Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach

The Enterprise saves a shuttle under attack and takes aboard a boy known as the First Servant, his physician father Gamal and Alora, a leader from the advanced world of Majalis and an old romantic interest of Pike's. Pike agrees to return them home and grows close to Alora again. Gamal tries to fake his son's death to keep him from going back, but the plan fails. At the boy's ascension ceremony Pike discovers the truth: the previous First Servant, also a child, is removed from a machine that sustains Majalis, and the new boy is connected in his place, sacrificed so that the planet can remain a paradise. Pike is horrified but has no power to intervene. Alora insists the sacrifice is the price of their way of life. Gamal, it emerges, had joined a rebel colony that opposes the practice. Before leaving to continue that resistance, he helps M'Benga with research into his daughter Rukiya's rare disease.