The Flowers of Vashnoi

The Flowers of Vashnoi

The lift van banked. Vadim Sammi, the district ranger piloting, pointed through the broad canopy. “The boundary of the Vashnoi exclusion zone is in sight, Lady Vorkosigan. Just… there.”

Ekaterin peered. The cleared fields and scattered farmsteads had petered out a few kilometers back. Below the van stretched a rolling, undifferentiated carpet of mixed native Barrayaran red-brown and invasive Earth-green vegetation, scrub and trees, broken by an occasional glint of stream or patch of meadow or swamp. “How can you tell?”

Her husband Miles, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the half-hour flight from the district capital of Hassadar, leaned over between the front seats. “There are warning signs posted. On stakes or tacked to the trees every ten meters for the whole two-hundred-kilometer perimeter of the zone. One of the ranger cadre’s jobs is to walk the boundary once a year, record the ambient radiation, and replace any signs that have fallen down with their trees or whatever.”

“We move them inward a few meters every year, where we can,” said Vadim. “It’s something.”

“And just the signs are enough to keep people out?” asked Enrique Borgos, from the back seat beside Miles.

Ekaterin turned to smile a bit ruefully at the expatriate Escobaran scientist. “It’s the invisibility problem. When you can’t see the danger anywhere, you tend to see it everywhere. And so the imagination paints poison even where it’s not.”

Enrique considered this, rubbing his nose. “I’d want a rad scanner, myself.”

Miles shrugged. “The signs have worked for decades. With the older generation, at least. The younger folks… we’re debating a fence.” He blinked, reflectively. “Progress of sorts, I suppose.”

“But if Enrique’s project succeeds, maybe we won’t need the fence,” said Ekaterin.

Miles took a breath. “Yeah.” And, after another moment, “Vadim, catch some altitude and take us a turn around the city. I don’t think Ekaterin’s ever seen it this close.”

Quite. Despite Ekaterin’s direct involvement in the project back in the Hassadar lab, this would be her first personal visit to the test plot. Miles had been hypocritically twitchy about letting her near the zone, and she’d humored him up to a point. They’d passed that point a while back. They’d been firmly united in leaving the children back in Hassadar with their perfectly competent nanny, however.

“Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan,” said Vadim. The lift van climbed.

Ekaterin studied Vadim’s profile. He’d been working with Enrique on the outdoor test plot for some weeks, but today was the first she had met him. The rangy ranger was not quite thirty, above middle height, close-shaved and hair shorn short. His face seemed carved from some mineral that cleaved in blocky angles and planes, but his brown eyes were warmer, if a bit uncertain in the alarming presence of Lord and Lady Vorkosigan. He’d been in the ranger cadre for nearly a decade, she understood. She wasn’t sure how to let him know that his dedication to the Vorkosigan’s District had won his liege lord’s regard in advance; he didn’t need to earn it anew. Well, Miles would have him talked down before the day was done, no doubt.

A long ridge running northeast-southwest fell away beneath them, and the site of the lost city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi spread out before her eyes. She was able to mark its boundaries only by the curve of the river that had formerly bisected it, and, in a wide, irregular outer ring a few kilometers off, humps and hillocks in the vegetation that might once have been collapsed buildings.

“I think I was about ten the first time my grandfather, old Count Piotr, flew me over this site,” Miles reminisced, staring out his own window. Twenty-five years ago, Ekaterin’s mind filled in. “There were still these big, glassy patches running here and there, which were said to glow blue in the dark, though that might have been a campfire tale. The scrub and weathering seem to have finally broken them all up.” In the afternoon daylight, nothing glowed now save an occasional reflection off the water.

“How large was the city?” off-worlder Enrique inquired, his palm to the canopy.

“In population, upwards of a quarter of a million,” Vadim supplied, in a tour-guide tone that Ekaterin supposed he was often required to adopt when shepherding visitors. “Which was big, for that soon after the end of the Time of Isolation.”

“And not small by modern standards, either,” Miles added. “Over two hundred thousand people died in the first moments the Cetagandan atomics struck. Another fifty thousand later on, they say, over days and weeks and months, though I’m not sure anyone was organized enough to keep a reliable count by then.” Eighty years ago, that calamity had been, and several wars back, though in the Barrayaran mind the Cetagandan invasion was still the big war, the real war, the crucible of the Imperium. “Most of my grandfather’s immediate family were there that day—both his parents, all of his surviving brothers, a boatload of cousins. Council of war, I believe. Prince Yuri meant to have joined them, but he was delayed in that fighting up north. Though the historians don’t think the Cetagandan ghem-junta was targeting him alone—they wanted to get us all, if they could.” His lips curved grimly. “I can’t say they were wrong in that.”

As the subsequent world-shaking history of General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had amply proved. Ekaterin had never quite known whether to be glad or sorry that she’d not met Miles till long after that formidable old icon had passed away.

“My Da says he never saw my grandfather make a memorial burning for that part of his family,” Miles mused. “And nor did I, come to think. I asked him about it once—just about at age ten, probably, that being when I’d first become curious about it all. He said this”—a wave of his hand took in the scene sweeping silently below—“had been burning enough.”

A grimace of Vadim’s lips signified agreement. Ekaterin wondered if the ranger had district ancestors who’d shared that famous pyre, and what family stories had been passed on to him by age ten. His wasn’t a duty that drew many volunteers.

“Anyway,” Miles went on, as Miles was prone to do, “after we threw the Cetagandans off this planet and the war was over, my grandfather ended up with title deed to the whole contaminated zone. As personal property, not as an entailment of the countship like the public buildings in Hassadar or Vorkosigan House up in Vorbarr Sultana. The Vorkosigans hadn’t owned all of the area even before its destruction, so he couldn’t have inherited the whole thing outright—I believe he actually bought out some of the other survivors who had claims. Which, back then, was a way of slipping some very proud and traumatized people a bit of charity. When the old man died, he left the whole zone to me. I was seventeen, and still a bit touchy about, ah”—a wave down the short length of his body, vaguely hunched, less than five feet tall—“my appearance. I didn’t take it as a compliment, though I realized no one expected the zone to be habitable again in my father’s lifetime. But the older I get, the less sure I am what he was really thinking.”

Ekaterin supposed she was even less in a position to guess. But the old man would have had to be blind indeed not to have seen, even then, his birth-damaged only grandson’s growing powers of mind. And heart. Incandescent, someone had once described Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan. Maybe, love, Piotr chose to pass his wounded lands into hands that he thought could hold them. Maybe he didn’t underestimate you after all. Or maybe she was just too foolishly fond, too much a partisan for level judgment even after four years of marriage. She smiled and stared out, her eye following the route of the river eastward.

It meandered quietly, carrying its load of contaminants out of the Vorkosigans’ District and undrinkably through the eastern neighboring district, to empty out at last into an abandoned estuary and the sea that swallowed, if not all, much. Maybe not forever-abandoned, now. Let us see what this generation of Vorkosigans can do. She sat up and looked forward eagerly as they banked again and tracked up the ridge that, along with the prevailing winds, had once saved the lands just to the west from the worst of it.

“What the hell…?” Miles stretched his neck and frowned. “Vadim, what is that crap down there?”

The ranger turned his head. “Rubbish tip, my lord.”

Ekaterin followed their gazes; the lift van swooped lower.

“I’m not sure I approve of that. Maybe we do need that fence… though I don’t suppose it would stop a flyer.”

“I don’t think anyone lands, my lord. They just shovel it out the back of their lift van or lightflyer while they hover.”

“That would explain the scatter, yes.” Miles’s scowl deepened. “I expect it does no harm. Seems wrong, though.”

“Lese-majeste?” Ekaterin inquired, amused by his bristle.

“Mm, or defacing a graveyard.”

She let her eyelids droop in a conceding nod.

In a few more moments, the lift van slid down to thump to a landing at the edge of a patch of woods and meadow otherwise indistinguishable from its surroundings. The occupants of the van busied themselves arranging their protective gear. Miles and Ekaterin wore disposable jumpsuits over their ordinary clothes; Enrique and Vadim, more permanent garb. Flexible galoshes went on over shoes, lab gloves over hands. Miles watched anxiously as Ekaterin pulled on her hood and sealed her face mask, a simple half-cylinder of clear plastic with a filter arrangement. She watched back, a little more sardonically, as he sheepishly adjusted his own. At the last moment, about to jump down from his seat, he bethought himself of his cane and slipped a double layer of lab glove over the ferrule, self-tying it with the floppy fingers. Everyone checked their dosimeters, then finally piled out.

Ekaterin nodded to the dosimeter hanging at Vadim’s waist. “Does the lifetime limit on exposure curtail your career as a ranger?”

He shrugged. “It’s less important the older you get. And the treatments keep getting better. I hope to stay just behind that moving line for as long as I can.”

“Technically,” Miles put in, “I passed my lifetime limit halfway through my space career. You can’t take that stuff too seriously, or you’ll be paralyzed. Anyway, there’s gene cleaning now.”

Vadim gave a heartened nod at this elastic view of safety protocols, and followed his little liege lord as he stumped toward the experimental plot.

Ekaterin fell in beside Miles. “Does that radio-insouciance go for me, too?”

“Of course not.” He gave her a wary glance. “Though the limits are conservative.” And, in a lower mutter, “Besides, they only matter if you’re going to live to grow old.”

Ekaterin wondered whether to take up the ongoing argument about Miles’s personal conviction that he would not survive to some ripe old age, and had to live fast, cramming in experience, to make up for it. And was so much a part of what made Miles, Miles. Not now, perhaps. There would be time later; she was determined on it. She contented herself with a, “You’d better. Or I’ll have your scalp,” which made his sharp gray eyes crinkle behind his filter mask.

A faint humming marked the edge of the test plot, a twenty-meter-wide square laid out at the edge of the woods encompassing both scrub and a slice of meadow. At each corner, a force screen generator supported a barrier, half a meter high and a meter deep below ground, to contain the area and its important, if small, experimental inhabitants. Ekaterin and Vadim stepped over it; with a faint yelp, Enrique stumbled through it; Miles, about to hop, planted his cane and stepped over more carefully. It had been quite some time since his knees had last buckled unexpectedly, but this was not a good place to go rolling in the dirt. Ekaterin looked around eagerly for her first view of what she couldn’t help thinking of as her radbugs at work, though really, her design contribution had been small compared to Enrique’s. The exterior was the part everyone saw first, though, and first impressions were psychologically important.

“There’s one!” Miles pointed with the condomized tip of his cane toward a red-brown Barrayaran weed—henbloat, the botanist-and-gardener part of Ekaterin’s mind noted automatically—and used it to push back the stalk and reveal the insectoid shape contentedly chewing a leaf in the shade beneath.

The bioengineered creature was six or seven centimeters long, six-legged, beetle-like in form with its glossy wing carapaces. The carapaces, head, and legs were a deep, shimmering purple. Upon its back a clear trefoil shape glowed a butter-yellow. Really glowed; the tiny light was bright enough to reflect off its shadowy surroundings. The general effect was quite enchanting, Ekaterin thought.

Even before the design modifications, it had been entirely unjust of Miles to dub the earlier, original version ‘the vomit bugs’, or, during the unfortunate time they’d escaped inside Vorkosigan House, ‘those damned pullulating cockroaches’. Butterbugs had been the official name of that parent generation, brought by Dr. Enrique Borgos from his Escobaran laboratory, unfairly lost to—well, be frank—to financial mismanagement. His new lab at Hassadar on Barrayar was being much more shrewdly managed, if not by Enrique. Enrique had better things to do with his brain.

The butterbugs themselves were just mobile, self-maintaining packaging for the real secret, a suite of bioengineered microbes in their guts that processed any Earth-organic matter the bugs could munch. The butterbugs ate vegetation people could not; regurgitated an extremely nutritious tofu-like substance edible to humans; and excreted one of the best fertilizers Ekaterin-the-gardener had ever tested. Really, there was no downside.

Except for the bugs’ original appearance, which some people—Ekaterin glanced under her lashes at her husband, still peering under the plant—who had less excuse than most to judge others by their surfaces, had found repulsively off-putting. So, at the other shareholders’ requests, Ekaterin had taken on the packaging problem; the new food-producing butterbugs, renamed glorious bugs, were quite attractive and a hit. Miles… had come around slowly.

Miles had come around a lot faster, though, when Enrique had floated the tentative notion of a bug that might eat radioactively contaminated matter, chelate the heavy metals to a claylike substance to be regurgitated at collection points, and excrete what was to all intents and purposes clean, fertile soil. The lab had suddenly found itself generously funded for the new project from Lord Vorkosigan’s personal purse. And Dr. Borgos, who was not a slow learner despite his youth—the man was not yet thirty even now—had this time come to Lady Vorkosigan for design tips first.

She was quite proud of her motif for the bugs, redubbed radbugs for their new task. It had been her notion, though Enrique had carried it out, to make the warning signs built-in to the bugs’ backs glow more brightly the more contaminated the bugs became, the bioluminescence making it instantly apparent when they were safe or not to handle, and to what degree.

“Dear God. That’s… disturbing,” muttered Miles, staring at the glowing radbug.

“Oh, but it’s working!” Thrilled, Ekaterin bent down for a closer view; Miles hung back. The little creature munched on, oblivious to the varied emotions of its observers.

“Aha!” cried Enrique.

Ekaterin and Miles came quickly across to where he was crouching over a tiny mound of dull gray pellets. He unhooked his rad scanner from his belt and passed it over the pile. Its discontented-sounding twitter rose abruptly in pitch and volume to a wail.

“Wow!” said Enrique, making a hasty record of the readout. “This stuff is hot!”

Miles took a look past his shoulder at the reading, which Enrique obligingly tilted his way; his eyebrows shot up. “By damn.”

Enrique straightened. “It looks like we may have to address that disposal problem earlier than we thought. Really, this reverses the usual method of cleanup, which is to dilute and dilute till your matrix is no worse—or little worse—than whatever you suffer for the normal background. This un-dilutes. Concentrates.” He went off to fetch a trowel, kneeling again to scoop up the sample into a lead-lined jar to take back to the lab for further analysis. He handed it off to Vadim, who carted it gingerly away to stash in the lift van.

“I admit,” said Miles, watching all this closely, “that my desire to make a permanent end to this crap by taking it up to orbit and firing it into the sun is mitigated by visions of some horrible transport accident. Binning it up and sinking it in the most active subduction zone on the planet might be safer as well as cheaper. At least humans don’t pull food from the Barrayaran seas.”

