Jin and Mina and Vorlynkin filed through.  The look Vorlynkin flicked at Miles in passing had very little love in it.  Jin took the consul's free hand as they came up to the tableside.  Because who else was there left to hang onto, in this spinning hour?

The children stared some more.  Mina's lips parted in bewilderment; Jin raised his eyes to Miles with a half-voiced Huh?

Drawing back in something between outrage and scorn, Mina said, "But that's not our mommy!"

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Miles just barely kept himself from blurting, idiotically, Are you sure?  Neither set young face held the least doubt.  "Then who," he choked, wheeling to stare at Raven, at the draped figure on the table, "was it that we just . . ."  Murdered was unfair, as well as inaccurate.  And, he suspected, would also be deeply offensive to the upset cryorevival specialist.  "That we just . . ."  Fortunately, no one here seemed to expect him to fill in the blank.

"Her numbers were right," said Raven.  ". . . Or anyway, her numbers were the ones you gave me."

So either Miles had grabbed the wrong drawer code from the cryo-storage data, which he knew very well he had not, or the numbers had been fudged somewhere upstream.  By somebody.  For some reason.  Concealment?  To protect Lisa Sato's cryo-corpse from kidnapping by her supporters, or someone like the N.H.L.L.?  Or by Miles—no, Miles didn't think anyone on Kibou-daini could have imagined a nosy Barrayaran Imperial Auditor taking this interest.  Or might it have been a genuine error?  In which case—Miles pictured the millions of cryo-drawers in, under, or around Northbridge alone, and his heart sank.  The thought that nobody might actually know where Lisa Sato had been stashed was too horrible to contemplate for more than an instant.

Or—and the notion was so arresting, Miles caught his breath—someone else had been ahead of him, with the exact same idea.  In which case . . . No.  Before his inner visions could proliferate madly, he'd better fasten them down with at least a few facts.  Physical ones, not all these trailing tenuous tentacled inductions.

Miles took a deep breath, to slow his hammering heart.  "All right.  All right.  We'll start with what we can know.  First is to ID that poor, um, patron.  Make that a priority for your autopsy, Raven.  I'll go back to the consulate tight-room and—"  Miles broke off as Vorlynkin cleared his throat, ominously.