Miles traipses, giggling, into her office.

"Hello. What has you so entertained?"

She puts away the giant diagram and summons up the message. (With her other arm she scoops her husband.)

Would you fucking stop?
—MPVK

"Right?" cackles Miles. "Oh my God, Mark!"

"Do you suppose Simon is going to abide by this request?"

"Probably not. But he might write back."

"Now that I'd like to see."

"I'll ask him to copy us." He unhugs one arm from Linya so he can pen Simon a quick note to that effect.

Forehead-kiss.

"Can you imagine the effort it would've taken to find - that has to have been an actual fountain pen. Those aren't hugely common on planets that didn't have a Time of Isolation recently! They're getting moderately hard to find even on Barrayar! And the paper, the envelope. I'm half surprised it's not sealed in blood. Probably just 'cause he couldn't get his hands on a seal dagger. He used his initials! My little brother is a glorious little shit, Linya!"

"He would have had to go to some kind of specialty supplier, certainly, but I'm not sure it would be that hard to find the relevant ingredients if he were willing to drop a lot of money or shoplift. He has very good handwriting, doesn't he?"

"Yeah. I don't even have handwriting that good. Where does he find the time to learn all this shit?"

"Speaking as I do from the perspective of someone biologically disinclined to time-wasting..."

"I am not a very idle person," he reminds her, "and I'm six years older than he is, and he's apparently managed to learn every single thing I know plus, I must assume, extensive assassination training, plus apparently counter-espionage and calligraphy on his own time. I am going to remain impressed and slightly jealous for the forseeable future."

"You spend time with people," murmurs Linya. "Which is not timewasting exactly - behold how I am spending time with you right now - but it does not tend to lead to you knowing calligraphy at the end of the day. And if we know one thing about Mark's upbringing it's that it was woefully short on people."

"...True. Well, now I'm sad and slightly jealous."

Snuggle.

"It's possible he chose it principally to be recognized and not because he's using the name privately, but yes."

"I don't know... I'm getting a definite impression that if he wanted a way to be recognized without acknowledging the name, he would've found one. Include a dried bean, maybe. The initials feel very - deliberate. The whole thing feels very deliberate. You know, apparently when they successfully manage to follow Mark around, most of what he does is read books and commit casual petty theft. I'm getting the weirdest picture of his life."

"I suppose a bean would have done the trick handily... What does he pettily thieve?"

"Food, books, clothing, basic necessities. You'd think the money I gave him would be more than enough to cover that sort of thing. Maybe it's some kind of obscure statement."

"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."

"It's fine." He hugs her. "You didn't engineer his childhood."

Snuggle.

Linya schedules a trip to Komarr while he's gone, because she might as well and has a timetable and an excuse. She collaborates on things with Dr. Cheung and then turns around and goes home again.

Here is the final report on pens. I included all the details in case you wanted them. To summarize, it would be possible to make pens a fully permitted device in my office, but the necessary hardware additions would give your no doubt carefully balanced tradeoff between weight and storage capacity quite a shove.

If you decide to produce an alternate secure model, this should be everything you need to design one. Please don't show the marked sections to anyone who has not passed an ImpSec background check. If you need someone checked for that purpose, appropriate contact information is also attached. Don't fret about bothering the analysts; it's what they're for.

-Simon

A few days later, there is a message from Miles saying that something came up ('honest, I didn't even get the orders until just now') and he will be delayed for an unknown interval ('one of those cook-until-done jobs') and she shouldn't worry too badly. ('Feel free to pester Illyan for the latest reports as often as you like. He'll hold back some details, but he'll tell you how I'm doing to the extent that he knows.')

Linya pesters Illyan, once every three days, in between her usual activities of engineering and music and genetics and reading physics textbooks.

Illyan reveals that Admiral Naismith is currently breaking up a wormhole blockade that briefly threatened to disrupt important trade routes. All sources report that Miles is doing fine. All sources continue to have reported that Miles is doing fine every time she checks, right up until the day that Illyan preemptively messages her before her scheduled query to tell her that Miles is doing fine and on his way home, and will be there in ten days.

