"Did the Baronne send you?" Miles asked.
"No. But I told the guards your food was drugged, and the Baronne sent me to stay and watch you eat it," she added, somewhat off-the-cuff.
"Is that, uh, true?" he asked.
"No." She tossed her head, making her long hair swing, and dropped him from her attention to focus hungrily upon Rowan. "Who are you?"
"She is the Baronne's sister," he said instantly. "Daughter to your lady's mother. Did you know you were named after your, uh, grandmother?"
" . . . Grandmother?"
"Tell her about the Durona Group, Rowan," he said urgently.
"Give me a chance to speak, then, why don't you," Rowan said through her teeth, smiling.
"Does she know what she is? Ask her if she knows what she is," he demanded, then stuffed his knuckle into his mouth and bit it. The girl hadn't come for him. She'd come for Rowan. He had to let Rowan take this one.
"Well," Rowan glanced at the closed door, and back to the girl, "The Duronas are a group of thirty-six cloned siblings. We live under the protection of House Fell. Our mother—the first Durona—is named Lilly, too. She was very sad when Lotus—the Baronne—left us. Lotus used to be my . . . older sister, you see. You must be my sister too, then. Has Lotus told you why she had you? Are you to be her daughter? Her heir?"
"I am to be united with my lady," said the girl. There was a faint defiance in her tone, but her fascination with Rowan was obvious. "I wondered . . . if you were to take my place." Jealousy? Madness.
Rowan's eyes darkened in muted horror. "Do you understand just what that means? What a clone-brain transplant is? She will take your body, Lilly, and you will be nowhere."
"Yes. I know. It's my destiny." She tossed her head again, flipping her hair back from her face. Her tone was one of conviction. But her eyes . . . was there the faintest question, in her eyes?
"So much alike, you two," he murmured, circling them in suppressed anxiety. Smiling. "I'll bet you could exchange clothes with each other, and no one could tell the difference." Rowan's quick glance told him yes, she'd caught it, but thought he was pushing it too hard. "Naw," he went on, pursing his lips and tilting his head, "I don't think so. The girl's too fat. Don't you think she's too fat, Rowan?"
"I am not fat!" said Lilly Junior indignantly.
"Rowan's clothes would never fit you."
"You're wrong," said Rowan, giving up and letting herself be pushed into fast-forward. "He's an idiot. Let's prove it, Lilly." She began to peel out of her jacket, blouse, trousers.
Slowly, very curiously, the girl took off her jacket and skirt, and took up Rowan's outfit. Rowan did not yet touch Lilly's silks, laid out neatly on the bed.
"Oh, that looks nice," said Rowan. She nodded toward the bathroom. "You should go look at yourself."
"I was wrong," Miles admitted nobly, steering the girl toward the bathroom. No time to plot, no way to give orders. He'd have to utterly rely on Rowan's . . . initiative. "Actually, Rowan's clothes look quite good on you. Imagine yourself as a Durona surgeon. They're all doctors there, did you know? You could be a doctor too. . . ." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rowan tear the bands from her hair and shake it loose, and grab for the silks. He let the door shut behind him and Lilly, aiming her at the mirror. He turned on the water, to mask the sound of Rowan's knock on the outer door, of the guard opening it, of her retreat, hair swinging down across her face. . . .
Lilly stared into the long mirror. She glanced at him by her side in it, waving his hand as if to introduce her to herself, then down at the top of his head by her shoulder. He grabbed a cup and took a gulp of water, to clear his throat for action. How long could he keep the girl distracted in here? He didn't think he could successfully sap her on the skull, and he was not completely certain which item in Rowan's medical satchel, sitting on the countertop, was the threatened sedative.
To his surprise, she spoke first. "You're the one who came for me, aren't you. For all us clones."
"Uh . . ." The disasterous Dendarii raid on Bharaputra's? Had she been one of the rescuees? What was she doing back here, then? "Excuse me. I've been dead, lately, and my brain isn't working too well. Cryo-amnesia. It might have been me, but you might have met my clone-twin."
"You have clone-sibs too?"
"At least one. My . . . brother."
"You were really dead?" She sounded faintly disbelieving.
He pulled up his gray knit shirt and displayed his scars.
"Oh," she said, impressed. "I guess you were."
"Rowan put me back together. She's very good." No, don't draw her attention to the missing Rowan. "You could be just as good, I'll bet, if you tried. If you were trained."
"What was it like? Being dead?" Her eyes were suddenly intent upon his face.
He shrugged his shirt back down. "Dull. Really boring. A blank. I don't remember anything. I don't remember dying—" His breath caught. . . . the projectile weapon's muzzle, bright with flame . . . his chest bursting outward, terrible pain . . . He inhaled and leaned against the counter, legs suddenly weak. "Lonely. You wouldn't like it. I guarantee." He took her warm hand. "Being alive is much better. Being alive is, is . . ." He needed something to stand on. He scrambled up on the counter instead, crouching eye to eye with her at last. He twined her hair in his hand, tilted his head, and kissed her, just a brief press of the lips. "You can tell you're alive when somebody touches you back."