“Yet,” said Ekaterin. “There are projects in the works, I understand.”

“Well, if we do nothing, which is what we have been doing for the past eight decades, it ends up in the sea all the same. Just getting it away from the coast has got to be an improvement.”

“May I suggest final decisions should wait on further testing, Miles,” said Enrique. “Depending on how the profile of other heavy metals works out, there might be commercial applications for this waste. It might even turn out to be a product. It’s already far more concentrated than any natural ore.”

“What other heavy metals? I thought we were going after the residual strontium, cesium, and samarium, mainly. And that bloody plutonium.” With which the Cetagandans had salted the bomb on purpose, to the outrage of more people than just the Barrayarans.

“The first sample I took, last week, did show a good harvest of those. But also traces of several surprises, including platinum.”

“Platinum!” said Miles. “How are the butterbugs—excuse me, radbugs—finding platinum, here?”

“Atom by atom, evidently. Enzymes, you know.” Enrique got a familiar, faraway look in his eye. “Which gives me an idea for addressing gold mine tailings. You know, those dumps from old, inefficient mining operations. I’m sure whatever you people had back in your Time of Isolation was horribly inefficient. They’re known to be laced with the metal, but there has been no way to safely and economically extract it. If I could design burrowing bugs… worms…? something, they might…. hm.”

“Talk to Martya,” Miles advised. “Or Mark. Sounds like their department. I just want…” Miles trailed off, looking around through the lengthening afternoon shadows in the scrubby woods.

To redeem his family’s liege-dead? To prove his worth to his late grandfather, again?—this was a pursuit that seemed, in Ekaterin’s observation so far, to have no end for him. In any case, she joined him as he strolled the perimeter of the plot, chewing his lip under his mask and staring out into the lovely, lethal landscape.

“Good heavens!” said Enrique, which drew them both back to the Escobaran’s shoulder in a hurry. He had picked up a stick and was prodding at a radbug easily twice the length of the one they’d seen under that henbloat. The bug hunkered down with a surly little hiss.

“That’s not a queen, is it?” said Miles uneasily.

“No, no. All the radbugs here are sterile workers. Though they do molt and grow throughout their lives. They are supposed to go back and die on the waste piles, when they reach the end of their life cycles. One of the things this plot is supposed to tell us is how long the average worker can survive in the field. I was expecting to have lost a few already, though of course some insects are extremely radiation-resistant…” His eyes narrowed, picturing something. Or the absence of something. He went to the nearest waste pile and poked it with his stick. No purple body parts shimmered among the lead-colored pellets.

Looking abstracted, he went off to locate the several other little piles scattered around the plot. Looking chary, Miles followed along.

Enrique glanced up from the last of these and smiled a bit thinly. “I wonder if you three could help me out, here. Space yourselves evenly across the plot and count all the radbugs you see. Be sure to look under things, logs and what-not.”

Obediently, Miles, Ekaterin, and Vadim did so; Enrique took the far end of the sweep. Miles did good work with his cane, startling several bugs out of hiding from rotting timber and leaf litter; they waddled off in purple-and-gold-gleaming flashes.

“Twenty-nine,” Miles reported.

“Seventeen,” said Vadim.

“Twenty-three,” said Ekaterin, and looked to Enrique, whose lips were still moving.

“Twenty-six,” he said at length.

“Ninety-five total,” said Miles, who was quick at that sort of thing. “Is that good or bad?”

“Well, it’s, er… puzzling. Because I released an even two hundred here, last week.”

Miles drew a long, long breath through his filter mask. “Enrique…” He took visible control of his temper, always a bit edgy around the bugs. History. “Could they have flown out over the barrier?”

“No! They don’t have wings!” Enrique picked up a not-too-glowing bug in his gloved fingers and folded up its carapaces to demonstrate the un-functional wing-nubs beneath. Miles recoiled only slightly.

“If they don’t fly,” said Ekaterin, “could they climb?”

Four people bent their heads back to stare upward into the scrubby trees, like gawkers studying a Winterfair light display. But no gold twinkles winked up there.

Miles wheeled and frowned at the corner boxes. “Could the barrier have, I don’t know, shorted out in the night and shorted back on?”

“Seems unlikely,” said Enrique.

“Why don’t we all take a quick look around outside the field,” suggested Ekaterin. “If we find, well, any radbugs outside, it’ll at least prove the possibility.” The possibility of what, she wasn’t quite sure, but it served to separate Miles from Enrique.

“Mm,” grunted Miles, but joined the others in a squinty-eyed patrol through the woods nears the plot. The bugs, after all, didn’t hide well, having their own built-in signal lights.

Ekaterin was just wondering how fast radbugs could travel overland, and doing futile calculations in her head, when Miles’s voice drew her gaze up from the ground: “What the hell is that?”

He stood several meters off, staring out into the shadowy scrub. His chin thrust forward, then he followed its line, limping. He nearly stumbled over a root, and Ekaterin hurried to his side.

“What did you see?”

“Pale shape. It flickered back into the brush.”

“Feral animal?” Feral dogs, cats, pigs, goats, chickens, red deer, ponies, black-and-white rats, and other escapees from human settlements were known to roam the Barrayaran wilderness, if only in areas where Earth-descended plants had first made a dent; almost no Barrayaran vegetation was edible to Earth-descended animals of any kind, humans included. So the feral populations tended to be sparse and starving. The notion of hungry feral chickens—which could fly, certainly over a half-meter-high force screen—gave Ekaterin a new and alarming idea of what might have happened to the disappearing radbugs. Loaded radbugs in the food chain were a horrifying notion. But people in the Vorkosigan’s District were careful about wild-caught food, at least in these days when rad scanners were cheap and abundant enough to be shared around freely.

“Too tall. Too quiet.” Miles squeezed his eyes open and shut a few times. “I did not see—”

“Did not see what?” Ekaterin prodded as he stalled out.

“I did not just see a wood-elf,” Miles said, very firmly. If in an undertone. He either underscored or undercut this certainty with a few jabs of his cane into the leaf litter. He raised his voice. “Vadim!”

The tall ranger arrived, striding up out of a dell. “My lord?”

“I saw something strange moving over thataway.” Miles pointed with his cane.

Vadim’s head turned. “Nothing’s there, my lord.”

“Still. Take a reconnaissance, see if you notice anything.”

The ranger cast him a dutiful salute and moved off into the growing shadows. The radbugs should be even easier to spot in the dimness, Ekaterin thought, gleaming in the gloaming, but she glimpsed none.

It was several minutes before Vadim returned to report, “I didn’t find anything, my lord.”

Miles scowled.

“Could it have been a little hallucination? They say dusk is the trickiest light of the day,” offered Enrique.

“I’ve had hallucinations,” said Miles shortly. “I know what they look like. Not… that.”

“Medication allergy,” Ekaterin explained to the ranger’s startled stare. And Miles was not, to her certain knowledge, on any of those medications now.

Enrique turned slowly around, squinting into the gathering gloom. “This won’t do. I need more data.”

“But not tonight, sir,” said the ranger firmly. “It’s time we were leaving.” He tapped his dosimeter significantly.

With reluctance, the party allowed themselves to be escorted off to the lift van.

Ekaterin accompanied Enrique back to the plot the next morning to help get his more-data. They didn’t need to add to the zone ranger’s lifetime rad-dosage sum for this, and Miles was tied up in meetings in Hassadar, so she and the Escobaran spent the next hour tacking live-feed vidcams up on the trees by themselves.

“I should have thought of this earlier,” Enrique grumbled, as she handed him up the last of the cams—cheap commercial models, bought in a bulk bundle in town last night. Miles had offered to scrounge some of Imperial Security’s finest equipment, but there was such a thing as overkill, Ekaterin had pointed out frugally. Miles tended not to think frugally on any scale smaller than a district budget.

“How were you to know?” Ekaterin consoled the scientist. “Anyway, the purpose of the first test plot is to find problems; it’s certainly working for that.”

Enrique spoke into his wristcom to his partner back in the hundred-kilometers-safely-distant Hassadar lab: “Do you have the signal, Martya?”

“Yes, locked in,” Martya’s voice returned cheerfully. “You’ve pretty much got the whole plot cross-covered now. I’m getting very fine detail on the close-up zooms—I can count the legs. And compare the brightness.”

Enrique nodded satisfaction and stepped down off the ladder with a grunt. Ekaterin went to set it in the little shelter with the growing collection of to-be-left-in-the-zone tools.

“If our bug thieves turn out to be feral chickens or rats,” she said, returning, “is there some way you could make the next batch of bugs especially bad-tasting to them?”

“I shouldn’t think they were very yummy to start with,” said Enrique, “but yes. It would be a trivial modification, though I expect we’d best buy a few actual chickens for the lab to test the options. That’s another thing I should have thought of, I suppose. But I was focused on tuning the microbe suite.”

“As well you should have been,” said Ekaterin. “Miles was really pleased with the concentration you obtained.”

Enrique brightened. “Yes. It may be time to bring the robotic collection scheme forward.”

“We certainly can’t be sending out squads of proles with shovels,” said Ekaterin. “That would have been too Time-of-Isolation even for the Time of Isolation.” She hesitated. “Though operating the remote collectors might be a reasonable employment for district people, if it would get the system up sooner.”

Enrique nodded. “I expect we’ll be training the bugs to stockpile it in removable grids in some kind of hutches, like the original butterbugs. Let’s do another head-count.”

They split the plot to make a more detailed survey than last night’s rough estimate. It came out only three more; no hundred-bug hoards, or hordes, were found under anything.

Enrique pressed his lips together in frustration. “I think the next batch of bugs should be individually numbered. Maybe with some sort of little tracer built into the tags.”

Applying tiny tags to the bugs was going to be a tedious task for some lab tech, but Ekaterin could only nod agreement. “So—have you done a plant survey?”

“Ah,” said Enrique, after a slight hesitation. “Good thinking.”

Ekaterin, who’d been about to ask for a look at it, gave him a mildly reproachful glance. “After eighty years, all the contamination that could wash away easily, mostly has. The rest is locked up in the biota or down in the subsoil. It would be good to know which plants were drawing up the most rads from the subsoil. And which ones the bugs have a preference for, if any. If there turns out to be some optimum combination, seeding the zone might be a way to help speed things along.”

“I’d need more people…”

“Or you might be able to get some help from Hassadar District College,” Ekaterin suggested. “Botany, Agronomy, any of those departments might welcome the project.” Come to think, there had to have been some such botanical surveys done already, sometime, by somebody. She knew the rangers kept up-to-date radiation plots, but then, those could be mapped from the air. Next stop, Hassadar College.

“We’d been keeping the radbugs, if not exactly secret, very closely held,” said Enrique. “So as not to raise false hopes, your husband said.”

Or false fears. “I think most of the hopes were his, but yes. We might disclose them soon. Maybe,” she modified this prudently. “Everything in the district competes for resources. The best solution is to make more resources, Miles claims.”

She fell in beside Enrique as he walked one last circuit of the perimeter, staring around for bugs, or anything forgotten, or maybe just ideas.

“What does Miles plan to use this land for, anyway?” he asked, as they made the far turn and started back. “Not that the radbug project hasn’t been intrinsically interesting, as both pure and applied science. But it’s not as if your district is overpopulated even yet—Martya claims you’ve been losing people to the capital for decades, and, now, all that emigration to Sergyar. Why not just let it all sit there and look pretty?”

“From a distance?” said Ekaterin dryly. “Forever?”

Enrique shrugged. “It’s far from the only unpeopled and un-people-able wasteland on the planet. Agriculture? Seems archaic. Industrial food- and fiber-making are more efficient. And your cities are growing.”

“Not everyone wants to live in a plascrete box.” Ekaterin certainly didn’t. “And even the industrial bio-processes need organic feedstocks.”

“Yes, but you’ll have a hard sell from here. There’s likely still going to be a rad residue, even after cleanup. Food seems, so to speak, off the table. Fiber… eh…” He frowned in doubt.

Ekaterin said, a little shyly, “This used to be one of the most fruitful agricultural areas on the continent. I thought the first recovery application might be commercial flower farming.” She could see it in her mind’s eye even now, acres of glorious blooms, rivers of color. And more district employment, too.

“Oh.” Enrique blinked. “Yes, that might do very well.”

“Even if it only becomes a park, it might be a park people could walk in without protection, maybe camp in without dosimeters. We need our open spaces. Our green-and-red-brown spaces.”

“A garden, then,” said Enrique. “Two hundred kilometers around?”

Ekaterin smiled. “Maybe.”

“Ambitious.”

“Miles,” she said primly, “has strong views on not limiting one’s scope.”

“I’ve heard some of his, er…”

“Rants?” Ekaterin supplied.

He gave her a grateful You said it, I didn’t nod. “I suppose that’s why we’re all here.”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

Enrique’s call came earlier than Ekaterin expected, the next morning as she was struggling to get breakfast into two toddlers. Miles was helping, sort of—both twins seemed more interested in using their food to bomb the Hassadar Count’s Residence cats, swirling under their high chairs, a more entertaining and quasi-military exercise to which Miles had allowed himself to be diverted.

“Bracket him, bracket him, that’s right, Helen—!”

Giggles and shrieks, not much chewing and swallowing. Except by the three overweight cats, who greeted this manna with ecstatic growls. A one-to-one ratio of parents to children ought to be an even match, but Ekaterin was sometimes not sure whose side Lord Vorkosigan was on. Grimacing in mixed amusement and exasperation. Ekaterin stepped away from the war zone and raised her wristcom to her lips. “Yes, Enrique?”

“Ekaterin, you’ve got to come out to the lab right away!”

“Is it an emergency?”

“Yes!”

Martya’s voice interrupted: “Not by now, surely. This was last night. Even if you flew out there right away, you’d be too late to do anything about it.”

“Martya”—Ekaterin, experienced, addressed the practical partner—“what’s going on?”

“Our vidcams picked up our bug thief last night.”

“Aha! Was it chickens?”

“No…”

“Well, what was it?”

“It’s a little hard to say. You should see this.”

Miles, ears pricking, looked up and waved her on. “If Martya sounds that taken aback, it probably is urgent. You’d better go. I have things under control here. I’m not due in that damned committee for another hour, and it’s only a five-minute walk across Hassadar Square.”