When she has an estimated date of return Linya ceases to pester Illyan. (Except to ask him if a 30% reduction in storage space for a secure pen would be too much, or if he instead wants it heavier or more fragile.)

30% seems a little much, but I'm not the one to ask about data storage capacity. What are the weight penalties like as you increase the storage toward normal? I'll have a poll sent around to see if the relevant portion of your customer base can agree on a tradeoff.

She sends him a little 3D chart of tradeoffs she can make between storage, sturdiness, and weight.

Results are back two days later. Apparently there is a sharp divide between the camp that is willing to trade any amount of storage to keep their pens light and the camp that is willing to trade any amount of weight to keep their storage the same, but the second camp is about twice as big as the first. Almost nobody is willing to give up any sturdiness. Illyan declines to mention where he personally falls on the weight versus storage question.

Linya can just make a capacious version and a lightweight version...

Yes she can, if that strikes her as a reasonable solution!

So she whips up designs and sends them to the fabricators and has prototypes (in silver, both of them) sent to ImpSec for lucky beta testers.

See you soon, she writes back.

He arrives home shortly.

"I'm fine! I'm me! I'm fine and I'm me!" Hug. Kiss.

"I am glad of both things." Kiss. "While you were gone I whipped up prototype versions, two of 'em, for pens up to Simon's standards."

"Why two?"

"Market disagreement about acceptable tradeoffs between weight and storage space. I had to add extra hardware for the heavy-duty security - the DNA scan feature on my pen is tiny but I did effectively steal it from float-chairs, didn't have to invent it from scratch, and it piggybacks on my being haut."

"And people might get weird about it if their pens gene-scanned them. Barrayar," Miles says wryly. He hugs her some more. "Can I braid your hair? I missed braiding your hair."

Miles braids her hair! The arrangement he chooses is rather aggressively gorgeous.

And he gets a kiss for his trouble.

Ooh, a kiss. How delightful. He also missed those.

"Well. Good." Snuggle.

A couple of days after she does that, Miles wanders into her office one afternoon and asks, "What do you know about Lairouba?"

"Not much, why?"

"Because I'm headed out there for a job, and Illyan's mission briefings occasionally leave something to be desired. The Lairouban delegation to those trade talks on Tau Ceti wants bodyguards to defend them from Toraniran assassins; apparently there's some history there. Several hundred years of it. I hope nobody's secretly related to anybody this time around."

"I did know that Lairouba and Toranira were unfriendly - I suppose my standard of 'not much' might not be a useful one and I should say what the not much is. They speak, I believe, their own language that was originally a pidgin of Urdu and Indonesian with smatterings of other influences, as well as unpidgined dialects of both of those plus Arabic and Farsi and Amharic. Predominantly Islamic colonists but there has been some perturbation since; I believe they're still nominally mostly Muslims but with some unique subsects. Cold climate but not as cold as Jackson's Whole."

"Yeah. And the Lairoubans and Toranirans have nearly identical source populations but they politely hate each other for obscure reasons, and one of their favourite tricks is assassinating each other's diplomats and then loudly protesting innocence. Which is what I am about to go prevent, assuming the Lairoubans accept the Dendarii bid, which they had better. Goodbye kiss? I have time for plenty of goodbye kisses, my ship to Escobar won't be ready for another three hours."

"Well then." Kiss. It's not a very goodbye-ish kiss because she doesn't let him go immediately afterwards, though.

Not-very-goodbye-ish kisses are fully acceptable here. They have three hours, after all.

She does let him go after three hours.

And off he goes. Taking into account travel times and the likelihood of the trade talks dragging on past their three-week projected span, he estimates he will be at least two months out there. But at least this time she can pester Illyan for news.

Which she does, although not until Illyan could be expected to have heard things besides, say, "en route to Komarr".

Illyan informs her of his own accord when he hears that the Lairoubans accepted the Ariel's bid for their guard contract, shortly after Miles made rendezvous with the fleet at Escobar.

