“Oh voids!” Squell wailed. “No, no . . .”

“What in Kumru’s name,” barked Smistria, “is Pip doing?”

“I can’t endure this,” Squell sobbed. “I can’t! I need to unravel, I need to go, I’m collapsing, I’m collapsing . . .”

Pip’s mouth set into a line. Ze closed zir eyes and rubbed the bridge of zir nose with one hand. Then ze opened zir eyes and faced forward, as if ze were another passenger on the skywhale. As if, Fift’s childhoods being over, they were perfect strangers.

Fift’s throat closed, constricted, dry.

“Squell, stop it,” Frill said. “You can’t collapse now, there’s no room in the Idylls . . .”

“You’re bluffing,” Fift said to Pip. “Ze’s bluffing,” ze said to zir Fathers. “You’d never let zir do that—kick me out of the family . . .”

On the stairs to the docks ze hesitated, looking up at the vault of the roof of Fullbelly, down at shadowed Boorwine.

Mother Pip, facing forward, glacier-cold. One of zir eyebrows twitched.

“Fift,” Frill said, “you just stay where you are on that stairway. Don’t go anywhere, I’m coming to get you!”

“Of course no one is kicking you out of the family, Fift,” Arevio said, “but you have to get yourself under control.”

“Either you are engaged in childing,” Pip said, aloud, in the skywhale, zir nostrils flaring slightly, “or you are not. That is the fact of the matter. That we have pledged to protect one who refuses to accept and acknowledge this protection, who flouts it to plunge zirself into . . . other pursuits . . . This is an untenable situation, Fift.”

“And you think my Fathers—”

“Your Fathers may express any number of emotions about it; they may beg and plead with you to come home and rejoice when you humor them with occasional compliance; they may get the Peaceables to drag you home physically; they may undertake various schemes to make it look as if we are a family and shore up our ratings. But the choice lies with you, Fift. Either you choose your home, your cohort, your responsibilities . . . or you cast them aside.”

“That’s—” Fift was aware of the whole skywhale watching, not to mention a wave of new viewers: three hundred thousand in the skywhale, two hundred thousand on the stairway at the edge of Foo. “You’re—you’re creating a series of false dichotomies!” Like the muddled adjudicator in the shell in Marim’s pocket, but ze couldn’t say that. “This is your idea of parenting? You . . . you either have total control, or . . . or you abandon me?”

Father Frill reached out as if ve was going to grab Fift, then paused, vir hand hovering, and placed it slowly, gently, on zir shoulder. Fift flinched anyway. “You have to stop this,” Frill said.