Jin set a metal pot of water to boil on an ordinary, if battered, rechargeable camp heater. The boy's rooftop realm was clearly furnished out of back-alley scavenges, but some fruitful ones. The water heated quickly, and Jin slipped his three eggs, precious treasures, gently in. "Twig laid the brown one," Jin informed Miles, "and Galli the other two. They're fresh last night. And I have salt!"

Jin bustled about and produced a couple of plastic plates, the bottle of water refilled and ready for sharing between them, and half a loaf of what proved to be surprisingly excellent bread, if a trifle dry. With an air of confession, Jin lowered his voice. "Eggs come out of chickens' butts, you know."

"Yes, I knew that," Miles returned gravely. "We have Earth chickens, and other birds, where I come from, too."

Jin relaxed. "Oh, good. Some people get upset when they first find that out."

"Some people think Barrayar is a primitive world," Miles offered.

Jin brightened. "Does it have many animals?"

"Yes, the usual Earth imports, atop its own native ecosystem. The native animals are mostly small, like bugs, though. There are larger creatures in the seas."

"Do people fish?"

"Not in the seas. In stocked lakes, yes. The Barrayaran plants and animals are mostly toxic to humans."

Jin nodded wisely. "Around here, the native stuff they first found on the equator was mostly microorganisms. They figure that's where the oxygen came from, before the last big freeze. They set up a lot of Earth plants to follow the melting glaciers, north and south. But not many animals."

"Kibou-daini is a lot like Komarr-that's the second planet of my Empire," Miles said. "A cold world, being slowly terraformed. Sergyar-that's the third world-you'd probably like it. It has a fully-developed native ecosystem, and lots of amazing animals, or so my mother tells me. It's only been colonized in the last generation, so scientists are still finding out new things about the biota."

Jin looked at Miles more warmly. It seemed he had just risen in the boy's estimation-were adults who could make sensible conversation rare in Jin's world, perhaps? For a certain value of sensible equating to zoological, apparently.

"I don't suppose you have any coffee. Or tea," Miles said, without much hope.

Jin shook his head. "I have a couple of cola bulbs, though." He darted back to his shelves to return with a pair of bright plastic drink bulbs. "Except they're warm."

Miles took one up and squinted at the ingredients label, a vile concoction of cheap sugars and chemicals, and decided he couldn't manage this before breakfast even if one of the chemicals might be caffeine. So, when did you grow so nice, my Lord Auditor? Or was it grow so old? The eggs, bread and water would be challenge enough for his queasy stomach. He shook his head no-thanks and set the bulb down.

The eggs were still simmering. Miles looked around and said, "Interesting place, this. Not at all like anything I've been shown on Kibou so far." Not with the cryocorps stage-managing the tours, certainly. "How many other people live here?"

Jin shrugged. "A hundred-two hundred? I'm not sure. Suze-san would know."

Miles's eyebrows rose. "That many!" They stayed out of sight well. He supposed a community of illegal squatters would have to be discreet in order to last. "How did you come here?"

Another shrug. "I just found it. Or it found me. A couple of folks out collecting tripped over me sleeping in a park, and sort of collected me, too."

A tradition, it seemed. "Do you have other family here?"

"No."

An atypically short response, from the chatty-lonely?-child. "Family anywhere?"

"My dad's dead." A hesitation. "My mom's frozen."

A distinction with a difference, on this planet. "Siblings?"

"I have a little sister. Somewhere. With relatives."

That last word had almost been spit out. Miles controlled his brows, maintaining an empty, inviting silence.

"She was too little to take with me," Jin went on, a bit defensively, "and she didn't understand anything that was going on anyway."

"And what was, er, going on?"

The shrug again. Jin jumped up. "Oh, the eggs are done!"

So was Jin an orphan? A runaway? Both? Miles dimly thought Kibou-daini maintained the sort of children's social services usual to technologically advanced planets, if perhaps not up to the relentless standards of, say, Beta Colony. Jin was a mystery, but not, alas, the most pressing one on his hands this morning.

Jin rolled hot eggs onto their plates, making sure Miles got the special brown one, and Miles kept the wits not to argue about his guestly double-portion. Jin handed over a restaurant packet of salt from someplace called Ayako's Cafe, and they divided the bread and shared the water. "Excellent," said Miles around a mouthful. "Couldn't be fresher." Jin smiled.

Miles swallowed a bite of bread, and said, "So, you said someone around here had a comconsole? Would they let me use it?"

"Suze-san." Jin nodded. "She might. If you get to her early in the day, when she's not so grouchy." He added more reluctantly, "I could take you."

Was he regretting untying that ankle-rope? "I'd like that very much, thanks. It's rather important to me."

The I'm-pretending-I-don't-care shrug again. As if the only way Jin could imagine keeping any living thing was by tying it up and feeding it, lest it run away and never be seen again.

Jin bustled about after breakfast to feed meat shreds to the falcon, bread bits to the chickens, and other carefully sorted scraps to the rats and the residents of the glass boxes. He cleaned cages and swished out and refilled water pans with fresh drinks all round. Miles was quietly impressed with his thoroughness, though the boy might have also been dragging his feet, reluctant to end this visit. In due course, and feeling much stronger and less dizzy, Miles followed his guide cautiously down the ladder once more.

Chapter Three

Miles trailed Jin through another unlocked metal door, down some stairs into a disturbingly darkened corridor, through a utility tunnel, and into yet another building. Subliminal sounds and smells, as well as better lighting, suggested this one was occupied, and indeed, around another turn they came to what had obviously once been an employee kitchen and cafeteria. About a dozen people lingered there, some cooking, some eating. All watched in wary silence as the pair passed, except for a young woman working at an industrial-sized mixer who spotted Jin, waved a large spoon in the air, and called him to breakfast.

Jin faltered, sniffing at the aroma of baked goods wafting from her vicinity, but then smiled and shook his head. "Later, Ako! I got a guest!" Miles stared back over his shoulder as Jin drew him onward.

Along a corridor two flights up, they passed a row of doors to what formerly, Miles thought, might have been offices, but now seemed to be living quarters. Through the open ones he saw filtered daylight, and piles of personal junk variously tidy or messy, the sort of shabby, battered goods that only folks who feared they couldn't get more would ever use, or save. The people he glimpsed seemed to be mostly dozing in bedrolls on the floor, or puttering quietly. A few residents squinted back at Miles as they passed. While they seemed a mix of ages, a disproportionate number were elderly. Maybe the able-bodied young ones, like Ako-the-cook, were out doing things?

This place was drawing power and water enough to maintain decency, if not such luxuries as lift tubes. No signs of buckets used as chamber pots, stairwells doubling as urinals, or cookfires set in wastebaskets or bathtubs. So where was the power coming from, and the sewage going to? Was someone here paying for utilities, or were they being secretly siphoned from the municipal systems? The answers, Miles thought, might be revealing, if only he had time to pursue them.