Catkejen said as they approached the Dead Marxist, an Eastern European eatery, “Just forget about Siloh for tonight. Kick some jams out. Hey, look at that guy!”

A slim man was passing by, dressed in wraparound silvery cloth. He looked like a knight in armor and was plainly wearing nothing underneath. “Um, yeah.” Rachel was still distracted, and seeing fleshy delights was not helping.

“Okay,” Catkejen said, “I call dibs.”

Rachel had become a tad uncomfortable among all the slim Loonies. She was more meaty than the carved, bony ladies of the Library and the stringy, muscled miners. She swayed and jiggled, a message of flesh and skin around a robust frame of bone and sinew. The uniform lighting here was kind to a bigger frame, allowing no shadows. Rachel had always had an ambivalent dance with her body, liking its strength and stretch, but not the advances it invited from legions of the lustful, of both sexes. At times back Earthside she’d felt her body to be a dress of skin she wore for others. Now, with the skimpy diet of Luna’s limited agriculture, she would probably lose some mass, but not, alas, so far.

Catkejen peeled off, but Rachel kept going until she saw just outside the Dead Marxist the back of Geoffrey Chandis. This brightened her mood and she swung around him to say hello, then saw a pair of hands reach around his neck, a head kissing him—and it was Ruby.

Rachel turned away and Ruby came up from a big smacking kiss to say, “Hey, join us.”

“Uh, I don’t—”

“No, don’t,” Geoffrey said firmly, taking Ruby’s hands off him.

Ruby plunked her hands back onto him. “Not done!”

Geoffrey said, “Not in the mood for frisky right now,” but instead of removing her hands, she started stroking him, shoulder to legs to ass.

Rachel grabbed one of Ruby’s hands and used its leverage to twirl the woman away from him. “Done now.”

At once Ruby was in her face, eyes slitted. “He’s not yours!”

“Not yours either,” Rachel said, and stepped around her. Geoffrey was standing there, eyes wide, a big smile. With a swooping hand he stepped toward the Dead Marxist and she followed him. Ruby sputtered behind them.

For the next hour she sat beside Geoffrey at the long table where their gang gathered. Without much thinking about it she had formed a pattern of clubbing with Catkejen and playing the silent one, letting their darting talk fill her in on the inner workings of Loonie and Library.

“—this new drink, Tangeriney Wankmaggot, can’t even spell it, though I can spiel it, in German—”

“—and this one Message we were decrypting kept addressing ‘those of inner scaffolding’ and we realized that came from some aliens who had no bones, and wondered why anyone wanted them.”

“—listen, looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not—”

“—can’t complain. Still do, though.”

—“Anglish itself, ever think, is a puzzle. Take f’instance”—writing a flowing hand in air floss, which quickly dissolved—“ ‘their our know rules.’ See? Pronounced, easy—spelled, not so much—”