Aurie Pym, their summer nanny while she was on college break, strolled in just then, sipping coffee. “Need some help, Lady Ekaterin?”

“Yes,” said Ekaterin gratefully. “For the love of heaven, get some protein into those two.” She jerked her head toward the playtime in progress. “Or he won’t be the one who’s sorry later.”

Aurie grinned. “Understood.”

The chortles of laughter, punctuated by an occasional lying meow protesting imminent starvation, and fatherly praise of “Good shot, Sasha!” that followed Ekaterin out relieved her maternal guilt, somewhat.

It was a short hop by lightflyer from downtown Hassadar out to the lab, installed on an old hardscrabble farmstead abandoned when its prior occupant had emigrated to what Ekaterin hoped were more fertile fields on Sergyar. In any case, the farmstead seemed more lucratively suited to its new purpose. MPVK Enterprises, Laboratory One, read the formal public sign by the gate, though Martya’s sister Kareen had dubbed it The Butterbug Ranch, a name which had stuck in private.

Ekaterin bypassed the new pole barn housing the experimental bug hutches and headed for the current main building, the converted farmhouse. Some more impressive HQ was planned for Someday, when we’re not so busy. She found Enrique and Martya back in the old parlor that served as auxiliary office and communications center.

She waved at Martya Koudelka-Borgos, a tall, blond, efficient woman in her late twenties. “Hi, Martya. So, what’s the big mystery?”

“More mystery, it seems. Come look.”

Enrique was seated at the comconsole, scowling at an array of vid images that Ekaterin recognized as the cross-angles of their plot. “Here, I’ll back it up to the beginning. Just after dusk, last night.” He enhanced the images to defeat the low light level, at some cost in true color and resolution.

She leaned over his shoulder and stared.

A strange, slight figure stepped carefully over the force barrier and wandered into focus. It was dressed in trousers a couple of sizes too large for it, cinched up around the narrow waist by a rope belt, and an old black T-shirt. Skinny arms shone a luminous white by contrast—skin not just pale ivory, or lacking a tan, but near-paper-white. When the figure glanced upward, the vid caught a clear view of a bony face, equally white, and wispy white hair that looked as though someone had trimmed around the head using a bowl for a guideline.

“Freeze that shot!” said Ekaterin. “Go in close.”

The eyes were a pale ice blue. The ears looked decidedly pointed.

“My word, it’s Miles’s wood-elf!”

“Miles’s what?” said Martya, raising her brows.

“An albino person, surely,” put in Enrique, in a tone of helpful scientific correction.

“Yes, yes, I see that. But Miles, night before last, saw someone moving in the dusk, someone Vadim couldn’t find—he said it looked like a wood-elf. And, oh dear, it really does!” Miles would be—well, among other things, relieved that his vision hadn’t been the harbinger of some mental breakup. But otherwise, Ekaterin was fairly sure, as disconcerted as herself.

In the stilled vid-shot, it became clear that the elf was a boy. Ekaterin’s experienced eye pegged the age as somewhere between a well-grown eleven and an undersized fourteen, beardless, into his growth spurt but not yet into full puberty. Just about the age of her eldest son Nikolai, child of her first marriage.

Enrique, with a glance at her for permission, put the figure into motion once more. The boy set down a saggy cloth bag he’d carried slung over one shoulder and drew from it a liter-sized glass jar, with holes punched in its metal lid, which he unscrewed. He then dodged around the plot picking up the brightest radbugs and popping them into the jar.

“He’s not wearing gloves!” Martya wailed.

“He’s not even wearing shoes!” Ekaterin echoed her horrified tone.

Enrique sat up straighter. “Hadn’t noticed that, the first time through. But he’s stealing our bugs, the little—juvenile delinquent!”

When a dozen or more bright radbugs filled the jar, crawling over each other and making a flashing golden-purple lantern out of their prison, the boy bent and dribbled in a few leaves plucked from the bushes, rattled them down, and screwed the lid back on. He then skipped over to their open-sided shed and began loading the few tools stored there into the bag, examining each judiciously.

“There, right there, he’s stealing all our stuff!” said Martya.

They were all cheap tools designed to be used and then abandoned to their contamination in the zone; it was not the thought of the equipment but its potential radioactivity that raised the hairs on the back of Ekaterin’s neck. She didn’t know why the boy spent so much time shopping, because everything went into the bag just the same except the stepladder, which was too big to fit or, evidently, to be carried off. Though he tried it out, setting it up—but apparently not knowing enough to lock the safety catches, eep—and climbing up and down it, jumping off a few times from higher and higher steps. Luckily, it didn’t collapse on him during this game. Tilting it up against one tree, he climbed to take a closer look at one of the little vidcams. He tapped and yanked at it, but couldn’t pull it off its bracket; then, with an air of experiment, licked it. It certainly provided a closeup of his startling pale eyes. And long tongue. The view through it thereafter was somewhat smeary.

“Eew,” said Martya, dismayed.

Eventually tiring of this uncooperative object, the boy climbed back down, shoved the ladder back into the shelter, and turned away.

“But how did he get all the way out there?” asked Enrique. “There are no roads to the plot, not even old ones. Surely he’s too young for a lightflyer or float-bike license.”

“The backcountry people in the district, especially up in the mountains, aren’t too picky about little urban details like licenses and legal ages,” Martya observed, accurately.

Ekaterin studied the vid displays, following the boy-thief from view to view. “If he had a vehicle, I expect he would have taken the ladder. He seemed to like it a lot.” And what a strange thing to choose for a plaything, not that kids didn’t do that—spurning the toys and adopting the boxes they came in—but he’d treated it as a novelty, as if he’d never seen the like before. And why hadn’t he used some of the tools to take down the vidcams, considerably more valuable? “He might have walked.”

“All the way out there? Barefoot? From—wherever?” said Enrique in disbelief.

Ekaterin almost smiled. “People still do walk places in the backcountry. Not just for exercise, but to get where they’re going. Or ride horseback.” She eyed the slight, burdened figure, now stepping over the force barrier, dragging the bag with one hand and holding up the lantern-jar with the other. “Or on a pony,” she allowed judiciously.

“But our bugs, he’s taking them away!” complained Enrique. “What can he want them for? Ransom?” His slightly wild expression suggested that no price would be too much to pay to have them back safely.

“He’s just a child, Enrique,” said Ekaterin, a new and rather horrifying notion of the boy’s motivation growing in her mind. Could anyone on Barrayar, no matter how young or backcountry, not know what those trefoils meant? What if he’d simply thought her deadly radbugs were pretty?

“A mutant child, at that,” said Martya. “Do you suppose someone makes him go into the zone and steal things for them?”

All right, Ekaterin’s vision had not been as horrifying as that. “He looked… rather self-propelled. Cheerful. Active-skinny, not starving-skinny.” No bruises or marks of other abuse had showed on the pale skin, at least not on his arms or head or neck. The few scratches had looked like normal wear-and-tear for anyone crashing through the scrub without heavy clothing. But no one should be crashing through this scrub without protective gear. “I thought it was the District Rangers’ main job to keep people out of the zone. We’d better call Vadim.”

Martya promptly did so, only to discover that it was, apparently, the ranger’s day off; in any case, he was not reachable and did not return a call at her message.

“I didn’t know he had days off,” said Enrique, sounding vaguely puzzled. Naturally enough; Enrique didn’t exactly take breaks either, at least not scheduled ones, his time being divided into days with too many things to do, and days with far too many things to do—much like her own, Ekaterin reflected ruefully. Although he was occasionally dragged out of his lab by his wife Martya as a matter of principle. Ekaterin wondered guiltily if she ought to do that for Miles more often, but vacations with Miles usually ended up being more something you needed a vacation from, afterward. It was easier just to stand out of his way and let him go on till he dropped, which he eventually did. She tried not to let her mind sketch parallels with hyperactive toddlers.

“Did you bring your lightflyer?” Enrique demanded of Ekaterin.

“Well, yes—but even if we flew out there, we couldn’t land it. Or else we’d have to stop at the ranger station on the way back for decontamination,” she added more precisely. Enrique’s pedantic habits of thought were a trifle contagious.

Enrique waved this away as a bagatelle. “The thief evidently came back several times. If he has mechanical transport, we might be able to spot where he hid it. If he came on foot—” Enrique stopped and scowled.

“He couldn’t have come from very far away,” Martya completed the thought.

“Yes, but that would put his start point inside the zone,” objected Ekaterin.

“Then maybe we can spot it,” said Enrique.

“You and Vadim must have over-flown that area quite a few times when you were picking out and setting up the plot. Surely you’d have seen anything visible from the air.”

“Yes, but we weren’t looking for trespassers then!”

It was a valid point. She considered submitting the question to Miles, but first, he would already be head-down in his committee by now, not that he wouldn’t welcome almost any interruption from that, and second, he would likely veto her participation in the scouting expedition on sheer reflex. Try to veto, she corrected this thought a bit mulishly. She glanced at her chrono. It would only take an hour to fly down there and circle the area a few times, and she was already partway. And… she had to admit, the mysterious albino boy had left her both curious and disturbed.

“All right…”

While Ekaterin called Aurie with this altered schedule, Enrique threw their protective gear into the back seat of the flyer, just in case. Ekaterin took the controls. Her flyer was a speedy little thing—a recent anniversary gift from Miles—and in much less time than it had taken the ranger’s lumbering lift van, they came up on the site of the plot once more.

Despite Enrique’s jittering anxiety, there was, as she’d mostly expected, nothing to see, even circling low and slow: no darting or lurking figures in the scrub, no parked vehicles of any kind, not even a pony tied to a tree.

Enrique hauled out the mass scanner.

“Those things can yield false positives,” she noted. “Even if you narrow the mass range. Dogs, goats, whatever.”

“But also true positives.”

“Mm, that’s so…”

A famous criminal gang had once infested the zone, radioactive Robin Hoods who stole from, well, pretty much anyone, and kept it for themselves, but that had been thirty years back. They hadn’t lasted long. They had become instant local legends, though—Miles as a young boy had been just of the age to be impressed. She hoped he identified more with the brave local guardsmen who’d finally rousted them out of their holes than with the repellent robbers. But it was a stretch to imagine such dramatic figures stooping to filching gardening tools.

Nevertheless, at Enrique’s insistence she banked the flyer in a widening spiral around the plot, at treetop level and the lowest possible speed. The red-and-green woods flickered by below. She wondered briefly if being colorblind would have actually helped her confused perceptions. If their quarry was anything as dangerous as criminal fugitives, Ekaterin thought she’d be perfectly happy for someone other than herself and one gangling and not very physically coordinated off-worlder to be the first to find them. Wasn’t the ranger cadre trained for just such tasks? She was about to point this out to Enrique when he suddenly sat up and exclaimed into his scanner. “There, over there!” He waved urgently out the windshield.

“What? People?”

Enrique fiddled. “Mm, oh, not at three hundred kilos. Maybe wild ponies, or red deer… ah.”

Ponies, three of them, browsing in a slice of water meadow. Wild and shaggy and probably with hot bones. No sign of a paddock fence. She was about to bank away when one of them trotted, well, not trotted—hopped its way out of the longer grass and put its head down to the streamlet running from the ridge to the west.

“Hobbles!” Ekaterin cried in excitement.

“What?” said Enrique.

“That pony is wearing hobbles! They’re like, like… binders, restraints people fasten around the front fetlocks—front legs—to let them wander and graze but not go too far, when they don’t have fences. That pony is tame!” Staring at the unkempt, cranky-looking creature, who snorted up suspiciously at the hovering flyer and braced to bolt, Ekaterin corrected this assertion to, “Owned, anyway.” She eased the flyer away so as not to spook the little herd.

If they had been flying any higher or faster, Ekaterin would not have seen it, that faint rectangle in the trees covered with moss, vines, and rocks. “Is that a roof over there?”

Enrique followed her gaze and swung his mass scanner around as she banked the flyer again. As their altitude dropped and the angle changed, the dilapidated gray structure swam into her focus. A shack, a cabin—Ekaterin gulped. I am not superstitious, drat it!

It was not a sinister hut in the forest on chicken legs, it was not… Ekaterin’s heartbeat came off its sudden sprint as the ‘chicken legs’ resolved themselves into an array of dead tree trunks, cut off at about three meters from the ground and supporting the structure like pillars under a platform. The gnarled, dry old roots spread out like talons at the bases of their boles. As false a first impression, if as understandable, as Miles’s wood-elf.

Also, the hut did not lack windows or have a hidden doorway to be invoked only by a virtuous and intelligent girl with the magic words; the wooden door was right there on the end, with a ladder descending from its narrow slice of porch. Good protection from feral dog packs or other ground-based hazards, including the poisonous soil itself, the rational part of Ekaterin’s mind insisted, firmly. All very logical, made perfect sense, and her stomach could just turn itself back right-side-up any time, now…

A faint haze of smoke dispersed from a fieldstone chimney.

“Land, land!” Enrique thumped her shoulder.

“I’m landing!” They scraped through the tree branches that squeaked over the flyer like clawed fingers, then bumped to a halt a dozen meters in front of the strange structure.

Ekaterin stared. Enrique scanned.

“Is there anyone inside?” Ekaterin asked through a dry mouth. Where there was smoke…

“Not right now…” Enrique scrambled over into the back seat and handed up Ekaterin’s protective gear. They each began to don the cumbersome overalls and booties in the cramped confines of the lightflyer. Lab gloves, their hoods-and-masks, and then they both popped out of their respective doors, puffy white ragdoll figures with vaguely insectoid heads, although properly, Ekaterin thought, the round air filters should be set at eye and not cheek level in the half-cylindrical transparent face masks in order to complete the illusion.

At the foot of the shack’s ladder they paused and stared at each other. While happy to defer to Enrique in the areas of his considerable technical expertise, she was, after all, Lady Vorkosigan. This task wasn’t anything she’d ever pictured appending to her new role, but the implication was clear. Ekaterin swallowed, wrapped a gloved hand around a ladder rung, and hoisted herself aloft. Still clutching the scanner, Enrique awkwardly followed.

A string-latch opened the plank door. The hut was a single room, lit only dimly by small, mismatched windows on each side, slate-and-fieldstone hearth at the far end. A few coals glowered out through gray ash. As her eyes adjusted, Ekaterin saw that the walls and floor were crowded by a motley assortment of goods—partly handmade backcountry tools and furniture that might have come straight out of the Time of Isolation, familiar enough from Ekaterin’s trips with Miles up into the mountains, partly what clearly were recent rubbish-tip gleanings.

