The munc center always used to be a reassuring place for Yirella. If Uma or Doony ever got knocked about, she would come to Uranti, knowing scratches and bruises would be tended to and soothed. If they’d stupidly eaten something bad, they’d get medicine and treatment in a ward. This time when she walked into the broad entrance hall that ran clean through the diameter of the dome, the old sensation of comfort was nowhere to be had. The hygienic white tile floor and light gray walls were too functional for her now, too symbolic of the true nature of muncs: artificial, doomed…

Uranti was in a treatment room at the back of the clinic, tending to a munc belonging to a boy in the clan’s fifth yeargroup. Sie smiled and waved Yirella to a seat as sie finished wrapping a cut in black a-skin. Boy and munc held hands delightedly as they were dismissed, with Uranti’s dire warnings not to exert themselves for twenty-four hours following them out.

“The arena?” Yirella asked.

Uranti stripped the sanitary gloves from hir hands. “Field hockey. I have no idea which genius thought it would be a good idea to give muncs hockey sticks that they can wave around on a crowded field.” Sie sighed, shaking hir head. “This whole bonding procedure is one giant malleable experiment.” Sie looked around. “Where are yours?”

“Back at the house.”

“Really? Don’t they mind being apart from you?”

“I guess. A little. I don’t have the kind of bond the boys have with their cohorts. I suppose I’m more reserved. It’s rubbed off on Uma and Doony.”

Uranti gave her a soft smile. “And yet, no one else in your yeargroup has given their muncs an actual name.”

“We’re not allowed to.”

“Dear me, is that a touch of rebellion I hear in your voice?”

“I was just being practical—and polite. Which seems a bit pointless now.”

“How so?”

“The modification; it’s the kind of phrase an old-Earth politician would use—given what you’re going to do to our poor muncs.”

“I see. Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to see them.”

“Them?”

“The combat cores you modify them into. I’ve seen the images, and I’ve studied the blueprints. But it’s not them.”

“I understand. The map is not the territory.”

Yirella frowned for a moment. “Something like that. Yes.”

Uranti led her back into the main corridor and into a hexagonal hub chamber. The portal sie chose emerged into a section of the building Yirella had never been in before. She was in an observation gallery that ran along a clean assembly facility 150 meters long, with seamless pearl-white walls, floor, and ceiling; smaller glass-walled rooms lined the sides. In her t-shirt and shorts, with sandals on her feet, Yirella felt totally out of place. The few people she could see walking amid the industrial-size fabricators were all wearing hospital-style gowns.