Our apologies: this survey is designed for career-seekers between 100 and 800 years of age. Please employ a reputable childhood advisory [—SURVEY TERMINATED BY USER—]

Chapter 3

3

“Fift,” Father Frill said, pulling vir battle gloves off, “I think you should consider unraveling.”

Fift was fifteen, and Father Arevio was showing zir how to score the vines in the supper garden, cutting long, shallow gashes along each to let the spice-gnats feed on the sap. Father Frill had just swept in: singlebodied, wearing a crimson leotard, covered in a sheen of sweat, vir coppery hair in disarray. Straight from sparring in the large mat room, in other words.

Father Smistria, following Frill at a leisurely pace—ve was sweaty too, and still wearing battle gloves—stopped to lean against the wall at the entrance of the supper garden. Ve crossed vir arms.

“In ancient times,” Frill said, “you would nearly be considered an adult by now, do you realize that?” Ve dropped vir gloves—Arevio frowned at this—and ran vir fingers through vir hair to untangle it. “We have this idea of First Childhood being some kind of peaceful oasis, but it’s not! It’s a stressful time! It was for me. Of course, it’s simpler for a staidchild, I suppose—but still. You seem glum. It might help if you just, well, lose it entirely. You know . . . collapse.”

Arevio meditatively flipped the short-bladed knife ve was holding, caught it by the hilt, then turned back to scoring the vines.

Glum? Fift thought. Ze seemed glum? Ze felt . . . how did ze feel?

Frozen. A chunk of ice tugged along in a stream. In the wake of Mother Pip.

In another body, ze sat next to Pip, looking through the porthole of a robot bat, wheeling through the space between the habitations. The rotating spoke-wheel of Foo, home to Fift and a million others, fell away behind them.

They were on their way to see a client.

Fift forced zirself not to fidget in zir seat.

Pip should have had a more worthy apprentice than a fifteen-year-old Only Child with no real triumphs to zir name. Fift should have been working for one of the one-stop-shop banker-historian/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​bookie/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​clown/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​logician booths at a walkaround market, or doing menial work of the most peripheral kind at some big institutional-memory conglomerate.

But Pip (who was the third of four siblings) bulldozed through such considerations. Zir clients admired zir habit of flaunting conventions; zir eccentricities worked to zir advantage.

Whether Fift could afford eccentricities . . . that was another question. The wrongness of zir position clung to zir like an itch.

Father Smistria snorted. “Glum? Glum? How should ze seem? Should ze be dancing and singing around the house?”

Frill ignored vem. “I unraveled several times as a young person,” ve said, “and I think it did me a great deal of good.”