Father Smistria had taken a direct approach; ve had gone straight to the senior logistics coordinators, who stood on a small dais betting on the dancing, and explained their situation. At first, they had been happy to see vem; Smistria was a well-regarded adjudication reactant, and vir attention was worth something. When it became clear, though, that ve insisted on intruding with business of a most unpleasant and distressing sort (namely, the near-total collapse of some of the very services the logistics coordinators were pledged to nurture) into a social gathering now repurposed (albeit not originally designed) precisely to distract from that collapse, the mood turned grim. Smistria, realizing vir mistake, tried to win them back, complimenting the party, reminiscing about old times. Flattery wasn’t vir strong suit, though: you could see how vir jaw was rigid with the effort.

Moving zir head to see past the more insistent beverages that clustered around zir, Fift ran lookups on the crowd. Partly because it was educational to see who was at such a gathering; but mostly, it was just a relief to be somewhere lookup was working flawlessly. More of a relief than ze would have predicted: the crisp unhurried display of the responses, flickering up, one after another, as ze glanced through the crowd, made zir eyes sting with shameful joy. (There they were again, the tears, not unlearned after all, just lurking deep.)

Maybe ze should be doing something about the fact that ze was trapped on a byway with a thousand out-of-control Vails who were beating Shria up. But it was seductively peaceful just to stand here and watch lookup work.

Tigan Melitox Farina of name registry Blue Piggyback Dentition 5, 3-bodied Vail, 221 years old, speaker of Parrot Company.

Foon Pelix Nathandine of name registry Yellow Optimum Sugarbubble 6, 3-bodied Staid, 315 years old, noted textilist.

Pam Thyrup Shevrian of name registry Uncanny Parameter Platypus 7, 2-bodied Vail, 389 years old, adjudicant and meta-aesthetic reactant.

“This is our time!” Panaximandra roared again, and the crowd roared too; the crowd was alive, moving. Were they fighting? Dancing? Did they even know themselves? Grabbing and grappling and turning and churning and bucking and striking. This wasn’t just vailish exuberance. Something had been bottled up, compressed and hidden and starved for air, and now, in the absence of the feed and lookup, among these anonymized rent-a-bodies, it was breaking free.

“FREEDOM!”

Father Squell was pacing the breakfast room, circling the table, vir silver spikes quivering in vir pale scalp. “I just don’t understand,” ve said. “I don’t understand how you could be in the riot. You said you were leaving. You said you were walking away from the riot.” Tears were running down vir cheeks.

“What is happening,” Grobbard said, “at the party?”

“Well, they’re talking to people,” Fift said, and rubbed zir eyes. Under the table, zir legs were quivering with exhaustion, propagated from the body on the byway.