“I’m a little fucking distracted now, you old toad,” Fift said—and felt an immediate stab of guilt, even though ze’d only said it in the body that was waiting by the ball-drop, and the absent feed would (hopefully) not preserve the comment. Ze turned zir head to watch the ball carrying Smistria and Frill bounce, buffer, and settle into the goop.

Blue and black and red feet, their toes webbed together, and one black boot (but not Shria’s) filled the space in front of Fift’s eyes. Ze checked lookup. Still down. Ze checked the feed for a view. There was one view of where ze was now: slow, jittery, flecked, taken from an elevator some distance away. The byway was mobbed with colors, with bodies, jerky, rushing. From that vantage point, over the feed, it looked like they were dancing. Shria was somewhere in that mess. Ve wouldn’t answer zir.

Ze rested zir forehead against the ground. In the lab at Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, ze had wondered where zir tears were, if they were gone forever. Now, very faintly, ze felt their incipient trace, an uneasy quavering that, if ze failed to hold it down, could become panic, sobs, shaking.

Father Smistria and Father Frill were holding hands when they came out of the ball-drop. “Come on, Fift,” Frill said, and they rushed on ahead of zir. They seemed weirdly abuzz, the martial tension of their fight having shifted into something that drew them closer. Smistria’s thumb traced a line across Frill’s wrist. Fathers! Ridiculous. Fift puffed after them.

In the jittery, grainy view of the byway, there was no sign of Shria.

“This is our time!” Somehow Panaximandra’s voice carried better over the feed, sounded clearer, if tinny and scratchy and jittery from lag. “These are our signs! Remember this feeling, the texture of luxury, the feeling of freedom! Remember who you are! And when you return to your little nooks in the hive, be unsatisfied, be thirsty! We must cut ourselves free before we can begin to live!”

Cut ourselves free? A month ago, that might have sounded good to Fift. A Ticket that would transport zir away from Mother Pip and banker-historian apprenticeships and shameful longings and the alternate codification of the twelfth emergent mode of the Long Conversation, from fussing Fathers and grinding boredom. A jailbreak from the prison of zir life. But now it sounded exactly backwards. Ze was unanchored, lost, in the midst of a tornado. Ze wanted back in to zir life. Ze wanted to go home.