The rag-stuffed mattress on a wooden cot to one side was held up by a net of woven plastic rope bits. Another rag-stuffed mattress, shoved out of the way underneath like a trundle bed, seemed to have an old print shower curtain for a counterpane. A crudely cobbled-together double bunk on the other side of the room was similarly decked out. Four people live here, then…?

The kitchen goods around the hearth were a like mix—one solid ancient cast-iron frying pan hung on a hook, a very miscellaneous assortment of plastic and metal and formerly electric gadgets repurposed to a powerless—in both senses, perhaps—lifestyle. Impoverished, yet not wholly uncomfortable… Ekaterin was reminded of Miles’s description of his grandfather, the crusty old count whose childhood went back to the time Barrayar had been rediscovered, as a man notably indifferent to indoor plumbing.

Less historically romantic in the winter, to be sure.

But what are they doing for food…? The shelves included ordinary food in modern packaging that could have come from any grocery in Hassadar; home-dried vegetables and herbs hung in strings from the rafters that might have looked quite enticing, except, grown here? and dried meat likewise alarming; a basket containing a few feather-and-dirt-flecked eggs plainly filched straight from feral chickens.

“Nobody home,” Enrique stated the obvious. His voice, though curious, did not quaver with nerves.

Ekaterin steadied her own. “They’ve not gone far, I’d guess. Let’s take a look around outside.”

The kitchen garden, now she knew to look for one, was not in one big tidy plot visible from the air, but distributed around in small, sunny patches. In a dark, moist, shaded dell hidden among the trees behind the cabin was… what? What looked like yellowish fence posts, but it couldn’t be a garden in that gloom. As she ventured nearer, the posts resolved into a cluster of peeled saplings, with strange pale knobs on top. Oh.

“Now, that’s a touch disturbing,” admitted Enrique, peering over her shoulder. “Or is this another of your local customs?”

“Not… really.”

Skulls on posts. Eleven of them, Ekaterin counted. A twelfth post stood up new and bare. Most of the skulls seemed old and weathered enough to be free of flesh and hair. Ekaterin couldn’t decide if that was reassuring or not. Variously weathered, so different death dates? As she studied them, her stomach knotted at a further observation.

“They’re… small. Mostly. Enrique, I think these are children’s skulls.”

“Unless they are microcephalic people,” he offered. Was that supposed to be helpful…? But really, he didn’t look as if he believed his own alternate hypothesis. “One might tell from the teeth, I believe. I wonder where the bodies are?” He lifted his mass scanner and walked around among the grinning posts, eventually looking downward. “Ah. They seem to be buried by the bases of these poles.”

“Are there very many?”

“Mm, no, they seem to be in a one-to-one ratio with the disjecta membra.”

Not a mass grave, then, though certainly a graveyard. She was no trained forensic pathologist, but she could recognize milk teeth when she saw them, and the meaning of those small jaws. Children; a variety of ages. A couple of the smaller crania were notably misshapen. Her own teeth set. She unhooked her rad scanner from her belt and held it near to test several skulls. It chittered excitedly. The concentration of radiation was well above background, if not quite as intense as some of the hot animal bones found in the zone.

Enrique, who had been circling the plot waving his scanner and squinting into the woods, said, “There’s another structure over there.”

Her gaze tracked his. Even more thoroughly hidden in the vegetation, some plank verticals… an outbuilding? They both started up toward it. It was much smaller than the hut on stilts, though not as small as a privy, and not raised off the ground, though it seemed to sit on a crude fieldstone foundation. Windowless. Doorless…?

Enrique fiddled with his scanner. “Now there’s someone inside,” he remarked in a satisfied tone. He pursed his lips. “Or possibly a goat.”

They walked around it and found that it fronted on a wider clearing. It had a door, to Ekaterin’s relief. Closed, low, barred from the outside by a crooked stick with the gray bark still on, resting in two wooden catches. A scan of the soil around the entry by what Miles called the Old Mark One Eyeball revealed a few odd feathers and dried chicken dung and, yes, goat berries, swept out and scattered by some twiggy broom, not naturally piled. There was nothing like a rematch with motherhood, Ekaterin reflected glumly, to attune one to the messages in feces. The ponies had left no such calling cards—was this a shelter for the smaller animals, then? No, wait, a tell-tale mound of droppings lay off the corner of the shed, a pony-length from where such an animal might be tied by its bridle.

Ekaterin’s hand closed on the stick—Enrique nodded encouragement—then paused. “Stow your scanner and get ready to catch someone’s goat if it bolts.” Lady Vorkosigan’s rights of trespass were arguable, but wouldn’t be aided by complaints about letting people’s domestic animals escape. And goats were tricky brutes, as Ekaterin recalled clearly from some youthful misadventures on her great-aunt’s South Continent farm.

Enrique crowding her heels, she opened the door and stepped inside, preparing to let her eyes adjust to the shed’s shadows.

Instead, it was like walking into a Winterfair light display, or some space station’s observation lounge, or a planetarium show gone wrong. Very wrong.

From the floor, the walls, the ceiling, there glowed, yes, surely upwards of a hundred flower-like trefoils set in metallic purple gleams, ranging in color from a dull umber to butter-bright, scarcely less radiant than the thin chinks of daylight leaking between the boards. The effect was as enthralling as it was appalling. Some held still; some moved slowly, like wandering planets in this stunning constellation. They ranged in size from no bigger than her thumb to something that would fill her palm. Her gloved palm.

A hoarse voice from the floor said, “Oh, Ingi! Did you find me some more, huh?”

Ekaterin’s gaze jerked downward.

The stout shape huddling there with its back to them wore a man’s old shirt with the sleeves cut off. Its pale arms hung out; three or four especially brilliant thumb-sized radbugs crawled along these waving trackways, clinging with their little claws. A few more skulked among the dark and rather greasy curls on its head. The figure rocked back and forth, turning toward the door without getting up. A couple of larger radbugs nestled in its lap, half-hidden among folds of skirt. A moon-shaped face with a gaping grin looked up into the silhouetting light from the door, small slitted eyes crinkling.

A girl—a woman? She was near adult-sized, and her thick torso was definitely past puberty, though the wide face was as smooth as an egg. But as the girl stared up at her visitors’ masked and hooded aspects in a shock that entirely reflected their own, the lineless features crumpled into a child’s bewildered terror.

“The white ghosts! White ghosts!” she shrieked at what must surely be the top of her lungs; the wail echoed off the boards and made Enrique flinch. She scrambled up, shedding radbugs, which bounced among the rough cobbles and scuttled away, save for one unfortunate insect smashed under an, oh God, stumpy bare foot. Thick, uncut toenails ridged up like claws on all six toes, save for the nails cracked and broken off.

“My bugs!” yelped Enrique back. “Stop stepping on them, you idiot!” Pejorative, or literal classification? With Enrique, at this harried moment, it was hard to be sure. “Settle down!”

Instead, the girl sprinted for the low door, evading Ekaterin’s lurch. “Grab her!” Ekaterin cried.

“She’s not a goat!” But he complied, or tried to; she twisted away and struck out hard with her arms and fists, scratching wildly at his faceplate with her stubby fingers. Too many fingers…

“No, don’t eat me!” she screamed, bounced off the doorjamb, and pelted away. “Ingi! Ingi! The white ghosts are after us! Oh, where are you?”

Ekaterin stared at the agitated scrub where the howling girl had vanished. The cries stopped before the zigzag movement did, but it was already impossible to discern her direction.

“I have to get a container,” said Enrique breathlessly, turning, seeming not to know which radbug to grab first. “Before they get out.”

“This shed seems to have held them so far.” She grasped Enrique’s arm and pulled him out after her, gently flicked an exploring radbug back inside with her bootied toe, closed the low door once more, and retrieved and replaced the stick-lock, such as it was. “We can collect and count them later. First things first.” Which were… what? Ekaterin took a breath. “That child—those two children”—might Ingi be the name of their bug-thief? the girl’s words had suggested it—“can’t be maintaining this place by themselves, and they certainly can’t have built it.” Judging by the weathering and general dilapidation, these shacks were decades old. “There must be grownups of some kind around here, who are responsible for this, this… whatever this is.” And she was developing some very uncomfortable notions about that. “Let’s find them.”

Enrique nodded and took up his scanner again. As they walked on, he said, “Why did she run away screaming like that? We weren’t going to hurt her.” Now that he was over his initial surprise at finding his missing bugs, he craned his neck in a somewhat distressed fashion toward the scrub where the crying girl had fled. “She seems to have gone to ground in that patch of deadfall, by the way.”

“Let’s not go after her right away, maybe,” said Ekaterin. “Let her calm down a bit.”

“And I certainly wasn’t going to eat her!” Enrique added, growing indignant in retrospect. “White ghosts? Was that supposed to be us?”

“At a guess, someone told her”—what?—“some fairy story to scare her, to keep her from approaching strangers. Or letting them approach her. Strangers in protective garb, anyway.”

“It must have been a pretty evil grownup, to tell such lies to such a child.” Enrique stared around, plainly perturbed. They checked what turned out to be the privy, on the opposite side of the hut from the graveyard, and found it empty. Regularly and recently used, though, Ekaterin’s nose attested even through her air filters.

“What, didn’t your parents ever do that? To try to keep you safe when you were too young to understand?”

“No, not really. They mostly explained things as they were. Well, not subatomic physics, not when I was three. I generally tried to make them read me nonfiction, though, as soon as I was old enough to complain.”

“Mm.” Ekaterin considered the problem of a pupil less literate, and literal, than the young Enrique. One more frustratingly—perhaps frighteningly—slow. Still, the girl had exhibited speech, reasonably appropriate and grammatical if wrong-headed, which already put her well-up on the ladder of cognition. Not too profoundly impaired—or she wouldn’t have survived out here this long? Ekaterin pictured those smaller, more misshapen skulls. “How do you regard fiction, then? Or parable, myth, fable?”

Enrique waved a conceding hand. “Consensual lying, perhaps.”

“That’s actually a, a pretty socially advanced thing.” Though Sasha and Helen seemed to be coming up on it fast. But then, they had Miles for a Da.

“But if one embeds a lesson in a lie, and the children find out it’s a lie, they’re likely to throw out the lesson as well. I mean, logically. They couldn’t trust anything at that point.”

“Mm.” Ekaterin wondered if that explained something about adolescence. “At that point, I suppose one has to invent the scientific method. Or learn it somehow.”

“I really didn’t get my head around that till I was seven or so,” Enrique confessed, as if it were a regrettable lag.

Ekaterin’s lips twitched. “You know, Enrique, I suspect you’re going to be a pretty good Da, when you come to it. In your own weird way.”

“Do you really think so?” Enrique brightened at this measured praise. “You and Miles seem very good at it. I mean, you two never seem to panic.”

“In Miles’s train, one learns to set a rather high bar for that.” She was not, for example, panicking here, now, yet. Chokingly uneasy wasn’t panic, was it?

If there was another human being within half a kilometer, it wasn’t apparent to Enrique’s scanner. Ekaterin gave up on it and eyed the distant deadfall. “Just how hot is this patch, really?”

“It’s on a bit of a spur, coming down from the ridge. We rejected this area for our test plot for just that reason. Rather well drained, I should think.”

“Hence rather well rinsed?”

“We could check the rangers’ rad map back in the lightflyer.” Belatedly he added, “Why do you ask?”

“Let’s see that map.”

They both clambered into the front seat—her new lightflyer was going to have to be decontaminated inside and out after this, drat it—and Ekaterin called up the vid projection. The grid of their current position showed none of the structures they’d just seen, and it should have, but yes, this patch was one of the cooler ones, interlaced with more distant hot spots and streaks according to the accidents of topography. Her Mark One Eyeball had guessed as much.

“When you say We rejected this area, just what do you mean?” asked Ekaterin.

“Well”—Enrique cleared his throat—“actually, Vadim said, ‘That area has too much elevation. Don’t waste time on it.’ Which was true. Do you think he, ah… knew about this place?”

“After ten years patrolling the zone? He has to.” Therefore deliberately concealing it—maybe even enabling it? Given how long this squatter homestead had plainly been here, maybe more people than Vadim had to know? It smells of collusion would be… reasoning ahead of their data, as Enrique would no doubt put it.

“You think he lied to me, then?”

“By omission, anyway.” Which was going to be a problem, later. Or sooner.

Enrique scowled.

Ekaterin blew out her breath, swung out of the flyer, and began to unseal her hood-and-mask from her suit.

“What are you doing?” asked Enrique, alarmed.

“Going to talk to that girl. She’s not come out. It’s cruel to leave her cowering and crying in the bushes.”

“I—your husband will be very upset with me if he finds out I let, um…”

Ekaterin pulled a stray stand of her dark hair free from the seal fasteners and tucked it behind her ear. “Let?” she murmured, dangerously. Then, taking a little pity on him: “You don’t need to mention it.” Which was a rather Milesean approach, come to think, and therefore cosmic justice.

“Vorkosigans,” muttered Enrique, and flung up his hands.

Ekaterin smiled at him, tucked her hood prominently under her arm, and aimed back toward the woods. “Stay here. Keep an eye out,” she added, more to give him a feeling of use and keep him from following than because she thought there was much more to discover.

“These people could be serial killers, you know!” Enrique called at her back, grumpily. “Radioactive serial killers!” She waved without turning around.

Decontamination for her, after this jaunt, might now extend to an overnight at Hassadar General Hospital, she reflected without joy. The basic chelation treatment, while well understood and practiced there, was going to involve needles and peeing into measured pots and, probably somewhere, feces. It seemed overkill, given that all the children she ever planned to have were already gene-cleaned frozen embryos safely sequestered in a reproductive center in Hassadar, waiting for their parents to have—now, there was a black joke—time. Thank heavens for Aurie Pym, anyway.

Ekaterin walked, very slowly and quietly, up to within a few meters of the deadfall—three or four trees collapsed and rotting in a tangle, festooned with mostly-green vines, brillberry and feral grape—then sat cross-legged on the ground. She raised her chin and called, in what she hoped was her most maternal and soothing voice, “Hello. I’m sorry we scared you, back in that shed. My name is Ekaterin. What’s yours?”

Tense silence from the tangle.