She drew back, shocked and interested. "You kiss differently from the Baron."
His brain seemed to hiccup. "The Baron has kissed you?"
"Yes . . ."
Sampling his wife's new body early? How soon was that transplant scheduled? "Have you always lived with, uh, your lady?"
"No. I was brought here after the clone-crèche was wrecked. The repairs are almost complete. I'll be moving back soon."
"But . . . not for long."
"No."
The temptations to the Baron must be . . . interesting. After all, she would have her brain destroyed soon, and be unable to accuse. Vasa Luigi could do anything but damage her virginity. What was this doing to her apparent mental conditioning, her allegiance to her destiny? Something, obviously, or she wouldn't be here.
She glanced at the closed door, and her mouth went round in sudden suspicion. She pulled her hand from his grip, and raced back to the empty bedroom. "Oh, no!"
"Sh! Sh!" He ran after her, grabbed her hand again, lunged up to stand on the bed to turn her face to his and regain eye contact. "Don't shout!" he hissed. "If you run out and tell the guards, you'll be in terrible trouble, but if you just wait until she comes back, no one will ever know." He felt quite vile, to be playing so on her obvious panic, but it had to be done. "Be quiet, and no one will ever know." He had no idea if Rowan intended to come back, for that matter. By this point maybe she had just wanted to escape from him. None of his plans had assumed a piece of luck like this.
Lilly Junior could physically overpower him with ease, though he was not sure if she realized it. One good punch to his chest would drop him to the floor. She wouldn't even have to hit him very hard.
"Sit down," he told her. "Here, next to me. Don't be afraid. Actually, I can't imagine what you could possibly be afraid of, if your destiny doesn't make you blink. You must be a courageous girl. Woman. Sit . . ." He drew her down; she glanced from him to the door in great uncertainty, but allowed herself to be settled, temporarily. Her muscles were tight as springs. "Tell me . . . tell me about yourself. Tell me about your life. You are a most interesting person, do you know?"
"Me?"
"I can't remember much about my life, right now, which is why I ask. It's a terror to me, not to be able to remember. It's killing me. What's the very earliest thing about yourself that you can remember?"
"Why . . . I suppose . . . the place I lived before I came to the crèche. There was a woman who took care of me. I have—this is silly—but I remember she had some purple flowers, as tall as I was, that grew o
ut of this little square of a garden, hardly a meter square, and they smelled like grapes."
"Yes? Tell me more about those flowers . . ."
They were in for a long conversation, he feared. And then what? That Rowan had not yet been brought back was a very good sign. That she might not be coming back left an unsettling dilemma for Lilly Junior. So what could the Baron and Baronne possibly do to her? his mind mocked savagely. Kill her?
They talked of her life in the crèche. He teased out an account of the Dendarii raid from her point of view. How she had managed to re-join the Baron. Sharp, sharp kid. What a mess for Mark. The pauses grew longer. He was going to end up talking about himself soon, just to keep things going, and that was incredibly dangerous. She was running out of conversation, her eyes turning more and more often toward the door.
"Rowan's not coming back," said Lilly Junior at last. "Is she."
"I think not," he said frankly. "I think she's escaped clean."
"How can you tell?"
"If they had caught her, they would have come for you, even if they didn't bring her back here. From their point of view, Rowan is still in here. It's you who's missing."
"You don't think they could have mistaken her for me, do you?" she gasped in alarm. "Taken her to be united with my lady?"
He wasn't sure if she was afraid for Rowan, or afraid that Rowan would steal her place. What a ghastly, hideous new paranoia. "How soon are you . . . no," he reassured her. Himself. "No. At a glance in the hallway, sure, you'd look quite alike, but someone would have to take a closer look for that. She's years older than you. It's just not possible."
"What should I do?" She tried to get to her feet; he held her arm, pulled her back to his side on the bed.
"Nothing," he advised. "It's all right. Tell them—tell them I made you stay in here."
She looked askance at his littleness. "How?"
"Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion," he said truthfully. "You can blame it on me."
She looked most dubious.
How old was she? He'd spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life story, and there didn't seem to be very much of it. Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naivete. The greatest adventure of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the Dendarii Mercenaries.
Rowan. She's made it out. Then what? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson's Whole. You couldn't trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-eyed.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "You are so beautiful . . . on the inside. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman."
"My lady is a great woman," she said sturdily. "She deserves to live more."
What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only herself, apparently.
"Besides," said Lilly Junior. "I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were squirming all over her."
"Who?"
"Oh, that's right. That must have been your clone-twin."
"My brother," he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?
She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored. She looked at him speculatively. "Would you like to kiss me again?" she inquired.
It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this girl worried him. She was not his . . . equal. But he had to kill time, keep her in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. "Well . . . all right. . . ."
