“Opportunists! That’s who!” Frill smacked the doorjamb again.

“Oh, I see,” Smistria said, vir voice dripping with sarcasm, “certainly people who evaded consensus to tamper with the world’s sources of light are the last people we should suspect . . .”

“Lag is still increasing,” Father Grobbard said. Zir face was unlined, and zir arms, holding Fift, were relaxed. But Fift could feel the tension under zir perfect, staidish reserve. “Transportation and logistics are in chaos throughout Fullbelly . . . perhaps throughout the world. And Fift . . . I’m no longer getting any visual image of you.”

“I’m fine,” Fift said from zir other body across the room—ze’d slipped out of Nupolo and Squell’s grasp and gone to watch the rolling mini-kitchen concoct sweet frozen soup. Ze had the queasy sense ze sometimes had when ze stood doublebodied in one room, as if ze was still a baby who couldn’t get zir two views of the same scene to mesh. The old nightmarish fear, that ze would suddenly see two irreconcilable pictures, lurked at the edge of zir mind. “We’re fine.” Ze pulled zirself from Father Grobbard’s arms as well.

“You and that vailchild,” Squell began. “How you had the idea in the first place to run off in search of—”

“Pip’s idea,” Father Nupolo said.

Someone in the milling crowd was screaming—a Vail in a feathered tunic, standing on a rollertube. They crossed into a courticle, where a pack of six canids—they might have been real vat-born animals, or someone’s very exotic bodies; who could know without lookup?—went tearing by, knocking over a set of shelves, spilling multicolored balls everywhere. Shria stepped protectively in front of Fift, but the canids raced around them, hullabalooing.

“Oh, diggery! I can’t see anything at all! This is not all right,” Squell said. “This is dangerous. With everyone invisible like this, people are going to start doing . . . well, anything!”

The balls bounced and caromed and sprung over the floor’s edge, falling towards the habitations below until they were caught by the sticky invisible strands of the interspace. They hung there in midair, like tiny bright planets.

“Come on,” Shria said, pulling zir onto the next byway.

Fift’s attention agents could reach the world-of-ideas only in fits and starts. Instead of the clear explanations, the wealth of opinions, the quickly forming consensus that ought to have been there, there was only a jumble of disorganized information. Agitated, Fift’s agents pestered zir with things ze hadn’t requested: The number of publicly locatable canids in Fullbelly. A history of canids and their spit. A route to the Fullbelly Spitting Championship Preparation Village, with a special offer of a tour from one Bilz Takapo of name registry Green Sugarbubble Distinct 8. Fift muted them.