Predoria grinned a wide, lecherous grin. Around vem, the industrial reactants—Vails and Staids, all wide-eyed, some trembling, all clutching the luxurious cloth—rose to their feet.

“Trickster’s feet!” Dobroc swore. “Get out of there, Fift. Get out of there now!”

Fift turned from Predoria and snatched Pip’s sleeve. {Mother Pip, we’ve got to go.} ze sent. {It’s going to be another riot . . . or . . .}

{We are going nowhere.} Pip sent, glaring. Ze stood rigid and upright and still in the hall’s center. {Do not imagine that these reprobates frighten me . . .}

Hrotrun tensed to spring, but ve never sprang at the Peaceable. Instead ve screamed—a cry of terror and agony and loss like nothing Fift had ever heard before—and grabbed at vemself, clutching vir arms, vir legs, as if trying to hold vemself together.

The Peaceable was screaming too. Ze balled zir fists at the side of zir head, fell to zir knees, and shook so violently it seemed that ze would fly apart.

They were all screaming. Stogma. Bluey. The willowy Vail in Hrotrun’s cohort with the bone-white skin. The blue-skinned Vail in the frilly, puffy red gown and the leathery brown one dressed only in tool-straps bedecked with trowels and soft-nosed flangiers—their struggle had become a desperate, violent embrace, as if they were trying to burrow into each other’s bodies, like mindless surface animals tearing through the dirt.

Vvonda, curled in on vemself, hands covering vir head, shaking, sobbing.

Shria—

“What’s happening to them?” Fift said in the silence of the noise-canceling couch, smelling spice-sap, fresh-cut wood, acrid muscle-engine sweat, and dust.

—Shria was screaming too, and worse: vir two bodies at the goopfield were locked in combat, one pair of hands around the other’s throat, strangling vemself—

{What’s happening to Shria?} Fift sent zir context advisory agent. {Ve didn’t do anything wrong! Ve was trying to protect the Peaceable, to stop Hrotrun—what are they doing to vem?}

{In the absence of ontology}, zir context advisory agent sent, {normative expectations lose their purchase, and the flow of possible meanings becomes a flood.}

And in the reactants’ hall the fabricators’ doors burst open, spilling clouds of thick red smoke. The reactants stumbled back, coughing. Fift caught a whiff of the smoke and it stung zir throat, and suddenly the place was full of running bodies, Vails and Staids on their feet.

“Fift, you’ve got to go,” Dobroc said.

Predoria leapt from vir bench—ve towered over them. Ve looked back over vir shoulder, grinning at Fift, and then, head down, luxurious fabric clamped to vir mouth, ve charged into the smoke.

It burned, scraping its way into Fift’s throat; zir lungs fought back, coughing—

Ze grabbed Pip’s shoulder.

Flashes of light in the red mist and the outlines of Peaceables entering through the doors, and the reactants diving through windows, pushing past Peaceables, falling before them.