Miles stared up at him in a tilted fascination, and Jin was horribly afraid for a moment that he'd mortally offended the little man. But in a rusty voice, Miles finally said, "You know-under the circumstances-that might not be a bad idea, kid."
Jin grinned relief, and hurried to find a bit of rope in his cache of supplies. He hitched one end firmly to the metal rail beside the tower door, made sure it paid out all the way to the corner gutter, and returned to affix the other end to his guest's ankle. The little man was already asleep, the water bottle tucked under one arm and the gray cat under the other. Jin looped the rope around twice and made a good knot. After, he climbed back onto the chair and dimmed the hand light to a soft night-light glow, trying not to think about his mother.
Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.
If I ever find bedbugs, I'll catch them and put them in my jars. What do bedbugs look like, anyway?
I have no idea. It's just a silly rhyme for bedtimes. Go to sleep, Jin!
The words had used to make him feel warm, but now they made him feel cold. He hated cold.
Satisfied that he'd made all safe, and that the intriguing off-worlder could not now abandon him, Jin returned to the parapet, swung over, and started down the rungs. If he hurried, he would still get to the back door of Ayako's Cafe before all the good scraps were thrown out at closing time.
Chapter Two
When Armsman Roic woke for the second time-or maybe it was the third-the opaque drug-mush in his head had cleared to a thin throbbing haze. He felt for his wristcom and found it, unsurprisingly, gone. Groaning, he turned on his musty mattress thrown on the floor of this…?place, and opened his eyes to plain daylight and his first clear view of his prison.
It was bare of furnishings. Some kind of old hotel room, he decided after a minute from the shape, stains, outlets, corroded-looking sprinkler overhead, and cheap light above the only door. His mattress lay in what might once have been a clothes niche, opposite a small working bathroom with the door removed. A chain bolted around his ankle led in turn to a bolt on the wall. The links were long enough to let him use the facilities, he remembered that from the blurry night, but not to reach the outer door.
He visited them again, and, hoping to wash out more of the mush, drank thirstily from a flimsy plastic cup apparently left for his use. A long narrow window stretched above a stained bathtub. He stared out onto a featureless rise crowded with tall, arrow-shaped conifers, dark and tangled. He rapped on the glass; it gave back that dull tone that said unbreakable, at least by anyone not armed with a power drill or perhaps a plasma arc.
He tested the length of his chain. It didn't go even halfway to the door, but by standing upright, he found he could see out the front picture window, unobscured by curtains or a polarizing filter. They must not expect visitors. This room seemed to open onto a second-storey gallery. The view beyond the railing ran downhill to a broad patch of flat scrub that curved out of sight, framed by more tangled taiga. Not another building to be seen.
He wasn't in the city any more, that was certain. Had there been any urban glow on the horizon last night? He could only remember the night-light in the loo. He could be ten kilometers from Northbridge or ten thousand, for all he knew. Which could make a difference, later.
He folded his considerable length back onto the mattress, and began working at the bolt in the wall, the only item even remotely resembling a weak point. It didn't budge, and his big fingers could scarcely get a purchase on the annoying little thing. If only he could get it started wriggling…?
How t' devil did I end up in this mess? He imagined Armsman-commander Pym critiquing his actions of yesterday, and cringed. This was a thousand times worse than the infamous bug butter debacle. Yet it had all started so benignly, four weeks ago.
If abruptly, but there was nothing new to that-Lord Auditor Vorkosigan's galactic assignments from Emperor Gregor usually arrived abruptly. After a dozen off-world trips in m'lord's wake, Roic was getting practiced at the scramble to arrange m'lord's luggage, in his role of sometime-batman, m'lord's and his own travel documents, in his role as personal assistant-the job title Roic traveled under, as explaining the ancient and honorable rank of Armsman to galactics was always a losing game-and m'lord's security. And-though m'lord almost never discussed this aloud-private medtech for m'lord's lingering health issues.
The competent Vorkosigan House staff, under the even more competent supervision of Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan, had actually relieved him of the first of these tasks. Canceling his own affairs had cost more of a pang, as he'd just worked up the courage to invite Miss Pym down to Hassadar to meet his parents for the first time. But as an armsman's child, Aurie had understood perfectly. Courting his commander's daughter had been an oblique process this past year, rather like those Earth insects Lady Vorkosigan had described, where the male approached with painful caution lest he be mistaken for a meal by his intended. But it was Armsman-commander Pym who would tear off Roic's head and eat it if he made a mis-step.
Still, in less than a day they'd boarded the shuttle for orbital transfer to the jumpship, and began three boring, if comfortable, weeks of travel to New Hope II, or Kibou-daini as it was called by the locals to distinguish it from two other planets and a transfer station of the same name in the wormhole nexus. Kibou for short, thankfully. M'lord, accustomed from his old days in Imperial Security not to waste travel time, had handed Roic quantities of homework about their destination, and himself plunged into even larger and more classified reports.
Roic himself couldn't figure this gig out. Granted, Lord Vorkosigan was the only person Roic knew who had actually died and been cryo-revived, making him the hands-on expert in the subject among Gregor's Auditors, the Emperor's personal stable of troubleshooters. And he knew his galactics, no question there. And he had just successfully concluded, in his other hat as the-Count-his-father's voting proxy to the Council of Counts, several years on committees devoted to upgrading Barrayaran law on reproductive technologies to galactic standards. Cryonics, Roic supposed, was the other end of these life-tech issues, and so a logical extension. But the Northbridge Invitational Conference on Cryonics, hosted by a consortium of Kibou-daini cryorevival corporations, had proved as harmless a hotel-full of misty-eyed science boffins and well-fed lawyers as Roic had ever seen.
"Don't underestimate the viciousness of academics when funding is at stake," m'lord had said, when Roic had pointed this out. "Nor attorneys' command of ambush tactics."
"Yeah, but they don't generally use stunners or needlers," Roic had returned. "It's all words. My skills seem wasted. When they start firing off those paragraph grenades, I'd rather hunker down behind you."
He'd spoken too soon, it seemed.
He'd sat in on every program m'lord had attended, in the back of the room where he could watch all the exits, and been hard-put to stay awake, though m'lord recorded everything indiscriminately. He followed m'lord to meals with other attendees and to lavish evening parties provided by the conference's sponsors, at varying distances from looming over m'lord's short shoulder to leaning against the far wall, as m'lord signaled. He learned far more about cryonics and the people who dealt with it than he had ever wanted to know.
And he had just about come to the conclusion that the entire jaunt was a put-up job between Lady Vorkosigan and Empress Laisa, to give Ekaterin a much-needed holiday from a spouse who diagnosed all complaints as a sign of boredom, to be alleviated with an exciting new task. Since Lady Vorkosigan already ran an enormous household, rode herd on four children under the age of six and a teenage son from a prior marriage, played political hostess for her husband in his roles both as an Imperial Auditor and as the Count's heir, had undertaken supervisory responsibilities for agriculture and terraforming in the Vorkosigan's District, and tried desperately, in her spare seconds, to maintain a garden design business, bets were on below-stairs as to when she would break and respond to m'lord's idea of husbandly help by defenestrating the little man from the fourth floor of Vorkosigan House. This trip seemed a reasonable substitute to Roic.