Zir agents were entombed in privacy thick as polar snow. The lab where they sat was veiled and secret. And the feed was gone in Foo.

“We have the guidance of consensus,” Uban said.

“‘Guidance of consensus’?” Fasmul said. “Listen to yourself. Is that any different than what they said in Epiul’s time?”

Ellix chewed zir lip. Ze looked over at where Fift was slumped against the wall, one body’s head leaning on the other’s shoulder. Fift was fully awake now, but ze kept zir eyes closed.

“Ellix,” Uban said, “we’re supposed to be bringing the kid in. We don’t have time for a whole Groon-mourned recitation.”

“So what changed?” Fift asked Shria. Ze forced zirself to meet vir eyes.

Shria didn’t look away. “I’ve been stuck in that stoppergoo for a while,” ve said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

Ve moved closer, slowly, cautiously. Fift’s heart was racing. Ze closed zir eyes, and ze could feel Shria’s warmth hovering in the darkness just beyond zir.

Ze was falling down a shaft into a deep gravity well. Zir skin ached.

Could they do this? A cacophony of voices crowded zir mind. Some kind of accusation of . . . inappropriate inclinations. A perverted fantasy of boundless unending intimacy. Our cohort is at risk because of you.

“I was frightened, Fift,” Shria said. “But I’m not frightened now.”

Fift leaned forward through the darkness, crossing the last fingerbreadth to Shria, and into a kiss.

Fift had seen young Vails kissing over the feed. The wild energy, the hungry ferocity of their lips, the clenching fingers, nails scraping over horripilating flesh.

Shria’s lips were terribly soft.

They did the same things ze’d seen Vails do, but slow—slow as a long, chaste, staidish snuggle.

Shria’s lips grazed zirs, floated away, were gone for a time while Fift remained, alone in the darkness of zir closed eyes, feeling the radiant heat of Shria’s skin; then they returned, and—as slowly as the fall of snow in Kumru’s hair recalling the erosion of the mountains of iron, echoing the decay of the small light-footed particles at the universe’s end in Ranim’s eighth ode—Shria kissed Fift again.

Ellix looked pensively at Fift. “Ze’s a stubborn kid,” Ellix said. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s another option.”

A shudder radiated from Fift’s core, an incandescent fire that was neither hot nor cold, or maybe both, like a strange matter reaction transforming the core of a planet until it broke apart, shattered into a wave of dust scouring all its system’s worlds.

Fift pulled away, opened zir eyes.

Shria opened virs.

“Ellix,” Uban said, and sighed. “Look, it’s your call what we do here. But they’re going to come down hard.”