"It's good to be home. My trip was unpleasantly exciting towards the end. How much have you already heard?"

"Very little. Apparently Miles has a brother now, and there was a Komarran plot involved?"

"Komarran substitution plot, involved cloning Miles when Miles would have been I think about six. The clone, when he is not pretending to be Miles, has shown willing to answer to Mark. The principal Komarran plotter is dead and Mark has been turned loose with a pocketful of cash and the awareness that he may turn up on our doorstep at any time he chooses. The consensus is that there are no more clones - at least, not that survived to adulthood - and I have a medical scan I took of I'm-sufficiently-certain-it-was-Miles for baseline comparison if Mark decides to resume imposterish ways, though I don't find it overwhelmingly likely."

"Well, I'll take a copy of the scan. Did you meet Mark?"

"Yes. He attempted to impersonate Miles to me, for about five minutes, but it didn't go well and he had to kidnap me instead, and then while kidnapped I spent some time tied to a chair having as civil a conversation with him as one can have while tied to a chair, and then during the cleanup of the whole mess I was part of him passing for Miles to some witnesses."

"...In... what way did it not go well...?"

"I picked him up. He flinched."

"I wonder why."

"By his description he didn't mind the various surgical interventions that led to him looking like Miles irrespective of genetic destiny very much - but the rest of his upbringing was not so pleasant either and that's had what may well be a stronger, if less visible, effect. The way Miles put it was that he's so horrifyingly deprived of positive touch that being picked up and kissed by someone who thought he was her husband nearly gave him a heart attack."

"Poor soul."

"Very. I don't know what he's going to do with himself, but Miles sent him off with enough money that he should be able to do it comfortably for a while and - as I mentioned, he knows he can come here. Assuming he believed us."

"I'm not sure that's a safe assumption, under the circumstances. But I guess we'll find out."

"Or we won't. Although he seemed to be over the deathwish by the time he left."

"...The deathwish...?"

"During the tied-to-a-chair conversation, among other things, he solicited 'better ways to die' than going through with the substitution plot and getting himself killed due to it being a poorly thought out idea."

"...Did he define what qualified as a better way?"

"That was left unstated. I didn't come up with one he liked, anyway."

"I see. He sounds... complicated."

"Exceedingly. And he does a very good impression of Miles up until the moment someone touches him - although apparently Ivan can tell on sight because Mark likes him more than Miles does. So I'm probably going to be scanning Miles every time he's out of my sight for more than ten seconds for the next while. Whenever he gets home."

"Yes. Whenever that is."

"A fact which I am even now, alas, ignorant of."

"Me too. It seems to come with the job."

"It does." Linya sighs. She pulls her pen from her necklace and sends the medical scan to Cordelia's pen. "There's the scan file, although if you pick up a scanner of your own that prefers another format it'll need conversion."

"Thank you. I'll... just keep it on hand for now." She pauses, then adds, "I think Simon's going to want to talk to you soon. Apparently he's dissatisfied with the reports he received from Earth and wants to hear the in-person perspective of someone who was there for at least some of it."