Fift was sitting on a couch peacefully talking about aliens with this person . . . this strange, kind staidkid, whose voice stroked its fingers down your spine. Fift was lying in bed, staring at the wall. Fift was following zir Mother into the reactants’ hall, an echoing space filled with dim, soft light from rows upon rows of knee-high fabricators, in tiers sloping upwards, ten thousand Vails and Staids crouching before them.

While Shria was fighting in the streets of Wallacomp.

Shria’s cohort would be broken up. Ve would be sent to the Pole after all . . . just as Fift had feared, on that long-ago day in the forest.

In the reactants’ hall: a susurration of murmurs, an overwhelming arrhythmic pulse of pinging, all around, everywhere. When each reactant’s fabricator was done with its current cycle, it would emit a tiny bright sound, and the reactant would pull something out of it: a shift, a bangle, a doll, a spoon, a smack-club, a singing fruit, an idyll-rattle, a flute, a songstick, a prism, a dove . . .

After each ping, a reactant would lift out whatever their fabricator had made, would taste or cradle or stroke or play or put on or dangle or pet or inspect the fabricated product . . . and then would sit, face slack, eyes closed, yielding up their reaction to the feed.

Then they would dump whatever it was in the compost-sluice, or put it back into the fabricator, or release it to fly into the rafters. And the fabricator would begin the next iteration.

There was no point in viewing Shria! Ze couldn’t help vem. Ze couldn’t rescue vem.

{We’re looking for an industrial reactant?} Fift asked Pip.

Mother Pip cocked an eyebrow, then took Fift by the shoulder, stopping zir. {Am I to take this stunningly clever deduction of the obvious as an expression of dismay? Are you now, at last, considering the social status of our cohort? And if so, do you think you could handle it yourself this time, following my instructions?}

Fift pulled away. {Okay, okay.} ze sent.

“For one thing,” Dobroc said, “I wanted to meet you.” Ze looked at the hem of Fift’s robe. There was room on the couch between them for one body. The labyrinth of Dobroc’s skin drew the eye; patternless, it seemed to hover on the verge of pattern, so that Fift’s eye, seeking pattern, traced zir cheek, jaw, throat.

“Okay,” Fift said, “. . . and the other thing?”

“I wanted to show you something,” Dobroc said. “Something I made.”

Climbing up through the reactants’ hall, Fift and Pip had fifty thousand viewers; that was uncomfortably many, but it made sense, after Hrotrun. They must be convinced that the second confrontation was beginning.

“You have to understand,” Dobroc said, “that some people think you’re part of the show. Of the Cirque’s show, the Unraveling. You, um . . .” Ze met Fift’s eyes. “You’re not working for the Cirque . . . on purpose . . . are you?”

“No!”