“And you think,” said Father Smistria, stepping forward into the supper garden, tugging on vir beard, “that our fifteen-year-old staidchild checking into an Idyll would do our ratings a great deal of good?”

Frill flung out vir hands. “Irrational prejudice!” ve snapped. “The idea that unraveling is vailish! Unraveling isn’t vailish, it’s just human. It’s a basic human right. And in fact . . .”

Ve paused and turned vir head towards one wall of the garden. So did Smistria, and so did Arevio. It took Fift a moment to realize why: Father Miskisk had gotten up.

One night every month, Miskisk came to sleep in their apartment, as the birthing pledge required.

Over the house feed, Fift saw Miskisk stalk through the corridor. Vir shoulders were hunched, vir gait stiff and hurried. Ve hesitated at the door of the supper garden—Fift’s hand tightened on the vine ze was holding—but kept going.

Father Frill sighed.

In the bat, Mother Pip sent: {You have not adequately studied Pom Politigus’s career.}

{I studied the weave you gave me.} Fift sent. It had been slow going: Pom Politigus, proprietor of Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, the most prestigious body-design emporium in a billion cubic bodylengths, had been Mother Pip’s client for two hundred years.

{Fift, I can see perfectly well from the access trail which strands of the weave you’ve haphazardly blundered along. A banker-historian must know zir client intimately, more intimately than the client knows zirself. To study—to absorb—the life, the career, the public emotional history of the client, is the merest preliminary.}

Fift pressed zir nose against the porthole, as far as ze could get from zir Mother in the cramped space. They were almost at Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, which occupied the second of a cascade of angular translucent baubles, arranged in a glittering helical chain. The chain hung luxuriously in a great swathe of empty space that residents of Foo called “the below and beyond.”

Fift pulled the weave back up, fumbled through it again.

Pom’s emporium was large enough for hundreds of bodies to be serviced, remodeled, and remapped simultaneously by zir elite staff of two dozen. It was a middlebrow establishment in the wider scheme of things; but for ten million people in the immediately surrounding cubic volume, it was a marvel. Stylish and confident younger siblings from Foo would save up a year’s worth of daring for a chance to impress their friends with some minor bodily enhancement from Stiffwaddle. Certain of Fullbelly’s ultrarich—virtuoso logistics coordinators, major attention brokers, celebrity statistician-poets—dropped by weekly.

A low-level pattern-recognition agent called Fift’s attention to the apprentices at the bottom of the staff list. And there ve was: Shria Qualia Fnax of name registry Digger Chameleon 2, 3-bodied Vail, 15 years old, genital design specialist.