It was Episti’s turn, but ze was frozen watching the Peaceable who’d lost control, like a lapine caught without cover.

Esro. What had Oplops said of Esro? “‘The concavity of the stone,’” Fift said, zir voice rough and strained, “‘encloses and does not define.’”

The Peaceable looked down at Morinti.

Thirteen billion viewers saw zir drop zir bopperstaff. It fell to the floor beside Morinti’s unconscious body.

“Fift!” Dobroc shouted, somewhere in Temereen, among the marchers.

“Kumru,” Ellix said. “This is bad.”

Fift took the spoon. It was cool and slick in zir hand. The dock smelled of the yeasty enzymatic engines of bats, and the ozone sting of bopperstaves, and the sweat of fear and hope. There was a light breeze, the far-off yelling of the crowd, the hum of whales, and a distant noise that might be the march in Temereen. Emim’s mouth was opening to speak. Fift felt zir heart pounding, and the sweat on zir neck, and the fabric of zir shift sticking to zir knees and thighs and shoulders, and the subtle pull of Foo’s rotation in zir inner ear, and the solidity of zir muscles and bones and tendons and flesh, and the soft prickle of zir skin, and the gentle feathery peristalsis of zir intestines, and the electric thunder of zir brain.

And then all that was ripped away.

Chapter 20

20

Fift screamed.

Double-throated, the air wrenched from two sets of lungs, ringing through what had been Iraxis apartment.

Throat one, throat two:

and nothing. No third throat.

The Midwives had cut the dockyards’ polysomatic network. In the apartment, doublebodied, Fift couldn’t feel zir body at the docks. Ze’d been torn asunder.

One hand clawing at zir scalp. A second hand caught in zir robes. A third and fourth hand braced on the anteroom floor . . .

Zir mind scrabbled vainly for zir other two hands, searching for missing fingers, trying to bend missing knuckles, to stretch missing palms, to thrust missing fingertips into anything at all. Panic ballooned in zir throats.

Where was ze? Where was zir body?

The absence, the missing third body, was nothing like the heavy, murky solidity of a body in sleep. It was a brute subtraction of the world: a knife, an unbeing, a bloody arterial spurting stump of self . . .

Ellix was trying to hold one of Fift’s bodies, which was bucking, writhing, kicking. Ellix’s heavy body bore zir to the ground, trapping zir limbs.

In zir other body, only other body, only void-spurned sisterless other body, ze leapt on Ellix’s back, fingers digging into zir robes, driven by a hysterical urgency: ze needed to dig through Ellix’s body, like a lapine burrows through dirt, to get to zirself—

Squell hauled zir off Ellix and threw zir on zir back. “Fift!” ve shouted. “Listen to me!”