Deah kept her field clean, courteous, and professional as the next pair of renSime parents entered the school's hastily finished front entryway.

        It had been several days since she'd made her fateful decision while correcting the tests - long enough for her melodramatic angst and self-loathing to fade to something more like morose cynicism. She'd begun her new classes with Sosu Demi, rejoining - at least for now - the rest of the students who'd started the same day she had. She'd been studying like crazy, hoping not to get behind in this class as badly as she had in Doem's. However, there were already signs that the same thing was going to happen again in every awful particular. She had been trying to avoid thinking about that.

        The renSime couple now approaching her were without doubt the most ridiculous looking pair she'd seen yet. Like hayseeds dolled up for their first trip to the city, they wore dowdy and mismatched clothes, and the woman wore an unbelievably tacky hat with fake fruit woven into its basketry. They both gawked all around them as if they'd never been inside a building before.
        "Greetings, and welcome to the Othwol Institute for the Channeling Arts," exclaimed Deah. This was the fifth time she'd given this speech and she was actually beginning to enjoy it. Hey, it beat the hell out of struggling with Sosu Demi's homework assignment for about the zillionth time. She plastered a huge grin across her face, suffused her nager with well-being and enthusiasm, and continued. "I'm sure you'd love to be able to wash up and rest for a bit before the Parents Visiting Day Grand Tour. Would you allow me to show you to your room? I'm Hajene D--"
        "Look at this lobby!!!" shrieked the woman, rushing past Deah into the building. She began to spin around in circles, staring up at the crystalline ceiling high above, arms upstretched to zlin the fascinating effect upon the ambient.
        Deah blinked in astonishment. "Er... it's to be dedicated to Klyd Farris in a ceremony next month," she offered, having dredged that fact up from the cheat-sheet of 200 items the student greeters had been asked to memorize the night before. She had, of course, only managed to memorize half of them in time, but that was better than none.
        Though the dizzy woman seemed lost in her own gyrations, the husband ate up Deah's trivia enthusiastically.
        "A magnificent specimen of modern municipal architecture!" he boomed. "Stone and glass produced by artisans from both sides of the border, the architecture a blending of state of the art technology and a brave new soaring design... what could be more inspiring!"
        "Whaaat?" Deah's brow furrowed until she realized where she recognized the description from: it was, word-for-word, what somebody had handwritten on the front of her Othwol Institute brochure. Evidently the identical words had been written on theirs. Deah couldn't decide whether to be appalled at the Tecton for writing the same message on everybody's brochure, or to laugh at herself for having assumed everybody would get their own unique phrase.
        "Oh! Well, I'm sure your son... daughter?... is very inspired." She grinned weakly and shoved her memories of her own first reaction to the Institute's appearance from her mind. "I mean, who wouldn't be?"
        "Oh, it's our daughter, our little baby," gushed the mother. "We're so proud of her, aren't we dear? Darling, who'd have thought, when our daughter was still wetting the bed at age eleven, that she would end up as a Tecton channel?"
        Deah choked, then managed to turn the laugh into a polite cough.
        "Our daughter was adopted," explained the father helpfully. "We weren't sure whether she'd grow up normal even... and now look at where she's reached!" He and his wife glowed with a fierce, even militant, pride for their girl.
        Deah thought Betta and Sorel would have a field day with this story, and began to feel sorry for these people's daughter in advance. "What's her name?"
        "Deah. Do you know her?"

        Deah felt a shock of adrenaline.
        Newly changed over, still not in control of her new senses, Deah had been held hypo by the Donor who had taken her to say goodbye. She had never zlinned them, but she was doing so now: these two strangers were her parents.
        "Of course I know her, mom. Dad. How are you?" Wetting the bed at age 11?? It was all Deah could do to keep her chagrin and confusion from her field.
        For their part, Rudge and Hilma looked like they'd each accidentally swallowed a Mold on a Bun whole. Shock scampered through their shallow nagers, chased by confusion, embarrassment, and then denial.
        "Oh ha ha," squeaked Deah's mother. "We were wondering when you'd recognize us." Her hands and tentacles waved frantically as if for rescue.
        "You er, ah, sure kept us waiting in suspense, my dear," stammered Deah's father awkwardly.
        It was perfectly obvious that they hadn't recognized her either. Had she really changed so much in only six weeks? It didn't seem likely, even if she was about a half an inch taller. And dressed differently. And, er, her hair was in a Norwestern style. And of course she'd zlin like someone else... that is even if they'd noticed what she zlinned like before with a First Order Donor standing right there. Hmmm.
        For her part, she couldn't help but goggle back at them. They still didn't look like her parents to her. For one thing, these people were old. She hadn't remembered her parents being that old. And was this really how everybody dressed back home? No wonder her new friends had laughed at the clothes she'd brought with her, and had been so eager to help her choose replacements.
        These were her parents all right, but Deah was stunned at how much her own eyes had changed in only a few weeks.
        "Um, well," she coughed. "I recognized you the whole time of course. I was just joking." She felt her face growing hotter and hotter. Well it's not as if she'd ever zlinned them before! And the childhood senses did fall to the background after changeover, no matter how a Sime might try to prevent that. Oh god. Now I'm going to be totally paranoid and stare at everybody....

