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the small body beside her and shivered. From where the driver stood, waiting, she heard the brisk snap of a candicaine pipette, a snuffling noise as he inhaled. Ceryl kicked at a slip of paper blowing past, stirred up by the change of pressure from the skygate’s opening. WELCOME THE HEALING WIND! she read. Another flyer printed illegally by one of Araboth’s many doomsday cults. She fumbled in her pockets for more of her own pipettes but found nothing, only bits of glassine and powder. Her month’s narcotic ration was long spent. Her last morpha tube had gone to sedate the moujik girl.
    From high overhead came the clashing of immense hidden gears. The skygate began to close. Ceryl watched as the sky was skinned to a violet sliver, until the gate clanged shut and the brief vision of the heavens disappeared in the pulsing lavender light of the domes. She turned and, gently, stroked the dank white cheek of the dead girl behind her. Then she bent until her head touched her knees and silently began to cry.
    The gynander Reive sat on the bed in her little room on Virtues, the hermaphrodites’ level, smoking kef and eating her last tin of krill paste. She dug the paste out with her fingers and sucked them pensively, wishing it were already evening, when at a dream inquisition she would be fed delicacies, fresh shark and sea urchin roe and prickly pears. But that thought only made her more hungry.
    â€œNever mind, never mind,” she whispered. Like most hermaphrodites, Reive lived alone, and had grown into the habit of talking to herself. But then she remembered that she wasn’t really alone anymore. She smiled. Her face—rather too sharp, almost wizened—looked deceptively sweet and childlike, despite her fifteen years. “Wait!” she said softly, and pushed the krill tin away.
    The empty canister rolled beneath the bed. Reive reached for her kef pipe, sucked at it vainly, and tapped the ashes onto the floor. The place was a mess, krill tins and broken morpha tubes everywhere, old kohl wands strewn beside clothes she’d received in payment for her readings, everything covered with a coat of kef ash like whitish fur. It all smelled of smoke and soiled clothing and shrimp paste, and from her bed Reive regarded it with a fastidious distaste that belied her grubby fingers and the broken rubber bands tied around the long black plaits of her hair. A room so small and narrow that if she lay on the floor she could practically touch each wall with her outstretched hands.
    She sighed. If she hadn’t given that diplomat a bad reading last week, he might have taken her up to Thrones with him. There she might have found a wealthy patron, some dream-buggered politician eager to have his own mantic. Instead, Reive had scryed the diplomat’s dream quite bluntly, advising a change of métier, and he’d left the inquisition in a panic. Since then she was considered bad luck. She’d be lucky if she could get work scrying for some ’filer on Powers, the next level down.
    â€œAll right,” she announced, replacing the kef pipe in its little sandalwood box and shoving it onto a shelf. She wiped her hands on the worn spread and stretched across the bed, reaching down the side facing the wall. A moment later and she had withdrawn something, a small glass globe that fit easily within her cupped hands. Water splashed over its lip as she set the globe carefully in her lap and stared down into it.
    In the periwinkle light that glowed from the tiny room’s ceiling the globe seemed to float, a softly gleaming turquoise. Within it something else floated, a shrimplike creature the length of Reive’s finger. Its segmented body was a translucent coral, so that she could see the violet bead of its heart pumping, the gold and red filigree that formed its organs. Its feathery legs were a brilliant acid green, its slender tail a yellow that was nearly luminous in the ethereal light. It had