After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and remarked, "That's not the way the Baron does it."
"What do you do for Vasa Luigi?"
She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a minute, he choked, "Stop!"
"Don't you like it? The Baron does."
"I'm sure." Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining table, and scrunched himself up in it. "That's, um, very nice, Lilly, but it's too serious for you and me."
"I don't understand."
"Just exactly so." She was a child, despite her grown-up body, he was increasingly certain of it. "When you are older . . . you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without." He tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half-successfully. Vasa Luigi, you scum.
She frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not going to be older."
He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees and shuddered. Hell.
He suddenly remembered how he'd met Sergeant Taura. How they had become lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the pot-holes in his memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation; it must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution. But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a smash-and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century, if she wasn't . . . cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.
Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it. "Don't you want to live?" he asked her.
"I . . . don't know."
"I do. I want to live. And believe me, I have considered the alternative deeply."
"You are . . . a funny, little, ugly man. What can you get from life?"
"Everything. And I mean to get more." I want, I want. Wealth, power, love. Victories, splendid, brilliant victories, shining reflected in the eyes of comrades. Someday, a wife, children. A herd of children, tall and healthy, to rock those who whispered Mutant! right back on their heels and over on their pointed heads. And I mean to have a brother.
Mark. Yeah. The surly little fellow that Baron Ryoval was, quite possibly, taking apart strand by strand right now. In Miles's place. His nerves stretched to the screaming point, with no release. I've got to make time.
He finally persuaded Lilly Junior to go to sleep, wrapped up in the covers on Rowan's side of the bed. Chivalrously, he took the chair. A couple of hours into the night and he was in agony. He tried the floor. It was cold. His chest ached. He dreaded the thought of waking with a cough. He finally crept into the bed on top of the covers, and curled up facing away from her. He was intensely conscious of her body. The reverse was obviously not so. His anxiety was the more enormous for being so formless. He didn't have control of anything. Near morning, he at last warmed up enough to doze.
"Rowan, m'love," he muttered muzzily, nuzzling into her scented hair and wrapping himself around her warm, long body. "M'lady." A Barrayaran turn of phrase; he knew where that milady came from, at long last. She flinched; he recoiled. Consciousness returned. "Ak! Sorry."
Lilly Junior sat up, shaking off his ugly-little-man grasp. Grope, actually. "I am not my lady!"
"Sorry, wrong referent. I think of Rowan as milady, inside my head. She is milady, and I'm her . . ." court fool "knight. I really am a soldier, you know. Despite being short."
At the second knock on the door, he realized what had awakened him. "Breakfast. Quick! Into the bathroom. Rattle around in there. I swear we can keep this going another round."
For once he did not try to engage the guards in conversation leading to bribery. Lilly Junior came back out when the door closed again behind the servant. She ate slowly, dubiously, as if she doubted her right to food. He watched her, increasingly fascinated. "Here. Have this other roll. You can put sugar on it, you know."
"I'm not allowed to eat sugar."
"You should have sugar." He paused. "You should have everything. You should have friends. You should have . . . sister
s. You should have education to the limits of your mind's powers, and work to challenge your spirit. Work makes you bigger. More real. You eat it up, and grow. You should have love. A knight of your own. Much taller. You should have . . . ice cream."
"I mustn't get fat. My lady is my destiny."
"Destiny! What do you know about destiny?" He rose and began to pace, zig-zagging around bed and table. "I'm a frigging expert on destiny. Your lady is a false destiny, and do you know how I know? She takes everything, but she doesn't give anything back.
"Real destiny takes everything—the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure—and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can't give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I've come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it."
His conviction felt utterly megalomanic. He adored moments like this.
"You're insane," she said, staring at him warily.
"How would you know? You've never met a sane person in your life. Have you? Think about it."
Her rising interest fell. "It's no use. I'm a prisoner anyway. Where would I go?"
"Lilly Durona would take you in," he said promptly. "The Durona Group is under House Fell's protection, you know. If you could get to your grandmother, you'd be safe."
Her brows drew down just like Rowan's had, when she was knocking holes in his escape plans. "How?"
"They can't leave us in here forever. Suppose . . ." he walked behind her, gathered up her hair, and held it in a messy wad on the back of her head. "I didn't get the impression Vasa Luigi meant to keep Rowan past the point of need for secrecy. When I go, so should she. If they thought you were Rowan, I bet you could just walk right out."
"What . . . would I say?"
"As little as possible. Hello, Dr. Durona, your ride is here. Pick up your bag, and go."
"I couldn't."
"You could try. If you fail, you'll lose nothing. If you win, you'll win everything. And—if you got away—you could tell people where I've gone. Who took me, and when. All it takes is a few minutes of nerve, and that's free. We make it ourselves, out of ourselves. Nerve can't be taken away from you like a purse or something. Hell, why am I telling you that? You escaped the Dendarii Mercenaries on nerve and wit alone."
Miles Errant Page 80
