In her sweat she dreamt of Hesychast’s utopia. She was in the school at Iriad, where she had lived through the fall of Taranoke. But instead of ash-concrete the school was made of polished coral, and the walls slipped coolly beneath her fingers. She was going to her class, where they would be tested, today, for the fidelity of their birth: she would dance, and if the secret dance taught to her mother had come down through the flesh into her, then she would dance as her mother had when she heard this same music. Later there would be calisthenics, and lessons keyed to pleasure and discomfort, so their bodies would know that good clean work felt like cool water, and that poor work was itch and sweat. The time would come soon for injections of flesh memory from Falcresti donors: but not yet.

In the baths she saw her second cousin Lao, older and more graceful: in this dream she had aged with Baru, in that way dreams do. Oh, she was a marvel, as tall and poised as a heroic statue in the Exemplaries of Falcrest; but she had a masterless joy too, in the way she grinned and the fall of her thick black hair across her body. She was laughing with her friends, who loved and admired her. And seeing Lao’s goodness and her power, to brighten and inspire and delight, Baru wanted her, wanted her so badly, so she could make Lao feel as wonderful as she truly was: and in her gut that sense of falling quickly, like a leap from the reef into shallow sea.

And then she felt her bowels twist. The blood rushed from her head like she’d stood up too suddenly. Lao’s nakedness fell out of focus as the headache came. Baru went into the commode and gagged down the hole. In an hour she would have a rash; tomorrow a wrung, exhausted lack of energy, like after a bad fright. The flesh did not agree.

But in the dream she was also in the courtyard after lessons, sulking over a poor mark. And Tain Hu was there, too. She was climbing the lychee tree Baru had helped plant (in the dream it had grown tall), deep brown and strong, her mulberry-paper shirt and trousers pulled apart by her exertion to bare hard stomach. The girls (in the dream bodies of women) cheered her. She got to the top despite the thick branches, never looking down: she plucked a red spiny lychee, put it in her mouth, and somehow, by art of tooth and tongue, cracked the rind perfectly in half so it shucked off in her hand and let her bite down. Baru felt quite perturbed.