"Does he ever buy things in front of his supervisors?"

"Well, all I have is a summary of a summary of the agents' summaries of what he does with his time, so I don't know. But I haven't heard that he does."

"I suppose it's unlikely that he lost the chit."

"He pays for interplanetary passage pretty regularly, one must assume, and that isn't the sort of thing you can scrape up the money for by fencing stolen hats."

"I expect he's at least as capable as you are of effectively hitchhiking across the galaxy. Do you claim you couldn't talk your way onto jumpships without a budget in excess of stolen hat range?"

"I... won't say that I couldn't, but I wouldn't want to depend on it. I wouldn't make it a way of life. And if I had to sweet-talk my way through the wormhole nexus, I'd have somewhere to go - any Barrayaran embassy, the Dendarii Mercenaries if I could find them. Mark is clearly not choosing to deal with Barrayar, and he hasn't gone near the Dendarii either. He's just - adrift. Doing nothing in particular with his time except read, steal, and evade ImpSec with near-supernatural skill. No, I think he's kept the money. Maybe he just hasn't decided what to do with it."

"If he does enough interstellar travel it will eventually run out."

"True. Unless he's been making very clever investments all this time."

"Which seems like the kind of thing ImpSec might have noticed."

"You'd think. They haven't found the money yet, but given the dried beans incident I'm not confident that means anything. The books-and-petty-theft routine could be an elaborate runaround. Five thousand dried beans."

"Oh? They didn't turn up a purchase record for the beans? Or a theft report."

"As far as the poor fellow could determine, those beans appeared out of thin air. I mean, they were small beans, five thousand isn't a lot - enough to cover the surface area of a bed with a smallish inter-bean margin, apparently. I can think of half a dozen ways I could get my hands on a sack of beans without leaving a clear trail—if ImpSec wasn't bloody following me at the time!"

"Do they know if he placed them himself?"

"Well, no. But in the absence of information I'm going to guess yes, because the other option is that he managed to find and hire someone to untraceably cover a bed in dried beans, which presents the same 'ImpSec was bloody following him at the time' problem as doing it himself plus the additional problems of who it was, how he found them, and how he convinced them to take such a crazy job. Well, I suppose the answer to the last one is 'put on his Miles hat'. What an absolute little... Naismith he is."

Linya giggles. "Unsettling though I find his Miles hat, it is occasionally very entertaining to watch you contemplate your own characteristics from the outside."

"I feel a deep sympathy for my parents, I have to tell you."

"Maybe Aral Adri will take after me."

"I wouldn't get your hopes up. You should ask Mother sometime for all my terrifying childhood stories."

"I'm sure they'll be riveting."

"You'll wonder how I survived to adulthood. Sometimes I wonder how I survived to adulthood. Well, I did have help."

"...I have just accidentally imagined how, er, inconvenienced Mark would have been if you had not survived to adulthood."

"...Ah." He contemplates this. "That wouldn't have been good."

"Probably not."

"He might have gotten out alive... and I think he's smart enough to have figured out eventually that he could come home to Mother. But. Not a happy thought, all in all."

"Sorry."