Who the hell had I been with when?

"What surprises me," Rashid said, "is that Tobers don't discuss this openly. If it happens to everybody, why treat it as a shameful secret?"

I thought of Tobers back through the years, most of them living in relationships by the time they reached Commitment Day, and most of them intimidated by the permanent repercussions of the choice they were about to make. They had enough complications already without having to confess they were occasionally not who they appeared to be.

"It might not be shameful," I said, "but it is secret. That's not such a bad thing; that's not such a bad thing at all."

The path from the doctor's office to Mayoralty House led around the mill pond, where a single mallard floated peacefully in the center of the water. The bird was lucky; our miller, Palph, was a good archer, and any other day, a duck on the pond had a good chance of becoming Palph's dinner. No Tober, however, would dare kill a bird on the morning of Commitment Day — that was an insult to Master Crow and Mistress Gull.

I said as much to Rashid. He nodded, but didn't answer; his mind was obviously elsewhere. After a moment, he spoke without looking at me. "What's going to happen today at Birds Home?"

"Rashid," Steck began, "I've told you everything…"

"You didn't tell me the doctor took tissue samples," he interrupted. "So I'd like to hear what Fullin has to say."

I looked back and forth between the two of them. Of course, Rashid would have quizzed Steck long before coming to the cove — about our way of life, how switching sexes affected us, what the gods did in Birds Home. And because he was infatuated with her, he had believed what he heard: he thought he knew everything she did. Now, however, something had stirred a freckle of doubt; now, he wanted to check her version of the facts.

Steck's face flushed with emotion. Anger? Hurt? I couldn't tell — it disappeared in an instant, replaced by a hard-edged stoniness, as if she didn't care whether he believed her or not. "Go ahead," she said grimly to me. "Tell him whatever he wants to know."

"There's not much to tell," I mumbled, embarrassed for her. Embarrassed for my mother. "At noon, Master Crow and Mistress Gull arrive from Birds Home and land on the lake. The children go with Master Crow; the people ready for Commitment go with Mistress Gull."

"Go with," Rashid repeated. "That means you get inside."

"Yes, we boat out and get inside Mistress Gull and Master Crow," I said, wondering why he had decided to be obtuse. "There are chairs inside. We sit in the chairs and the gods fly us north to Birds Home."

"What happens there?"

"The children are taken into Master Crow's nest. They climb out of Master Crow and wait in a special area until they are touched by the gods. Then everyone falls asleep."

"Gas," Steck murmured. "Knock-out gas."

I shrugged, not wanting to argue about how the gods did what they did. It felt awkward, being questioned by Rashid to see if my mother had lied to him; I just wanted to get it over with. "After a while, the children wake up and find they're the opposite sex. They get back inside Master Crow and fly home."

"That's the children," Rashid said. "What about the candidates for Commitment? You and Cappie."

"Mistress Gull takes us into a different nest, her own. I don't know what happens there because it's a holy secret — no one who's gone through it is ever supposed to reveal the details. But the gods will come to us in the Commitment Hour and ask, 'Male, female, or both?' We tell them our choice, and that's our Commitment." I looked at him sharply. "Good enough?"

Rashid hesitated, as if considering whether to grill me further: to keep pushing to see if my story matched whatever my mother had told him. He glanced at Steck, but she wasn't looking at either of us. She had picked up a stone and was staring at the duck in the mill pond. Her fingers rolled the stone back and forth across her palm.

"All right then," Rashid muttered. "I was just checking. It's always possible that something changed in the twenty years since you Committed, Steck."

She made a scoffing sound, but her face lost some of its grimness. When she threw her stone, she aimed well clear of the duck. The rock landed in the water with a light plop, scarcely rippling the pond at all.

Mayoralty House lay at the base of Patriarch Hill, in the shadow of the OldTech radio antenna that speared into the sky on the heights. Zephram claimed the big ramble-faced building must have been a hotel back in OldTech times. It had more than two dozen rooms, all the same… or at least they had been the same before years of rain, snow and termites took their toll.

By the time the Patriarch came to power a hundred and fifty years ago, much of the old hotel had collapsed. He ordered it rebuilt to his own specifications, calling it the Patriarchal Palace. After his death, there had been a fierce political struggle between the mayor and Patriarch's Man of that day, fighting over which would get the house. Somehow, the mayor had won — possibly by making generous financial concessions to the Patriarch's Man — and the old hotel had been residence for every mayor since.

To the mayors, it must have been a mixed blessing. A house that size needed constant expensive upkeep. Even worse, the summers boiled insufferably hot in that area, thanks to a huge expanse of OldTech asphalt that bordered the building on front and sides. ("The hotel parking lot," my father said.) Four hundred post-Tech winters had churned that aging pavement like taffy, but fractured and crumbling, there was still enough old blacktop left to drink up every drop of sun and fill the air with the fierce smell of baked tar.

On the front edge of the asphalt, an OldTech horseless cart had been crisping its way to rust for four centuries. The exterior body was completely gone, shredded partly by weather and partly by Tober children prying off souvenirs to stash in dresser drawers and other hidey-holes. Earlier generations must have had it easy; by the time I came along, the only parts left were solid and heavy, almost impossible to break off. Cappie had won himself a quick close-lipped kiss for chiseling off a piece of the underframe and giving it to me on my ninth birthday.

As soon as the cart came into sight Rashid made a beeline for it, his plastic boots making sticky sounds as he crossed the sun-soft blacktop. Leaning over the remains of the engine, he tried to wiggle various components. I could have told him he was wasting his time — anything with a hint of wiggle had been worried off by children long ago.

Steck nudged me and murmured, "All his life he's been looking for a car that's still in running order. We've found plenty that look good on the outside — preserved by eccentric collectors, that sort of thing — but the engines are always seized up. Even with a heap like this, Rashid has this insatiable optimism that he might find good spare parts."

"This one doesn't have any parts," I said. "It's rusted into a solid whole."

"I know that," Steck replied. "You think I didn't try to pull pieces off that pile of junk when I was—"

She stopped. Rashid had just reached down into the motor, a look of triumph on his face. He bent over farther and farther, straining to get at something until his feet were almost off the ground.

"What is it?" Steck called.

Rashid's voice echoed from the cart's metal belly: "Something I've never seen in all my years looking under the hood."

Steck gave me a "let's humor him" look and we both moved forward. Rashid pulled his head out of the machine long enough to take a short metal cylinder from a pouch on his thigh; when he twisted one end of the cylinder, the other end suddenly shone with light like a lantern. He turned the yellow beam toward the engine and aimed it down into the rusted guts. "See that?" he asked.