{Mother Pip, please.} Fift sent. {You know my Fathers aren’t going to let me out for weeks once I go home. What if ve’s not well enough to send? I just want vem to know . . .}

“Without a sibling,” Squell wailed, “how was ze to develop those capacities? It was our duty, our duty, and we failed—”

{Shria,} ze sent, {just answer me, please, Shria . . .}

Pip did not answer. Ze turned zir whole body to Fift, and zir gaze was like a furnace. There was no room in Pip’s implacable glare for compromise. Only to submit, to be supplanted once more, to be squeezed again into the place Pip had made for zir in Pip’s ordering of the world.

Ze tried to move toward the breakfast room to sit down, to drink something, but zir Fathers blocked the way. Squell was wailing, and Arevio bustled in, glaring at Frill, to embrace Squell; and Frill drew vemself up in anger, shrugging away from Smistria; and it was too much, too many of them, crowding the hallway, full of their demands and noises and heat—too much, too many, no room for Fift—

“No,” ze said.

Ze’d said it aloud, on the skywhale. Into the furnace of Pip’s glare.

“No, I’m not going right home,” ze said aloud. “I’m going . . . I’m going to see vem first. To make sure ve’s okay. And then I’ll come home. That’s perfectly reasonable.” Zir voice quavered a little, and ze hated it. “Ve’s my friend.”

Squell’s wail intensified; ze shuddered and twitched in Arevio’s arms.

“Fift,” Pip said, also aloud. “Have the events of the past days unraveled your mind sufficiently that you now find Hrotrun and Predoria to be compelling role models? You are sixteen years old and thoroughly undistinguished. Ignore for the moment what will happen to your parents; what do you think will happen to you, if you break with us?”

Fift’s hearts squeezed in zir chests. “What are you talking about? I’m—I’m not—leaving the family, I’m just saying, I won’t come home right now.” Ze swallowed. “I’m . . . busy.”

“Fift!” Frill said, pushing past Arevio. “Stop this nonsense now!”

“Essentially,” Pip said, “you are declaring your majority.” The heat of zir glare was dimming, drawing away from Fift. “If you will not submit to parental authority in a moment like this, then it seems your childhoods are finished. Our cohort will not survive it.”

“What in sweet Kumru’s—” Smistria spluttered.

Descending the stairway, Fift glanced down towards the docks; one of the Peaceables was turning to look up at zir.

The furnace was gone; Pip’s glare was ice now, the silent, massive glaciers of the Pole. “It’s not how I would have chosen to begin my adulthood. Sixteen years old, suffering a public disgrace, with the world turned against you. But we each journey alone.”