“It’s a little late for thinking.”

Fift felt zir face get hot. Ze should have been thinking. But ze wasn’t the careful one. Ze was the rash one, they both knew that. Ze’d reached into the soft blue tangle of Shria’s—

“Well, you should have stayed with me,” ze said.

It was a terrible thing to say.

But ve should have.

Shria looked down, hunching vir shoulders. Expression leached out of vir face; it went slack, empty, pale.

Fift knew that look.

Nine years old, on the surface, clutching vir bundle of mossy sticks, avoiding Umlish’s eyes.

Fift looked out the porthole of the robot bat and saw, far below, two figures crouched at the edge of the empty byway, separated by a wall of silence: forlorn, desperate, alone—

—and raised zir eyes from the byway’s edge to search the vault of Fullbelly.

There was the bat; and there again was the cold sensation (which ze would never, ever get used to) of seeing zirself doubly from far away.

The bat descended like an angry omen. Fift stood up—and watched that tiny, helpless figure on the byway stand up—and felt dread prickle on the back of zir neck.

Chapter 11

11

“Should Fift Brulio even be here?” Arevio said. Ve picked dirt from under vir nails in one body; in another, ve stole a glance at Fift.

“For Kumru’s sake,” Frill said, sitting down in vir own lap. “Ze’s sixteen years old, don’t you think ze has something to say at a family meeting?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” said Arevio, as vir other body nodded vigorously. “Is it a family meeting or a parental cohort meeting? I don’t think—”

“Oh, please,” snapped Father Thurm. “Can we get on with it?” Bright squiggles of some arcane data visualization arced over the skin of vir strikingly bald black scalp.

It was something of a bad sign, Fift thought, that Thurm was actually here in a body.

Thurm’s career as an agrochemical Far Theory manager had blossomed around the time Fift was born, and ve’d become modestly famous as an amateur Near Theoretician on the same topic shortly thereafter. (Apparently the Far Theory part was organizing ancient agents too complex for anyone nowadays to understand, while the Near Theory part tried to guess how they worked? Something like that.) So Thurm was always busy. As far back as Fift could remember, ve showed up at the cohort only for the minimum one-night-a-month sleepover that the family’s pledge required.

It wasn’t like with Miskisk; Thurm messaged Fift every day or two with some joke or amicable suggestion, and still got along with most of the others. But ve never came to meetings. Pip and Thurm in the same room was an event.

“Does ze want to be here?” Smistria asked, half-turning to Fift.

“Ze needs to be here,” Pip growled, hands folded over zir stomach.