Quinn's eyes narrowed in pain. "Hell, we don't have the time. Or the personnel. And you're not debriefed yet, and besides, I need your experience. This . . . situation could change rapidly at any moment. Consider yourself under house arrest, and assigned to me. You can guard yourself. Take a visiting officer's cabin here on the Peregrine, and call it your cell if it makes you feel any better."

Thorne's face went very bleak indeed. "Yes, ma'am," it said woodenly.

Quinn frowned. "Go clean up. We'll continue this later."

Except for Quinn and Bothari-Jesek, they all filed out. Mark tried to follow them. "Not you," said Quinn in a voice like a death bell. He sank back into his station chair and huddled there. As the last Dendarii cleared the chamber, Quinn reached over and turned off all recording devices.

Miles's women. Elena-the-childhood-sweetheart, now Captain Bothari-Jesek, Mark had studied back when the Komarrans had tutored him to play Lord Vorkosigan. Yet she was not quite what he had expected. Quinn the Dendarii had taken the Komarran plotters by surprise. The two women had a coincidental resemblance in coloration, both with short dark hair, fine pale skin, liquid brown eyes. Or was it so coincidental? Had Vorkosigan subconsciously chosen Quinn as Bothari-Jesek's substitute, when he couldn't have the real thing? Even their first names were similar, Elli and Elena.

Bothari-Jesek was the taller by a head, with long aristocratic features, and was more cool and reserved, an effect augmented by her clean officer's undress grays. Quinn, fatigue-clad and combat-booted, was shorter, though still a head taller than himself, rounder and hotter. Both were terrifying. Mark's own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone they'd pulled from under the bed, if only she'd been the age she looked to be. Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn't kill and eat him after they mated.

Elena Bothari-Jesek was watching him with a sort of appalled fascination. "So like him. Yet not him. Why are you shivering?"

"I'm cold," muttered Mark.

"You're cold!" Quinn echoed in outrage. "You're cold! You gods be-damned little sucker—" She turned her station chair abruptly around, and sat with her back to him.

Bothari-Jesek rose and walked around to his end of the table. Willow-wand woman. She touched his forehead, which was clammy; he flinched almost explosively. She bent and stared into his eyes. "Quinnie, back off. He's in psychological shock."

"He doesn't deserve consideration!" Quinn choked.

"He's still in shock, regardless. If you want results, you have to take it into account."

"Hell." Quinn turned back. New clean wet tracks ran down from her eyes across her red-and-white, dirt-and-dried-blood-smudged face. "You didn't see. You didn't see Miles lying there with his heart blown all over the room."

"Quinnie, he's not really dead. Is he? He's just frozen, and . . . and misplaced." Was there the faintest tinge of uncertainty, denial, in her voice?