“I’m not a ghost. I’m a live lady. This is just a hat, see?” She put the hood on and then off again, setting it aside. Miles, she couldn’t help thinking, would be naturally better at this sort of beguilement, as he had demonstrated on more than one occasion. But he wasn’t the Vorkosigan on the spot.

A faint rustle in the brillberry leaves. Ekaterin held herself still. If the child-woman bolted again, should she give chase? No, probably not. Where, after all, did the girl have to go? Well, the entire zone, all three thousand square kilometers of it, but… no, there. A round, sallow, worried face poked cautiously through the leaves. Stared. Blinked.

“You’re pretty,” said a rough, thin voice.

Ekaterin controlled an utterly automatic flinch. In the drawing rooms of Vorbarr Sultana, a personal compliment was almost invariably the preamble to a pitch, some campaign to enlist her to facilitate access to her husband’s ear. Well, and a few misguided attempts at dalliance most certainly not intended to come to Lord Vorkosigan’s attention, but she didn’t actually have to evaluate those. She was now about as far from those drawing rooms as it was possible to imagine. So she produced a straightforward, “It’s nice of you to say so,” in return.

“Are you a princess?”

“No.” Thankfully. And, Were you expecting one? They couldn’t get many princesses passing through these parts. Or maybe it was some skewed fairy-tale logic—if all princesses were beautiful females, then all beautiful females must be princesses? “So what is your name?”

A long hesitation. “Jadwiga.”

“That’s a pretty name.” Almost the only part of the girl that could be so described. As she crept farther out of the tangle, Ekaterin noted her neck was disfigured by a lumpy, discolored growth, as big as Ekaterin’s fist—goiter, thyroid cancer? Both? It explained the choked voice. And made Ekaterin swallow involuntarily.

“Is it?”

“Yes,” said Ekaterin firmly. So try a not-too-long shot—“Do you know Vadim Sammi, the ranger? I just met him for the first time a few days ago. Seemed like a good fellow.”

At this, the girl came all the way out of the vines, seating herself on the ground cross-legged in unconscious imitation of Ekaterin, if still well out of reach. Ah, name-dropping. It worked in Vorbarr Sultana, too.

“Do you live in that house up on the tree stumps? That’s a very clever way to build, here.”

A nod. It made the growth wobble rather horribly; Ekaterin managed not to react.

“Who all lives here with you? I think it’s good that you’re not alone.” Though Jadwiga was surely alone just now. Why? She hadn’t exactly been locked into that shed, since a person would only have had to lean on the door to break the stick barring it. But someone on the outside must have set it.

“Ma Roga. And Boris. And Ingisi, he’s my favorite.” The head tilted. “Where d’you live?”

“Hassadar, some of the time. And some of the time in Vorbarr Sultana. But my favorite is a place on the long lake just at the foot of the Dendarii Mountains, near Vorkosigan Surleau.”

The girl took this in. “That’s a lot of places.”

“It feels like it, sometimes.”

It was hard to tell whether the blank and baffled look deepened. “Are they far away?”

“Not by lightflyer. It would be a very long way to walk. Have you ever been to Hassadar?”

A headshake.

“Have you ever heard of Hassadar?”

A nod. “Ma and Vadim talk about it, sometimes. He brings us good things to eat from there. And soap.”

“That… sounds nice.” And explained some of the less-archaic contents of the cabin’s shelves. “Has he ever offered to take you to Hassadar? Or anywhere?”

She shook her head hard. “If we ever go over the ridge, people will kill us.”

“That’s not true,” said Ekaterin, though she added in compulsive honesty, “Anymore.” She bit back a wince.

But Jadwiga seemed unaffected by the historical codicil. Her stare intensified.

Ekaterin tried, “Is Ingisi a very pale boy, with white hair?”

Nod. “I like to comb it. It’s softer than the ponies’ manes.”

Now, there was an arresting image. “Did Ingisi bring you the radbugs?”

“Huh?”

“The purple insects with the glowing gold flowers on their backs?”

A more vigorous nod, and a wide ingenuous smile. “Pretty.”

“Uh… thank you. I designed them. The man who is with me, Enrique, he made them.”

The little eyes widened as much as they could. A slight recoil. “Is he a sorcerer?”

“No, just a scientist. Anyone could do that work.” Scrupulousness compelled her to add, “If they were as smart as he is, and studied how for years and years the way he did.”

This won only a dubious frown. But the next question took a sharp turn: “Are you married?”

“Eh? Yes—oh, not to each other. Enrique has a wife named Martya, and I have a husband named Miles.”

The round face scrunched. “Is she pretty?”

“Well, yes, she is. Very tall, with soft blond hair, though not as white as Ingisi’s.” Ekaterin hesitated. “You like pretty things?”

Nod.

“There is a great deal of natural beauty here in the zone. The plants, the trees, the little streams…”

“The ponies!”

Ekaterin considered the surly animals they’d viewed from the air, and tried to come up with a positive remark. Positive seemed to be working, here. “Ponies have fuzzy ears. And velvety noses.”

“And big yellow teeth!” Jadwiga giggled. “They bite!”

“Well, that’s true. And kick, sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.” Jadwiga rocked on her haunches. “Do you like ponies?”

“Very much.”

“Want to see mine?”

“Yes, in a bit.” Jadwiga wriggled in impatience, which Ekaterin steadfastly ignored. “But you mentioned two other people—Ma Roga, and Boris? Who are they? I don’t know them.”

“This is all Ma’s place.” Jadwiga waved a skinny arm over her head. “Boris is her real son. He’s big.”

“Has Ma Roga lived here for a very long time?”

“Forever,” Jadwiga assured her earnestly.

Ekaterin wanted to work back to the radbug problem, but it seemed premature to alarm the girl with the news that they were both stolen and deadly poisonous. Because as far as the cumulative effects of contamination in the zone went, Jadwiga seemed way out ahead. She studied the girl’s thin arms and thick torso. The swollen belly of starvation? Another tumor? “Do you get enough to eat? Does Ma Roga feed you?”

Jadwiga waved a hand—she actually had only five fingers on the right side. “Oh, yeah. But it hurts to swallow. ‘Cause of this thing.” The hand squeezed her growth, but then flinched away. “Ingi and I tried tying a string around it once, to pinch it off, but it hurt too much, and Ma says it grows on the inside anyway so’s that wouldn’t do any good.” She made a face.

Ekaterin quashed horror. She managed, neutrally, “I’m afraid Ma Roga is right about that. You need a proper doctor.” And why hasn’t she been brought to one? What the hell, Vadim…?

Jadwiga wrinkled her short nose in confusion, but then shrugged it off.

Positive, Ekaterin reminded herself. And, real son…? “Have you lived here long?

“For always. Ma promised.”

“Do you know how old you are?”

“‘Course I do.” Faint indignation in that rough voice. “I’m fifteen.”

“But you are not Ma Roga’s daughter? And Ingi—he’s not her child either?”

“Oh, we’re all her children.” Was that wave in the direction of the skull-studded graveyard?

“How…” How to ask this? “How did you and Ingi come here? In the first place?”

“When we were little Ma told us she found us all under cabbage leaves, but that’s just silly. There’s this place in the woods, in the zone. Ingi says he’s seen it, but I don’t know. ‘Cept I know Vadim brought me specially.”

A muffled yell sounded from the distance, and rhythmic thumping; Ekaterin twisted around, one hand going out to push herself to her feet. The thumping resolved into the beat of small unshod hooves, and the yelling came from Enrique. Cantering toward them was a scruffy pony wearing a rope bridle, bearing a thin, white-haired figure, bareback, his legs wrapped around the pony’s barrel. In hot pursuit, clumsy in his protective garb and faceplate, ran Enrique. “Stop, you little thief!”

Ingi yanked back on his rope reins, bringing his mount more-or-less to a halt. “Jaddie!” he cried. “Get away, run away! It’s the white ghosts, get away!”

Jadwiga stared up, but declined to jump to her feet as Ekaterin had. “They’re not ghosts, stupid. They’re just people in white clothes.”

“That’s what Ma meant! These people! Outsiders!”

Ingi, it appeared, had a good grasp of consensual lying…

Jadwiga’s lower lip stuck out as she considered this. “Well, she told you not to ride in the sun, and you don’t listen to that, either.”

This delaying argument allowed Enrique time to overtake his quarry—he grabbed for the albino boy’s arm. Enrique did not so much pull him off as hold him while the pony jinked out from under him. The animal simulated a bolt in a desultory fashion but, as soon as it had trotted a few meters out of reach, put its head down to tear at the grass. Ingi fell on his feet and twisted out of Enrique’s grip.

Whatever he was about to try next was interrupted when Jadwiga, beginning to yell something else at him, was seized by a prolonged coughing fit that ended with her spitting out blood onto the ground. She peered at the thick red blob, appearing more peeved than surprised or alarmed. Her six-fingered left hand swept a little dirt over it, as if to cover it up. Ingi ran over and crouched by her side, making a frustrated wave. He finally offered her the hem of her own skirt by way of handkerchief to wipe her lips, which she accepted indifferently.

Ekaterin, in a moment of inspiration, sat back down, motioning Enrique to do the same.

“Hi, there,” she said, trying for some cross between maternal warmth and drawing-room politeness, in the hopes that either the former would be soothing or the latter would prove contagious, or at least quelling. “You must be Ingi, right? Jadwiga was just telling me about you. My name is Ekaterin, and my friend here”—a nod across—“is named Enrique.”

Enrique looked as though he would have preferred Dr. Borgos, but, getting a closer look at their inadvertent young hosts, quite plainly came to a prudent decision to let Ekaterin-the-Barrayaran take point on this one. Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground as well. Ingi, evidently feeling himself outvoted, sank to his knees. The grazing pony ignored them all, moving off a little farther.

“I saw you,” admitted Ingi. “In the woods.” The curiosity he had displayed in the scans from last night seemed to be regaining the upper hand. “In your suits.” His gaze kept returning to Ekaterin, de-suited or at least de-hooded.

“Spying on us, were you?” said Enrique. “You took our bugs!”

Ingi looked more shifty than guilty. “You left them. Anything left in the zone is ours.”

“Nice try,” said Ekaterin, “but no. You also must have seen Vadim with us. Vadim talked to you the other night, didn’t he? Told you to stay away, away from our plot, maybe?”

A shot more than figuratively in the dark, remembering Vadim’s little patrol into the gloaming, but it won a familiar squirm. Ingi really must be about her son Nikki’s age, caught on that uncomfortable boundary between eager and surly, equally desperate for praise and escape. “Maybe.”

“We know you took our bugs; we have vids. And we found them in the shed just now,” said Enrique sternly. “Was that all of them? Or did you put any of them somewhere else, or lose any along the way?”

Wary shrug. “Most of them, I guess.”

“Why?” Enrique almost wailed.

Another shrug. “Jaddie liked them. They were a present.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to give them back—”

Ekaterin held up a hand to stem this premature point. “A present. Was it her birthday?” It was nearly halfway around the year from Winterfair.

“Not exactly. She’s kind of sick.” White fingers pulled up shreds of grass, and the boy looked away. “They seemed better than flowers. She can pick her own flowers.”

“Do you know how sick?” Do you know your friend is dying?

A downward stare. “Yeah.”

Yeah. Backcountry children in general were not so insulated from death as their city counterparts. Nor birth, nor illness, nor any other part of life. Least of all in this—entirely illegal, Ekaterin was reminded—squatter encampment.

“These bugs are special, and very important to us,” Ekaterin began. “Important to the future of the zone, and of the district.”

“She says they made them!” Jadwiga gestured at Ingi. “Do you believe that? How can people make bugs?”

Ingi shook his head.

At some point, when they went public, Ekaterin was going to have to explain the radbugs to backcountry district subjects; some of the creakiest oldsters were perhaps little better educated than these lost children. Call it practice. “Enrique started with ordinary bugs, then bred these for a special job. You do know that the zone is the zone, forbidden to people, because it is contaminated with radioactives?”

“Rads are bad.” Jadwiga nodded. “Ma says.”

Ingi was watching Ekaterin suspiciously. “Vadim says city people overreact. That’s good, because it keeps them away. We don’t want people to come here!”

Ekaterin hesitated, then forged on. “To simplify it very much—what they really do is a bit more complicated—our radbugs eat rads. We think we can use them to clean all the poison out of the zone and make it a place people can live again.”

Enrique cringed visibly at this fast-forward version, but had the wit not to step on her lines. She could tell it hurt, though.

“We live here now,” said Jadwiga.

“Live without getting sick, though… no thyroid or bone cancer, or other, subtler damage.” Ekaterin touched her throat; Ingi rocked back. Jadwiga just frowned. “The thing is, the contamination that the radbugs eat makes them radioactive—full of rads—themselves. That’s why I made Enrique put the trefoils, the lights, the—the glowing yellow flowers—on their backs, to be a warning to people not to touch. The brighter the light, the more poisonous the bug is, and you shouldn’t handle it.”

Ingi’s brow wrinkled as he puzzled this through. “Why don’t the bugs die, then? If they’re really eating poison?”

“They do, eventually. But not before they’ve collected quite a lot of contaminants for removal. It’s… really rather heroic, when you think about it.” Or would be, if insects in general weren’t basically little machines to start with. Biochemical machines, to be sure.

Jadwiga looked deeply dismayed. “They’ll all die? But they’re pretty!”

Ingi said scornfully, “Everything dies.” But then shut his mouth abruptly. Conscious of his own tactlessness? Interesting.

Ekaterin was conscious of a strong impulse to strap both these feckless youngsters into the back of her lightflyer and whisk them straight to Hassadar General. Without waiting for whatever grownups had permitted this to go on. And then come back to deal directly with it all leading a squad of…. well, perhaps not rangers. Hassadar municipal guards? Vorkosigan armsmen? Drat it, we’d entrusted the ranger cadre to prevent this sort of nightmare!

Not that a squad of Hassadar guardsmen, or even their own very loyal armsmen, would greet being ordered into the zone with enthusiasm, suited up for it or not. The devil is in the details, Miles was fond of saying. She must need more details, because it was certain that full understanding of this devilish situation was still eluding her.

“Has Vadim ever offered to take either of you two anywhere? To a doctor, perhaps?” Ekaterin tried again, addressing Ingi this time.

Ingi flinched back, and cried, “No! We can’t leave! They’d have to shoot the dogs and goats and ponies!” Jadwiga bobbed in agitation, nodding.

