Hrotrun screwed up vir face. “I was just having some fun. I’d heard there was going to be—we’d all heard about the Cirque, and that the Ticket Holders were wandering around the up and across . . . I had a friend who could get me an anonybody, so I just . . . showed up.”

“Hundreds of anonybodies, and you all just happened to show up and seek out Panaximandra and have a riot by accident?” Fift said.

{Your approach is very odd, Fift.} Pip sent. Ze was studying Hrotrun’s face. {But go ahead and conduct your experiment, if that is what will satisfy you.} How like Pip to belatedly approve of what ze couldn’t stop!

“Well that’s where the anonybodies were. When we stepped into them, I mean. It was . . . a very strange feeling. And then . . . Panaximandra . . .” Hrotrun swallowed. “Ve came, looking like something out of an epic, so . . . powerful.” Hrotrun cleared vir throat, vir eyes moist again with tears. “And it was all . . . true. What ve said.” Ve blinked, dislodging a tear onto the smooth slope below vir eye: it slid down and lost itself among the brown feathers on vir cheek. Behind vir pleading look there was an edge of hatred.

It wasn’t how you look at someone fragile who needs to be protected, who you unfortunately hurt in your wildness. It was how you look at someone who controls you, who owns you, who supplants you at every turn.

It was Father Miskisk looking at Mother Pip.

“You hit me . . . because I was a Staid,” Fift said, amazed.