The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace. . . . The deathly flashbacks to Dagoola had faded of late weeks, but this one took him unawares in an ordinary public lift tube descending to the bubble-car system. Elli was falling, torn out of his numb grip by a vicious vortex– design defect in the anti-grav system—swallowed by darkness—

"Miles, ow!" Elli objected. "Let go of my arm! What's the matter?"

"Falling," Miles gasped.

"Of course we're falling, this is the down-tube. Are you all right? Let me see the pupils of your eyes." She grabbed a hand-grip and pulled them to the side of the tube, out of the central fast traffic zone. Midnight Londoners continued to flow past them. Hell had been modernized, Miles decided wildly, and this was a river of lost souls gurgling down some cosmic drain, faster and faster.

The pupils of her eyes were large and dark. . . .

"Do your eyes get dilated or constricted when you get one of your weird drug reactions?" she demanded worriedly, her face centimeters from his.

"What are they doing now?"

"Pulsing."

"I'm all right." Miles swallowed. "The surgeon double-checks anything she puts me on, now. It may make me a little dizzy, she told me that." He had not loosed his grip.

In the lift tube, Miles realized suddenly, their height difference was voided. They hung face to face, his boots dangling above her ankles—he didn't even need to hunt up a box to stand on, nor risk a twist in his neck—impulsively, his lips dove onto hers. There was a split-second wail of terror in his mind, like the moment after he'd plunged from the rocks into thirty meters of clear green water that he knew was icy cold, after he'd surrendered all choice to gravity but before the consequences engulfed him.

The water was warm, warm. . . . Her eyes widened in surprise. He hesitated, losing his precious forward momentum, and began to withdraw. Her lips parted for him, and her arm clamped around the back of his neck. She was an athletic woman; the grip was a non-regulation but effective immobilization. Surely the first time his being pinned to the mat had meant he'd won. He devoured her lips ravenously, kissed her cheeks, eyelids, brow, nose, chin—where was the sweet well of her mouth? there, yes. . . .

The bulky package containing the live fur began to drift, bumping down the lift tube. They were jostled by a descending woman who frowned at them, a teenage boy shooting down the center of the tube hooted and made rude, explicit gestures, and the beeper in Elli's pocket went off.

Awkwardly, they recaptured the fur and scrambled off the first exit they came to, and fled the tube's field through an archway onto a bubble-car platform. They staggered into the open and stared at each other, shaken. In one lunatic moment, Miles realized, he'd upended their carefully-balanced working relationship, and what were they now? Officer and subordinate? Man and woman? Friend and friend, lover and lover? It could be a fatal error.

It could also be fatal without the error; Dagoola had thrust that lesson home. The person inside the uniform was larger than the soldier, the man more complex than his role. Death could take not just him but her tomorrow, and a universe of possibilities, not just a military officer, would be extinguished. He would kiss her again—damn, he could only reach her ivory throat now—

The ivory throat emitted a dismayed growl, and she keyed open the channel on the secure comm link, saying, "What the hell . . . ? It can't be you, you're here. Quinn here!"

"Commander Quinn?" Ivan Vorpatril's voice came small but clear. "Is Miles with you?"

Miles's lips rippled in a snarl of frustration. Ivan's timing was supernatural, as ever.

"Yes, why?" said Quinn to the comm link.

"Well, tell him to get his ass back here. I'm holding a hole in the Security net for him, but I can't hold it much longer. Hell, I can't stay awake much longer." A long gasp that Miles interpreted as a yawn wheezed from the comm link.

"My God, I didn't think he could really do it," Miles muttered. He grabbed the comm link. "Ivan? Can you really get me back in without being seen?"

"For about fifteen more minutes. And I had to bend regs all to hell and gone to do it, too. I'm holding down the guard post on the third sub-level, where the municipal power and sewer connections come through. I can loop the vid record and cut out the shot of your entry, but only if you get back here before Corporal Veli does. I don't mind putting my tail on the line for you, but I object to putting my tail on the line for nothing, you copy?"

Elli was studying the colorful holovid display mapping the tubeway system. "You can just make it, I think."

"It won't do any good—"

She grabbed his elbow and marched him toward the bubble cars, the firm gleam of duty crowding out the softer light in her eyes. "We'll have ten more minutes together on the way."

Miles massaged his face, as she went to credit their tokens, trying to rub his escaping rationality back through his skin by force. He looked up to see his own dim reflection staring back at him from the mirrored wall, shadowed by a pillar, face suffused with frustration and terror. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked again, moving in front of the pillar and staring. Most unpleasant—for a second, he had seen himself wearing his green Barrayaran uniform. Damn the pain pills. Was his subconscious trying to tell him something? Well, he didn't suppose he was in real trouble until a brain scan taken of him in his two different uniforms produced two different patterns.

Upon reflection, the idea was suddenly not funny.

He embraced Quinn upon her return with more complicated feelings than sexual desire alone. They stole kisses in the bubble car—more pain than pleasure; by the time they reached their destination Miles was in the most physically uncomfortable state of arousal he could ever recall. Surely all his blood had departed his brains to engorge his loins, rendering him moronic by hypoxia and lust.

She left him on the platform in the embassy district with an anguished whisper of "Later . . . !" It was only after the tubeway had swallowed her that Miles realized she'd left him holding the bag, which was vibrating with a rhythmic purr.

"Nice kitty." Miles hoisted it with a sigh, and began walking—hobbling—home.

He awoke blearily the next morning engulfed in rumbling black fur.

"Friendly thing, isn't it?" remarked Ivan.

Miles fought his way clear, spitting fuzz. The salesman had lied: clearly the near-beast ate people, not radiation. It enveloped them secretly in the night and ingested them like an amoeba—he'd left it on the foot of his bed, dammit. Thousands of little kids, sliding under their blankets to protect them from the monsters in their closets, were in for a shocking surprise. The cultured fur salesman was clearly a Cetagandan agent-provocateur assassin. . . .

Ivan, wearing his underwear and with his toothbrush sticking jauntily out between gleaming incisors, paused to run his hands through the black silk. It rippled, as if trying to arch into the strokes.

" 'At's amazing," Ivan's unshaven jaw worked, shifting the toothbrush around. "You want to rub it all over your skin."

Miles pictured Ivan, lolling. . . . "Yech," he shuddered. "God. Where'sa coffee?"

"Downstairs. After you're dressed all nice and regulation. Try to at least look as if you'd been in bed since yesterday afternoon."

Miles smelled trouble instantly when Galeni called him, alone, into his office a half hour after their work-shift started.

"Good morning, Lieutenant Vorkosigan," Galeni smiled, falsely affable. Galeni's false smile was as horrendous as his rare real one was charming. "Morning, sir," Miles nodded warily. "All over your acute osteo-inflammatory attack, I see."