If he keeps preempting her pestering like that she may not have to do any at all.

Yes and yes. Neither Miles nor any of my observers in the area have mentioned it to me, but that doesn't rule out his being involved somehow. Thank you for this datum; I will add it to my collection.

That's all Linya hears from her agent that isn't perfectly ordinary check-ins about the agenting she's doing.

Before I say anything else: Miles is on his way home, injured but in stable condition and fully repairable.

The facts, as I understand them, are these:

The Lairouban delegation turned out to be a front for an assassination attempt on the Toranirans. Miles conceived a suspicion somehow, and in the course of investigating further before alerting his subordinates, he was captured by the Lairoubans and held captive on their ship. For reasons that remained obscure at the time this report was written, the Lairoubans gave him fast-penta; he sustained the majority of his injuries when they took exception to his idiosyncratic response. His Dendarii noticed that his wristcom's tracker had been partially disabled but was still locatable, and mounted a rescue operation, which succeeded with no further casualties. The Lairouban delegates have been turned over to local law enforcement, the Dendarii have terminated their contract early but kept the remainder of their pay as a penalty to the Lairoubans for kidnapping their commanding officer, and Miles should be home within ten days.

At some point during those several hours, she acquires a quiet audience.

Linya looks over her shoulder and plays quietly enough to be heard speaking over the notes. "Hello."

"I assume you've heard the news?"

"Yes. Having been in a room with a fast-penta'd Miles and an upset interrogator before I can construct more thoroughly detailed mental imagery than is strictly comfortable."

"Oh, dear."

"I'll be fine. So, reportedly, will Miles. But sometimes I am glad I play an instrument."

"It helps?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad."

"What do you usually do?"

"Remind myself that Miles is an amazingly capable young man, and try not to dwell."

"Sometimes I'm not so sure... but yes, it is. It's just hard to know that he's been hurt and still have to wait for him to come back."

"Simon didn't say exactly what injury it was. I wonder if he's going to have more emergency bone replacements."

"Reading between the lines of Simon's failure to say what injury it was, I'm guessing yes."

"Well, at least there's a finite number of times that can happen."

"I'm not sure I find that very comforting."

"I will actually feel somewhat better once he is no longer particularly breakable. Certainly there are other things which can also go wrong, but at least he will no longer be so plainly handicapped."

"Maybe it's too much to hope for that he won't need any more emergency bone replacements..."

"Oh, I'd prefer that, certainly - the ideal would be that he'd get the rest of his bones swapped for plastic models on a schedule without breaking them all first."

"Ah. I have no hope whatsoever of that. I know Miles too well."

"Well, maybe some of them he'll manage it with. He did his legs that way."

"Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised."

Ten days later, Elli Quinn escorts Miles to the surface of Barrayar, as he is pretty much incapable of moving.

And Linya inquires, when she hears that he's arrived, when he'll be able to receive visits.

It turns out that he is having his ribs and sternum replaced, and will not be available to visitors for another week and a half.

"I don't know how long they'll let me stay, but they let me in briefly. I may have implied that I will be more effective at preventing you from demanding the presence of any additional people you only intend to yell at than extra sedatives would be. That really couldn't have waited?"

"It really couldn't," he says. "Anyway, I didn't yell. Yelling hurts too much. I mostly hissed."

Linya kisses his forehead. "My mistake. If talking hurts too I can stop asking you questions."

"Some. It's okay, though, so does breathing."

"Aha. So how did you wind up needing your entire torso restructured?"

She pets his hair, since his head seems okay. "The Lairoubans gave you fast-penta and didn't like your Shakepearean predilections, which I can imagine in detail but not necessarily accurate detail."

...Linya suppresses her snort but not her smile.

"In my defense, it kept egging me on after the first few. And proved unable to start a dirty limerick I couldn't finish. When I woke up I told it that next time it made me laugh that hard with that many broken ribs I was having it written up for assaulting a superior officer, but eh, the damage was already done before it got there. And it did save my life. Rather gloriously, too."

