Anyone could go to the fulcrum, though hardly anyone did. Fift shuddered, remembering one class trip to the heart of Foo. At the fulcrum, the grinding and straining and crackling of the muscle-engines turning their habitation around its axis was so loud, even the pickups couldn’t hear anything. Fift’s ears, zir whole body, had been saturated with the bone-crushing sound. It had been agony until the class finally reached a noise-canceling couch, placed there to give a little respite to those on some industrial errand . . .

“—then things will be fine again!” Squell said, with a forced brightness. “And I do so want things to be fine again for you, cubblehedge.” Ve tentatively reached out and took Fift’s shoulder.

(Hrotrun’s fingers on the scarf at vir throat, stroking it, as if it were something soft, luxurious, sensual. As if . . . as if it were velvet . . . )

A noise-canceling couch.

Like the one where Abador gave Minth the Singing Fruit . . .

Fift turned abruptly and headed for the edge of Foo. There was a stairway there that clung to the outside of the habitation and led to a tunnel into the fulcrum.

The fulcrum: where you were practically invisible, and where it was so loud that, if you were sitting on a noise-canceling couch in the middle of the maelstrom of sound, you could talk and no one could hear you . . .

“So,” Squell said, “can you do that for me, my child?”

Not send to Shria? At all? There was no way ze could agree to that. Except, of course, that that’s just what Shria had asked for. “Let me think about it,” Fift said, without looking up at zir Father. Ze lay down and closed zir eyes, as if tired.

(Hrotrun took vir hand from vir scarf. Ve walked across the broken landscape of the abandonage, right up to Shria. Stogma and Bluey tensed, but Vvonda made a show of standing loose, and Shria just raised one of vir fiery red eyebrows, grinned vir lavender grin.

(Hrotrun placed one finger on Shria’s clavicle, traced sensually along its length. “You want an answer to your formal challenge, do you, youngling?” ve said.

(Shria’s nostrils flared. In anticipation? In anger?)

“All right, cubblehedge,” Squell said. Ve got up from the bed. “Rest a little. We’ll talk again soon.”

(Hrotrun punched Shria in the stomach.)

Chapter 15

15

It wasn’t the same as the riot.

It wasn’t hundreds. It wasn’t faceless red and blue anonybodies. There wasn’t that terrible roar, soaking into Fift, surrounding zir, dissolving zir like a soupcube in soup. It was just sixteen bodies: Shria’s friends, Hrotrun’s cohort . . .

Over the feed, the shoving and kicking, the tackles and grappling and gut-punches, seemed flat, bleached of emotion, unreal. Almost comical.

But it wasn’t funny.