"Hey!" yelps Miles, but he restrains himself from actually trying to jump them. It wouldn't do any bloody good.

"You know, that's just what your husband said. He also said tied to a chair is not your optimal conversational context. Care to comment?"

"It really isn't. Neither is 'recently stunned'. But I'll make do, if what you want to do is talk as opposed to bringing me somewhere I can buy you a ticket to Tau Ceti and then call the police."

"Yeah, sorry about that. I think the guards are more afraid of you than I am. You're engineered but you've had no combat training; I could take you. What's a ticket to Tau Ceti supposed to do for me?"

"You might be able to take me; I very much doubt you could outrun me," she points out. "Neither could they. I don't know what you want to do, but Tau Ceti is less here than here. I'll send you all the way to Beta or something if you'd rather. With a pocketful of cash if you like."

"And you can't outrun a stunner beam. Game to me," Mark points out. "Anyway, that's a very nice offer, but if I wanted to run I could just run. All the way to Beta Colony if I felt like it. I hear I've got a grandmother there."

"You have, although I've never met her so I can't comment on her hospitality."

"I am currently very much afraid that at some point my value as a live captive will run out and I will never get to go home and finish working on the baby and help Dr. Cheung's research and make sufficiently certain that Miles is my Miles to the point where I'm willing to act like it more than conversationally and ever play the piano again and so on. This is probably not what you have in mind."

"It isn't," he agrees. "I'm afraid of different things, different ways. It's like... how do I translate...? It's like having a little invisible goblin sitting on my shoulder with a nerve disruptor," he gestures to the approximate hypothetical location of the goblin, "and every time I think about doing something that I know would make Galen angry..." He shrugs. "It doesn't matter if it would be almost impossible for him to find me after I pissed him off. The goblin's still there. A fear so strong it has separated from its source and gained a life of its own."

She shakes her head. "I've never had that, no."

"I'm happy for you. I wouldn't wish my life on anyone."

"Neither would I. I have looked at Miles's genome. I have a loose inkling of what must have happened to you."

"Oh, lots of surgery," he says dismissively. "Surgery's not so bad. I thought it was a bit much when they replaced my leg bones with synthetics, but I wasn't about to complain. There's things worse than surgery."

"They replaced -? Of course they did. But you also do an astonishingly convincing put-on of Miles for having to be younger than him, and raised in a different context, and I don't imagine that left much spare time." Pause. "And I imagine when your leg bones were replaced you didn't have anyone visiting you in the hospital to sing to you."

"You sang to him? Of course you did," says Mark, smiling. "Putting on Miles is easy. I had to learn a lot about him, but I don't think it was as hard as you're imagining. I learn fast. No, the hard part is..." he trails off and makes a vague gesture in her direction.

"The part where I picked you up." She sighs. "You probably could have rescued the act, but then of course I would have touched you again eventually."

"Yeah. And—what was it Miles said—" He looks abstracted for a moment, then quotes perfectly,

"...Are you so horrifyingly deprived of positive touch that being picked up and kissed by someone who thinks you're her husband nearly gives you a heart attack?"