She drew back, shocked and interested. “You kiss differently from the Baron.”
His brain seemed to hiccup. “The Baron has kissed you?”
“Yes …”
Sampling his wife’s new body early? How soon was that transplant scheduled? “Have you always lived with, uh, your lady?”
“No. I was brought here after the clone-creche was wrecked. The repairs are almost complete, I’ll be moving back soon.”
“But … not for long.”
“No.”
The temptations to the Baron must be … interesting. After all, she would have her brain destroyed soon, and be unable to accuse. Vasa Luigi could do anything but damage her virginity. What was this doing to her apparent mental conditioning, her allegiance to her destiny? Something, obviously, or she wouldn’t be here.
She glanced at the closed door, and her mouth went round in sudden suspicion. She pulled her hand from his grip, and raced back to the empty bedroom. “Oh, no!”
“Sh! Sh!” He ran after her, grabbed her hand again, lunged up to stand on the bed to turn her face to his and regain eye contact. “Don’t shout!” he hissed. “If you run out and tell the guards, you’ll be in terrible trouble, but if you just wait until she comes back, no one will ever know.” He felt quite vile, to be playing so on her obvious panic, but it had to be done. “Be quiet, and no one will ever know.” He had no idea if Rowan intended to come back, for that matter. By this point maybe she had just wanted to escape from him. None of his plans had assumed a piece of luck like this.
Lilly Junior could physically overpower him with ease, though he was not sure if she realized it. One good punch to his chest would drop him to the floor. She wouldn’t even have to hit him very hard.
“Sit down,” he told her. “Here, next to me. Don’t be afraid. Actually, I can’t imagine what you could possibly be afraid of, if your destiny doesn’t make you blink. You must be a courageous girl. Woman. Sit …” He drew her down; she glanced from him to the door in great uncertainty, but allowed herself to be settled, temporarily. Her muscles were tight as springs. “Tell me … tell me about yourself. Tell me about your life. You are a most interesting person, do you know?”
“Me?”
“I can’t remember much about my life, right now, which is why I ask. It’s a terror to me, not to be able to remember. It’s killing me. What’s the very earliest thing about yourself that you can remember?”
“Why … I suppose … the place I lived before I came to the creche. There was a woman who took care of me. I have—this is silly—but I remember she had some purple flowers, as tall as,! was, that grew out of this little square of a garden, hardly a meter square, and they smelled like grapes.”
“Yes? Tell me more about those flowers …”
They were in for a long conversation, he feared. And then what? That Rowan had not yet been brought back was a very good sign. That she might not be coming back left an unsettling dilemma for Lilly Junior. So what could the Baron and Baronne possibly do to her? his mind mocked savagely. Kill her?
They talked of her life in the creche. He teased out an account of the Dendarii raid from her point of view. How she had managed to re-join the Baron. Sharp, sharp kid. What a mess for Mark. The pauses grew longer. He was going to end up talking about himself soon, just to keep things going, and that was incredibly dangerous. She was running out of conversation, her eyes turning more and more often toward the door.
“Rowan’s not coming back,” said Lilly Junior at last. “Is she.”
“I think not,” he said frankly. “I think she’s escaped clean.”
“How can you tell?”
“If they had caught her, they would have come for you, even if they didn’t bring her back here. From their point of view, Rowan is still in here. It’s you who’s missing.”
“You don’t think they could have mistaken her for me, do you?” she gasped in alarm. “Taken her to be united with my lady?”
He wasn’t sure if she was afraid for Rowan, or afraid that Rowan would steal her place. What a ghastly, hideous new paranoia. “How soon are you … no,” he reassured her. Himself. “No. At a glance in the hallway, sure, you’d look quite alike, but someone would have to take a closer look for that. She’s years older than you. It’s just not possible.”
“What should I do?” She tried to get to her feet; he held her arm, pulled her back to his side on the bed.
“Nothing,” he advised. “It’s all right. Tell them—tell them I made you stay in here.”
She looked askance at his littleness. “How?”
“Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion,” he said truthfully. “You can blame it on me.”
She looked most dubious.
How old was she? He’d spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life story, and there didn’t seem to be very much of it. Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naivete. The greatest adventure of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the Dendarii Mercenaries.
Rowan. She’s made it out. Then what? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson’s Whole. You couldn’t trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-eyed.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You are so beautiful … on the inside. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman.”
“My lady is a great woman,” she said sturdily. “She deserves to live more.”
What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only herself, apparently.
“Besides,” said Lilly Junior. “I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were squirming all over her.”
“Who?”
“Oh, that’s right. That must have been your clone-twin.”
“My brother,” he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?
She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored. She looked at him speculatively. “Would you like to kiss me again?” she inquired.
It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this girl worried him. She was not his … equal. But he had to kill time, keep her in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. “Well … all right… .”
After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and remarked, “That’s not the way the Baron does it.”
“What do you do for Vasa Luigi?”
She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a minute, he choked, “Stop!”
“Don’t you like it? The Baron does.”
“I’m sure.” Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining table, and scrunched himself up in it. “That’s, um, very nice, Lilly, but it’s too serious for you and me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just exactly so.” She was a child, despite her grown-up body, he was increasingly certain of it. “When you are older … you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without.” He tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half-successfully. Vasa Luigi, you scum.
She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m not going to be older.”
He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees, and shuddered. Hell.
He suddenly remembered how he’d met Sergeant Taura. How they had become lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the pot-holes in his memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation, it must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution. But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a smash-and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century, if she wasn’t … cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.