        ----

        Deah's parents were as eager to put the incident behind them as she was, so they quickly agreed to be shown to the dorm room they'd be staying in for their visit.
        But just as they turned to go farther into the building, the atrium's inner doors flew open and Arat Audnes came out of them.
        Most of the more popular kids in school had been roped into greeter duty like Deah, but she'd heard that the Powers that Be had different plans for Arat because of his volatile political status -- something involving the official presentation to be held later on in the one of the larger lecture halls.
        At the moment though, he didn't look ready for any kind of public appearance. He had bits of orange plaster in his hair, probably from the temporary student library where there was some work being done on the faux claywork moldings. He was carrying a library book (Harie Kilramos' Entran and its Complications) and apparently on his way somewhere in a bit of a hurry. He was in hard need, within a couple hours of transfer in fact, and looked and zlinned savagely depressed.
        Deah gulped as she noticed there was nobody with him. Arat was almost never seen completely alone. Even on bad days, there were at least a couple of people lurking at a discreet distance hoping for a chance to open a door for him or carry his books - two things Arat never did for himself if there was any way to avoid it. That there was nobody around at all meant today must be at about an 12 on the 0-to-10 Bad Arat Day scale.
        Oh God, here it comes.... Deah's gut clenched, but Arat seemed in no mood for a confrontation. He glanced briefly in her direction, utterly disregarding the presence of the two renSimes, then ducked his head and made as if to squeeze past them. Deah uttered a sigh of relief --

        -- too soon.
        "Well, if it isn't Arat Audnes," drawled her father loudly, his voice lazy, his nager filled with contempt.
        Arat stopped in surprise, staring at the man. Equally caught off guard, Deah gasped like a fish while her mother stepped into the available silence.
        "You have a lot of nerve showing your face in public!" she snapped, her voice pitched perfectly to convey shrewish harping without disguising a lazy twang a proper Nivetan wouldn't have been caught dead talking in.
        "It's about time you people got what was coming to you," continued Deah's father. "The days of juncts are over. Why, if it was up to most people, even old juncts wouldn't be allowed to walk the streets anymore! And people like you, the new juncts, ought to be simply put to death!"
        Deah was shocked. She could not believe what these people were saying! She couldn't believe they were saying it to Arat of all people! She couldn't believe they were her parents!
        Arat's nager had gone completely unreadable, but from his expression he was at least twice as stunned as she was. How would he react? As Arat's eyes narrowed, Deah made frantic don't-listen-to-them hand wavings and nager from behind her father, who continued on in self-righteous eruption.
        "Now I know the claptrap your lot is trying to spread around up here… that your parents were wrongfully imprisoned, that is was done for political reasons, yadda yadda yadda. But does anybody believe it? No!" Rudge's dorsal jabbed denunciation in rhythm with the words, coming within a hair's breadth of actually thumping Arat on the chest. "Your parents are in prison because they are juncts. And they're going to die there, because they are juncts. And they'll deserve what they get, because they are one-hundred percent, guaranteed, unrepentant, flaming juncts! Evil killers without a breath of morality in them."
        Deah had never seen Arat look the way he looked just then: though his nager was perfectly neutral, his body language was growing increasingly hostile and his dark eyes shone with fury, suggesting her father was hitting home in a way none of the students had ever been unwise enough to do.
        "Uh, Dad -"
        "Just a moment, honey. And another thing..." poink! His tentacle actually did jab into Arat's breastbone this time. "Don't think Norwest is far enough out into the sticks that the Tecton is going to overlook you. You can't run, and you can't hide. You're going to get what you deserve and there's nothing you can do about it."
        Harassing a Sime in hard need was a stupid thing to do no matter who it was. Baiting Arat on a Bad Arat Day was sheer insanity.
        "Dad!" Deah hissed, scandalized.
        "Not now, honey."
        "But -"
        "Now you listen here, Audnes," said Rudge, his voice growling low and determined. "Your turning out channel isn't going to save you either. The Nivet Coalition for the Abolition of Juncts is onto you, and don't think we can't stop you from working publicly. And if you can't work, you can't live. You're going down, and you're going down hard."
        There was a long, long silence.
        Arat's eyes had narrowed even further, into cruel black slits. He drew himself up stiffly to look down his nose at Deah's father, whose height he exceeded by more than a head. His expression was venomous but his nager remained hideously flat, like the green surface of a lake before a storm.
        "Are you quite finished?" he inquired icily. His accent had never sounded more elegant, more aristocratic, and her father's had never sounded more crude and backwoods. "If so, I'm expected in the Collectorium." With that, he raised his chin and swept out of the building through the main doors, ruining the grace of the movement by nearly slamming them off their hinges on his way through.

