dissonance

[isthisart]

Dr. Cheung's at a funeral all day, so Linya decides to go up to London and see if Miles is out of his Mood.

Security has decided to be deeply unhelpful today. She is currently showing them various forms of ID and repeating in a slow, patient voice that she has been here before, there is not more than one of her, and she promises she is not there to assassinate her husband or whatever fool thing has them skittish today. Perhaps she shouldn't drop in while the captain's missing; it seems to make them worse. But she got in before while he was missing...

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[thisvorlunatic]

Miles stays flopped.

[isthisart]

Galeni unpicks her hands. She lets them dangle by her sides. He detaches her ankles from the chair and she stays sat, but shifts her feet. "How long till it wears off you?" he wonders of her.

"A few minutes, probably," Linya pretends to guess. "Fast metabolism, generous ancestors..."

[thisvorlunatic]

"No kidding," mutters Miles.

[isthisart]

"Oh, no," she agrees. She flops her head onto her shoulder.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I," says Miles, "am going to go throw up."

He crawls into the bathroom and does that, thankfully into the appropriate receptacle, then passes out halfway back into the main area of the cell.

[isthisart]

When Miles wakes up he is on a bench with one of Linya's less essential articles of clothing balled up under his head and about half a meal's worth of food left to get cold at the end of the bench. Linya's napping, on the floor with a similar pillow arrangement and a sleeve of the jacket she's using flung over her eyes. She has even loaned Galeni a scarf-wrap for the same purpose. Linya's person remains decent, if underlayered.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Urgh," says Miles. He looks at the food, then shifts the plate under his bench and flops his face into his improvised pillow to attempt real sleep.

[isthisart]

In the morning, the guards come to take Galeni away. Linya eyes the guards who collect him assessingly but doesn't attack them - one has a stunner aimed at her from sufficient range that he could likely beat her reflexes.

There are sounds of an ineffectual struggle from Galeni, and then they're gone and it's just Linya and Miles, alone with the light fixture's all-seeing eye in the cell.

[thisvorlunatic]

"The light fixture is watching us," Miles mentions.

[isthisart]

"I have been thinking of likely ways for it to be doing that and wondering what tools I'd need to improvise explosives out of its parts," she agrees. "I don't have any."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Damn. There goes that escape plan."

[isthisart]

"The much-abused secondary products of your genome," Linya remarks, "are extremely inconsistent in their reactions to being picked up."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...um?"

[isthisart]

"How many of you are there, and which one are you?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Two," he says. "I'm the one who married you. Also the one who is Admiral Naismith. They know, so why shouldn't you? Fuck it all. The one who stunned you is an actual clone-duplicate created for an actual substitution plot. By Komarrans. What did he do when you picked him up...?"

[isthisart]

"Flinched."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh. Maybe he's not quite an utter soulless bastard after all," says Miles. "I'm not sure whether I find that heartening, or the opposite."

[isthisart]

"He probably could have salvaged it. I was thinking to myself, 'Naismith seemed very personable and not like he wanted to impersonate my Miles at all, and there probably aren't two of them even if the project originally called for several, or that would certainly have come up, wouldn't it'. But he didn't, he just - sort of apologized and shot me."

[thisvorlunatic]

"How polite."

[isthisart]

"Well, I don't have a lot of other instances of being shot to compare to." She sighs. "How do I know you're mine?"

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles contemplates this.

"I could punch a wall," he says. "Whatever heinous treatments they've put him through can't possibly have screwed his bones to exactly the right degree and kind of fragility, and if I were them I'd save the expense and not bother trying - not to mention the fact that it would make him a hell of a lot less functional as an assassin, which they pretty clearly mean him to be."

[isthisart]

"I don't know off the top of my head how they'd wreck a clone's bones like that, but that doesn't mean there's no way to do it," she points out. "They were not restraining themselves to any ordinary standard of medical ethics. If this were the first time this had happened, I'm sure I'd buy it, but I have made two major errors about my husband's identity over the last several days."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles sighs.

[isthisart]

"And one of those errors involved believing - what was admittedly probably you - when he told me something. How did the business with the Ariel happen? I didn't think you'd draw attention to your cover like that."

[thisvorlunatic]

"The Dendarii know me only as Admiral Naismith. They wouldn't have had any reason to look twice at the name Vorkosigan, and I wasn't personally overseeing every single job offer they took."