It was true that one of the rangers’ jobs was to cull the feral dog packs, although usually only when incursions were reported by the zone’s few rural neighbors. These hunts had formerly been conducted on horseback, with the aid of the rangers’ own dogs, but nowadays from the air, with the aid of scanners, Ekaterin understood. Although backcountry folks were just as likely to deal with such problems by themselves—no one had a tally of how much antique military ordnance was still floating illegally around the district, discreetly cached.

“Do you have milk goats?” Ekaterin asked instead, approaching the problem sideways. It was also true, one couldn’t just abruptly abandon milk goats. Nor remove radiation-riddled animals from the zone. This one might not be quite such a social lie as the one about white ghosts.

Jadwiga nodded again, and oh dear Ekaterin wished she wouldn’t. “I milk them,” the girl said proudly. “That’s my job.” She glanced in new concern at Ingi. “Where are they? Taking them out is his job,” she added to Ekaterin, with a jerk of her thumb at the white boy.

“They’re around front.” Ingi gave a vague wave of his hand toward the shack-on-stilts, beyond which they’d left the lightflyer. Ekaterin followed the gesture, and saw a shadowy brown goat-shape rattling the greener bushes—nibbling, no doubt. Concentrating contaminants up the food chain.

“You’re not suppos’d to let them eat the garden,” scolded Jadwiga, to which Ingi replied defensively, “They’re not!” but betrayed a more intimate knowledge of goats by adding, “Yet.”

Jadwiga tossed her head. “Anyway, Ma says she’ll never, ever leave. I heard her tell Vadim and Boris, once. They thought we were asleep. That when she dies, she wants to be burned in her hut. Which is ick, and anyway, then where would we live?”

“She told Vadim she had old Count Piotr’s own word she was to be left alone in the zone,” Ingi allowed, sounding a bit reluctant. “Vadim said, but if nobody else alive now remembers, how can she prove it? She didn’t say.” He added after a moment, “She cuffed him on the head, though, so I don’t think she liked him saying that.”

Ekaterin mustered her patience. Jadwiga was older, but Ingi seemed brighter; he might know more. “How did Ma Roga come to be living here in the zone in the first place?”

Jadwiga repeated, “Forever,” albeit with less conviction than before; then, apparently struck by the question—had she never considered it till now?—added, “Boris would know. He knows lots.”

Ingi added, “You’re just some kind of city tourists, anyway. You don’t belong here.” He turned to Jadwiga: “We don’t have to tell them anything.”

Before Ekaterin could decide on the best way to disabuse the boy of his misapprehensions, Jadwiga put in, “Don’t worry. When Boris comes back, he’ll make them go away. He made that bad hunter go away, that time!”

Ingi bit his lip. “Shut up about that!” he hissed to her. “Just… don’t.” Jadwiga rocked back, offended.

Now what’s this tale? Nothing good, Ekaterin suspected. She just managed not to rub her forehead with her gloved and contaminated hand. Her nose itched; she sniffed. “Does Vadim visit you often?” The children seemed to speak of him without fear, which restrained her provisional fury with the man. Somewhat.

Jadwiga nodded vigorously. “He comes on his day off, usually. Not every time. He taught Ingi to read. But he won’t take us a ride in his van!”

By the expression crossing Ingi’s face, this was a shared peeve. “You should ask him again for your next birthday, if…” He cut himself off abruptly.

If you are still alive? “So you’ve never flown? Never seen the zone or the district from the air?” A sneaky method of getting the pair of them to Hassadar General occurred to her, but she set the ploy aside. For now.

Ingi was drawn out again despite himself. “Is it amazing?”

“Like magic?” said Jadwiga.

Ekaterin blinked, suddenly made aware of how familiarity bred not so much contempt, as unmindfulness. Blindness, even. “Yes. Yes, it is. I quite enjoy flying.” She added rather at random, “My husband gave me my lightflyer for a Winterfair present.”

Both youths looked wildly impressed. “He must like you a lot,” said Jadwiga.

“Well… yes,” Ekaterin admitted.

“Is he rich? Like a prince?”

“There aren’t any real princes, Jaddie,” said Ingi, impatient again. Embarrassed? “That was on Old Earth.”

“That’s not so! Vadim said there was one born in Vorbarr Sultana, far away over nine and nine districts where the emperor lives in a golden palace.” This last was delivered in a fairy-tale sing-song. “Is that true?” she demanded of Ekaterin.

“Not… not exactly…”

Ingi gave a self-satisfied sniff.

Ekaterin took a breath. “The capital is only three districts to the north, the Imperial Residence is made out of gray stone blocks, mostly, and there are two little princes and a princess now, but she’s just a baby.”

Enrique raised his brows at her through his face mask—in amused approval at this unwonted precision, perhaps.

Silence, as they digested this. “Have you seen this, for real?” asked Ingi at last. Enrique’s glance swung to include the boy. Ingi, Ekaterin thought, should get to know Enrique. She suspected they might hit it off, once Enrique got over his stolen-radbug grudge, which, now that they looked to be recoverable, he likely would.

“Yes.”

Jadwiga sat back with a sigh of profound satisfaction. To know that she lived in a world where princesses were real? Ekaterin recalled the unselfconscious joy she’d witnessed in Gregor’s and Laisa’s faces, when they’d shown off their new daughter to her on her last visit to the Residence. How agonizingly different must have been the emotions of Jadwiga’s real parents, when they’d… thrown her away in the zone?

In the hard Dendarii Mountains not far to the south, it had been the stern Time-of-Isolation custom to cut the throats of mutie infants, an approach that had stretched secretly into modern times before being finally stamped out. There’s this place in the woods. In these softer lowlands, had a seeming-softer custom lingered on too long? What is this haunted place, this… dreadful orphanage? Ekaterin was growing frantic for facts. They could not be worse than her imaginings.

“Ingi!” cawed a hoarse voice, echoing through the trees. “Where is the brat? Ingi, you’ve let the goats loose again. I’ll tan your hide.” That last sounded too tired to be a credible peril, but the source of the call rounded the raised hut.

Be careful what you wish for…

Two people led another shaggy pony, burdened with sacks hanging over its round barrel. A man of middling height had a hand out balancing, of all things, a battered old upholstered armchair, threadbare with foam padding showing through, slung teetering atop the animal. As the white-garbed strangers came into his sight, his snub features set in a scowl, which somehow made him look beefier than he actually was.

The older woman stumping forward wore skirt and tunic and heavy boots. She was shorter and slighter than the fellow, but her frown was fiercer. The pony took advantage of the distraction to buck and dump its load, which the man caught at only enough to direct its groundward thump.

The responsible grownups. Finally.

Such as they were…

“Trespassers!” snapped the woman, coming at them.

The fellow grabbed a length of firewood from the pile by the house and raised it in uncertain threat. “Should I beat t’em, Ma?”

Enrique jolted, but Ekaterin flung out a hand to bar him from rising. She was intensely aware of her stunner, strapped unreachably beneath her rad suit. This confrontation teetered on a slope no one was going to be able to scramble back from, if it came to blows.

That spider is more afraid of you than you are of it, Ekaterin’s great-aunt, who was not afraid of much, used to intone. Ekaterin fancied Ma Roga, not the man trailing her—Boris?—was the designated spider-killer here. Jadwiga would not see the danger, and Ingi would try to collect it…

“You two!” the woman cried, waving her arms as if trying to daunt a couple of goats. “The rangers didn’t bring you, I don’t see their van, so you don’t belong here. This is our place. Get along!”

Ekaterin stared up, trying to channel her husband’s iron-plated bravura. “That happens not to be the case.” She rose, as much to override Ingi’s mouth opening with some scrambled explanation as Enrique’s valiant but untrained lurch to defend her. She wheeled to face the woman, uncomfortably conscious that she was abruptly the tallest person here, so long as lanky Enrique stayed down. “Lord Vorkosigan has given me oversight of the District Department of Terraforming, under which the Vashnoi exclusion zone falls. We’re all standing on his land.”

The woman jerked back, jaw working; whatever she’d been expecting the outsider to say, this wasn’t it. She came back with, “Well, he t’ain’t using it now, is he? This is cursed ground. So go away, or I’ll curse you, too!”

She made an utterly convincing Baba Yaga, no doubt of that, with her stringy gray hair falling across her clenched, tangled eyebrows, her crow-bright glare. Jadwiga, Ingi, the fellow waving the length of log, and, yes, Ekaterin all flinched. Had that threat worked to drive off interlopers before? Ekaterin suspected so.

If Boris swung, Ekaterin must try to block it, roll and rip off her suit and reach for her stunner after all. Because the vision of that log crashing down on Enrique’s irreplaceable head was a lot more horrifying. Ekaterin’s heart drummed in dismay. If it came to the worst, this crew hiding their bodies and relocating the lightflyer wouldn’t be nearly enough; Miles would turn the zone upside down and pursue them into the next world, figuratively or literally. Which would be exactly zero consolation for anyone. Curses indeed.

It was Enrique who broke the spell, looking up and asking in perfect earnest, “Really? How would that work, precisely?” His other auditors might imagine he was challenging them, or maybe mocking them; Ekaterin expected he was mentally devising a double-blind study.

Ma Roga stared back, nonplussed, in profound mutual incomprehension.

Now or never. Ekaterin stripped off her right glove and held out her hand. “Are you Ma Roga? I’m Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan. And lifting old curses is just what we’re here for. Ma, we need to talk.”

Briefly, Ekaterin was afraid the woman did not comprehend the gesture at all, and Jadwiga rather confused the moment by chirping, “Her fella’s a sorcerer, Ma! He makes magic bugs!”

“Scientist,” Enrique corrected glumly from his seat on the ground, as if he’d given up on being listened to.

Yes, much more dangerous.

Ekaterin held her extended hand steady. She wondered if the other woman was going to knock it away, but instead, staring at it, Ma Roga said, ” ‘T mutie lord your husband, then?” She glanced up, sharp eyes glittering through her brow-thatch.

Ekaterin thought about Miles’s weary teratogenic spiel, so often repeated and so seldom believed, and said only, “Yes.”

The old woman neither slapped away the hand nor took it, instead tucking both her own behind her back in a weirdly childish gesture of withholding. Ekaterin let her arm drift down, neither shoved out in insistence nor withdrawn as an option. The stalemate couldn’t last, but at least the upraised log, too, drooped as if in echo.

Keep talking. Miles could do this sort of thing in his sleep, and actually did, come to think, if mumbled and surreal. More surreal than this? Ekaterin inhaled. “I expect it’s going to be a long talk. Why don’t we all go sit someplace more comfortable?”

Especially Boris. Boris, still hovering in anxious menace, definitely needed to sit comfortably. Real son…? Maybe there was some faint resemblance between the pair in their bones and coloration. Boris’s da was notably not in evidence, so likely a grim tale there, too.

“And maybe,” Ekaterin added, “a long listening.”

Ma Roga just said, “Huh.” But one hand came out of hiding, if only to motion toward the hut.

Under Ma Roga’s barked directions, the children were set to unlading the pony, and Boris to lugging the armchair around front, where tall Enrique was drafted to help boost it up onto the porch. Spoils of a shopping trip to some zone rubbish tip, apparently. After sending Ingi to round up the goats and contain them in their pen, Ma took the new seat as a rightful throne. She did not invite the interlopers inside, though Jadwiga darted within and returned clutching a couple of musty cushions for their visitors’ behinds. Having captured her own princess, or at least real lady, the girl seemed as loth to let her go as her beloved flower bugs. The youngsters—all three of them, since despite his size Ekaterin was not at all sure Boris counted as a functional grownup—sat with their legs dangling over the edge.

The radbug project took a lot of explaining, not necessarily helped by Enrique’s technical corrections. Ingi at last fetched a bug for an illustrative sample, which led to the whole lot of them dismounting again from the porch and trooping around to the shed. Boris left his log behind; progress?

This was clearly the first Ma had learned of Ingi’s thefts, or gifts, as he insisted. She cuffed him, though not Jadwiga, hard on the head, and snapped, “Idiot. This led them here.” It was hard to read her expression through her smoldering stare—heartbreak, fury, despair? Nothing like hope or relief, anyway.

“Yes,” agreed Ekaterin, “but it was going to happen soon regardless. If the project works, changes are coming for the whole zone.” This can’t go on might pass unsaid, since it was plainly understood.

There was plenty to take its place. “How long have you lived here?” Ekaterin’s wave around took in the whole encampment. And the graveyard. “Because I think Vadim is going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.” And his supervisor, and whatever other of his fellow rangers had colluded in this concealment.

Jadwiga, not really following all this but sensing threat, defended hotly. “Vadim’s all right! He’s my big brother! He takes care of us all.”

A little silence followed this damning praise, till Ma Roga jerked her head at Ekaterin. “You and me. Let’s take a walk.”

Ekaterin quashed any hint of hesitation. “Very well.”

Enrique, waved off, turned instead to conscripting the youngsters to helping him capture, count, and contain his stray bugs, science lecture thrown in gratis. Ekaterin followed Ma Roga out of earshot into the woods, where the old woman pointed to a couple of stumps. Ekaterin sank onto one, reflecting on the quip, You can turn a tragedy into a comedy just by sitting down. She had a feeling it wouldn’t prove true here.

Ma Roga sat opposite, seeming to turn thoughts over in her mind. Ekaterin waited.

She finally leaned forward, hands clasped between her skirted knees, gaze on the ground, and said, “You ever hear of the Vashnoi marauders?”

“If it’s that bandit gang that plagued these parts thirty years ago, and hid out in the zone, yes.” Theft had led to more daring theft, then, inevitably, murder by accident, then by design. The pointless torture-murders of all the inhabitants of a poor outlying homestead had brought down fully-equipped retribution from the district, zone or no zone.

A short nod. “Old Count Piotr hanged the lot of us, in the end.”

Galactic-style therapy and criminal rehabilitation not being even on the horizon, at that point. From the nightmarish bits she’d heard about the case, Ekaterin could scarcely regret this.

“Save one. I pleaded my belly.” A sharp look upward.

Ekaterin blinked. Right. Back in the Time of Isolation, pregnant women were never executed, a custom that had lingered right into times that made more modern provisions for crime. And Piotr had certainly been Old Vor, or at least had been made so by the passage of his many decades. Most of the marauders’ case would have been handled at a lower district judicial level, but execution orders would have been sent up to the Count’s Court for final review.

