“That they’re editing the feed!” Frill said. “There are more casualties than we know about—”

“Oh, now who’s spouting crankish conspiracy propaganda? Grobby, could you please tell this overexcitable figment-chaser that no one can edit the feed?”

“I am afraid,” Grobbard said, “that Frill may not be entirely wrong. There are signs of a Far Technological war taking place among agents and feedgardeners. At the very least, it is certainly the case that they know who has seen what, and that many attention agents are suborned to the tasks of distraction and reframing.”

Fift’s throats tightened as if ze was breathing clotted air.

Smistria threw up vir hands in disgust.

Miolasia leaned forward, fishing a glittering mirror out of vir fur and tucking it behind vir ear. “It is a priority of ours to contain panic, and to soothe the world’s more excitable elements. And your child has unfortunately become, as I said . . . a kind of symbol.”

The house feed said that the bedroom was warm, but Fift felt cold. Ze heaved zirself off the bed, to zir feet, gathering zir robes.

“People are confused and unsettled,” Umlum said. “They project themselves into these children’s story. Fift’s innocent, childish questions inspire them. And some of these so-called ‘clip-operas’ are very cunningly crafted. They subtly offer the titillating suggestion of an inappropriate relationship, but with such simplicity that it seems somehow pure and hopeful.”

Fift flushed. An inappropriate relationship? Had they just said that? Zir skin crawled. It was one thing to be censured for zir stubborn loyalty to a peacebreaker, a criminal, a Vail who fought in off-mats riots. But it would be far worse if they thought that . . . if they knew that ze was a deviant, gendering wrong, lost and wild, swollen with fervid, unstaidish desires . . .

There’s no way they can know what happened at the lab, Fift told zirself. A brief memory flashed across Fift’s mind—a hand nestled among writhing blue cilia—but ze suppressed it brutally. It hurt to remember. They don’t know anything.

But even with no other evidence, the clip-op was bad enough: Fift’s forehead pressing into the crook of Shria’s neck as ve sobbed on the byway. Fift coming forward, through all the tumult and confusion of this unraveling world, to take Shria’s hand. Dobroc had shaped the images so that every viewer yearned for those hands to touch.

Ze wanted to bury zirself in some maintenance tunnel with no feed access.

Pip frowned. “But . . . most Revered Eminences . . . Fift is an innocent child . . .”

“Exactly,” Miolasia said. “An innocent. A Staid, in First Childhood, from a respectable, if vulnerable, cohort . . .”

They’d be taking Fift away, that much was clear. They were taking zir, and there was nothing zir parents could do about it.