The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Author:Benjamin Rosenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Erewhon Books

15

It wasn’t the same as the riot.

It wasn’t hundreds. It wasn’t faceless red and blue anonybodies. There wasn’t that terrible roar, soaking into Fift, surrounding zir, dissolving zir like a soupcube in soup. It was just sixteen bodies: Shria’s friends, Hrotrun’s cohort . . .

Over the feed, the shoving and kicking, the tackles and grappling and gut-punches, seemed flat, bleached of emotion, unreal. Almost comical.

But it wasn’t funny.

Fift saw, in the stiffening of zir Fathers around the breakfast room table, in the way they caught one another’s glances and raised eyebrows, that they’d seen it, too.

All three of Fift’s throats were dry.

Hrotrun’s hand, grappling for purchase, tangled in Shria’s bright orange hair. Vvonda’s shoulder barreling into them, taking them down; velvet; someone yanked away and thrown; the crunch of someone’s fingers breaking; an ankle sweeping feet off balance and Hrotrun’s willowy cohort-partner collapsing like ceramic disks clattering to a floor; Bluey’s hand closing on someone’s arm, and someone else slamming into vem, tearing vem away; a body bucking like a desperate lapine beneath the crush of other bodies; sweat glistening on violet skin, sliding against smooth bone-white limbs . . .

Fift pushed it all away, occluded that part of the feed. In the silence, in zir bare room, ze could feel zir heart pounding.

Halfway down the stairway to the access tunnel, ze put zir hands on the rail and leaned out into the breeze coming from beneath the habitation.

Breathed.

What was ze doing?

Why was ze going to meet this Dobroc person?

Ze didn’t want some pious gloomy Long Conversation pedant. Or some gloating, simpering, prissy gossip, offering false sympathy over Shria. Or some perfect, responsible, latterborn staidkid, pitying the mess ze and Shria were making of their lives . . .

Disturbingly, ze had an audience, and it was growing. Several hundred people were watching zir do nothing but stand on a stairway and look out over Temereen.

(In Undersnort, where ze waited with zir Mother in a long line for a sluice, there were a few thousand observers, checking in to see if ze’d found zir second attacker.)

It must have seemed to Shria like the perfect solution to the problem: issue a direct challenge, bring the matter onto the mats, where it would become a source of reputation and approval. Who could have known that Hrotrun and vir cohort would be so erratic, so irresponsible, so dangerous?

{Fift!} Father Smistria sent. {Whatever are you doing hanging off the side of Foo? Haven’t you caused enough trouble?}

Fift gritted zir teeth. “I’m taking a walk,” ze said aloud, in zir bedroom, where all zir parents could hear. “A walk. I need to think.” Ze told zir agents to block zir parents’ grumbles. If they wanted to keep pestering zir, they’d have to send someone in a body up to zir room.

Second afternoon light, gold and bluish-white, limned the habitations below.

Ze went down the stairs.

There were two Peaceables holding tubes of stoppergoo flanking the entrance to the access tunnel.

Fift’s heart stuttered. Would they stop zir? What are

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