They were watching out for Vails. For velvety cloth. Not a plump little staidchild in a plain white shift.

Fift went into the great dim tunnel past the surging, humming tubes of liquid.

Ze walked past abstract displays commemorating Our Mothers Who Dug Fullbelly, striated planes of gray hanging in midair, and faintly glowing mold-graffiti on the walls (“Your crimes are invisible,” “stanza 1345 4th subsec 2nd resp 8th corp” “Our Fathers Who Mugged Dullbilly,” “For A Good Time Call Kumru”). Ze walked among puddles of condensation and the scurrying trashrats who stopped to sip from them. The light was a dim amber. An intermittent breeze from the ventilating wall-lungs swept across zir, tugging zir robes first this way, then that.

Ze wouldn’t look at Shria over the feed. Ze didn’t want to see it. Not this. Not again.

Ze wouldn’t send to vem. Ve’d told zir not to bother vem. Ze’d obey Father Squell.

Ze didn’t look, but ze felt vem anyway, in memory. Vir silken lavender skin; vir rich mellow smell; the pressure of vir forehead on zir shoulder; vir body in flight, slamming into the red nobody.

The sound of the laboring muscle-engines grew from whispered to insistent to overwhelming to painful. Then, finally, there was the couch.

Dobroc stood up.

Fift looked down. Ze couldn’t look at zir. This was a mistake. But the hurricane of sound, loud enough to rattle zir teeth, pushed zir forward.

As Fift approached the couch, the monstrous sound around zir flooded into white noise, then sighed away to nothing, leaving zir ears ringing in a gentle silence.

Ze sat down.

Dobroc sat down on the other end of the couch. There would have been room for a body or two to sit between them, though they’d only brought one body each. They didn’t bow, or cup ears, or exchange any formal greetings. Fift couldn’t raise zir eyes to Dobroc’s. Ze looked at the hem of Dobroc’s shift instead.

The couch smelled of chalky industrial dust, and beneath that, the slightly acrid, almost-human smell of Foo’s great muscle-engines.

Ze couldn’t see Dobroc over the feed; they were out of the range of any pickup. Ze checked recent footage instead, zoomed in on Dobroc strolling the interdecks with a look of concentration, smiling mildly at the edge of a group of older Staids. Under zir thick, unruly shock of black hair, zir beige skin had been worked into an intricate topography of folds, ridges, grottoes, channels, swirls, cracks, and labyrinthine wrinkles.

It was an original and adept piece of somatic engineering. Fift had never seen anything like it before. It was dramatic, but also delicate: it made Dobroc seem like a maze to be entered, to lose yourself in. Fift couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to touch that skin.