In the meantime, Severus continued to join the others – including, inevitably, Erik and Hephaestus and the robots – to watch memories in the evening. The latest sequence of stored memories was the longest yet, and at a pace of one phial of memories per night, it stretched out over a full month.

The first phial that Cheiron tipped into the Pensieve felt slightly off, at first. There was no name-label written on it, only a scribbled M. Miles seemed to have reverted from twenty-something Admiral Naismith to the insecurity and self-loathing of teenage Miles. And yet, something was still wrong…

'It's the clone,' growled Konstantine. 'Lord Mark,' he conscientiously corrected himself, through gritted teeth. He wasn't being sarcastic – if his liegelord willed some terrorist-created clone to be a Vorkosigan scion, Konstantine would put up with this just as he put up with his liegelord recruiting Betans and even deserters as Armsmen, but that didn't mean he had to approve. Any more than Severus had to approve of Harry Potter.

'Of course!' said Spark, with an electronic giggle.

Severus could guess that, if he had watched more of Miles's memories from the intervening years, he would have had more of a clue what was going on. But he enjoyed sharing the clone's confusion as he tried to piece everything together – such as which Dendarii soldiers – including Angua's friend Taura, an eight-foot-tall werewolf wearing claw-varnish and eyeshadow – were also Miles's paramours and which ones just wished they were, and when Miles had been to Jackson's Whole before and made enemies there.

It was a story about identity. Miles as a secret agent whose girlfriend preferred his cover identity to the original, and who wasn't entirely sure himself which of him was his true self, and the clone, who refused to answer to the name of Mark but couldn't settle on another name he like instead (Severus remembered naming himself 'The Half-Blood Prince' in his diary as a teenager, as a secret identity to protect himself against the taunts from the school bullies), with barely any identity except as a Jacksonian clone returning to his home planet to wreak vengeance on those who exploited clone-children like him and his long-dead foster-brothers. Brain-damaged Dendarii soldiers with amnesia, being sent home to their families if they had families while they tried to regain a sense of who they were – but who could rehabilitate those with no family? (Severus could only hope that the hospital Trooper Aziz was sent to would put more effort into rehabilitation than St Mungo's seemed to bother with for long-term patients.)

Family and identity. Elena looking a little more peaceful at last, now that she and her mother had had time to get to know each other, now that, ten years on from their first meeting, her mother could forgive her for existing. The clone refusing to identify as Miles's brother, feeling bitter that he had been robbed of the chance to be himself as much as any of his friends who had been bred for the body-transplant industry had been, except that, instead of being swiftly killed by having his skull sawn open and his brain scooped out, he had been tortured and brainwashed for years to force him to become a replica Lord Vorkosigan. 'Some days I'm not sure who I hate more, House Bharaputra, the Komarrans, or Miles Naismith Vorkosigan.' (Severus wondered who he himself would have been, if he hadn't been drawn into the Death Eaters. A potions researcher? A Healer? Not a teacher, please, not a teacher.)

Finding identity. Only by getting into a deadly situation, which led to Miles's death when Miles came to rescue him, was the clone finally forcibly brought to Barrayar to meet his genetic parents. (Severus tried to remember whether this was what Christianity taught – that all people are God's children, yet lost to Him and become children of the Devil, only to become God's adopted children because Jesus died in their place?) But Mark had to make that decision for himself, and his mother could only discuss the options:

'It's strategically more important to establish you as yourself, Lord Mark, if Lord Mark is indeed who you are to be.'

'Do I have a choice?'

'You will, but a reasoned one, after you've had time to assimilate it all.'

'What am I, to you as a Betan?'

'Either my son or my son once removed. Unlicensed, but claimed by me as an heir. That leaves our emotional relationship.'

'Do we have one?'

'We do, though exactly what it is remains to be determined. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my attention is doubly riveted.'

('I wish my first conversation with Luke had gone that well,' Anakin muttered.)

Role models. 'You had exactly three role models to learn how be a human from. The Jacksonian body-slavers, the Komarran terrorists – and Miles. Miles thinks he's a knight-errant. And so, Mark, when you were finally forced to choose between two palpable evils and a lunatic – you upped and ran after the lunatic.'

(Who had Severus's role models been? Not his mother, once she stopped being the only magical adult he knew. Not Horace Slughorn or any of the other Hogwarts teachers. Not Lucius Malfoy, except to the superficial extent that he had taught himself to talk like Lucius so as not to be suspected of being a half-blood from Cokeworth. Not the Dark Lord, whom he hadn't even realised was the only other half-blood Slytherin he knew. No. There hadn't been anyone who made him think, 'I want to be like that.' All he had known was that he didn't want Lily to die – and then, after Lily's death, when he had started working at Hogwarts and had to protect Slytherin students from reprisal attacks after the Dark Lord's defeat, that he didn't want to let anyone die, and especially not children. But he had always been alone. Apart from having hoped as a child that he and Lily were linked by both being magical, he had never seen anyone he felt a connection with until – well, until he watched Return of the Jedi, and then, later, on the Rock, when Cheiron had shown him a memory of a teenager supervised by his dour, ugly protector.)

Loss of identity. Later on, some of the phials labelled only 'M' were those of Miles's memories of waking up with amnesia, tended by the Durona family, who were eager to know whether he could remember which clone of Lord Vorkosigan he was: the one created here on Jackson's Whole for Komarran terrorists, or the one created probably by the Cetagandans who grew up to be Admiral Vorkosigan? How could he answer that? And so, when someone who looked like him came leading a group of Dendarii to rescue him, it was logical for him to decide that that one was Admiral Naismith – and therefore that he himself must be Mark, and that probably nobody cared about him.

