{Just let me send.} Fift sent zir agents. Ze rolled onto zir hands and knees, the soaking shift clinging to zir skin. Ze pushed zirself up. {Let me send to vem. If you want to protect me, if you want to protect Iraxis cohort, if you want me to cave in and do what they say . . . just let me send first, let me tell vem why!}

Miolasia stood, almost leaping up from the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes and brushing off vir hands as if something disgusting was stuck to them. Umlum rose more slowly.

“Please, Revered Expressive,” Arevio said. Arevio, Nupolo, Frill, and Smistria were on their feet.

“Fift, you’re sixteen,” Frill said, in the breakfast room. “You don’t understand! We can’t ignore reality! We live in the world, not in some void-spurned hidden island on a surface sea! We depend on interconnections, relationships, with everyone in the world!

Squell swayed on vir feet, eyes closed.

“Listen, Fift,” Frill said desperately. “Maybe a cohort should be able to supplant the whole world! But you can’t just pretend the world is not as it is!”

“You ungrateful, muddled child!” Smistria said. “This is dissolution!”

Still seated at the meeting room table, Pip laced zir fingers together and turned to Fift. “Are you certain of this decision, Fift?” ze asked mildly. “To throw away this cohort, which has raised you with love, to lose us, to have us lose each other . . . for this gesture? To impress a vailchild who you may never see again? Who perhaps has fond memories of you as a child . . . but with whom, in fact, you have little in common?”

Across the table, Squell was rigid, glassy-eyed. In the breakfast room, ve made a high, hard, strangled sound and began to shake. The cobalt blue spikes set into vir pink scalp quivered.

“It’s the end,” Frill said, “we’re going to lose everything—everything! Don’t you understand?”

The gazebo’s outer membrane was filmy, translucent, slick with condensation. Fift could see the murky outlines of passersby outside. Ze stepped forward, put zir hand on the wall, felt the gaps puckering beneath zir fingers, the steam racing through.

In the meeting room, Fift stood. “Revered Eminences,” ze said, “this isn’t my parents’ fault. There’s no reason to dissolve their cohort. I—”

Miolasia smirked.

“Kumru’s frostbitten cock!” Frill shouted in the breakfast room. Squell, still making that rough, strangled sound, whirled on vem.

“I declare my majority,” Fift said. “I rejected my parents’ counsel—”

“Oh no, you certainly do not!” Arevio cried.

Squell’s hand moved fast, fingers tense and curled to a point, whipping loose-armed to strike at Frill’s temple: a blow that would have knocked vem to the ground, except that Grobbard, who had come slowly around the table, was there, zir hand closing gently over Squell’s at the top of its arc.