        Deah and her parents all turned to stare after him.
        "I can't believe you did that," said Deah, still trying to grasp what the future implications of this would be for her. For starters, it could be assumed that the act of superhuman self-control she'd just witnessed wouldn't be repeated anytime soon, especially for her benefit.
        "He said Collectorium. Good God, they don't let that creature actually handle Gens do they?" exclaimed Deah's mother in a shocked whisper. "While he's in need?"
        "Yes, mother, as a matter of fact, they -"
        "Deah, I don't want you hanging around him. Juncts are vicious brutes and they'd kill their own children if they turned Gen."
        "Father!" Deah made no attempt to hide her dismay.
        "Now, any time you start feeling too friendly toward Arat, just remember his parents bought him a poor enslaved Gen to kill, somebody just like your birth parents," said her mother.
        "But that's not how it happened," protested Deah.
        "Of course it is. Everybody knows it."
        "But -"
        "Who has ever told you any different?"
        "Well, Arat's best friend mostly. Wouldn't he know better than anyone?"
        There was an uncomfortable silence while her mother squirmed with sympathy for what she apparently thought of as Deah's naivete.
        "Deah, honey, I know you want to believe what people say. It shows you are a good person at heart, and the world always needs good people. But dear, you can't believe what just anybody says."
        I guess not, Deah thought resentfully, since I just heard you tell someone you thought was a perfect stranger that I wet the bed at age 11!
        "Yes, mother," she sighed.

        ----

        A couple of hours later, as Sosu Demi's lecture droned verbally and nagerically onward, Deah tried to understand what had transpired that morning.
        In the long 6 weeks since she'd changed over, she'd become accustomed to being treated as an adult and with respect. Even Sorel and Betta wouldn't constantly interrupt her and brush her off the way her parents did. It had been unfamiliar and a shock today, but the fact was Deah had grown up never being able to get a word in edgewise.
        Their treatment of Arat was even more disturbing. Deah knew that in their late-night meetings, in the darkened living room, her parents and their friends spoke of sedition and insurrection. Not theirs, but those of people who were against the Tecton. When Deah was a child, she had thought their talk very grand, erudite and mature, unfathomable. But what was it really, other than gossip?
        Even if everything they said was true, Arat was supposed to be disjuncting and he was supposed to be training to work for the Tecton and the good of all. Why harass him now? It seemed so senseless. Deah tried to remember ever witnessing similar behavior from her parents in the past, and decided there wouldn't have been any suitable targets for it in her tiny home town. Their "Coalition for the Abolition of Juncts" was nothing. They held their meetings at night to make them more exciting, like children's ghost stories.
        Deah felt ashamed of her parents, and ashamed of herself for being unable to stop their words. She was just lucky they'd suffered temporary insanity in front of Arat, who was not a gossip, instead of a chatterbox like Sorel. The worst part of it was, she now realized uncomfortably that on her first day of school -- when she'd declared that the Audnes deserved prison and she hoped they'd die horribly -- she'd sounded just as ignorant and misguided as her parents if not worse.

