Shria snorted. “At you?” Ve grabbed a passing trashrat and dropped it over the edge. It fell about a bodylength before it was caught by invisible gossamer strands. Bouncing, jiggling, and wriggling, it righted itself, then scurried away through the air, chittering, yanking its legs from the gummy invisible web at each step. “No. Not at you. That we missed the fight. That those rent-a-body freaks left before we got here.”

“Vvonda likes to fight.” Cold crept up Fift’s spine. The roaring sea of Vails, blood on the slick skin of the anonybodies.

Shria shrugged. “Well, you know. Sport fighting, playground stuff. Ve’s never been to the mats. Ve keeps saying ve wants to, but . . .” Ve shrugged. “At our age it’s kind of complicated. You just look like a fool and impoverish yourself if you go around challenging for no reason. It’s hard to work up the right set of . . .” Ve waved a hand vaguely, and then coughed. Ve looked tired. “You know.”

“Have you ever . . . ?”

Ve shook vir head. “I think that stuff is stupid.”

“But . . .” Ze stopped as vir jaw tightened.

The image of vem diving, tackling the red nobody. Disappearing into the crowd. Leaving zir.

The silence between them shifted; its inaudible score crept an octave higher. A moment before, that silence had wrapped them together in its invisible blanket; now it heaped between them, a frayed and stiff and tangled cloth, and Fift did not know how to move it aside. Ze wished ze knew what to say, to find zir way back.

{It’s my fault, isn’t it?} ze asked zir context advisory agent. {I let vem go into the crowd in the first place. I even followed vem in. I should have insisted. I should have been the prudent one, the still center. Why didn’t you say anything?}

But zir agents were still a mess. {Normative evaluation is compromised by deficits in synthesis, telos, and ontology.} zir context advisory agent sent. {Your pardon is entreated.}

The Midwives could take vem away. Fighting off the mats at sixteen years old. They wouldn’t care who started it. Not in the middle of a crisis like this. There were already reports filtering through the ragged feed, of curfews, confiscations, evictions, lookup curtailments, cohort dissolutions, disappearances.

They’d take Shria to the Pole, and it would be Fift’s fault.

Ze swallowed. “We should have just left.”

Shria looked over at Fift, a heat in vir eyes—anger? Shame?

“Because you’re right, it’s stupid, fighting is stupid.” Maybe if Shria said it aloud, for all the world to hear—if ve apologized now, renounced vir part in the riot—maybe they wouldn’t take vem away. They still had an audience, intermittently: a dozen, then a few hundred. Gawking at two kids who’d been terrorized when the world’s watchful feed went dark.

“Fift, stop it,” Shria said.

“But you just—”

“Cut it out.”

“I just think—”