“Is the Ariel still at Komarr, then?”

“Yes.”

“Quinn of course … Captain Thorne? Sergeant Taura?”

“All still waiting.”

“They must be pretty itchy themselves, by now.”

“Yes,” said Bothari-Jesek, and stabbed her fork so hard into a chunk of vat protein that it skittered across her plate. Itchy. Yes.

“So what have you learned this week, Mark?” the Countess asked him.

“Nothing you don’t already know, I’m afraid. Doesn’t Illyan pass you reports?”

“Yes, but due to the press of events I’ve only had time to glance at his analysts’ synopses. In any case, there’s only one piece of news I really want to hear.”

Right. Encouraged, Mark began to detail his survey to her, including his data-triage and his growing convictions.

“You seem to have been quite thorough,” she remarked.

He shrugged. “I now know roughly what ImpSec knows, if Illyan has been honest with me. But since ImpSec frankly doesn’t know where Miles is, it’s all futile. I swear …”

“Yes?” said the Countess.

“I swear Miles is still on Jackson’s Whole. But I can’t get Illyan to focus down. His attention is spread all over hell and gone. He has Cetagandans on the brain.”

“There are sound historical reasons for that,” said the Countess. “And current ones too, I’m afraid, though I’m sure Illyan has been cagey about confiding to you any of ImpSec’s troubles not directly connected to Miles’s situation. To say he’s had a bad month would be a gross understatement.” She hesitated too, for rather a long time. “Mark … you are, after all, Miles’s clone-twin. As close as one human being can be to another. This conviction of yours has a passionate edge. You seem to know. Do you suppose … you really do know? On some level?”

“Do you mean, like, a psychic link?” he said. What an awful idea.

She nodded, faintly flushed. Bothari-Jesek looked appalled, and gave him a strange beseeching look, Don’t you dare mess with her mind, you—!

This is the true measure of her desperation. “I’m sorry. I’m not psychic. Only psychotic.” Bothari-Jesek relaxed. He slumped, then brightened slightly with an idea. “Though it might not hurt to let Illyan think that you think so.”

“Illyan is too sturdy a rationalist.” The Countess smiled sadly.

“The passion is only frustration, ma’am. No one will let me do anything.”

“What is it that you wish to do?”

I want to run away to Beta Colony. The Countess would probably help him to… No. I am never running away again.

He took a breath, in place of a courage he did not feel. “I want to go back to Jackson’s Whole and look for him. I could do as good a job as Illyan’s other agents, I know I could! I tried the idea on him. He wouldn’t bite. If he could, he’d like to lock me in a security cell.”

“It’s days like these poor Simon would sell his soul to make the world hold still for a while,” the Countess admitted. “His attention isn’t just spread right now, it’s splintered. I have a certain sympathy for him.”

“I don’t. I wouldn’t ask Simon Illyan for the time of day. Nor would he give it to me.” Mark brooded. “Gregor would hint obliquely where I might look for a chrono. You …” his metaphor extended itself, unbidden, “would give me a clock.”

“If I had one, son, I’d give you a clock factory,” the Countess sighed.

Mark chewed, swallowed, stopped, looked up. “Really?”

“R—” she began positively, then caution caught up with her. “Really what?”

“Is Lord Mark a free man? I mean, I’ve committed no crime within the Barrayaran Empire, have I? There being no law against stupidity. I’m not under arrest.”

“No …”

“I could go to Jackson’s Whole myself! Screw Illyan and his precious resources. If—” ah, the catch—he deflated slightly, “if I had a ticket,” he ran down. His whole wealth, as far as he knew, was seventeen Imperial marks left from a twenty-five note the Countess had given him for spending money earlier in the week, now wadded up in his trouser pocket.

The Countess pushed her plate away and sat back, her face drained. “This does not strike me as a very safe idea. Speaking of stupidity.”

“Bharaputra’s probably got an execution contract out on you now, after what you did,” Bothari-Jesek put in helpfully.

“No—it’s on Admiral Naismith,” Mark argued. “And I wouldn’t be going back to Bharaputra’s.” Not that he didn’t agree with the Countess. The spot on his forehead where Baron Bharaputra had counted coup burned in secret. He stared urgently at her. “Ma’am …”

“Are you seriously asking me to finance your risking your life?” she said.

“No—my saving it! I can’t”—he waved around helplessly, at Vorkosigan House, at his whole situation—”go on like this. I’m all out of balance here, I’m all wrong.”

“Balance will come to you, in time. It’s just too soon,” she said earnestly. “You’re still very new.”

“I have to go back. I have to try to undo what I did. If I can.”

“And if you can’t, what will you do then?” asked Bothari-Jesek coldly. “Take off, with a nice head start?”

Had the woman read his mind? Mark’s shoulders bowed with the weight of her scorn. And his doubt. “I,” he breathed, “don’t …” know. He could not finish the sentence aloud.

The Countess laced her long fingers. “I don’t doubt your heart,” she said, looking at him steadily.

Hell, and she could break that heart more thoroughly with her trust than Illyan ever could with his suspicion. He crouched in his seat.

“But—you are my second chance. My new hope, all unlooked-for. I never thought I could have another child, on Barrayar. Now Jackson’s Whole has eaten Miles, and you want to go down there after him? You, too?”

“Ma’am,” he said desperately, “Mother—I cannot be your consolation prize.”

She crossed her arms, and rested her chin in one hand, cupped over her mouth. Her eyes were grey as a winter sea.

“You of all people, have to see,” Mark pleaded, “how important a second chance can he.”

She pushed back her chair, and stood up. “I’ll … have to think about this.” She exited the little dining room. She’d left half her meal on her plate, Mark saw with dismay.

Bothari-Jesek saw it too. “Good job,” she snarled.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry… .

She rose to run after the Countess.

Mark sat, abandoned and alone. And, blindly and half-consciously, proceeded to eat himself sick. He stumbled up to his room’s level by the lift tube, afterward, and lay wishing for sleep more than for breath. Neither came to him.

After an interminable time his stunned headache and hot abdominal pain were just starting to recede, when there came a knock on his door. He rolled over with a muffled groan. “Who is it?”

“Elena.”

He keyed on the light, and sat up in bed against the carved headboard, stuffing a pillow under his spine against some killer solid walnut acanthus leaves in high relief. He didn’t want to talk to Bothari-Jesek. Or to any other human being. He refastened his shirt as loosely as it would go. “Enter,” he muttered.

She came cautiously around the doorframe, her face serious and pale. “Hello. Are you feeling all right?”

“No,” he admitted.

“I came to apologize,” she said.

“You? Apologize to me? Why?”

“The Countess told me … something of what was going on with you. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

He’d been dissected again, in absentia. He could tell by the horrified way Bothari-Jesek was looking at him, as if his swollen belly was laid open and spread wide in an autopsy with a cut from here to there. “Aw, hell. What did she say now?” He struggled, with difficulty, to sit up straighter.

“Miles had talked around it. But I hadn’t understood how bad it really was. The Countess told me exactly. What Galen did to you. The shock-stick rape, and the, um, eating disorders. And the other disorder.” She kept her eyes away from his body, onto his face, a dead give-away of the unwelcome depth of her new knowledge. She and the Countess must have been talking for two hours. “And it was all so deliberately calculated. That was the most diabolical part.”