        ----

        In the early afternoon, an Assembly was called. It was surprisingly well-attended considering how often they got busted these days and how many of the students had parents they could have been visiting instead.
        Deah soon discovered why: the goal of the assembly was to stick someone with a monster dare to be accomplished publicly during the Parents Day Presentation itself. Nobody wanted to miss out on hearing what that would be! The ambient was charged with a special excitement.
        "Hey Mepig," called Betta, "I dare you to stuff insulation in the podium beforehand, then drop your pants during your speech so they all laugh when you walk off stage afterward!"
        The others laughed.
        "Oh you'd like that wouldn't you, Betta," grinned Mepig.
        At this stage it was still banter, with nobody talking the dares seriously.
        Arat was there, but he was keeping a low profile, slouched on his battered velvet "throne" with his nager drawn in to itself. He neither joined in the conversation or even looked up. An open textbook rested in his lap. His eyes and nose were running and he looked tired and generally miserable. Rumor had it that his second transfer with Teb Randon, only an hour before, had been entirely unsatisfactory. Deah tried to zlin more, but there was too much interference from the others' fields.
        Seeing Deah's glance, Betta grinned. "Hajene Undertow is in perfect form today. We may finally win another dare!"
        "Yeah," said Sorel. "Unless it's a dare about making people terribly depressed by your mere presence."
        "No kidding, Arat can do that without even using his field."
        "Or saying a word!"
        Arat ignored the Assembly, to all appearances engrossed by the text. Deah couldn't see the title, but from its color she suspected it was Hetting's Obscure Cases in Transfer Pathology, which Teb owned and had lent her once or twice. She had only pecked through it looking for a reference or two. She couldn't imagine anybody actually reading it cover to cover, as it was incredibly dry and the Simelan was about 250 years out of date. Maybe Arat was pretending to, in order to illustrate how much more boring the Assembly was than Begn Hetting - which would have to be pretty shenned boring, First Year curiosity notwithstanding.
        "OK OK," said Sorel finally. "Here's the real dare. And you guys are going to love this one. I dare you," she proclaimed loudly, "Arat Audnes, to hide during the Parents' Day presentation tonight. You have to disappear at least an hour before hand, and stay missing until at least an hour after."
        There was an expectation-charged silence as everybody waited for his reaction and his answer.
        During the pause, Jeniard edged forward and handed Arat a handkerchief. Arat blew his nose, which given the size of the nose in question and the condition it had been in, took some time. It was also excruciatingly audible in the surrounding silence. Everybody winced and fidgeted.
        Finally he handed the handkerchief back to Jeniard and Sorel demanded, "Well?"
        "No," said Arat shortly.
        There was a pause. It said something about Arat that he was able to intimidate an entire roomful of people while curled up around a textbook with his nose running like a faucet.
        "What do you mean, no?" Betta blurted. "No?"
        Arat glanced at Jeniard, an order.
        "He's not interested," said Jeniard, in a tone of staunch support. "No dare."
        Voices broke out in competing jeers, as Sorel and Betta and the others began haranguing Mepig's people (never Arat, of course) and they threw back rejoinders.
        "Yeah, you guys are a bunch of cowards."
        "Shut up, Ladlo, go run to your mommy and daddy!"
        "At least I know who my daddy is."

        As they argued, Arat pushed himself up from the couch and stood, towering at least a head over most of the other students. His expression was contemptuous. His nager was flat, heavy. He seemed, somehow, more adult than them - surely a manufactured effect.
        A sudden silence fell. His dark eyes cast over them all, and he seemed about to say something, but then he simply walked between them and out the door. Nobody dared actually try to stop him, although protest registered clearly in the ambient. Jeniard tried to hold his ground, but then broke and skittered out after Arat, less afraid of his roommate's Bad Day than of being left alone in a frustrated Assembly.
        "Don't worry," said Thed, one of Mepig's people. "We'll talk him into it, you can bet on it!"
        So they did make bets. Fairly substantial ones, too.

