He hit the keypad to lower the door again, sealing himself from sight. He belatedly twisted up his mouth on an imitation smile, and muttered something half-inaudible conveying enough allegiance to the social proprieties for him to pass by.
Her beginning stride was arrested at the sight of him, and she recoiled, buffeted by his black and hollow stare, then went carefully around him with a mumbled, “Excuse me … I’m sorry. A fashionable bandolier of expensive electronic equipment hanging decoratively on a jeweled chain across her torso advertised her status. She wore a soft wrap tunic and flowing trousers. The mirrored door slid up at last, and a woman exited the booth.
The body, too, was correct in every detail. Beneath black brows, the grey eyes’ glower deepened. Subtly deformed, and robbed by his short stature of any chance of the disturbing near-rightness passing unnoticed. A stretched-out dwarf with a twisted spine, short-necked, big-headed. The insignia-less mercenary officer’s undress kit-pocketed jacket, loose trousers tucked into ankle-topping boots-was correct in every detail. The short man in the grey and white military uniform scowled at his divided self framed therein. The mirror-sections were deliberately set slightly out of alignment, fragmenting their reflections. The row of comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse of Escobar’s largest commercial orbital transfer station had mirrored doors, divided into diagonal sections by rainbow-colored lines of lights. Miles is often mistaken for a mutant by his mutant-loathing countrymen. Thanks to heroic medical intervention, Miles survived his near fatal brush with war gas-as a pain-filled dwarf with bones as weak and brittle as some malign composite of chalk and glass.
When assassins came to rid the world of his father, his mother, pregnant with Miles, was in the line of fire, and Miles was but an egg for the omelet in an all too literal sense. Even the fact that Miles is the third in line to the throne and personally owns a major chunk of his home planet would not tempt any normal person to change places with him. Not everyone would envy young Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, even though he had formed his own mercenary fleet before attending the naval academy, and even though his mother was the beautiful Cordelia, the ship captain who has taught the Lords of Barrayar much about the perils of sexism. Series: Barrayar Mirror Dance Lois Bujold