Identity shattering. As Mark was captured and tortured by Baron Ryoval – a man who was who Ges Vorrutyer would have liked to be if he had been able to make a full-time career of being evil instead of having to fit it around his day job – he knew that Ryoval's purpose was not just to hurt him, but to make him dependent and enslave him. Mark had heard a bit about Konstantine, not just from Elena, but from Aral:

'Sergeant Bothari was very important to Miles. And to us all. Bothari was… a difficult man. I don't think Elena ever was quite reconciled to that. She's needed to come to some acceptance of him, to be easy with herself.'

Difficult? Criminal, I'd heard.'

'That is very… incomplete.'

Mark presumably didn't know the details – that Konstantine had evidently been controlled by something like a more complex version of the Imperius Curse, until he had finally managed to break free of it. But he could evidently see that this was what Ryoval was working on doing to him now. And if he was to avoid being mind-slaved, he had to split his personality into sections, so that the core of who he was could remain safe.

Remembering what Angua had told him about berserker werewolves, Severus wondered whether Mark had fled here during the torture sessions. Had Konstantine, for that matter? Severus could remember a couple of times in Cordelia's memories where Aral had mentioned that at one point in his past Konstantine had been on the verge of splitting into multiple personalities. He wanted to ask – but to ask questions, he would have to be human, and he couldn't face being human, right now.

Besides, as they watched the emergence of Grunt, Howl, Gorge and Killer, Severus found himself worrying, not about parallels between Mark and Konstantine, but Mark and himself. Using Occlumency, he had needed to hide parts of his mind from his own consciousness in order to shield them from mind-readers. Had Mark done irreparable damage to himself? Almost certainly. Maybe splitting one's own mind like this was as irreparable as splitting one's soul in the spell needed to create a Horcrux.

Had Severus done irreparable damage to himself, too? How would he even know? He didn't think that he had destroyed his soul when he killed Dumbledore, or how could he be here? He felt like the same person he had always been – or he thought he did. What if the part of him that was capable of trusting and having friends had split into a separate person which might be able to take turns at possessing his body but was too successfully shut off from him by Occlusion, or too irrevocably severed by murder, to communicate with him? Or what if it was dead? He needed answers. But he would be a good little spy, and listen to the others' discussion, and see what he could learn from that.

'He's not like me,' Konstantine said. 'Even when he's Killer. He's not – he doesn't love killing. He's just good at it when he needs to be. And he can decide when to stop being Grunt and start being Killer, without needing someone to tell him. He's not the same sort of crazy that I am.'

'Nor that I am,' said Anakin. 'I used to tell myself – that there was a sun-dragon that whispered to me, "All things die." But I was too afraid to admit that there was no dragon; that it was the voice of my own fear of death – of the deaths of those I loved. But – Mark is more like a man holding four dragons on leashes, training them to fight for him when he needs them to. His dragons make him stronger, not weaker. They allow him to remain Mark, instead of making him forget that he was ever Mark.'

'Yes,' said Cheiron. 'Mark decided to drive himself insane before Baron Ryoval did it to him, so that he could choose what sort of insane he wanted to be. But do you remember how he knew to do that?'

'He said,' Konstantine had been focusing so closely that he could quote Killer's words from the memory perfectly: '"It was what the Count our Father said. That people would give themselves to you, if you waited them out, and didn't rush to give yourself to them. The Count's a killer too, you know. Like me." He's not like me, because he chose to be like Admiral Vorkosigan, instead.'

'I used to tell myself that I was different people,' said Erik. 'I could hope that Christine could come to love the man called Erik, if the murderer called the Phantom was someone else – and if the little boy called the Living Corpse was so long dead that I didn't need to remember him. Only…'

'Yes?' said Cheiron.

'I didn't actually become separate people. I was just one highly talented homicidal maniac. But some of the older people kept in the freak show at the circus really had gone that way. They didn't even remember what the other parts of them had done – they didn't know that they had other personalities. When they've gone like that – is there a cure? A way of fitting the pieces back together?'

'What do you think?' asked Cheiron.

Erik considered. 'Nadir used to have an antique Japanese vase, broken and stuck back together like gold, so that its scars gleamed. He said it was an ancient art called kintsugi. When I saw him last – when I went to cry on him, because Christine had kissed me and I loved her so much that I wanted her to be happy and so I had decided to die – he told me that it was stronger because of the joins, and more beautiful than when it was new, and that if I could dare to live, I could heal and be more beautiful than ever, like the vase. He offered it to me to take with me, to give me hope. But I didn't want to have hope, then. It wouldn't have made so good an ending as my death would.'

'It sounds like something a Jedi would say,' muttered Anakin. '"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."'

'Did the vase work?' asked Konstantine.

'I don't know,' admitted Erik. 'It worked as an ornament. I don't know whether you could repair a teapot like that and brew tea in it. Could you?' he asked Cheiron.

'I don't know,' said Cheiron. 'In Greece, people mostly used bits of broken pottery as scraps for writing messages on, as there wasn't much paper around. Nutt might know – he runs craft classes at the Mook Rehabilitation Centre.'

Severus was fairly sure that the answer was 'no'. Gluing things back together might be the best a Muggle could manage, with no access to spells to make them as good as new, but surely they would only be a shadow of their former selves. And if this was a metaphor for healing – didn't that mean that people's minds couldn't truly heal and become as functional as they had been before a calamity? The brain didn't grow new cells in adulthood, the way the rest of the body could heal itself, so how could healing be possible? Maybe it was possible for people who were too uneducated to know that it was impossible, but surely not for him?

He didn't want to stay around for this discussion. He wanted to go and claw something, to work through all the despair in his soul.

But still, he had to admit, he needed answers. So tonight he would claw at one of the rough chunks of tree-trunk that Konstantine had brought in for him. And tomorrow he would go to find Nutt, and see what he had to say.