        ----

        Some time afterward, Sorel and Deah were studying in Deah's room when Betta burst in, waving her arms in circles.
        "Guys! Guys! I have this great idea!"
        "What is it now?" groaned Sorel. "Not another partial nudity dare!" Betta had been suggesting those all day.
        Betta giggled. "No no, it's not that, it's much better. You know how you dared Arat to hide during the presentation, and it sounded like such a great idea? Even his friends were all, 'yeah yeah do it!'. OK, so then Arat, he just pulls this amazing, 'No I don't want to'. I mean, what's gotten into him? Then I realized - "
        Deah rolled her eyes. "Maybe his parents are going to be here for Visiting Day and he wants to spend time with them instead of playing kid's-stuff pranks."
        "Oh, like Arat's parents are really going to be here!" scoffed Sorel. "Every Tecton official from here to Gulf Territory would have to suffer total marble loss for that to happen. Hey, by the way, how was the visit with your parents?"
        Deah groaned. "Don't even ask."
        "I'm trying to talk, here," complained Betta. "You guys, listen to me. You know those insulated curtains on the big stage where we hold the Assemblies? That's where I was sure he'd pick to hide, and -"
        "No really, what happened?" Sorel looked at Deah curiously. "Did they give you a hard time about your grades?"
        "Thank God, that didn't even come up. But they were behaving like children. Not five minutes after they got here my dad lit into Arat of all people - screaming abuse and stuff, and with me standing right there. My mom was no help, she was egging him on!"
        "Ooh!" shrieked Betta, temporarily distracted. "What did they say?"
        "I'm not sure I want to repeat it. It was stuff I wouldn't dream of saying to anybody, much less Arat. But the thing is, Arat didn't say a word in self defense. And, he kept his nager completely unthreatening. He could give a renSime heart failure just by zlinning ugly, if he wanted to, and the entire time, even though he was madder than hell, he did nothing. I thought he was going to pop a blood vessel."
        Sorel shrugged. "Ramy says Jeniard said the Powers that Be gave Arat a stern warning not to do anything to mess up this presentation. Teb Randon and Kitty Katki and a bunch of the others all took him into a little room and gave him a hardcore lecture. That's why I picked the dare I picked, although I never dreamed he'd turn it down. Apparently he's taking the warning real seriously."
        Betta squirmed impatiently. "Arat takes everything real seriously. That's why he'd be so much fun to play a prank on - which is what I'm trying to suggest, if you all would keep quiet long enough for me to get to the good part."
        They stared at her.
        "You want to play a prank on Arat?"
        "Yeah! What do you think of this: we grab Arat and wrap him in one of those theater curtains. Stick him in the curtain hamper and lock it up. He'll be missing throughout the presentation, and everybody will just assume he took the dare. Later on we can 'guess' where he 'must be', and make it look like it was his idea all along. He'll be too proud to admit it wasn't, especially if we get a bunch of his friends to help 'look' for him. And he'll be in such trouble with the teachers."
        "You're utterly insane!" Sorel sounded more admiring than anything else. "You realize of course that if you actually managed to pull it off, you'd be making yourself a target for his most wicked revenge."
        "Only if he knows who it was. What if we wrapped ourselves up in curtain, too? It would disguise our fields until we had him restrained."
        Deah shook her head. "It's easy enough to say 'we grab Arat and wrap him in one of those curtains', but think of actually trying to do it!"
        "What? He's not so tough. It's all attitude."
        Sorel grinned. "Yeah, well, attitude counts when your field strength kicks ass on everybody else in the room, as Arat has demonstrated to our detriment many times before."
        "You think I'd give him a chance to use his field? I was thinking more of an ambush type scenario. Drop a curtain on him without warning, then grab him and roll him up in it before he has a chance to get free of it. With the curtain insulating us, it'd simply be a matter of overpowering him physically. With enough people helping, that shouldn't be a problem. Then we unwrap just his body, without his arms, and everybody pull him hypo. After that he has no hope of recognizing anybody even if the insulation fails."
        "What if he has an allergic reaction to the curtain? He's supposed to be allergic to most kinds of cloth. Jeniard said he'd sooner sleep in a nest of fire ants than one of the school's blankets."
        Betta snorted. "That's crazy! He's probably just fixated on that special blanky of his 'cause it's something he brought from home."
        "Interesting insight," said Sorel sarcastically. "Did you get that idea from examining your own relationship to your stuffed animals?"
        "No, I got it examining your relationship to your red party shoes."
        "You can't cope with your feelings of jealousy about my red shoes, so you take it out on Arat? Well that's hardly fair is it?"
        Betta rolled her eyes. "He's not going to be allergic to the curtain!"
        Sorel shrugged. "What if he is?"
        Deah couldn't believe it. These guys could go on forever about what was basically a moot point. "This is crazy. Sorel, if you are so worried about it, go steal his special blanket and use it to line the curtain."
        Betta's face and nager lit up. "That's a great idea!"
        "But I can't believe you'd bother going to so much trouble. You're talking about beating somebody up, wrapping him in a 200 pound curtain, and jamming him into a wooden box on wheels. I'd be more worried about him suffocating or pinching a lateral than getting a little old rash."
        "She has got a point there," said Sorel.
        Betta snapped her fingers. "Retainers! Ladlo's dad's a cop, he has those key-locked retainers. Those would protect his arms really well."
        Deah winced. "We and what army are going to get Arat into retainers?"
        "Cops manage to retainer people solo with no problem."
        "You can't be proposing we get Ladlo's dad to help us kidnap Arat!"
        Sorel laughed. "Actually if we could trick him into going outdoors, the cops probably would arrest him. You know he's legally restricted to the government complex don't you?"
        "If we can get Ladlo to lend us those," continued Betta brightly, "or include him in on the plot, ..."
        "Guys, guys." Deah felt compelled to interrupt. "Now you're really talking crazy. You can't throw Arat in retainers. That's got to be illegal. Everyone will know where they came from, and it'll be pretty obvious they weren't Arat's idea."
        "But what about construction gauntlets?" suggested Sorel. "They'd be easy to steal, and probably available in his size, and they'd protect the laterals. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest he'd have been able to figure out how to put them on himself, but..." she paused, and said straight faced, "I hear you get good at it with practice."
        Betta giggled suddenly. "And I'll thank you to keep your laterals to yourself."
        The duo collapsed into helpless laughter, and Deah covered her eyes with her hand.

