"Excuse us." Illyan met no one's eyes, pushing through. The assembled ImpSec officers all wheeled to stare after the pair, as they made it to the corridor and turned left.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conscious of the ImpSec driver's eyes following him, Miles walked carefully through the front door of Vorkosigan House. He did not let his shoulders sag until the doors closed safely behind him. He fell into the first chair he came to, on top of its cover. It was another hour before he stopped shivering.

Not the growing darkness but bladder pressure at last drove him to his feet. Our bodies are our masters, we their prisoners. Free the prisoners. Once up and moving, his only desire was to be still again. I should get drunk. It's traditional, for situations like this, isn't it? He collected a bottle of brandy from the cellar. Wine seemed inadequately poisonous. This burst of activity dwindled to rest in the smallest room he could find, a fourth-floor chamber which, but for its window, might have passed for a closet. It was a former servant's room, but it had an old wing chair in it. After going to all the trouble to find the brandy, he had not the ambition left to open the bottle. He crouched down small in the big chair.

On his next trip to his bathroom, sometime after midnight, he picked up his grandfather's dagger, and brought it back with him to set it beside the sealed brandy bottle on the lamp table by his left hand. The dagger tempted him as little as the drink, but toying with it did provide a few moments of interest. He let the light slide over the blade, and pressed it against his wrists, his throat, along the thin scars from his cryonic prep already slashed there. Definitely the throat, if anything. All or nothing, no playing around.

But he'd died once already, and it hadn't helped. Death held neither mystery nor hope. And there lurked the horrible possibility that those who had sacrificed so much to revive him the last time would be inspired to try it again. And botch it. Or rather, botch it even worse. He'd seen half-successful cryo-revivals, vegetable or animal minds whining brokenly in once-human bodies. No. He didn't want to die. At least not where his body could ever be found. He just couldn't bear being alive right now.

The sanctuary in between the two organic states, sleep, refused to come to him. But if he sat here long enough, eventually he must sleep, surely.

Get up. Get up and run, as fast as you can. Back to the Dendarii, before ImpSec or anyone could stop him. Now was his chance, Naismith's chance. Naismith's last chance. Go. Go. Go.

He sat on, muscles knotted, the litany of escape beating in his head.