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    “Brave pioneers, always remember that obedience is the highest virtue. Above all, obedience, respect, sacrifice, hierarchy …”
    I find the kitchen room of the home empty, but I hear Eo in the bedroom.
    “Stop right where you are!” she commands through the door. “Do not, under any condition, look in this room.”
    “Okay.” I stop.
    She comes out a minute later, flustered and blushing. Her hair is covered in dust and webs. I rake my hands through the tangle. She’s straight from the Webbery, where they harvest the bioSilk.
    “You didn’t go in the Flush,” I say, smiling.
    “Didn’t have time. Had to skirt out of the Webbery to pick something up.”
    “What did you pick up?”
    She smiles sweetly. “You didn’t marry me because I tell you everything, remember. And do not go into that room.”
    I make a lunge for the door. She blocks me and pulls my sweatband down over my eyes. Her forehead pushes against my chest. I laugh, move the band, and grip her shoulders to push her back enough to look into her eyes.
    “Or what?” I ask with a raised eyebrow.
    She just smiles at me and cocks her head. I back away from the metal door. I dive into molten mineshafts without a blink. But there are some warnings you can buck off and others you can’t.
    She stands on her tiptoes and pecks me good on the nose. “Good boy; I knew you’d be easy to train,” she says. Then her nose wrinkles because she smells my burn. She doesn’t coddle me, doesn’t berate me, doesn’t even speak except to say, “I love you,” with just the hint of worry in her voice.
    She picks the melted pieces of my frysuit out of the wound, which stretches from my knuckles to my wrist, and pulls tight a webwrap with antibiotic and nervenucleic.
    “Where’d you get that?” I ask.
    “If I don’t lecture you, you don’t quiz me on what’s what.”
    I kiss her on the nose and play with the thin band of woven hair around her ring finger. My hair wound with bits of silk makes her wedding band.
    “I have a surprise for you tonight,” she tells me.
    “And I have one for you,” I say, thinking of the Laurel. I put my sweatband on her head like a crown. She wrinkles her nose at its wetness.
    “Oh, well, I actually have two for you, Darrow. Pity you didn’t think ahead. You might have gotten me a cube of sugar or a satin sheet or … maybe even coffee to go with the first gift.”
    “Coffee!” I laugh. “What sort of Color did you think you married?”
    She sighs. “No benefits to a diver, none at all. Crazy, stubborn, rash …”
    “Dexterous?” I say with a mischievous smile as I slide my hand up the side of her skirt.
    “Reckon that has its advantages.” She smiles and swats my hand away like it’s a spider. “Now put these gloves on unless you want jabber from the women. Your mother’s already gone on ahead.”

3

THE LAUREL
    We walk hand in hand with the others from our township through the tunnelroads to the Common. Lune drones on above us on the HC, high above, as the Goldbrows (Aureate to be technic) ought to be. They show the horrors of a terrorist bomb killing a Red mining crew and an Orange technician group. The Sons of Ares are blamed. Their strange glyph of Ares, a cruel helmet with spiked sunbursts exploding from the crown, burns across the screen; blood drips from the spikes. Children are shown mangled. The Sons of Ares are called tribal murderers, called bringers of chaos. They are condemned. The Society’s Gray police and soldiers move rubble. Two soldiers of the Obsidian Color, colossal men and women nearly twice my size, are shown along with nimble Yellow doctors carrying several victims from the blast.
    There are no Sons of Ares in Lykos. Their futile war does not touch us; yet again a reward is offered for information on Ares, the terrorist king. We have heard the broadcast a thousand times, and still it feels like fiction. The Sons think we are