It would be cold at the Pole. Cold and silent. Fift would be alone, forgotten, vanished. And zir parents would be here, in this apartment, empty of Fift. If they were lucky.

“I . . . I don’t understand, Revered Expressive,” Nupolo said.

The bedroom, with its soft bed, its scarred wall, its silence, was unbearable. Fift went out into the hall.

“An innocent staidchild,” Umlum said, “is precisely what these rogue Clownist elements need.”

“It’s easy to expose the fanaticism of off-mats rioters,” Miolasia said. “People recognize the ideology of someone like Panaximandra for what it is: a perverted fantasy of license, violence, individualism, and boundless unending intimacy that can only lead the world to destruction.”

In the breakfast room, Squell moaned.

“And we have an understanding with the mainstream of the Clownist movement,” Miolasia said, “that they will not cross certain lines.”

Fift passed the breakfast room. Ze heard zir feet scuffing along the floor outside.

“But these rogue elements, these loose emergent groupings,” Umlum said, shaking zir head sorrowfully. “They speak a new language. Their talk of liberation and equity and solidarity is very attractive, very intoxicating. It is easy to misunderstand, to imagine that these are not just the same old fanatic warrior dreams in clownface.”

Down two flights of stairs, through the hallway with the sleeping alcoves, past a sleeping body of Arevio’s.

“And so, for a young Staid to become a figurehead for these people,” Miolasia said, “to willingly ally zirself with the chaos, to appear to see in it not subjugation and destruction, but liberation . . .”

“Father Grobbard,” Fift said, in the breakfast room, “Father Frill, Father Smistria, Father Nupolo . . . I don’t know what they’re talking about. I didn’t willingly ally myself with anything!”

“Of course you didn’t,” Father Frill said. “It’s nonsense. They’re trying to scare us, that’s all . . .” Ve swallowed.

“I assure you,” Father Nupolo said, “Fift has no intention—we have no desire at all to—”

“Anything we can do to cooperate,” Father Frill said, bells tinkling. “We’re more than willing—”

“I want Miskisk,” Squell whispered hoarsely in the breakfast room. “I want Misky back! Why did ve go away?”

Cold. It would be cold at the Pole. Fift shivered, and pushed into the bathing room through a curtain of stiff grass.

After the rough, warm grass of the hallway, the tiles of the bathing room were a cold emptiness under Fift’s bare feet. Ze ordered steam.

“Of course you are,” Miolasia said. “We expected no less. So it’s really quite simple. For your own safety, and that of the world, we need you to come to the Pole.”

Even Mother Pip looked flummoxed. “To the—to the Pole?”

“All of us?” Arevio said.

Fift sat at the pool’s edge. Gray and blue tiles and slick white pillow-surfaces, large enough to encompass twenty or twenty-five splashing bodies. The last time Fift saw it crowded, ze’d been six.