“If it were up to me,” Ellix said, “you’d go to the Pole. But Fasmul here thinks it’s a bad idea. Ze thinks you have a shot at a different option.”

“What option is that?” Fift asked Ellix, weakly.

“Consensus is unsteady at the moment,” Ellix said, a little reluctantly. “There’s a chance that it’ll shift in your favor if you stay at large for a little while. With the feed down . . . there are places you could go to delay things. To stay on the run. A dangerous game.”

“Pom wants to show you off at this party,” Shria said. “Ze’s invited some senior Midwives, Rysthia and Elo. I don’t understand all the factions among the Midwives, but I guess these ones are considering whether to oppose the crackdown, and Pom wants them to use . . . us.”

“Us?” Fift said.

Shria flung a hand up theatrically. “A tale of two innocent children,” ve said, mimicking the Cirque’s grandiose announcement of the Unraveling, “caught up in the machinations of Clowns and feedgardeners and vailarch revanchists . . . their cohorts, their futures, unjustly, brutally destroyed by the mainstream Midwives’ reactionary rigidity!” Ve let vir hand drop. “Us.”

Fift’s banker-historian agents were asleep, but even without them, ze could imagine the shape of it: the bent bow of their fame released, a swing from disgust to sympathy, the nonlinear whip-snap of a cascading ratings rebound, a seismic collapse of consensus, instabilities to exploit . . .

“Do you think it’ll work?” Fift said.

Shria shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t know if Pom and these other Midwives really understand what’s going on in Wallacomp . . . It’s not just riots now. It’s not just Panaximandra’s goons fighting Clown sympathizers. It’s like a festival . . . there are all these team-tags with a flood of new ideas, and people have taken over the byways . . . not to riot, but just to sing in unison, to make speeches, to blank out ratings and lookup and social nuance agents and just meet each other, eye to eye, mind to mind, unmediated. It’s out of the Midwives’ control. It’s anger, but it’s also joy . . .”

“Some of them are quoting us,” Fift said.

Shria grinned crookedly. “A lot of them are quoting us. Your friend’s clip-op made us into a whole thing. Anyway, my point is, I don’t know if Pom and Rysthia and Elo can put the frustrated trashrat back in the box. They want to use us to their advantage, but this may be bigger than them.” Ve cracked vir knuckles nervously again.

Fift took Shria’s hand again.

“Fift?” Ellix asked. “Do you understand what you’re choosing? We’re out of time.”

“I don’t want to go to the Pole,” Fift said, a little shakily.