"It's no good, after all," said Mina. "Maybe it never was. Maybe we should just go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru's."

Stop struggling? "You could, maybe," Jin said bitterly. "Not me. No, wait, you couldn't either-you'd gab."

Mina looked indignant at this accusation. With a "Huh!" she rose to go back upstairs. At the archway into the kitchen, she flung back over her shoulder, "Two ponies have eight legs, so there!"

Jin couldn't think of a counter-argument to that.

?

As Jin was fingering his nuyen and wondering if he dared help himself to a snack, the consulate clerk wandered into the kitchen to refill his mug of green tea. He leaned against the counter and stared at Jin, who fidgeted under the cool regard.

"You're Lisa Sato's children, aren't you? The cryo-rights activist?"

"Uh…?yah?" Jin wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a secret here, but Matson-san obviously already knew.

Matson-san took a sip of tea and frowned. "Nobody's really told me anything. But, ah…?if you want me to call the police for you and your sister, before the Barrayarans all get back, I could…??"

Jin shot to his feet, almost knocking over his chair, and cried in horror, "No!"

Matson-san sloshed hot tea, swore, set the cup down, and wiped his scalded hand on his trousers.

"It was the police who took Mom!" said Jin.

"Call your relatives, then?"

"No! That's even worse!"

"Er," said Matson-san. "So you two kids are not, um, not…?prisoners, here, are you?"

"Of course not! Miles-san is helping us!" He considered events so far, and amended that to, "Trying to, anyway." And then, because that sounded weak and ungrateful, "Nobody else has ever tried like him," which was certainly true.

Matson-san scratched his head and grimaced. "Ah." He took up his tea again. "Well, if you change you mind, you can tell me, all right?" Jin glowered at him in a dismay that made him hold up a placating hand. "Just trying to help, too."

Jin wanted to cry, If that's your idea of help, don't! but it seemed too rude a thing to say to a grownup. He settled on, "All right. But I won't. Change my mind."

Matson-san shrugged uneasily and went back out to that front office-room. Jin gathered his money and fled upstairs to hide it away.

?

With three of the four people he wanted to interrogate at Suze's place still out cold, bless Roic, Miles perforce began with Madame Sato.

Inside the glass-walled, softly-lit isolation booth, she was sitting up in her narrow bed, looking pale and exhausted but on the whole very good for a new revive. She was clean in a crisp patient gown and warmly padded robe, each extra layer of cloth providing protection from exposure both to germs and prying eyes. Miles suspected-no, knew very well-from his own too-frequent hospitalizations that the latter could be more important to one's morale than the former. Ako had washed the gel from her hair; it lay undamaged in a silky fall over her shoulder.

He eased into the booth, wondering if he seemed menacing to her or merely weird. Hard to tell from her stern glare. He adjusted his filtering mask and cleared his throat.

"Good afternoon, Madame Sato. My name is Miles Vorkosigan." He smiled reassuringly, then realized she couldn't see his mouth. "Sorry about the mask. But Dr. Durona says your immune system's coming back fast. We should be able to dispense with the sterile precautions and get you out of here fairly soon."

"Are you a doctor?" Her voice was raspy but functional.

"No, your revival was done by Raven Durona, a specialist from Escobar. Who works for me," Miles realized he'd better add. Explaining himself to her was going to be an uphill slog.

"I saw him earlier." She swallowed-partly nerves, partly still getting used to being back in control of her body, he expected. "Where is here? They said I was in Northbridge." Her tone said she doubted this. Doubted everything, right now.

Miles glanced around. The view from booth took in only the shadowed, deserted recovery room, which had no exterior windows, not even looking out on the wall of another building. "Northbridge, that's right. You're in an old, decommissioned cryonics facility on the south side, which has been taken over by some rather clever squatters."

"Someone said you have my children…" The tightening of her throat smeared that last word nearly soundless.

Miles now wished he'd brought them along, even though he was still nervy from his prior failure. "Yes, Jin and Mina are safe at the Barrayaran consulate." He added after a moment, when she still didn't seem to know whether to parse this as a comfort or a threat, "Jin has all his creatures there, even Gyre-the-falcon and your old cat, so he's content for now. Mina is pretty much sticking with Jin." This familiar reference to the traveling zoo would convince her of his veracity, he hoped.

"The Barrayaran consulate! Why?" She swallowed again. "Who are you? Why are you here?" She didn't add, Why am I here? but Miles thought it was implied.

"What do you remember?"

Her lips clamped shut.

Miles tried again. "The last thing Jin and Mina remember of you is your arrest by the Northbridge municipal police, eighteen months back. Two days ago, my people and I found you frozen in a portable cryochamber in Dr. Seiichiro Leiber's townhouse basement. I'm now trying to close that eighteen-month memory gap. For both of us, I suppose."

That last plainly shocked her; her stare at him shifted from fear and misplaced anger to sheer bewilderment. "What?"

Miles sighed, hitching himself up on the stool at the end of her bed. An Auditor was supposed to listen, not talk-one of Gregor's wee jokes, was that?-but this woman had earned her briefing. Besides, it was quite likely that Lisa Sato didn't know enough about Barrayar to point to it on a wormhole map. "I expect I had better begin at the beginning. I'm a galactic. My official job title is Imperial Auditor. That's a high-level government investigator for the Barrayaran Imperium. You no doubt wonder what I'm doing on Kibou-daini." Miles wondered himself, some moments. "I was originally sent to check out a smelly situation with a large WhiteChrys company franchise on Komarr-that's the second planet of our empire-" As succinctly as he could, he explained the WhiteChrys scam with the Komarran planetary voting shares, including his successful bribery sting. For the first time, she looked faintly cheered.

"Yes, hit them where they keep their hearts, in their wallets," she murmured with satisfaction. "Although WhiteChrys isn't even the worst of the corps."

"Hold that thought, we'll come back to it. Now I need to explain how I met your son Jin, and found this place…" Necessarily, he backed up to his attendance at the cryo-conference, and the attack upon it by the N.H.L.L.

"Those murderous idiots!" said Lisa Sato, her voice hearteningly enlivened with scorn for someone other than Miles.

"In their defense, they don't seem to have succeeded in killing anyone, this round. If not for lack of trying. I actually feel I owe them-they opened up my case for me in ways I'd have had trouble finding on my own, although I suppose the Komarr scam part would have run on rails regardless. Anyway, after I broke away from them I ended up lost in the Cryocombs…"

That part held her nicely spellbound. Miles had the mother-wit to save most of his embroidering for after Jin had joined his tale, which drew her in fully. She had less trouble following the explanation of Suze's schemes than Miles had, first encounter.

"But why was Jin here?" she asked, at a loss. "I'd left the children with my sister Lorna. I only thought I'd be gone overnight, maybe a day or two, until I could get a lawyer-eighteen months?"

"Do you remember being taken to be frozen? Who did it?"

Her brow furrowed in an effort of recall. "I was in what was supposed to have been a temporary cell, more of a room, really, at the municipal police station. A man came in. I thought he might be from my lawyer. There was a hypospray, then…" She shook her head, then winced. Post-revival headache, no doubt. His had been a doozy.