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sugars and chemicals, and decided he couldn't manage this before breakfast even if one of the chemicals might be caffeine. So, when did you grow so nice, my Lord Auditor? Or was it grow so old ? The eggs, bread and water would be challenge enough for his queasy stomach. He shook his head no-thanks and set the bulb down.
    The eggs were still simmering. Miles looked around and said, "Interesting place, this. Not at all like anything I've been shown on Kibou so far." Not with the cryocorps stage-managing the tours, certainly. "How many other people live here?"
    Jin shrugged. "A hundred—two hundred? I'm not sure. Suze-san would know."
    Miles's eyebrows rose. "That many!" They stayed out of sight well. He supposed a community of illegal squatters would have to be discreet in order to last. "How did you come here?"
    Another shrug. "I just found it. Or it found me. A couple of folks out collecting tripped over me sleeping in a park, and sort of collected me, too."
    A tradition, it seemed. "Do you have other family here?"
    "No."
    An atypically short response, from the chatty—lonely?—child. "Family anywhere?"
    "My dad's dead." A hesitation. "My mom's frozen."
    A distinction with a difference, on this planet. "Siblings?"
    "I have a little sister. Somewhere. With relatives ."
    That last word had almost been spit out. Miles controlled his brows, maintaining an empty, inviting silence.
    "She was too little to take with me," Jin went on, a bit defensively, "and she didn't understand anything that was going on anyway."
    "And what was, er, going on?"
    The shrug again. Jin jumped up. "Oh, the eggs are done!"
    So was Jin an orphan? A runaway? Both? Miles dimly thought Kibou-daini maintained the sort of children's social services usual to technologically advanced planets, if perhaps not up to the relentless standards of, say, Beta Colony. Jin was a mystery, but not, alas, the most pressing one on his hands this morning.
    Jin rolled hot eggs onto their plates, making sure Miles got the special brown one, and Miles kept the wits not to argue about his guestly double-portion. Jin handed over a restaurant packet of salt from someplace called Ayako's Cafe, and they divided the bread and shared the water. "Excellent," said Miles around a mouthful. "Couldn't be fresher." Jin smiled.
    Miles swallowed a bite of bread, and said, "So, you said someone around here had a comconsole? Would they let me use it?"
    "Suze-san." Jin nodded. "She might. If you get to her early in the day, when she's not so grouchy." He added more reluctantly, "I could take you."
    Was he regretting untying that ankle-rope? "I'd like that very much, thanks. It's rather important to me."
    The I'm-pretending-I-don't-care shrug again. As if the only way Jin could imagine keeping any living thing was by tying it up and feeding it, lest it run away and never be seen again.
    Jin bustled about after breakfast to feed meat shreds to the falcon, bread bits to the chickens, and other carefully sorted scraps to the rats and the residents of the glass boxes. He cleaned cages and swished out and refilled water pans with fresh drinks all round. Miles was quietly impressed with his thoroughness, though the boy might have also been dragging his feet, reluctant to end this visit. In due course, and feeling much stronger and less dizzy, Miles followed his guide cautiously down the ladder once more.

Chapter Three

    Miles trailed Jin through another unlocked metal door, down some stairs into a disturbingly darkened corridor, through a utility tunnel, and into yet another building. Subliminal sounds and smells, as well as better lighting, suggested this one was occupied, and indeed, around another turn they came to what had obviously once been an employee kitchen and cafeteria. About a dozen people lingered there, some cooking, some eating. All watched in wary silence as the pair passed, except for a young woman working at an industrial-sized mixer who spotted Jin, waved a large spoon in the air,