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hair.
    â€œWe must go to meet her now,” she said airily, and turned and walked back to her chambers, ignoring the whispers behind her.
    â€œUcalegon will take you,” Drusilla hissed, and as Reive slammed her door she heard the others giggling.
    â€œDamn,” she muttered. She kicked her cosmetic box, sending it spinning across the floor. When she heard it crack against the wall she swore again, more loudly, then got onto her knees and gathered up the kohl wands and little tubes of rouge and mascara and powder. She settled on the floor, balancing a small broken triangle of mirror on her knees, and began to paint her face.
    When she was finished a simple mask peered at her from the shard of mirror, her cheeks a pale copper, her mouth demurely small and golden, her eyebrows raised to give her a look of innocent surprise. Reive drew the mirror up to her face and tilted her head so that her eyes caught the dim blue light. For years she had planned to get tinted lenses to disguise the true color of her eyes. But there was always something else to buy with her meager earnings, decent food for one thing, anything besides krill paste; and of course she always needed more kohl and opium sugar, though fortunately she wasn’t as dependent on that as some. And, she had to admit, green was an unusual color, forbidden or not; and sometimes patrons liked that. Although now it seemed they wouldn’t like anything to do with Reive.
    The gynander sighed and shook her head, her long uneven black plaits flying. She stood and rummaged under the bedcovers until she found a new pair of orange pantaloons of pleated false silk. She pulled them out, smoothing the fabric through which the outline of her penis could barely be seen, a small shadow against one pale thigh. Three thin rings of steel and rubicore pierced each of her nipples, and she wore a tiny pouch slung around her narrow waist. Last of all, she sat cross-legged on the floor and carefully drew two wards, one upon each tiny breast: the ward against Ucalegon, the Prince of Storms, and the one against Baratdaja, the Healing Wind.
    Before she left she flopped onto her bed and leaned down to peer at the glass globe. The mysid floated tranquilly, hardly moving even when she gently prodded it with a finger.
    â€œGoodbye, Gato,” she whispered. “We’re leaving now.”
    She went out shirtless, shivering a little in the hallway. She was relieved to see that the others had gone, no doubt to gossip about her in Drusilla’s chambers. For a minute she leaned against the wall, deciding where to go. It was too early to look for inquisitors. She didn’t want to seem desperate. Fortunes changed with mercurial speed in Araboth, especially among hermaphrodites and the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. By evening she might find herself with a new patron, a new chamber on a higher level. Abruptly she turned and headed down the corridor toward the Virtues Level gravator. It was two hours at least until patrons would start filling the corridors, looking for dream-mantics. For now she would slip up to the vivarium and visit Zalophus.
    â€œCeryl! Is that you?”
    Ceryl started, hastily wiped the tears from her face. From around the curve of the avenue an aardman stalked toward the rickshaw, carrying a small woman in a long, pleated white skirt, a fez perched unsteadily on her head. Tatsun Frizer, a taster in the Toxins Cabal and like Ceryl a member of the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. She wore absurdly ornamented yellow vinyl shoes that curled under so that she could not walk in them. In her arms she cradled a puppet, one of the newly fashionable and more odious geneslaves designed by the legendary puppeteer, Rudyard Planck. It licked its thin gray lips and glared at Ceryl with swinish red-rimmed eyes.
    â€œDon’t stop,” it hissed loudly into Tatsun’s ear. Rudyard Planck despised the Orsinate. He had mocked them first with a series of