        In no time, Betta and Sorel had perfected a ridiculous scheme whereby everybody would lurk wrapped in curtain and carrying big pieces of curtain. One key individual would lead the charge by jumping out of hiding and grabbing Arat's arms to restrain him long enough for the others to converge upon him.
        "That will be you, Deah."
        "Me? Wait a minute, why do I have to do it?"
        "You're the only one who's brave enough, that's why," said Betta reasonably. "And you've been in plenty of fights, right?"
        "Fights with other kids, not Simes. They couldn't zlin or augment."
        "Well, come on, how different can it be? Neither of you will be able to zlin worth a damn, and we'll give you plenty of selyn so you can augment as much as you want."
        "And," said Sorel, "we'll get as many people as we can to help out. I can think of four or five right off the top of my head, and I'm sure plenty of others will be interested as well. You'll only be fighting him alone for the first instants, and if you're careful about how you hide and when you make your move, you can probably catch him completely by surprise."
        Betta snorted. "Shen, she could jump out doing backward somersaults and playing a shiltpron with her feet, and he still wouldn't notice. Guy goes around so wrapped up in his own thing it's amazing he hasn't walked out of an open window."
        "True," Sorel admitted. "The important thing is to hang on like hell once you've got a grip on him. And our job is to hit him with the curtain and make sure it all happens so fast he loses his head, because Arat thinking clearly is just too dangerous."
        And with that, Betta and Sorel rushed off to make the arrangements, blithely assuming Deah was 100% comfortable with their plan.

        That was not the case.
        It wasn't that Deah was afraid she couldn't handle Arat - quite to the contrary. Augmenting and zlinning aside, she was no stranger to physical fights. She had always been in excellent physical condition and this had only improved since she'd come to Othwol. Arat, by contrast, seemed to regard his body as a nuisance. He'd been unathletic before changing over, and now between his numerous health problems and the fact that he avoided the exercise requirements, he remained more or less out of touch with his body -- at least where selyn wasn't concerned. Deah figured that between that and her years of experience fighting bullies in her home town, she'd be able to take him by surprise and overpower him.
        And she had no doubt that it would be nice to see Arat humiliated at her own hands - the reverse had happened with depressing regularity. With any luck, an embarrassingly thorough drubbing would improve his personality.
        What bothered her was this: She knew, and everybody else knew, that Arat Audnes blew her out of the water channel-wise. The few times she'd managed to equal him in a dare, it'd been more luck - and chutzpah - than anything else. Really Arat's only serious flaws as a channel were his utter inability to prove himself to the teachers - an inability which Deah fully shared - and a peculiar nageric fragility that was so difficult to pin down that nobody had yet succeeded in devising a dare guaranteed to expose it.
        In short, Arat did not really lose channelling dares, ever. And Deah could not truly match him in anything channelling-related that did not involve emulating a brick wall.
        Had she be reduced, then, to the level of those bullies she'd stood up against as a child? Could she really do no better to prove herself against Arat than to humiliate him physically, and with helpers no less? It was appalling.
        And yet despite her feelings, Deah had not refused her friends, because there was a part of her that did want to put Arat in the place of a bawling child who'd been robbed of his lunch money, and that shameful little piece of her kept her quiet.

