Pip turned for a moment to look at zir. There was a flicker of irritation in Pip’s expression, which was almost a relief. But immediately a cold and empty hopelessness swallowed it up, and Pip turned back to the window without reply.

In Tentative Scoop, the orange surface of the stoppergoo roiled like an uncalm sea, and Vail heads—one, two, three; there was Stogma—emerged, gasping.

“I’ve got to go to vem!” Fift said.

“Go to vem where?” Dobroc raised zir hands from zir lap, half-reached towards Fift. “In Tentative Scoop? They’ll never let you near vem. More riots are breaking out in Wallacomp, and cordons of Peaceables are converging . . .”

Fift felt it on zir skin, in zir throats, a tightness, as if it were zir entombed in stoppergoo. “Dobroc, I have to do something. I can’t just . . .”

Ze heard zir voice trail into silence, into the silenced roar from beyond the couch.

In bed, at home, zir head throbbed, an ache like someone was squeezing it.

The skywhale was jammed with people—crowding the harnesses, pressed against the walls, sitting in their own laps. Many of them, like Pip, were vacant, feed-bound; others huddled in silent, private conversation, occasionally breaking into a harsh laugh or a hissed whisper. Most of them had lookup locked down to the barest minimum of public information. Fift saw an old Staid four seats over stiffen as zir lookup shifted from “proto-cohort of five” to “no cohort.” Ze sat, rigid, staring at zir hands.

The textile of the world was fraying apart between their fingers. In Tearless, people driven to collapse were commandeering entire habitations by force. Adjudications were failing en masse, adjudicators and reactants sucked in as disputants themselves in snowballing mega-disputes. Below the porthole, a byway teemed with desperate new orphans.

There were still twenty thousand viewers watching Fift in the skywhale.

{Please, Shria, send something. Are you . . . are you all right?}

Nothing.

“I’ll go to vem at work—that’s where vir third body must be. I’ve just got to talk to vem, I’ve got to know ve’s—”

“Fift, I—” Dobroc frowned. “Listen, that clip-opera I showed you? It’s been up for five thousand heartbeats now, and it’s received . . . quite a bit of viewership. And after this last encounter of yours with Predoria . . . well, Cirque-watchers are even more confident that you’re a thematic nexus.”

“Dobroc, I don’t care about any of that now!”

“What I’m trying to say is . . . there’s going to be a storm of audience out there, Fift.” Ze swallowed, looked down. Ze ran zir fingertips over the back of zir other hand, tracing the labyrinthine hills and ridges. “Look—do you—do you want me to come with you?”