“It’s all right Ralph,” I whispered. “We’ll find someplace where we can hide until this blows over. Or maybe we’ll hide out forever,” I added, thinking that I couldn’t see any good reason to go back at this point. I was tired of being the alien, the weird one, the outcast.

I remembered Toby, and wondered if this was how he had felt.

Toby had been the dumbest kid in my class, back in the last school I had been in before Dad and I moved to Kwarkis. He was okay, but he just wasn’t with it. Some of the kids were mean to him, which I thought was stupid. Most of us pretty much ignored him.

I felt bad about that now. I wanted to go back and put an arm around him, like Fifka had put three arms around me, and tell him that I liked him. Which was true, now that I thought about it. He was a nice kid and never did anything to hurt anyone. I had always figured that he didn’t add anything to the class, but now that I thought about it, I realized that just his being there had been important. He was part of who we were, and we would have been different without him.

I wondered how the kids in Darva Preet’s class felt about me. Did they think about me at all? Would they miss me, now that I was gone—or would they just be relieved that they didn’t have a two-armed gimp around to deal with anymore? Did I make the class more or less than it had been when I came to it?

I was so wound up in my thoughts that I hardly noticed where I was going, hardly noticed Nnnnnn standing in my path until I almost bumped into him.

“Do you think this is wise?” he asked, his voice deep and solemn. He didn’t sound mean, but there was something very frightening about him. I think it was simply that he was so sure of himself.

I stared at him, unable to speak.

He knelt in front of me and looked directly into my eyes.

“Are you an adult or are you a child?” he asked.

My throat was dry, my stomach tightening into a knot of fear and despair. I remembered what my father had told me about the way Nnnnnn and his people felt about kids. Running away was one thing—without me around, Dad might have been able to skinny his way out of the mess I had created. (Though when I stopped to think about it I realized he would have turned that forest inside out to find me, no matter what it meant to the deal.) But face-to-face defiance of the diplomat from another planet was something else altogether.