Chalia met zir in the vestibule. “Fift!” ve cried, delighted. Ve came running out of the inner apartment, doublebodied. Ve flung vir arms around zir, and vir arms around zir. Then, a little embarrassed, ve pulled zir away from the semipublic vestibule and into the house’s privacy. Not that ze had much audience, anyway—a few hundred, trailing along on a nostalgic whim, perhaps, once their agents had figured out that ze was heading to Foo.

“Hello, Little Sibling,” Fift said.

“But not Littlest!” Chalia said it brightly, but there was still some unease under that smooth surface. The transition from latterborn to middleborn couldn’t be easy, though Fift didn’t have much frame of reference. Zir own transition from sisterless to elderborn that day in Izist had been atypical to say the least. Chalia was living the classical version, the original Supplanting on which all transactions are based. And now, Lumlu would have three bodies to demand attention with.

“What,” Chalia said, “are you wearing?”

“The latest trend,” Fift said, smirking. Ze hadn’t even realized what a figure ze must present out here in this dark green and bright yellow. Not the white shift of a proper Staid, nor even the wheat or tan or black that the moderately daring had begun to wear.

Chalia burst out laughing. It was a good joke, too, Fift thought happily. It was absurd on many levels—imagining Chalia’s strange Staid sibling as a sartorial pioneer was funny, and the idea of little Windswept Sheltering having its own miniature trends and fashions was ridiculous, too—yet it had a grain of truth: since the habitation had built those trellises and planted vines on them, ze’d begun to see their colors worn around the plaza and the waysweep.

“You look completely weird,” Chalia said. “I love it.”

“How are the ’rents dealing?” Ze asked. Where were they, anyway? Probably they were watching over the house feed; maybe not. Ze didn’t care.

Chalia bit vir lip, then puffed out vir chest, tossed vir hair. At thirty, in the flush of Second Childhood, ve was beginning to lose a certain shyness that had hindered vem up until now. Ve was short, Fift’s height, but lithe and strong, even though ve spent as little time as ve could get away with on wrestling and fencing and acrobatics (ve preferred fiddling with agents; one day, perhaps, ve’d be a feedgardener). Vir skin and hair were a burnished brown. The fashion lately, for young Vails with any degree of confidence, was to avoid somatic design entirely: letting the body simply grow and express whatever phenotype had, willy-nilly, been stochastically mashed together out of the parents’ gametes. Which was a different thing, Fift thought, from leaving your body alone for lack of the courage to change anything. Chalia wore it well. “I don’t know,” ve said. “They’re pretty excited. Relieved. Apparently—well, uh . . .”