“Old Piotr gave me a choice of hanging or prison. I asked to come back to the zone, instead. And he said, So be it, and the bailiff-boy banged his spear-butt in the clacker. And so I did.”

All the gruesome details were doubtless available in court records in Hassadar, should Ekaterin muster the nerve to feed her curiosity. No need to make the old woman—old, hell, she could scarcely be done with her fifties, but she looked a proper ancient hag—relive that in her memory now, or re-confess it all either. Ekaterin’s rightful business was with what had happened next. She mustered a Go on nod.

“I liked it here. Everyone finally left me alone. Didn’t know how much I’d like that, till I had it to try, for the first time in my stupid young life. Piotr’s old ranger fellows kept an eye. They’d have scorned those dosimeter-hickeys that Vadim frets about so, in those days. Boris was about three when I first found the clearing in the woods, and the secrets that were left there.” Her gaze flicked up at last. “It wasn’t only muties exposed, you know. Back in the Time of Isolation, there was starvation, or just one baby too many to deal with. Or no man, though I’d say a girl could be better off without one of those. I sure was.”

Ekaterin said, “I understand.” Partly to indicate she was still listening. Mostly because it was true.

“It’d become a hobby of mine, picking up things thrown away in the zone. That was the first thrown-away baby I found. Not the last, though they got fewer and fewer, till Ingi, thirteen years ago. None after that, o’ course.”

“What happened thirteen years ago?”

A shrug. “Countess Vorkosigan’s lift-van clinics reached the last outlying hamlets west of t’ ridge.”

Ah. Yes. Ekaterin reflected on her normally cheery mother-in-law’s rants about modernizing education and medicine in the district. Piotr had at first given his son’s galactic bride access only to the lower-level schools, children for the woman. But when the district fell fully into her hands at the old man’s death seventeen years back, Countess Vorkosigan had pressed forward with her wave of eager young people all ready for the new technical schools. The larger towns had been served first, hoping to reach the most people the fastest; from that base, pushing outward with mobile clinics as the solution to the last and hardest part of the distribution problem.

“So this is already ended, lady,” said Ma Roga. “Years gone. We’re all ended, here.”

“No. It’s a new beginning.”

“Not for me.” Ma Roga shook her head. “I know your kind. You think you can do anything, but you can’t.”

Ekaterin set this aside for now, though she thought, You should meet Miles. “So what’s the story with Vadim and Jadwiga?”

Another shrug. “Vadim was fifteen when she was born. His parents sent him to me with her. A few folks around here knew about me by then, see. He wasn’t any too happy with the job, for all his da argued it was for his protection, too. Worse’n being set to drown kittens, y’know.”

“Ah.”

“He’d come by to check up on her, time to time, even before he got old enough to join the rangers. Then his da died, road accident, and then his ma took the one-way free passage to Sergyar that was on offer back then, when the new count was took away to be viceroy. Happy to leave all her sorrows behind, I suppose, b’cause last I heard she was still alive there.”

“You all”—Ekaterin glanced at her bare hand—”we all are going to have to go first to Hassadar General, for evaluation and treatment. After that we can make decisions with real information.”

“You can get to make t’em, don’t you mean,” said Ma Roga with a flash of sarcasm. “It’s too late for Jaddie. It was always meant to be that way, for her.”

“Maybe,” Ekaterin conceded. “Maybe not. That’s not for you or me to say, it’s for the doctors. But Ingi seems pretty healthy so far. Boris, too.”

“You can’t just fling these children on the outside world after all these years, and expect them to swim for it. Jaddie just can’t, Boris, well, he ran away once but dragged back smartin’, and poor Ingi—the boys his age would tear him to pieces. His heart if not his body, though maybe his body too. You can’t imagine it, how cruel they can be in a gang.”

Ekaterin’s lips thinned. “I’m married to the mutie lord. I don’t have to imagine it. I can just have Miles tell me.”

Ma Roga’s chin jerked. Not daunted, this was not a woman who did daunted, but maybe taken aback a trifle. Any little crack in her hopeless certainties was to the good.

“You’re not wrong to be concerned,” Ekaterin went on, “but it’s better out there than it was thirty years ago, I promise you. Once the children aren’t getting any more exposed and sicker, there will be time to take thought. Nobody’s flinging anyone anywhere without looking out to see where they’d land.”

And Ekaterin could guess whose job that was likely to be. Adding another task to her overflowing plate. I will cope. It’s what I do. She raised her chin. “I can’t know, and turn away.”

“I wish you would,” growled Ma Roga. “We were just fine out here, till you came. People left us alone.”

Ekaterin shook her head.

Ma Roga turned her face up, listening. Ekaterin heard it too, the distinctive whine and throb of a lift van.

“Yah, here’s more trouble, right in train,” Ma Roga sighed, and shoved to her feet with a grunt.

Ekaterin followed her back to the clearing in front of the hut in time to see the familiar lift van the rangers flew, the Vorkosigan mountains-and-maple-leaf markings distinctive on its sides, jounce on its landing feet and settle. She was by this time entirely unsurprised when Vadim hopped out.

Wearing civilian clothes, not his regulation rad suit, and carrying a couple of grocery bags. He turned and dropped them in shock when he took in Ekaterin, trailing Ma Roga. His breath hissed, he scrabbled for his stunner, pulled it, and froze.

They stared at each other for a long, teetering moment.

Ekaterin crossed her arms and said dryly, “If you pretend you never drew that, I’ll pretend I never saw it.”

Vadim’s blocky face seemed drained to clay. His hand twitched once, then, slowly, reholstered his sidearm. Ekaterin tried to let her pent breath out unobtrusively.

She straightened her spine and walked forward. “Am I right in guessing you have some of Enrique’s bug-transport canisters in the back of the van?”

“How did you…?”

“Fetch them along. We found the missing radbugs. They’re in the goat shed, along with Enrique.” She eyed his missing rad suit. “I trust you have some spare gloves back there as well. You’ll need a pair, and I need a clean right.” She held up her bare hand and wriggled it.

“Er, er… yes, Lady Vorkosigan.” Some simple orders to follow seemed to steady him, providing a replica of routine to cling to.

While Ma Roga gathered up her groceries, Vadim opened the back of the van and retrieved the canisters and gloves. Ekaterin hitched hers on, wondering if it was really going to do any good—well, at least it would allow her to help handle the loaded bugs. Vadim passed her two canisters to carry, then took the other pair himself.

Ma Roga watched this in sullen silence, then hoisted her bags and headed for the hut. “Send the kids back to me,” she told Vadim. “We got things to settle.”

He nodded warily and led off, needing no directions to the goat shed. Right.

“Ah, Vadim!” Enrique straightened up with a smile as they rounded the shed. “Glad you’re here. Oh, excellent, the canisters. I was just wondering what to use. Er… where’s your suit?” He glanced down. “And, er, your dosimeter?”

“I don’t wear t’em when I’m just visiting here,” Vadim replied in a mumble.

So as to prolong his employment as a ranger? Which was looking plenty dodgy at the moment anyway. Add that to the set of worries that must be coursing through his mind just now.

Sunnily, Jadwiga skipped up and hugged him; with a discomforted glance at Enrique and Ekaterin, he ruffled her hair in what looked a habitual gesture. “Hey, brat.”

“You met the lady! Isn’t she pretty?”

“Yeah, I uh… work with her.”

“You do? And you didn’t tell us?” Indignation was as open on her round face as any other of Jadwiga’s emotions.

“It’s a recent job,” Vadim excused himself. “Anyway, Ma wants you all back at the house. Chores.” He jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder.

“And after that,” Ekaterin put in, “we’re all going, well, first we’re all going for a ride in the ranger’s lift van to the decontamination station, and then some people will pick us all up and take us to Hassadar General Hospital.” And, oh dear, wasn’t that going to supply some culture shock. She must take thought how to cushion it as best they could. “We’ll all be spending the night there, and getting some simple treatments, and some doctors will be looking at Jadwiga’s growth”—she touched her throat—“to see if there’s anything they can do to fix it.”

“Oh.” Jadwiga looked more confused than thrilled at this news, though Ingi, who had brightened at the mention of the van, shot Ekaterin a sudden sharp look, beseeching hope muted by who-knew-what harsh experiences of disappointment and frustration. Ekaterin bit her lip on promises she could not yet guarantee.

“But what about the goats and ponies?” Jadwiga turned to Vadim. “You’ll come back ‘n take care of them while we’re gone, right?”

Vadim exchanged a grim look with Ingi. “I probably won’t be able to come back here.”

“But who will take care of them?”

Boris said glumly, in the tone of one who knew just who won the dirty jobs, “I s’ppose Vadim and I have got to shoot t’em.”

“Oh, no!” Jadwiga wailed, her little eyes filling with tears.

Enrique looked up from where he was opening a canister. “What’s all this?”

Vadim explained unhappily, “Any domestic animals that can’t be turned loose have got to be put down. It’s less cruel in the long run.”

Enrique blinked, then said reasonably, “Well, then, why don’t we move them to that back paddock at the Butterbug Ranch? We’re not using it for anything. We can declare it a quarantine zone. I should very much like to have some large mammals with prolonged exposure to the zone to study.”

Oh, bless you. Trust Enrique to see opportunities where everyone else just saw impossibilities. That his same speculative eye also fell on the three youths was an observation Ekaterin kept to herself. They’re large mammals too, I suppose.

In any case, Jadwiga dried up. “Is it a nice place?”

“Yes,” said Ekaterin, “and later you can come visit.”

“Oh.”

Boris looked heartened as well. All the disruption being forced on these people’s lives, and this offer was what got them all on board? Let it be for a lesson. This day had been entirely too full of lessons.

“We better go help Ma,” Boris sighed, “or she’ll be yellin’.”

“And cuffin’,” Jadwiga agreed cheerily, with no evident fear or resentment.

After some brief resistance from Ingi, who was much more interested in the radbugs and Enrique’s doings, Boris herded the other two off in rather standard big-brotherly style. Ekaterin thought of her son Nikki and the twins.

After that, the three adults fell to rapid and efficient bug-wrangling, with careful scans around for any deceased experimental subjects.

“What are you going to do with these bugs?” Ekaterin asked Enrique as he sealed down the first lid.

“Eh, that’s a bit of a puzzle. The first test run is now quantitatively disrupted, not to mention procedurally contaminated, though there’s enough in the qualitative results so far to send me back to the drawing board anyway.”

“Me, too, I’m afraid,” said Ekaterin with regret. “It seems I made the bugs too pretty, this time. Which is what kicked all this off.”

“No such thing as a too-pretty bug,” said Enrique stoutly. “But I’m thinking we want a modified design that will drill into the subsoil directly, like paracoprids, for the most efficient contaminant recovery. Maybe paired with a surface model, so this work isn’t wasted, necessarily.”

“Hm.” She eyed the ranger, who was still looking unhappy though not so congealed. “What were you going to do with them, Vadim?”

He cleared his throat, and muttered, “Put t’em back in the test plot.”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Enrique. “Worst choice. I’ll take them back to the Ranch, to the quarantine shed, and run their analysis separately. We’re going to have a careful counting job when we wind up the first test plot. Would you like me to fly your lightflyer back to the decontamination station, Ekaterin?” He sighted down the sleeve of his uncompromised rad suit. “Since it seems I’m the only one among us who isn’t going to be stuck the night at Hassadar General.”

“Yes, please.” And that was apparently that, as far as Enrique was concerned. Vadim grew slightly less rigid. That would not be that as far as Miles was concerned, but the ranger cadre was in his chain of command, not Ekaterin’s. One ugly job that wouldn’t land on her, great. Though she supposed she’d have to listen to Miles vent, later.

Vadim was just gathering up two filled canisters to lug to their vehicles, when a muffled shout sounded from the direction of the hut, of a deep timbre that could only be from Boris, and a frightened squeal that might be Jadwiga. Startled, Ekaterin stood, then started forward at a second cry. Then broke into a run as the hut came into sight, with smoke issuing not from its chimney, but from a side window. Vadim spat an oath and matched her stride. Perplexed, Enrique followed.

They all scrambled up the ladder and across the porch, banging open the door, then paused at an inexplicable scene. The bedding was on fire, smoking orange flickers stinking of some vile home-brewed distilled spirits used as an accelerant, the air churning acrid gray with it. Jadwiga cowered in a corner, crying, with Ingi hovering over her in a posture of uncertain protection. Boris and Ma Roga were locked together in the middle of the floor in a struggle over a long and wickedly sharp-looking kitchen knife.

Ma huffed in a demented determination, clenching and wrenching. Boris’s eyes were white-wide with horror. They stumbled, knocking over a table, kicking through the grocery sacks; food packages spilled across the floor.

Aghast, Vadim pulled his stunner and tried to take aim at the lunging, lurching Boris. Ekaterin saw his mistake at once, and snarled, “Give me that!”

She plucked the stunner from his fist, dropped to one knee, and fired.

Her shot took Ma Roga square in the head. Buzzed by the nimbus, Boris fell back wheezing and flung the knife away. It spun clattering under a burning bunk. Blood streaked scarlet on his neck and hands.

“Boris, carry Ma out! Vadim, get Ingi and Jadwiga out!”

“I’ll see what I can do about this fire,” said Enrique, passing her up. “Hold your breath and go.”

Yes, he was the only one wearing protective gear; his suit would give him some shielding from the heat, and full protection from smoke inhalation. Trained for all levels of chemical laboratory emergencies, he was, if not exactly calm, focused and unpanicked. Ekaterin turned to helping drag the distraught Jadwiga.

They heaved back out the door. Ma was a dead weight, Jadwiga worse for her squirming, but they manhandled everyone down the long ladder with no broken necks. They all stumbled a few meters off and turned to stare.

Burning bedding was pitched from the side window, and more through the door and over the porch. A few more miscellaneous flammables followed, flames choking out as they fell and bounced; and then, at length, Enrique, his white suit only a shade scorched. He climbed carefully down. “Got it out, I think,” he panted. “The cabin won’t go up, but don’t go back in till we’re sure.”

“Why,” gasped Vadim to Ekaterin, hands on his knees as he caught his breath, “did you shoot Ma?”

Shortly, she would be sick and shaking. In this stretched present, she was still floating on an adrenaline high the like of which she hadn’t felt since that incident of destruction in a Komarran jump-point station docking bay, lord, over five years ago. “Couldn’t you see? Boris wasn’t trying to knife Ma. Ma was trying to knife Boris.”

