Mirror Dance

“Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion,” he said truthfully. “You can blame it on me.”

She looked most dubious.

How old was she? He’d spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life story, and there didn’t seem to be very much of it. Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naivete. The greatest adventure of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the Dendarii Mercenaries.

Rowan. She’s made it out. Then what? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson’s Whole. You couldn’t trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-eyed.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You are so beautiful … on the inside. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman.”

“My lady is a great woman,” she said sturdily. “She deserves to live more.”

What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only herself, apparently.

“Besides,” said Lilly Junior. “I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were squirming all over her.”

“Who?”

“Oh, that’s right. That must have been your clone-twin.”

“My brother,” he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?

She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored. She looked at him speculatively. “Would you like to kiss me again?” she inquired.

It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this girl worried him. She was not his … equal. But he had to kill time, keep her in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. “Well … all right… .”

After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and remarked, “That’s not the way the Baron does it.”

“What do you do for Vasa Luigi?”

She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a minute, he choked, “Stop!”

“Don’t you like it? The Baron does.”

“I’m sure.” Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining table, and scrunched himself up in it. “That’s, um, very nice, Lilly, but it’s too serious for you and me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just exactly so.” She was a child, despite her grown-up body, he was increasingly certain of it. “When you are older … you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without.” He tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half-successfully. Vasa Luigi, you scum.

She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m not going to be older.”

He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees, and shuddered. Hell.

He suddenly remembered how he’d met Sergeant Taura. How they had become lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the pot-holes in his memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation, it must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution. But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a smash- and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century, if she wasn’t … cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.

Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it. “Don’t you want to live?” he asked her.

“I … don’t know.”

“I do. I want to live. And believe me, I have considered the alternative deeply.”

“You are … a funny, little, ugly man. What can you get from life?”

“Everything. And I mean to get more.” I want, I want. Wealth, power, love. Victories, splendid, brilliant victories, shining reflected in the eyes of comrades. Someday, a wife, children. A herd of children, tall and healthy, to rock those who whispered Mutant! right back on their heels and over on their pointed heads. And I mean to have a brother.

Mark. Yeah. The surly little fellow that Baron Ryoval was, quite possibly, taking apart strand by strand right now. In Miles’s place. His nerves stretched to the screaming point, with no release. I’ve got to make time.

He finally persuaded Lilly Junior to go to sleep, wrapped up in the covers on Rowan’s side of the bed. Chivalrously, he took the chair. A couple of hours into the night and he was in agony. He tried the floor. It was cold. His chest ached. He dreaded the thought of waking with a cough. He finally crept into the bed on top of the covers, and curled up facing away from her. He was intensely conscious of her body. The reverse was obviously not so. His anxiety was the more enormous for being so formless. He didn’t have control of anything. Near morning, he at last warmed up enough to doze.

“Rowan, m’love,” he muttered muzzily, nuzzling into her scented hair and wrapping himself around her warm, long body. “M’lady.” A Barrayaran turn of phrase; he knew where that milady came from, at long last. She flinched; he recoiled. Consciousness returned. “Ak! Sorry.”

Lilly Junior sat up, shaking off his ugly-little-man grasp. Grope, actually. “I am not my lady!”

“Sorry, wrong referent. I think of Rowan as milady, inside my head. She is milady, and I’m her …” court fool “knight. I really am a soldier, you know. Despite being short.”

At the second knock on the door, he realized what had awakened him. “Breakfast. Quick! Into the bathroom. Rattle around in there. I swear we can keep this going another round.”

For once he did not try to engage the guards in conversation leading to bribery. Lilly Junior came back out when the door closed again behind the servant. She ate slowly, dubiously, as if she doubted her right to food. He watched her, increasingly fascinated. “Here. Have this other roll. You can put sugar on it, you know.”

“I’m not allowed to eat sugar.”

“You should have sugar.” He paused. “You should have everything. You should have friends. You should have … sisters. You should have education to the limits of your mind’s powers, and work to challenge your spirit. Work makes you bigger. More real. You eat it up, and grow. You should have love. A knight of your own. Much taller. You should have … ice cream.”

“I mustn’t get fat. My lady is my destiny.”

“Destiny! What do you know about destiny?” He rose, and began to pace, zig-zagging around bed and table. “I’m a frigging expert on destiny. Your lady is a false destiny, and do you know how I know? She takes everything, but she doesn’t give anything back.

“Real destiny takes everything—the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure—and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can’t give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I’ve come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it.”

His conviction felt utterly megalomanic. He adored moments like this.

“You’re insane,” she said, staring at him warily.

“How would you know? You’ve never met a sane person in your life. Have you? Think about it.”

Her rising interest fell. “It’s no use. I’m a prisoner anyway. Where would I go?”

“Lilly Durona would take you in,” he said promptly. “The Durona Group is under House Fell’s protection, you know. If you could get to your grandmother, you’d be safe.”

Her brows drew down just like Rowan’s had, when she was knocking holes in his escape plans. “How?”

“They can’t leave us in here forever. Suppose …” he walked behind her, gathered up her hair, and held it in a messy wad on the back of her head. “I didn’t get the impression Vasa Luigi meant to keep Rowan past the point