Even through the blindfold and around his painful swinging belly, Ben tried to project the magnanimity of the generous conqueror. Although he would prevail now, it wasn’t anything personal, it was all in the service of greater fellowship. This was exactly the kind of thing he had never done at Sidney.

But then padded fabric grazed his chest and something hit him in the neck, right in the widest part of his windpipe, and he wrenched his upper body away from the source of this, the impact stopping his breath. He heaved but kept it down. He crouched low. The water was so heavy in his stomach that it almost seemed to pull him forward. He thought for a second about shuffling off to the side and out of the scrum, but then a shin met the side of his head and he was taken over by anger, outrage that his unspoken attitude of generosity had been disregarded, and so with his left arm he swept back and forth, then lunged with his right every time he met anything solid. He heard the ragged breathing of all the newbs around him, the hoarse whispered shouting of the upper-formers. He smelled someone’s metallic breath for an instant, and they smelled his metallic sweat.

In a later era, when anyone could have quietly recorded this and posted the video, it would have been an artifact, something that wouldn’t go away, but even the start of the ordeal was now a decaying memory for all of them. A bolt of numbness under his chin, and his front teeth clacked together and he felt a floating speck of tooth with his tongue and he went hard to his knees. He reproached himself for not continuing on but he pawed his blindfold down and went on all fours back to the wall, where now about three quarters of the newbs sat. Josh Yost and Hideo had vomited into the storm drain. Ben looked around and there were three kids left, not directly facing each other, and then two of them smacked heads together by accident and leaned away and sat down. Jed was declared the winner.

The newbs went back upstairs inside their own hoods of quiet. Ben found Ahmed sleeping in his high bed.

Ahmed was facing out toward the room, profligate with trust, and Ben could tell he was deep down and without dreams. Ben climbed up to his bed now and wondered if he had had so much water that he might wet the bed. He ran his tongue over the small new roughness in his left front incisor.

With his belly spreading on either side of his spine, Ben again looked up at the very slight phosphorescence. He imagined his girl again, peeling the backings off each star and moon and ringed planet. Ben lay there looking at their remains, trying to stay awake until he needed to pee again.

3. Thermocline

3. Thermocline