Ellix exhaled through zir teeth. The feed was down, so the Peaceables’ neural states weren’t being published, but Fift thought ze saw a flash of fear in Ellix’s eyes before ze squared zir shoulders and nodded.

Uban and Fasmul started pulling off their Peaceable’s robes.

“Okay,” Fift told Shria. “Yeah. Fuck the Midwives, let’s do this.”

Shria grinned, and leaned in, and kissed Fift again.

The kiss sang through Fift. But the spice-gnats of doubt were still worrying at zir heart. They were hanging their safety on Pom’s story: two innocent children, caught up in the machinations of a terrible world.

But the world would despise them for this kiss, if it knew.

Most of all, it would despise Shria: rioter, peacebreaker, Clownist radical, chaotist, and now despoiler of staidish childhood, trespasser of the still center.

Ze broke away. “Shria . . .” Ze tried to swallow the words, to cling to this impossible moment. Zir heart was thundering; ze might be torn apart.

There was uncertainty in Shria’s face, and bravado, and hope.

Rips in the fabric of the cosmos through which possibilities of terrible transformation could be seen . . .

Uban took Fasmul’s robe, and zir own, and held them out to Fift. “Put these on,” ze said. “And hurry.”

Maybe Pom could swing it. Maybe ze could turn the tide in their favor. But not if the world saw . . . this.

Fift wanted to feel Shria’s lips again, vir warmth, to press zir nose into vir lavender skin and smell vir wild forest smell.

But.

“We can’t,” ze whispered. “We can’t let them see this. If anyone found out . . . they’d use it against us. Against you. There’d be no chance, then. For us, or for . . . your family.”

Shria set vir jaw. Vir eyes flashed. “So we won’t tell anyone.”

Fift’s throat was dry. It felt like zir body had been pumped full of electricity. As if zir skin had been peeled away, and every touch of Shria’s went through zir, into the marrow of zir bones.

Ze tried to imagine their life outside this lab. Stealing glances at each other. Letting their fingertips brush against each other under a table as they were interviewed for some show Pom would get them on, the ponderous Salutations of Second Afternoon, Fullbelly! or the glitzy Manifestation of This Moment. Today we’re talking to the two innocent kids the Midwives have abused. Yes, we’re innocent kids, very innocent; we haven’t done anything wrong. Feeling this wave of fire when their fingers touched.

And every glance and touch captured by the feed, and the rumors spreading, and the pressure never to admit it, never to let it slip.

“I don’t . . .” Fift stammered. “I don’t know if I can . . . hide this.”

Shria’s face darkened: little flashes of uncertainty and hurt and despair quickly suppressed, like a storm cloud swallowing its own lightning.