"I'd thank it - for the life-saving, mind - but that would probably puncture your cover."

"Alas, yes."

"Before anything much exciting had appeared to happen, my export agent, who was loitering on the station in case an opportunity to encourage someone in useful directions came up, was invited to have dinner with the Toramirans, who didn't seem to know why they'd invited her."

"Yeah, no idea. From what I gathered, the Lairoubans were planning to have them all poisoned at the event they would've attended if they hadn't been talking to your agent instead. Maybe somebody tipped them off. It'd be nice to know who. Nosy and secretive Tau Cetan? Toramiran underling with a hunch? Lairouban would-be assassin with cold feet?"

"It seems like an odd way to avert a poisoning."

"The craziest things happen when you get a lot of people all trying to accomplish secret goals at once. Sometimes even when they're all ostensibly on the same side. You should know."

"Yes. I suppose Carmina could have just been convenient, but there were certainly hundreds of people with agendas who'd be thrilled to have dinner with a delegation on that station; why her and only her? Doesn't that seem strange?"

"A bit, yeah. I don't know. I would give you an explanation if I had one. Maybe her schedule was convenient. Maybe the list of possible diversions was alphabetized by first name."

"It's a suspicious coincidence. But I'm not sure how to investigate it; Carmina would have told me if she knew anything - about why she was invited or whether someone else really sent the invitation, about my husband's secret identity, whatever."

"Yeah. Sometimes coincidences do just happen. The vid feed from the docking bay glitched for a few seconds while I was with the Lairoubans, no foul play, just a normal random outage, and that was when Bel noticed I'd gone missing - trying to report that the troopers who'd gone to check it out hadn't found anything, and it couldn't reach me. Probably saved my last couple of ribs."

"That makes two coincidences that were extremely helpful and relevant to your mission."

"'Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action' - I don't see a third," he says. "And it stretches credibility to think I'm being stalked by some kind of good fairy whose idea of helping is to make it slightly likelier that my troops will find me before the enemy is quite finished beating me to death."

"Well, three times wouldn't be enemy action. It would be good fairy action." Hair pet hair pet hair pet. "If not especially fantastic good fairy action."

"Mediocre fairy action," he suggests.

"Yes. Mediocre fairy action. Is this really two coincidences? The Toramirans being drawn away from the poisoned dinner engagement to another meeting could be counted separately from the other meeting being with my export agent."

"If it was an action, it was one action," he says. "So I'm only counting it once. And I'm pretty sure the vid glitch wasn't an action at all. Although thank you, now every time something goes slightly less badly than it could have on a mission I'm going to chalk it up to the mediocre fairy."

"I predict that this will lead to interesting mission reports."

He snickers softly. And briefly. "Ow. I love you."

"Sorry. I can sing instead of risking being amusing if you like."

"I like it when you sing."

She lets the doctors shoo her at that point, and doesn't press the point about visitor allowability until the formal day of such permission has arrived.

She goes and kisses him, ever so obligingly. "Hey you."

"I love you. I also love good painkillers," he says. "But I love you more. I'm stuck in this bed for another week, can you believe it?"

"Easily. I am afraid you will have to be flat. I will do what I can to mitigate the boredom part."

"I loooove you."

"I love you too." Kiss.

Kiss! Very flat kiss.

"Are you planning to spend your non-hospitalized convalescence at Vorkosigan Surleau again? Being, if at all possible, hand-fed?"

"I don't strictly speaking need to be hand-fed, at least not as much as I did when I couldn't move my arms. But if the opportunity presents itself..."

"I suspect the sternum replacement would make it more comfortable not to move your arms unnecessarily."

"You're right about that. But it's not as bad on that score as having my actual arm bones replaced."

"You could probably convince me to feed you some of the time anyway."

"I love you."

"I love you too." Kiss.

Kiss. Slightly dozy kiss.

"I don't suppose this incident will convince you to schedule the rest of your bones sooner rather than later."