And then, presumably, Ingi and Jadwiga, in descending order of difficulty. And then turn the knife inward as the flames licked up, like some mad makeshift barbarian funeral sacrifice?

Boris and Ingi both nodded. Boris was not-quite-crying; Jadwiga was blubbering; Ingi could not look any paler, but his face was set and shocked. “Why?” he cried.

Ekaterin wished she didn’t understand this so very clearly. She struggled to put it in terms everyone here would grasp. “I suppose… she thought we were trying to take her family away. And she tried to take you back in the only way she knew how.” Murder, suicide, and a pyre all in one swift, final, defiant denial.

“That’s crazy,” whispered Ingi. Though Ekaterin thought Boris and Vadim saw, at least a little. Enrique stood back, as sober and polite as a stranger at a wake for none of his own. But Ekaterin bet he was taking it all in.

“It was a mistake,” Ekaterin went on. “We didn’t intend any such thing, necessarily. We could have talked it out. I should have been more clear…”

Through his smoke-smudged faceplate, Enrique’s brows twitched as if to argue this last, but he made no comment aloud.

Ekaterin sat on the ground with a jolt, cross-legged, and commenced to digging out her wristcom from under her suit sleeve. The trouble with emergency buttons was that when you were in the middle of the dratted emergency, there was no time to go for them. All you had time for was, was, grabbing a stunner and shooting. Which, she supposed, was why Miles kept making her take those self-defense-course refreshers every dratted year.

God. Whatever else this day wanted from her, she had nothing more to give it.

Three tries with her shaking finger, and she managed to stab the screamer button. The response, at least, was gratifyingly instantaneous.

“Armsman Pym? I want backup.”

Ekaterin was grateful that she actually had time to finish her bland hospital dinner before Miles boiled in. Even he had to suffer a forced delay in the hallway, as the nurse on duty ushered the visitors into their required protective garb. Armsman Roic in his brown-and-silver duty uniform leaned over to half-salute-half-wave at her through the lead glass in her door, his smile anxious. She waved back in a good simulation of cheer, which seemed to comfort him.

After final inspection by the nurse, Miles was at last allowed to enter, Enrique trailing amiably. Ekaterin was relieved to see the two wore only standard disposable gowns over their clothes, with medical-style face masks and gloves, the simplest level of protection from contaminants. If Hassadar General’s experienced radiation unit wasn’t panicking about her, no one else needed to. Miles had left his cane in the hallway with Roic, which slowed his rush to her bedside to a mere limp. She could feel the heat of his hands through his oversized gloves as he grasped her own, any more expressive oh-god-you’re-all-right hugs thwarted by her—temporary, she trusted—quarantined state.

“Have you been home?” she overrode his beginning babble.

He shook his head. “Not yet. I’d have been here sooner, but there were people. In lines. Well, more climbing over each other. Eventually I channeled my Inner Piotr to shake them off.”

Enrique nodded, looking vaguely impressed.

She could just picture that—a useful trick, if sometimes startling. “I fielded a call from Aurie and Nikki before dinner. Nikki was a bit frantic, but I think I talked him down. You need to go home—no, first you need to stop wheezing. Then you need to go home and calm them, too.” She added after a moment, “Though Aurie says the twins are pretty oblivious, so far.”

“Right. Right.” He drew a long breath through his mask.

Enrique seemed more put-together—he’d evidently had time for a shower and a change of clothes since their return from the zone, and maybe a meal, or more likely a food bar shoved into his hand by Martya in passing. He had a meditative air, which was just the look one wanted on one’s expensive imported scientist, although on what track his train of thought would exit his labyrinthine brain was often a surprise. But it appeared he’d had time to debrief his eyewitness account directly to Miles.

“What’s going on out there?” she asked. “Did they put Ingi, Jadwiga, and Boris together in one room as I’d asked?” Whatever would follow tomorrow, tonight the traumatized little family needed to be together. Save one, she was reminded.

Miles nodded. “Not quite procedure, but your argument prevailed, given their similar levels of exposure. I haven’t had a chance to meet them yet, though I did glance through their window. Sitting in their beds and eating their dinners, it looked like.”

That did sound reassuring. “And Ma Roga?”

“They have her in a private locked room with a Hassadar guardsman stationed outside the door, regulation when treating an arrestee. She’s recovered from the stun all right. Seems to be silent and surly rather than combative, the nurses say.”

Ekaterin hitched up the sagging neckline of her unflattering hospital gown. “She hasn’t actually been arrested yet, has she? Because we need to think about that one.”

“The radiation isolation is enough to keep her locked down for the moment.”

“All right.” She rubbed her forehead. “Miles, your district is exhausting.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “I know.”

“Have you figured out yet why that, that encampment was allowed to go on for so long?”

He grimaced. “I’m going to be having words about that with my rangers tomorrow, once I’m sure I have the full story. It’s… almost a legacy problem, I suppose. In several senses.”

Hiking himself onto the side of her bed, he tapped his fingers on his paper-clad thigh and continued, “The zone boundary has always been more permeable in practice than in theory. In that first generation after the destruction, a lot of people who’d survived in the outlying areas kept trying to sneak back into their homes. A dedicated ranger cadre didn’t yet exist, so it was handled erratically by the district guard, military police and squads, and village speakers.

“Neither side was happy with the other, needless to say. Shooting people to keep them from dying had logical flaws obvious to everyone. At one point it was proposed to burn the standing homesteads, to block people going back. I’d call it a major row, except that in the shadow of Vashnoi, people had a new definition for major.”

Ekaterin nodded understanding. Enrique listened intently.

“Finally, Piotr ruled that anyone over age sixty could return, if they refused to be talked out of it. No children or young people allowed in. There was this weird little geriatric community around the edge of the zone for a while.

“The problem settled down—I suppose it would be too cruelly accurate to say died down—in a few years, well, decades. Younger people had no memory of the places and no desire to go back in. Plus the more sensible majority who wouldn’t go back on a bet. That phase was pretty much all over by the time I came along.”

“Not quite, it seems,” said Ekaterin.

“Yeah,” Miles agreed ruefully. “But it meant that however much it was against the later rules, once there were rules, it was established custom that old people on the fringes of the zone were left alone. So that dispensation Ma Roga claims Piotr gave her had precedent. It is not, mm, totally unreasonable that the newer rangers felt she was, so to speak, grandfathered in, even though she lingered there long past the time she… should have.”

“She could have come out ages ago,” said Ekaterin, considering that ghastly graveyard behind the hut-on-stumps. At least seventeen years, if not thirty. “And maybe saved more of those foundlings. Even if, in her isolation, she didn’t realize it, someone should have. Though, really, she doesn’t seem to have been in anything like a total news blackout. But she did try to take care of the abandoned kids, tried to save them. It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all.” Ekaterin frowned into her lap. “I’m wondering if we should run DNA identifications on those bodies buried under the posts.”

“I could,” said Enrique. “What would you do with them?”

“That’s the hard question. Find the parents, plunge them into grief and guilt for a second time, when it all seemed over? To what benefit, for what change?”

Miles opened a gloved hand, full of acknowledgement, empty of solutions. One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.

“What are you going to do about Vadim?” she asked him.

Miles’s grimace this time seemed to go soul-deep. “He has to be fired, for violating any number of ranger regs. Which makes me feel like a faker. So I think we’ll call it terminated for reaching his rad limit, which he can’t prove he hasn’t, and maybe pass him along under the table to Mark. Who could find a dozen different jobs for him to do, yeah.”

“From one Vorkosigan to another?” Ekaterin smirked, secretly pleased. “Is there no escape?”

“Not for the competent. Which he is, but he was placed in a horrible fork.” Miles’s shrug was unrepentant. “I should get one self-indulgence out of all this. Vadim can be it.”

“We did get the milk goats safely to their new paddock at the Ranch,” Enrique offered. “The rangers have been detailed to bring the ponies tomorrow.”

“Oh,” said Ekaterin, “good. That’s one thing at least. Do you suppose you could stop by their room before you leave and tell those kids?”

“Certainly.” He hesitated. “Even I could see their animals meant a lot to them. It gives one hope, rather.”

Ekaterin’s mouth twisted up. “For what, their… rehabilitation, perhaps? No, reintegration is a better term, or would be if they’d ever been integrated in the first place. Really, it’s as if they’d been transported right from the Time of Isolation and plunked down here.” Doubtfully, she considered Jadwiga. There’d been that hint that Boris had once ventured out into the wider district, even if he’d fled back to the zone after. She needed to learn more about that. Ingi seemed both young enough and bright enough for a good social prognosis, but then there was his physical appearance. Or, more accurately, how other district youths would react to it. She glanced under her lashes at Miles.

“I was thinking,” said Enrique, a phrase that made Ekaterin prick her ears, “about that old bunkhouse for hired hands that’s sitting out back at the Ranch. After the docs here are done, it might serve as a sort of halfway house for them, while they acclimatize to modern Barrayar.” He did not add, Such as it is; good for him. “There are all kinds of tasks at all levels around the labs that need doing. Boris might be trained; Ingi absolutely could be.”

“And Jadwiga? …If she gets out of the hospital?” It would be days, if not weeks, before they could learn her medical fate, and there was nothing more Ekaterin could do to speed it up. For once, she identified with Miles’s deep-rooted impatience. She reminded herself sternly that Hassadar was as good as any hospital on Barrayar for treating radiation-related issues, as the fact that Miles hadn’t whisked her elsewhere proved.

Enrique waved a more optimistic hand. “Of course. If she can milk goats, she can do all sorts of responsible things. Maybe not as quickly as some, but the Ranch runs on its own schedule.”

Ekaterin wondered whether Enrique was craftily adding to his large mammal collection, or if Jadwiga’s joy in his bugs had simply won his heart. Maybe both. Did it matter? “That might work. Or at least might be worth trying.”

“Does Martya have time for home schooling? Or interest?” asked Miles cautiously.

“We’ve dozens of employees. Nothing says it all has to fall on one person,” said Enrique.

It was a encouraging vision, Jadwiga and Boris in a sort of ad hoc sheltered workshop, gainfully employed as much for their own pride as any independence. Ekaterin knew all about that. And the labs were nothing if not flexible. Ingi, she suspected, was capable of much more, and in Enrique’s wake would most certainly find out what. The albino boy’s halfway house could well become not destination but launch pad.

Which left one—victim, perpetrator, it was hard to decide, maybe perpetuator—notably uncompensated. Ekaterin blew out her breath. “Should that invitation extend to Ma Roga? She can’t go back to the zone.”

Enrique’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think she should be left with those kids, do you? After what happened?”

“I’d guess that was temporary insanity brought on by her not being able to think past her current horizons, but… no, something seems broken there. I don’t know if it can be mended.” When rehabilitation was rejected, and punishment was pointless, what was left?

“Incarceration for rad poisoning could segue pretty readily into incarceration for attempted murder,” Miles observed.

“It seems circular. Oh.” That was right, Enrique hadn’t heard Ma’s story about how she’d come to her self-run house arrest in the first place, and therefore he could not have told Miles. Ekaterin pulled back her shoulders and recounted it now to both of them—a synopsis of a synopsis, so leaving out who knew what devilish details? She wasn’t sure it helped.

Miles whistled, behind his mask. “Huh.”

Enrique didn’t look any less doubtful. “So what should I tell those kids?”

Ekaterin massaged her tight temples. “For tonight, just tell them that she’s being treated. I don’t think we’re going to be able to unravel all these years in an hour.”

Or at all, possibly. Ma Roga was a district woman to her hot bones, but of Piotr’s era, not Miles’s; a relict of grim resistance. Ekaterin could better picture her walking back to her beloved hut on her own two feet than adapting to modern Hassadar; slyly returning to being a sinister legend among the local folk, terrorizing the occasional tourist who stumbled across her. Boris might even choose to visit his aging mother on occasion, dutiful if wary. Hadn’t Count Piotr himself given way in the face of that determination? Maybe the old man had called it right the first time.

Enrique smiled acknowledgment, wished Ekaterin a quick recovery, and went out.

She gave Miles’s gloved hand a little shake. “You should go home to our own kids.”

“Yes.” But he didn’t release his grip. They sat that way for a minute.

Ekaterin sighed. “Is this all going to work?” Her harassed gesture around encompassed everything: the zone, the radbug project, the district, far too many decades of inherited history.

Miles vented a mask-muffled noise, not quite a laugh. “It’s not as though we can stop trying.” He let go of her hand to roll his own shoulders, the only knots he could shake out so simply. “‘S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly.”

Ekaterin’s lips bent in a wry smile. “I wonder if all the work we’re doing will suffer the same forgetting?”

“Vashnoi has always been a garden, right?” Miles quoted some imagined child of the district’s future. “Is it still a victory if you don’t get the credit?”

“Hah. Welcome to my world,” she teased him.

“And welcome to mine. You’re not running away screaming yet, I see, Lady Vorkosigan. Good sign.”

“I’m in isolation. Running away would be medically disapproved.”

“There’s one upside.”

She shoved at his hip to dislodge him from his perch on her bed. “Go home, Miles. Tell Nikki I’m fine. Don’t stir up the twins just before bed.”

“Yeah, yeah. Love you, too.” He leaned over and bump-kissed her on the forehead through his mask, then, reluctantly, let himself out. Shortly, de-gowned, he leaned up to her window and waved farewell through it. She made shooing motions. Roic gave her a devoted half-salute and herded his lord off.

Freed of her audience, Ekaterin lay back and permitted her weariness to surface. She tried and failed to keep all of today’s wild events from scrolling through her memory with her every mistake highlighted. Maybe she needed to copy Enrique’s approach, with all negative results recorded as diligently and enthusiastically as the positive ones, continually studying how to do better.

Yes, the next generation of radbugs should be more robust, like dung beetles, built to burrow down into the subsoil like little six-legged shovels. And very bad-tasting. But should they port over their current color-and-light scheme, or not? Was the misadventure of the first test plot a unique outlier, or a key insight?

For once, she might need a survey on an aesthetic matter. You might still be wrong, but at least the blame is distributed, ran Miles’s sardonic quip on surveys. Or maybe not. So many factors to juggle…

When she slept at last, she dreamed of gardens of moving lights, molten with color, where children, their future-faces as elusive as butterflies, played and were not poisoned.