Fift felt a stab of unease in zir stomach. This felt like an allusion to Shria’s secret about the Clowns, and ze was acutely aware that zir parents were probably watching. Ze’d checked at the first sluice they’d taken: Fathers Grobbard, Squell, and—weirdly—Miskisk had been listed in zir audience. Since then, ze hadn’t wanted to look.

“But if the sightings are fake, then why . . .” ze said.

“We should go somewhere,” Shria said. “And in the pavilion down there they have mangareme fluffies.”

At the other end of the platform, the sluice operator stood, singlebodied, a middle-aged Vail in full sluice operator regalia: a heavy jacket with multiple frilled ridges, glittering sashes inked with schematic diagrams of population-flow logistics, a purple Ascensionist devotional plume towering above vir hat, and epithets—Guardian of Fullbelly’s Energic Balance, Regulator of the Flow—spelled out in the air around vem by swarms of glowflies.

At least it was a sluice ve was guarding, and not an elevator—they weren’t asking to be hauled upwards yet. But they were so far from home that the sluice operator was unlikely to believe they would walk all the way up again on stairways.

Ve glowered at them. What could they offer, vir eyes asked—two sixteen-year-olds from unremarkable cohorts, marooned in the wasteland of First Childhood, with no reason to be here other than a vague hunch about a possibly nonexistent performance?—to justify the additional energy, the logistical complexity, the risks and annoyances of permitting them to descend another three hundred bodylengths, on vir sluice?

How could Fift and Shria possibly prevail in the transaction?

On an ordinary day, they couldn’t have. Fift wouldn’t dare try, and even Shria would have been bested by that cold glare, knowing ve had no real reason to venture so far from home and insufficient emotional capital to stare the sluice operator down.

Today, they’d done it three times already, two sluices and a spinbounce. Each time, they’d prevailed. But each time, they got farther away from home, and it got harder.

“Come on,” Shria said, taking Fift’s hand. Ve grinned.

The sluice operator’s eyes narrowed as they approached, taking the measure of them. Fift read vir story from lookup, too, with a banker-historian’s eye: Thesid Minorict of name registry Understandable Deviation 4, 3-bodied Vail, 368 years old, elderborn. Part of a provisional proto-cohort with two other Vails and one Staid; a diligently practicing Ascensionist (An ironic religion, Fift thought, for a sluice operator; an elevator would be more ascensive!); at this job for the last fifty years; staunch, well-regarded, unexceptional; no challenges on the mats, ever; no particular martial or aesthetic or somatic glories; but vir confidence was displayed in the very thoroughness with which ve allowed vir stolid ordinariness to be detailed in lookup. Economic-emotional status firmly, immovably, in the satisfied/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​contributing zone.