Lovisa wanted to lash Mari with shaming words, for standing there like a coward while Nev dealt with Pari on her own. But that would have to wait, because now Lovisa was readier than ever to confirm the location of her mother’s fox, then sneak home. She’d wanted a decoy she could stomach touching and kissing, but now her need for a strong stomach had vanished. She was going to pop Pari Parnin’s puffed-up sense of self-delusion. She would make him think she wanted to have sex with him, then she would lead him all the way to the attic of her house in Flag Hill, where she would refuse him. If he got in trouble with her parents for trying to seduce their daughter in their attic, all the better.

“Hi Pari,” she said, moving closer to him. “When did you get so funny?”

“I thought you’d never notice,” he said with a smirk. She got to work, laughing at his unclever jokes, stroking his arm. She complimented his golden-green scarves and touched her fingers to the orange jewels adorning his pockets. He began to respond, not with conversation, but with heavy hands, knowing smiles, body-to-body contact.

Then, with a promise to return, she excused herself briefly. Was her mother’s fox here or not? Moving through the edges of the party, she watched the occasional fox whiz past like a spinning leaf in a stream. There wasn’t much hope of recognizing a nose or an ear if none of them ever kept still.

Lovisa saw Nev in a corner, standing alone. Scanning the crowd, Lovisa saw someone else who’d spotted Nev in her corner: Nori Orfa, that northern boy, quick to smile, flirty, the one Lovisa didn’t trust. Nori began to move toward Nev.

Half out of her own need and half out of an unexamined impulse to interrupt Nori, Lovisa pushed through the crowd to Nev.

“Hi,” she said, bursting breathlessly into the space before the taller girl.

Nev looked down at Lovisa, not speaking, but conveying worlds with her contemptuous eyes. She wasn’t holding the fox kit anymore. Lovisa could see her shirt, black and high-collared, with long, thin ribbons in every color that wrapped around her torso and seemed knotted together at arbitrary locations. On someone else, it would’ve looked like a failed attempt to simulate current Ledra fashions. On Nev, with her high chin and her straight shoulders, her humorless mouth, it was exactly right. She looked like a queen.

“Come to pick on me?” said Nev. “Or do you people only do that when you have an audience?”

“Have you forgotten all the times I’ve picked on you when we were alone?” said Lovisa. “I’m hurt.”

“Ha, ha. What do you want, Lovisa?”

“Can you tell foxes apart?”

“Sometimes.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever noticed the one that belongs to my mother?”