Had Dobroc created this look zirself? Such a dramatic design would seem to imply a certain self-confidence and poise, particularly in someone so young. Unless zir parents had chosen it for zir.

Dobroc sat just as silent and reticent as Fift on zir end of the couch.

At the top of the sluice to Undersnort, Fift shuffled along behind Pip in the midst of a hodgepodge crowd. Who was the second attacker? Would Pip tell zir if ze asked now?

Mother Pip hadn’t said anything about Shria; ze just stared out into the middle distance, probably working on the accounts of some client. As if Fift’s . . . best friend wasn’t ruining vir life in the goopfields of Tentative Scoop. As if nothing was real, and nothing mattered. This plodding through stairs, byways, sluices—it was like Holy Kumru’s endless time-loop ordeal in the snow, “until all meaning was lost, until atonement blurred away the long-forgotten thing atoned for . . .”

In zir room, Fift sat alone, looking at the tiny scar on the wall where the house had grown too fast, stretched too hard. Ze should probably do some homework, if ze could concentrate. Ze’d abandoned the Ranhulo, but other assignments kept flowing in from zir scholastic agents. Ze’d done the assigned review of instant-fame comportment, and it was all very sensible advice. Ze hoped there wouldn’t be points for practical application, though, since meeting an instant-fan—if that’s what Dobroc was—with very tenuous prior connections to zir, alone, in a concealed area, was definitely against the rules.

Dobroc cleared zir throat. “Thank you for seeing me,” ze said. Zir voice was gentle and clear with a hint of roughness, like fingers stroking warm sand. That voice must be part of why ze was ranked; you could fall into it, and be carried off, to the Ages before the Ages.

“Oh,” Fift said. “Well, of course.” Ze looked at zir hands, fingers grasping knuckles.

What do you want? ze thought, but didn’t, of course, say. The silence of the couch was immense; zir heart throbbed just beneath zir hearing. What had Fift been thinking, coming here? Was ze that lonely? Was it Dobroc’s words of support, the lure of someone admiring zir? Maybe Dobroc was just being polite.

Ze wanted to check on Shria, but if they were still fighting, ze didn’t want to see it. Or maybe the Peaceables had arrived to break up the riot? Maybe not: in the world-of-ideas, people were saying that the Peaceables had been overstretched since the Unraveling began, with all the cohorts failing or being forcibly disbanded, all the newly incoherent to herd to Idylls. So maybe the Peaceables wouldn’t have arrived yet. Maybe that was even worse.

Did Dobroc know about Shria?