come and take the answer from between her teeth.
The Cardassian sneers with contempt. “We might as well interview this one,” he says to the leader. “She won’t give me a straight answer.”
“She will eventually,” the leader says with a smile that ignites Naprem’s blood. “They all do, eventually.”
And with that, they close the back of the transport. It’s a minute before the emergency lights come on, barely illuminating the space. Uru’s staring at her small dancer’s feet, shaking her head.
“Why do you always have to be such trouble?” she asks.
Naprem swallows, just as the transport starts to move. Only the buoyancy of her fury is preventing the cold dread from sinking into her chest. She curls her hands into fists, and this time, no soft petals intercede beneath her fingers.
“Someone has to be,” she says.
Onea leans her shoulder into Naprem's, and together, they're carried away into the night.