Ze was still screaming. But the sound, the tearing in the throat, the blood engorging the face—they seemed to have nothing to do with Fift at all. They seemed to belong to the apartment, simply furniture.

Squell’s inward, suffering look was gone. Vir eyes were clear. The silver spikes in vir scalp gleamed as ve pinned Fift. “Fift, what’s happening to you now, I’ve been through it! I’ve endured body separation! When you’re working in the asteroids, all it takes is a solar flare at perihelion, or a router getting destroyed in a collision, and you get ripped apart . . .” Tears sprung to vir eyes.

The feed—the feed was a muddle. Fift’s feed-navigation agent was gone—had resigned—had abandoned zir. Zir mind tore an erratic path through a cloud of images. Dobroc chanting, orange stoppergoo, a confused angle of stomping feet, skywhales serene in flight—but where were the docks, where was zir body?

“Listen to me, Fift!” Squell’s voice was soft but clear beneath the sound of screaming. “You can master this. Take the terror, take the absence, and use it to fill the gap. Make a body out of that, just for now. Fift, listen. Listen! The pain is good—”

Ze had to find zir body. Ze blundered through the feed, trying to find the docks manually, agentless. The docks . . . no, not the Temereen docks, not the central Foo docks, no, no, for Kumru’s sake, please, where . . .

The pain was like fire—like a frenzied skywhale crashing into a habitation, splintering spires, crushing bone and gristle, Fift’s joints ripped apart, flesh torn—

Squell shook zir. “The pain shows you where the rest of you is. Your other body, it’s still there. It’s not dead, it’s not hurt, you have minutes and minutes before the separation becomes permanent. You want to know where it is? You want to find it?”

To find it, to find it, where—

“It’s right where the pain is. Fift, you know how you push your bodies away from each other sometimes, you damp the connection? I know you still do that! This is the same. You’re still there on the other side of the wall of pain!”

The body was where the pain was. As if ze’d turned away from zirself, dimmed the connection, gotten lost behind the wall of pain. Make a body out of that. Ze tried reaching out, but the panic was a tsunami, ze was abandoned, shattered . . .

“Bring zir back,” Ellix muttered, zir chin pressed into Fift’s shoulder, zir limbs locked around Fift’s, keeping zir down. “Kumru forsake you all, bring zir back . . .”

Then the gut-wrenching slam of self into self:

They’d turned the network back on.

Hands! The feeling of them, bruised and grasping, knuckles scraping the dockyard floor, fingertips clawing cloth. Six hands—