“I’ll tough it out. How do I look?” I’d never developed the least sense of flatlander style. Sharrol picked my clothes.

“Half man, half snake,” she said. “Me?”

“Like this snake’s fitting mate.” She didn’t really. No flatlander is as supple as a crashlander. Raised in Earth’s gravity, Sharrol was a foot shorter than I, and weighed the same as I did. Stocky.

The apartment was already in child mode: rounded surfaces everywhere, and all storage was locked or raised to eyeball height (mine). Tanya was five and Louis was four and both were agile as monkeys. I scanned for anything that might be dangerous within their reach.

Louis stared at us, solemn, awed. Tanya giggled. We must have looked odder than usual, though given flatlander styles it’s a wonder that any kid can recognize its parents. Why do they change their hair and skin color so often? When we hugged them good-bye, Tanya made a game of tugging my hair out of shape and watching it flow back into a feathery crest. We set them down and turned on the Playmate program.

The lobby transfer booth jumped us three time zones east. We stepped out into a vestibule, facing an arc of picture window. A flock of rainbow-hued fish panicked at the awful sight and flicked away. A huge fish passed in some internal dream.

For an instant I felt the weight of all those tons of water. I looked to see how Sharrol was taking it. She was smiling, admiring.

“Carlos lives near the Great Barrier Reef, you said. You didn’t say he lived in it.”

“It’s a great privilege,” Sharrol told me. “I spent my first thirty years under water, but not on the Reef. The Reef’s too fragile. The UN protects it.”

“You never told me that!”

She grinned at my surprise. “My dad had a lobster ranch near Boston. Later I worked for the Epcot-Atlantis police. The ecology isn’t so fragile there, but—Bey, I should take you there.”

I said, “Maybe it’s why we think alike. I grew up underground. You can’t build aboveground on We Made It.”

“You told me. The winds.”

“Sharrol, this isn’t like Carlos.”

She’d known Carlos Wu years longer than I had. “Carlos gets an idea and he follows it as far as it’ll go. I don’t know what he’s onto now. Maybe he’s always wanted to share me with you. And he brought a date for, um—”

“Ever met her?”

“—balance. No, Carlos won’t even talk about Feather Filip. He just smiles mysteriously. Maybe it’s love.”