        ----

        "So how have you been doing in school?" asked her mother. "You haven't said a word in your letters." Her tone implied she certainly hoped there wasn't a good reason for the omission.
        Deah grimaced internally, thankful that her showfield was quite adequate to block her parents' lesser senses. "I'm doing fine, mom."
        They entered a small reception area in which Mepig was doing his greeting and handshaking. Everybody's parents would get to meet the famous boy whose equally famous father had embraced the Tecton and all its changes. Deah's parents were particularly excited about this, since they were from Nivet and Mepig's father was a Nivet official.
        "Ohhh!" yelped Deah's mother loudly, nearly deafening Deah. "There he is!!!"
        Deah barely managed to recover her footing as Hilma shoved past her, then watched in dismay as her mother charged toward Mepig wringing her hands and blathering at the mouth. When she was a child, she'd thought of her mother as having a darting, deerlike grace. Now with a bit of experience as a Sime, she realized her mother was the Sime equivalent of a bull in a china shop. She watched as her father eagerly followed Hilma. She sincerely hoped they wouldn't embarrass her as badly as they had the last time they'd met one of her fellow students.
        "I voted for your father even before Unity," gushed her mother. Deah winced; Mepig had probably heard that one a thousand times. Could anyone's parents be less hip?
        "I saw him getting off of the train in Emmistown, back in Year 2," said her father, bobbing with zeal. "You were there too... dressed up in a little soldier's uniform. I felt proud to be part of the Tecton!"
        "It's such an honor to meet you," enthused her mother, in an attempt to outdo him.
        "And such an honor to have a daughter attending school with you," insisted her father.
        "I realize you wouldn't see Deah much, you being so important and all, and Deah being, well, who she is," Deah's mother amended.
        "Oh, no, I see Deah all the time," said Mepig mildly.
        Her mother gasped. "Really! How wonderful for her!"
        Ugh. Deah couldn't listen to another moment of this. She spotted a pitcher of water and some glasses over in a corner. She walked as casually as she could over to the table and wasted as much time as she could manage in pouring herself a drink. Then she drank the water, and poured herself another. The relative distance and the noises of the process masked the conversation enough that she was mercifully not required to hear what they were saying. Zlinning it was bad enough.
        When she'd wasted as much time as she dared, she walked back to them, assumed a position near enough to be included in the conversation, and tuned in on what Mepig was saying.
        "And we're all sure that Deah will pull through eventually," he concluded.
        Deah's eyes flew wide open. What had he been telling them?
        Wearing the expression that meant trouble, and lots of it, Deah's mother pounced. "Wait a minute, are you saying Deah is doing badly?"
        "Mom - "
        "Not now, Deah. Well? What about it?"
        "I thought everybody knew. She's been developing a lot slower than she should be, and is way behind everybody else who came at the same time." Mepig smiled blandly, zlinning of perfect truth.
        "Well! I had no idea!" Deah's mother's dismay was clear to zlin. "Deah, honey, why didn't you tell us?"
        Deah thought she would die of embarrassment. Only the thought of what they were going to do to Arat later kept her from sinking into the floor then and there. You'll get yours, Mepig. Indirectly, but you'll get yours.
        "Well, I, I didn't want to worry you, Mom." Deah shot subtle nageric daggers at Mepig, who only smiled wider. "But you see -"
        "Deah, darling, I know it's hard but you really must push yourself. Strive to succeed. Try harder."
        "Mother, I am already trying as hard as -"
        "Perhaps if you learned how to better manage your time," suggested Deah's father. "You and I could sit down later and I could help you draw up a schedule. You'd be surprised at how much time gets frittered away in a day."
        "Oh, dad," she groaned.
        Meanwhile, Mepig had slipped away and gone to join a small group of students who had come to the door. One of them was Arat. Mepig was laughing. Arat glanced in Deah's direction - cold, arrogant dismissive look - and then turned his back on her. Deah stiffened. Had he told Mepig to humiliate her? Or was Mepig simply retelling the story for Arat's amusement?
        Either way, she didn't have any doubts about their plan anymore.

        -----

        The trap was set. Every one of Arat's people was accounted for, and Arat was about to pass through the auditorium in order to get to the dorm and change into his dress uniform. Sorel had returned seconds before, warning them that he was on his way and confirming that he was once again alone.
        Everybody got into position, hidden behind hanging drapes of insulation. Deah, cloaked like a black velvet ghost, lurked behind what was left of a center-hanging drape they'd sacrificed for the prank. Arat would have to walk right past her.
        As Betta had predicted, Arat was lost in thought and not paying any attention whatsoever to his surroundings. Head down, he hurried along the path of dusty footprints on autopilot, some books under one arm. He missed the breathing lump of curtain by the door, and the shapes of people hidden in the folds of those still hanging. Of course, it wouldn't have been easy to zlin them even if he were more alert. The theatrical insulation was very good stuff.
        As she got a better look at Arat, Deah felt an unforeseen pang of trepidation. From a distance his appearance was deceptively delicate. Close up, this was revealed to be an illusion caused by his unusual height. He lacked the extremely heavy bones of someone born in meat-eating Gen Territory, but he was as sturdily built as one could reasonably expect of someone raised on this side of the border - moreso than Deah, in fact - and he had a tremendous advantage over her in reach, to boot. Shen knew how big he would have grown if he'd had proper nutrition as a child!
        Deah reminded herself that a person who'd never been faced down by another kid in his life could hardly know anything about fighting, and that in any case she wouldn't be fighting him alone for any longer than the first instants. And besides, she'd been humiliated one time too many today. As she remembered her parents making fools of themselves in front of him, and then even worse, when Mepig had deliberately spilled the beans about how stupidly awful Deah was doing in school and then laughed about it to Arat, she saw red and Sime strength tingled down her limbs.

