“Ze’s the child of your sibling-cohort,” Fasmul said. “Or ze was. Final stanza, here: you really think ze’s going to be better off at the Pole? With the Midwives we have today?”

Ellix chewed the inside of zir cheek. Ze turned to Uban. “And you’ll back us up?”

Uban threw up zir hands. “After what we’ve been through, you have to ask? ‘Though there is neither air nor light in the spaces between, I am heartbound to follow . . .’”

“All right,” Ellix said. Ze sighed. “It’s wild foolishness, but I suppose wild foolishness is the best we’ve got at this point. Let’s ask Fift. It’s really zir call.”

Half-expressions moved across Shria’s face like glimpses of aquatic creatures in the deep: suggestions of excitement, joy, longing, trepidation, worry, defensiveness, each melting away before it was fully formed.

Ellix came over to Fift and put a hand on zir shoulder. “Fift, wake up,” ze said, and Fift opened zir eyes.

In Shria’s eyes, Fift could see the world transformed—as when strange matter reactions create brief rips in the fabric of the cosmos through which entire other orders, subject to different laws, can be glimpsed.

Fift wanted to kiss vem again. But doubts began to swarm, crowding around Fift’s heart like spice-gnats sucking at a vine. How would they live in the world outside this room? Would Fift live like a wild rebel Vail, having sex and fighting in the streets? Or were they going to pretend, absurdly, to be a hundred years older than they were, two babies in First Childhood mawkishly dressed up in imitation of a respectable proto-cohort dyad? Fift tried to imagine some way for them to be—strolling the byways hand in hand, laughing over mangareme fluffies, fucking—and zir mind boggled. Ze had no model for such a relationship.

Shria watched zir face, cocking vir head to one side. “Fift?”

Fift let go of Shria’s hands.

“Listen, child,” Ellix said, squatting down next to zir. “You have a decision to make. We can take you to the Pole—all your bodies—and you can live with the Midwives. They’ve said they’ll adopt you, and they will. You’ll become one of them. It’ll be . . . a bumpy sluice. You’re starting the training late; they’ll separate you from the world for at least a century, and they may never trust you in the field. But it’ll be safe.”

Fift thought of how the Midwives had cut zir bodies apart, and a spike of fear shot through zir. The Midwives knew where ze was. They must be closing in. There was no place to hide from them. “Shria, I don’t know if I can go through that”–zir voice caught in zir throat, tightening like a knot–“again. Being ripped apart, like on the docks. Do we have a plan?”

Shria bit vir lip. “Pom does.”