Both officers went rigid. "What sort of men?" asked Michiko.

"Just…?men."

"Friends? Relatives?"

Relatives were not a good thing, in Jin's world. "No. I just met them today."

"Where did you meet them?"

Jin's mouth clamped shut.

"Not addressed. Not postal-sealed. No legal reason we can't peek, is there?" said Dan.

The woman nodded and handed the envelope over. Dan popped a folding knife and slit it open from the bottom, holding it above the countertop. A thick wad of currency thumped out, followed by a fluttering note.

It was more money than Jin had seen in one place in his life. From their widening eyes, it was more money than the two security officers were used to seeing in one lump, too, certainly in the hands of a kid.

Dan riffled the wad and vented a long, amazed whistle.

Michiko said, "Drug ring, do you think? Feelie-dream smugglers?"

"It could be-gods, it could be anything. Congratulations, Michiko. Shouldn't wonder if there's a promotion in this." Staring at the envelope with more respect, Dan belatedly pulled a pair of thin plastic gloves from his pocket and donned them before he picked up the note. It seemed to be printed on half a flimsy.

Dan read aloud, "We must trust that you know what you are doing. Please contact us in person as soon as possible." He turned the note in the light. "No address, no date, no names, no signature. Nothing. Veery suspicious."

Michiko bent to look Jin sternly in the eyes. "Where did you meet these bad men, child?"

"They weren't bad men. They were just…?men. Friends of a friend."

"Where were you taking all this money?"

"I didn't know it was money!"

Michiko's eyebrows rose. "Do you believe that?" she asked her partner.

"Yah," said Dan, "or he might have taken off with it."

"Good point."

"I wouldn't have! Even if I had known!"

"No one can threaten you now, Jin," Michiko said more gently. "You're safe."

"No one did threaten me!" Jin had never felt less safe in his life. And if he blabbed, Suze and Ako and Tenbury and everyone who had befriended him wouldn't be safe, either. And Lucky and the ratties and the chickens, and big, beautiful Gyre… Lips tight as he could press them, Jin stared back at the officers.

"Call Youth Services to pick up the boy," said Michiko. "The rest of the evidence had better go to Vice, at a guess."

"Yah," said Dan, his gloved hands sliding Jin's precious envelope, the wad of cash, and the note into a transparent plastic bag.

"My animals," Jin whispered. Such a simple task Miles-san had entrusted him with, and he'd screwed it all up. He'd screwed everything up. Between his scrunched eyelids, tears began to leak.

?

With a grating noise and a puff of powder, the bolt popped out of the concrete.

"Finally," breathed Roic.

Chapter Five

Roic waited for dusk to deepen, and for the occasional echo of footsteps along the gallery to fall silent for a good long time, before venturing a cautious reconnoiter. The door lock yielded to force, or rather, the flimsy doorframe splintered and gave up the mechanism whole, more loudly than he would have liked, but no one called out or came to investigate. Crouching to slip beneath any view from the windows, bare feet silent on the boards but for an occasional tiny clink from the chain swathing his ankle, he discovered that the gallery wrapped the rectangular building on three sides, with stairs down on either end. About a dozen rooms like his lined this level. There was no third storey.

Another building, with faint yellow gleams leaking from its windows, lay down the slope to the right. Obscured in the trees behind it seemed to be a parking area, but a marked lack of security lighting made the details invisible-both to Roic and to anyone passing overhead in a lightflyer, he guessed. Right now he was grateful for the shadows. He slipped around to the far end. A third building, vaguely shedlike, sat low and black in the gloom down at the border of the level scrubland. Roic wondered if there'd been a fire, to so clear out the crowded conifers.

Roic's heart nearly failed him when a voice above his head hissed, "Roic! Up here!"

He jerked his head back to see a pale smudge of a face peering over the edge of the roof. A long black braid swung forward over the figure's shoulder, triggering recognition and relief. "Dr. Durona? Raven? So they got you, too!"

"Sh! Not so loud. We were in the same lift van. You were out cold. Come up, before someone comes back." A pair of lean arms extended downward; Raven was apparently lying prone. "Careful of my hands…"

With no more noise than a grunt and a scrape, Roic scrambled up to the flat rooftop. Their careful foot-slides making no thumps that could be heard through a ceiling below, they took shelter of sorts in the lee of a vent housing.

Raven Durona could have passed for a Kibou-daini native-a slim intellectual Eurasian in body and face, with a high-bridged nose and straight black hair to his waist-till he opened his mouth and that un-local accent came out. Delegate from the Durona Medical Group on Escobar, he'd been the only other person at the cryo-conference Roic had known, and moderately well at that, but m'lord, inexplicably, had signed them away from each other. Raven had accepted the signal with the merest nod and eyebrow twitch, and steered around Roic and m'lord thereafter. Leaving m'lord clear, Roic realized in retrospect, to trawl for his own targets.

Roic lowered himself to sit cross-legged, the Escobaran cryo-surgeon wrapped his arms around his knees, and they put their faces close together.

In a nearly voiceless murmur, Roic said, "Seen any guards?"

"No, but our captors are still awake," Dr. Durona returned in a matching tone. "They're mostly still down in the dining hall, but some wander back up here at random. They sleep below us."

"How'd you get out of your room?"

"Surgery on my bathroom window-lock."

An exit doubtless aided by the fact that the man was lithe as a snake; Roic's shoulders would not have fit. "And the chains?"

"Chains? You had chains? Special, Roic!"

"Never mind. How far are we from Northbridge, did you see? And where t'hell are we?"

"About a hundred, hundred and fifty kilometers, I'd guess. The one glimpse I had was all forest as far as I could see. There don't seem to be any roads-everything must come in by lightflyer or lift van. This place used to be some kind of lake resort for Northbridge weekenders, before the dam blew out in a storm and the lake ran down the river. The rebuild got tied up in lawsuits, so the resort has been defunct for a couple of years. One of our kidnappers owns it, turns out. Which may have been how the Legacy Liberators came up with this crazed scheme in the first place."

"What t'hell are they doing-no, wait. First, have you seen Lord Vorkosigan?"

Raven shook his dark head. "I thought I saw them tackle him, back in the lobby when they grabbed me and you were throwing people into the lift tube and bellowing at them to keep climbing-I swear some of those poor delegates were more scared of you than of our attackers-but I haven't seen him since. There are only six other hostages here, plus me and you. All locked in for the night. It seems the N.H.L.L. was setting up to host three times that many. They're not best pleased with you for that."

"How many bad guys?"

"What a Barrayaran turn of phrase! About a dozen here, at a guess. I've not seen them all together. They take it in shifts to harass us."

"Huh?"

"Lecturing us, mostly. About the stern and glorious goals of the New Hope Legacy Liberators."

"Oh. I had a sample."

"Only a sample? The rest of us have endured hours of it. They marched us down to the dining hall and harangued us till they were hoarse."