“We’re safe! No mechs here, even. You can’t invoke some—”

“I already have.” Killeen’s mask had returned at Toby’s outburst, the window between them closing in an eye-blink. Killeen and Cermo stood together, tall and certain, Cermo chunky and giving away his apprehension with elbows cocked, knees loose. The crevices in Killeen’s face seemed deep, shadowed, hiding something. Yet the voice was mild, calming as he argued further. Toby had heard him use the same tones on a crewman who had stepped out of line and needed herding back in.

Toby took a deep breath, licked his lips. Using his Aspects, he dredged up legalistic lore, rattling jargon he only dimly understood. “Override our customs? How can you? I haven’t even been informed by Family Council of any of this.” He let his peripheral vision drift, sizing up opportunities. “First you have to—”

“I called a special Council. Since you had left Argo without permission of the watch officer, they allowed as how they could pass judgment without your being informed.”

Toby was aghast. He should have suspected when it was so easy to slip away. “You let me leave.”

“I gave orders that you were confined to the ship.”

“Sure, knowing you could turn it this way, and then—”

“The Family demands this.”

“Family? Ha! It’s you who want it.”

“I stood aside during their deliberations.”

“Huh!” Toby spat back, edging to his left. Of course—his father knew how days in that tiny cell would affect him, make him jump ship. So the Cap’n prepared arguments, finished the dealings, then waited for Toby to skip. The shock of seeing how he could be so easily used, his impulses calculated, seethed through Toby like a chilly, clarifying dash of water.

He got control of his voice and said slowly, as mildly as he could, “Dad, Shibo doesn’t want to be ‘restored.’”

Killeen laughed dryly. “Nonsense. An Aspect always wants out.”

“She’s a Personality—bigger, more ample . . .” Toby struggled to say what he felt. “You don’t carry one, you can’t know what it’s like. They’re above all this, the surge of anger and want and fear that we feel—all of it. She likes herself the way she is.”

Killeen was still smiling, shaking his head. “You can’t expect anybody to believe that.”

“I certainly do! No Personality carried in this Family ever had a choice of coming out again. Nobody ever asked the question.”

“Well, we can,” Cermo said carefully. “Just manifest her before the Council.”

“No,” Killeen said abruptly, clenching his fist. “I’ll settle this. Manifest her now, right here.”

“What?” Toby made himself take a deep breath. His mind reeled with harsh, violent imagery. Nausea burned his throat.

“Come on, let her speak.”

“No!”

—fevered skin softly resistant, a cupped rosy breast—

“You’d have to anyway, before the Council,” Cermo said reasonably.

“Any objection she has, I can talk her out of it,” Killeen said affably. “Come on, son.”

—tongue flicking in damp hollows, secret crevices—

“No!”

Killeen’s smile hardened. “Yeasay. Now.”

Shibo said,

If it causes this, I’ll think again. I don’t want to see you two—

No! Toby sent to her in the confines of her imprisonment. No.

Killeen’s mouth hardened. “Now. And I mean it.”

Toby broke to his left. He didn’t have much hope but he dug in, revving his knee-servos to max, feeling their surging whine beneath his skin.

Shouts behind him. They probably could run him down but he would give them a chase anyway. He leaned into it, puffing hard.

Then the shouts became hoarse, shrill. He snapped his head around. Quath was blocking Cermo and Killeen, moving with surprising speed. She shot out a telescoping leg and hooked Cermo’s foot, tripping him. Killeen she stopped with a rude bump, sending him sprawling.

Toby was astounded, but he didn’t let it slow his pounding boots. He got out of the park and plunged into the busy streets beyond.

Escape has two steps: first, separating from the pursuer. Then, distancing yourself from the incident, so nobody suspects the distant hubbub has you as its prey.

Toby cut down alleys where he could, leaped clean over a stubby building—his servos cutting in hard—and dodged his way through three streets, faster than he could think through a plan. People chuckled and shouted at him but they seemed to assume he was a mere oddity, not a thief escaping from a job. He relaxed slightly and had the presence of mind to wave at the curious, smiling broadly, as though this was some stunt. Pretty soon he slowed to a fast walk and nobody seemed much interested in him.

He angled through an open-air market without attracting more than the usual attention paid his size. He made his breathing slow. His antic, popping anxiety faded.

Without thinking he found that he had circled around, always turning right when he could. Ingrained Family training. Coming around on your pursuer let you know where he was, since he was following your trail. You could decide whether to take him by surprise, but you had to do it before the tracker realized what you were doing. Or else you took off in a totally different direction, taking time to cover your tracks.

Only in a city there was no tracking, unless Toby had stirred up a crowd somewhere to mark his passage. But Killeen and Cermo couldn’t talk easily with these dwarves, especially in their mood. So he might have a margin of time.

He had ended up behind the park. A chase moves away from the start and usually nobody thinks to check back there. He had learned that playing in the dusty streets of Citadel Bishop, then later again, dodging mechs. Now he hoped that his own father couldn’t read him that deeply. The thought made him fidgety, glancing around corners before exposing himself on the approach to the park area. After all, Killeen had played him like a penny flute lately.

No sign of Killeen or Cermo. No shouts or unusual hurry. He leaned against a building, eyeing the park a block away.

This was only a temporary victory. The Family would comb this city and pluck him out.

He felt a familiar cool signal in his comm. Quath, apparently, had played the same kind of games as a child—or hatchling, or whatever the Myriapodia were when young. But Toby couldn’t see her anywhere.

<I have offended your father. I am sad that matters have come to this.>

The bulky form was above him, clinging somehow to the side of a building, concealed in shadow. Nobody nearby had noticed.

“With Dad acting that way, it had to happen.”

<Still, it brings acrid currents flowing among us.>

“Freedom starts between the ears, sticky-paws. I had to follow what I know. So did you. Thanks.”

<I acted to preserve the possibilities for both of you.>

“Really? Do you think I should give Shibo back to him?”

<I have no views on so species-specific a question.>

“Come on!”

<My qualifications do not extend to your own, individual, cerebral symphonies.>

Toby leaned against a wall, watching Quath clamber down the gray ceramic building—which shuddered and popped with the strain—and said, “I don’t hear much music these days, buggo. Just noise.”

<It is your unconscious, trying to speak.>

“How would you know?”

<Only creatures who lack such mental architectures can see them clearly.>

“You don’t have unconscious thoughts? I mean, impulses, things that just turn up when you’re not thinking about them?”

<All aspects of myself are delegated to subminds. For your species, the mind is made by adding segments atop older elements. Not I. Your makeshift construction is typical of a phylum which has not reshaped itself fundamentally.>

“Maybe we like ourselves the way we are.”

<A matter of taste. To me, an [untranslatable], your relation to Shibo is understandable. I delegate to my under-selves. Is it that way for you?>