But could ze trust zir? Was it really Fift that Dobroc saw, or an idealized shadow ze could cast as zir clip-opera hero: the staidchild who talked to Thavé, a new Mundarn for an Unraveling age?

{Ask vem}, Pip sent, {if ve is collapsing.}

“Are you . . . collapsing?” Fift asked Predoria.

Predoria closed vir eyes and sniffed the lotion coating the back of vir hand in long, slow snuffles. Ve opened vir eyes. “What if I am?”

“It wasn’t perfect,” Fift said to Dobroc. “Maybe it was all right during the riot, I don’t know . . . but afterwards, when we were waiting for the bat . . . I said something, did something wrong—‘the still center eluded me like the willow wind!’” There was something delicately delightful about using Long Conversational allusions with Dobroc—something Fift couldn’t do with Shria or zir Vail Fathers, obviously, and which Pip scorned, and Grobbard took altogether too seriously. In fact, ze’d never felt this lightness, this naturalness, speaking in the old Staid way before. But Dobroc made zir feel like the Conversation had flowed out beyond its halls and proctors and was dancing in the world. “And now, well, ve sent me—oh, I’ll just forward it to you!”

{If so,} Pip sent, {ve should report to an Idyll, before ve pisses away the final shreds of vir tenuous hold on a social identity.}

“If you are,” Fift said, “why don’t you get to an Idyll . . . before you piss away the final shreds of . . . your social identity?”

“My social identity,” Predoria mused. “My social identity.”

Dobroc, receiving Shria’s letter, closed zir eyes.

{What is up with this Vail?} Fift sent Pip. {Ve doesn’t act like someone with hardly any pride left.}

Pip sent Fift zir lines: {Your position here in the reactants’ hall. Your ability to exchange minimal politenesses with strangers. Your ability to travel around Fullbelly.} Pip’s face was impassive; ze was looking up at the long hallway, up the rows of reactants, through the echoing, pinging space, as if ze were a reactant zirself . . . an architectural or social reactant, perhaps, letting zir feelings about the room seep into the feed.

Dobroc’s hand found zirs again. Its grooves and whorls pressed against zir skin; it rested quiet and unmoving, neither heavy nor light. Ze opened zir eyes. “I see,” ze said.

Predoria’s eyes bored into Fift’s: those pale orange irises in those white globes. Ve didn’t look like someone on vir last dregs of self-confidence. Ve looked, rather, like ve had boundless reserves. For a moment, Fift wondered if this was a setup, something by the Cirque, part of the show.