"I am not feeling very positively about bone replacement surgery right now," he says. "Even considering the alternative. The surgery is fresher in my mind, and I don't have the satisfaction of having watched Bel Thorne stun everyone responsible. Besides, there aren't that many left."

"Well, it's up to you, but I thought I'd ask. The scheduled version of the surgery skips much quicker to the part where I come and sing to you without the days in transit having received approximately field medicine."

"I do like the part where you come and sing to me."

"It is undoubtedly the best part."

"Mm, no, sadly I must disagree," he says. "The best part is getting out of the fucking hospital afterward."

"I don't know if I'd categorize that as a part in quite the same way, but I'll concede the point."

"Good." He closes his eyes. "Sorry to ruin your fun, but I think I'd like to sleep now. It's hard work lying here flat on my back all damn day."

Then she will do so while she is visiting.

And then he will get out of the hospital, and go to Vorkosigan Surleau, and wish to be hand-fed some fraction of the time. It's a large fraction to start with, but he is determined to regain full upper-body function as quickly as possible.

Ekaterin is overjoyed!

Good! That's the point.

Sure. Does next week, same time, work for you?

A long pause, and then: I'll see. I have to go to sleep now.

Perhaps the mysterious family emergency is distracting her, because Ekaterin doesn't follow up anytime in the next few days.

Oh! I'm sorry, it completely slipped my mind. I'd love to - I'll just check with Tien that he doesn't have anything planned.

Okay. I'll come fetch you if you don't tell me not to, then.

Okay. Let me know?

I'll do my best!

And Linya waits.

Tomorrow works for me! I still haven't been to see it and they still have the mineral exhibit.

Great! See you then!

So Linyabel turns up to collect Ekaterin, the next day.

Ekaterin seems oddly shy and flustered at first, but soon returns to normal. She enjoys the museum trip very much.

It has minerals! And other things. It is a nice museum. Linya returns her home after they grab dinner.

The next morning, Miles departs on an egg-sitting run of unspecified duration.

Which leaves Linya with more unallocated time than usual. Does Ekaterin want to go to a symphony with her?

Ekaterin would love to!

So plans are made!

And they go to the symphony. It is very musical. Ekaterin enjoys herself.

Linya's next idea, the following week, is to bring Nikki along to a zoo.

"Oh—yes, I'm fine," she says. "It's nothing."

"...Okay."

"Thank you. Sorry."

I wish I could, but I've been so busy lately.

Tien got a new job, and we're moving in a few days. Congratulations on your son! You always do the most amazing things.

Where are you moving to?

Salair.

Thank you. I will. I'm afraid our new flat doesn't have room for a garden, though.

And she gets a tiny lilac in a white pot.

Thank you so much for the lilac.

I haven't seen it display any musical inclinations so far, but maybe it's just biding its time.

It hasn't? Darn, I thought I got you the kind that sings. It's only not supposed to dance.

It can't sing, it can't dance, it can't pilot a lightflyer. Linyabel, did you get me a defective lilac?

I must have gotten you a defective lilac. I'm so sorry. The reputation of the supplier was excellent, I don't know what went wrong.

I will treasure it anyway. It's very beautiful, and it can't help how it was made.

You are too kind, being a home for that talentless little lilac.

Thank you very much. They're absolutely lovely.

Thank you. How are you settling in?

It's not going as smoothly as I hoped, but I have a sweet little lilac to keep me company.

What troubles is it consoling you about?

Nothing very important. It's just hard to keep up with all the little things sometimes. I'm sure I'll manage.

Does Nikki like the new place?

Not really. He hasn't had time to get used to it yet.

Poor thing. Probably a houseplant wouldn't help him, either.

I'm afraid not. Although he did have a laugh over the talentless lilac.

He'll be starting school soon, won't he? Is he excited?

Not really.

Nervous, or just indifferent?

Indifferent, and a little grumpy.

Maybe he'll like it when he gets there. I don't know a lot about what schools here are like, though. Perhaps he'd be reasonable in hating it.

We'll see.