        When Sorel's curtained arm dropped, it was the signal to attack.
        Deah sprang forward under augmentation and snatched at Arat's wrists, clamping down to trap his tentacles in their sheaths and entangle his forearms in black cloth. His head went up and he jerked backward. The books tumbled to the floor.
        For those first, terrifying seconds, she was looking straight into his eyes, as his surprise turned automatically to fury, as his first instinctive pull away yanked her off balance and stumbling after him. He was like an unbroken colt, too big and too strong for any one person to physically restrain. In another moment, he would break free.
        But Betta and Ladlo jumped up with a large piece of the curtain and tackled Arat from behind, engulfing him in black cloth and shoving him forward into her. She staggered backward under their combined momentum.
        More black-clad figures darted in to join them, mobbing their victim. The plan had been to lift him up, to rob him of leverage, but all of that was forgotten now in the haze of primitive adrenaline. They tried to drag him down, a contest of augmentation versus weight. The knot of flailing figures wove a crashing, drunken course over the debris-littered stage, then veered into the back wall.
        Deah gasped as she was crushed against the concrete, with Arat jammed against her and the others piled up behind. She could feel his heaving ribs, could hear his breaths snort out like an enraged stallion's only inches from her ear. But the black prevented them all from feeling his wrath, from cowering in it. The insulation had made them equals.
        In another moment, it was clear they had him successfully pinned, but he did not cease to struggle. As his forearms jerked violently, Deah's concentration narrowed to her hands, her tentacles, the rock-hard forearms underneath hers, and his tentacles struggling to escape their pinched-shut sheathes. His breaths had become wheezes, and she remembered too late how sensitive he was to the dust. And it was all over this stage and all over them.
        As long moments passed, his breathing became even more labored and his struggles became intermittent shudders, and finally he went limp against her.
        "You guys!" she hissed, barely able to breathe herself. "I think he's unconscious!"
        "Sshhhh!"
        "Wait, we have to be sure."
        "Don't be stupid, get off!" whispered somebody else.
        His body sagged between them as they backed off. Dozens of hands lowered him to the ground, as Deah staggered in tow and fell to her knees at his side. Somehow, she'd managed to hold his arms free of the crush, preserving his laterals as well as her own. She was only now beginning to understand how narrowly she'd escaped serious injury. How had she ever gotten talked into this?
        The others crowded round, feverishly loosening the twisted cloth.
        "You went too far!"
        "Shut up."
        "He better be alive, or we're all dead meat."
        "He's not dead, would you shut up!"
        Rough hands slapped the face through the heavy folds. After a few moments, breath did come, ragged, coughing.
        "I told you."
        "Shhhh!"
        Deah felt surreal in this scene of hushed voices, slithering movements, the cramps growing in her hands. She couldn't zlin through her disguise, and her hood had gotten twisted slightly awry so that the eye holes no longer quite lined up, severely limiting her sight.
        A knife sang from hiding, and a coarse ripping sound announced the slitting of the curtain. More ripping, as rough hands parted the gap, revealing the chest of his Tecton uniform. And, more to the point, exposed the core of his field from insulation. She could smell his sweat, and the strange scent of the herbs he used under his arms. All around them, the anonymous figures sloughed off their black cloaks, becoming anonymous uniforms with black hoods. She was disturbed to see some Fellps uniforms among them.
        She knew the moment he was brought hypoconscious because he let out a frightened and wordless whimper. The sound stabbed through Deah's mind, erased the picture of anger from that moment before the curtain fell.
        Craning her neck to peer through her reduced eye-slits, Deah made out the pale lines of his arms, streaked with dust. In a shift of perspective the anonymous black pile resolved into shoulders and a head, two legs: a human being, trying futilely to curl up but held forcibly flat against the floor.
        Other hands displaced hers. As she fell back, clenching and unclenching her cramped fingers and tentacles, she stared at his long fingers crumpled into defensive fists, the orifices raw and red, already showing bruises from the strength of her grip. The tentacles were contracted far into their sheathes, pressed instinctively together in outside and inside pairs to protect the sheathed laterals.
        "P... please."
        The busy hands froze at the sound of that voice. It was Arat's voice, but a very different tone of voice than he had ever used before: submissive, pleading, and hoarse.
        "I don't know who you are. If you just let me go, I promise I won't tell anybody. I'll do anything you want."
        Someone's fist rammed him hard in the stomach, and a harsh voice whispered "Quiet, you!" so brutally Deah looked up, unable to tell who had said it, unable to think who would say it in that voice.
        They were terrified of Arat, she realized suddenly. This act, this violation of Arat himself, was more awful and intimidating to them than a kill, than an excision, than anything else they might have read about. He was an icon to them: a symbol of everything that made them feel inadequate and underprivileged, even now.
        The gauntlets were laid under his forearms and latched into place, hiding the quivering flesh from view. Then, the largest pieces of curtain were wrapped around him, layer upon layer, until he was trapped in a fully-insulated cocoon. Only then did the conspirators dare to remove the drapes protecting them, throwing them into the bottom of the hamper that would soon receive him too.
        While the others worked silently to clean up the evidence of what had happened, Deah stood looking down, numb with shock. The object of their struggle seemed curiously reduced, now, a pitiful black bundle that curved in on itself as she watched.
        She wondered what Jeniard was doing right now.

Ohhh... sorry to leave you with a "cliffie". To be continued in the next chapter.