Ze lay down in the supper garden and watched the still green vines overhead.

Their breathing slowed. Their heartbeats slowed, a bit at a time, one and then the other, like slipdancers circling their common center, closing in, slowing, coming together, until they were almost, almost, one.

After a while, a good long while, ze sighed.

“You had one more big secret,” ze said.

“Mmm,” Shria said. Ve was resting on zir, vir chin against zir scalp. “Right. Well, I still don’t know if I should . . .”

There was a ping in their headspace; a message wriggling through the anti-surveil, stirring their drowsing agents, vibrating with Mother Pip’s barely concealed impatience. Muffled but insistent, wondering what was taking them so long.

“Fuck,” Shria said.

“We’d better go,” Fift said.

“Fuck,” ve said. “I’ll—wait. Wait. I’ll tell you.” Ve leaned down, put vir mouth by Fift’s ear.

“It’s about the Clowns,” ve whispered. “The Cirque. When they were here. People relax here, you know? They trust the anti-surveil. No one pays attention to the apprentice setting up the scopes—”

The ping came again, the insistence no longer concealed.

“They want,” Shria whispered, “to ‘put the Midwives in their place.’”

A bolt of cold drilled through Fift’s spine. “What?”

“That’s what they said. They have some kind of plan. Something big.”

“Like what?”

Shria shrugged. Ve let go of Fift and stood. “Come on,” ve said, and one of vir bodies dove through the dilating cervix of the room.

In vir other body ve reached back and gave Fift’s shoulder a squeeze. Ve looked a little relieved, a little scared. “Come on,” ve said again. “Let’s not get in more trouble.”

Fift got up, unsteadily, from the couch.

Chapter 4

4

The Clowns didn’t strike that summer. Fall came, draining chlorophyll from the leaves of the deciduous trees on the surface far above Fullbelly, so that the forests were lit up like fire. The mornings were frosty, and bodies on the surface shivered with the chill. It was hunting season, and surface time was oversubscribed. (Father Smistria cackled at the slackwits freezing themselves half to death to pretend they were ancient hunter-gatherers; Father Nupolo chided vem for ignoring the benefits of the surface-going minority for planetary resilience.) Then the first snows came, and the queues at the elevators disappeared.

Shria sent {Hi} and Fift sent {Hi} back; after that, they didn’t know what to say. They kept trying—discussing, with grinding awkwardness, homework and food, and recommending each other clip-opera series (Shria liked Goopfield Pratfalls With Perm and Trink, though ve said it was mindless; Fift sort of liked Middleborn at Three Hundred Why Mother Why?!, though plenty of it was overdramatic mugging for the feed.)