{Father Miskisk!} Fift sent. {I’ll do my best, Father Miskisk!}

All it was was sitting still and waiting to be passed a spoon, and saying “the spoon is in my hand,” and passing it on at the right moment. Saying the names of the twelve cycles, the twenty modes, and the eight corpuses of the Long Conversation. Sitting still in white shifts on a wood floor, zir heads shaved and oiled. Zir Vail parents waiting in the gallery outside. Ze’d do it well, and everyone would be proud, and there would be umbcake and sweetlace afterwards. And Father Miskisk would smile.

Chapter 2

2

“So you’re latterborn again,” Umlish said. Ze smirked. “I guess we should congratulate you.”

Umlish was talking to Shria, a skinny nine-year-old Vail who had joined their class a year ago.

Fift was a little way down the trail from them in the woods, beyond the clearing where they stood. Ze could hear them with zir ears, and see them through the branches and bracken, though the view was clearer over the feed. Fift was nine, too. At ten, Umlish was one of the older kids on this excursion to the surface.

Shria’s hand paused a fingerlength from a tangle of silver-barked sticks, some of them furry with greenish lichen. Ve didn’t look up. Vir eyes were red from crying already.

Shria: lavender skin and fiery red hair, orange eyebrows that curled like flames. Bony bare knees and elbows poked between the red and blue strips of cloth of vir suit. Vir clothes were a bit too big and too skimpy for the surface, as if whoever had cooked them up had been distracted. It was misting up here—tiny droplets of water sparkling in the air, the strange wild atmosphere hesitating between fog and rain. Shria crouched down, doublebodied, one body’s arms already loaded up with sticks, the other gathering.

Umlish didn’t look cold. And ze wasn’t carrying any wood. Ze stood, singlebodied, half a bodylength from Shria, zir hands lost in the folds of zir white robes. Hair, eyes, skin the same sheer gray—zir parents had probably decided to match them like that. It was show-offy, in a staidish way. Kimi and Puson, two other Staids, stood behind Umlish, both doublebodied. Puson was also nine. Kimi, who was only eight, was carrying all the sticks. They were watching Umlish, doing their best to look calm and expressionless, but they couldn’t help looking excited by what Umlish was talking about.

Because Umlish was talking about what happened to Shria’s sibling.

Shria’s hand moved again, picking up the next stick.

“That’s not going to burn,” Puson said. “Lichen means it’s too wet. Especially in this weather.”

Umlish smiled primly. “You do have an environmental context agent, don’t you?”

Fift’s own arms were full of sticks, some of which had lichen on them, or small fungi.