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Yuan was six when he asked if he could hold Gale’s hand like January did.

It was an otherwise peaceful evening. They were eating dinner together, just the three of them at a little table in Gale’s sitting room with no cameras or staff. It was the one night a week they had private family time, and Gale had been explaining a mammoth joke they’d heard earlier that week. Yuan had smiled once he’d understood, and then, very politely, said, “Can I hold your hand like January does?”

Part of January’s stomach went cold.

Both Gale and January knew what he meant the instant he asked – January had developed the habit of twisting off his gauntlets and taking Gale’s hand as a show of silent support in front of other Houses, and the newscasters loved zooming in on every shot of it they could get.

Gale and Yuan already held hands – Dr. Okonkwo had said that physical touch was important for Earthstrongers to feel connected to people, and probably also heirs to the House of Gale if Anansi hadn’t drilled that need completely out of them – so Gale and Yuan held hands sitting next to each other on Yuan’s bed for the half hour before Yuan’s bedtime while Gale read stories.^[1] But they held hands with Yuan’s cage on, and usually the only person who touched Yuan when he was fulfilling his medically-recommended hours of having his cage off was January.

What Yuan was asking was if he could hold Gale’s hand without his cage.

“You can,” said Gale almost instantly.

January, who was hastily editing Earthstrong safety exercises in his head to be achieveable for a six-year-old, tagged on, “But only if you practice with me first.”

“Okay,” said Yuan, who was generally agreeable. Then, because he was being raised by Gale, he added, “Why?”

“Let’s reason it out together,” said Gale. “Why do you and January wear cages?”

“Because we’re Earthstrong,” said Yuan, “which means that our bodies are built for Earth which makes everything super heavy so we have to be super strong to live there. But we’re not living there, so the cages make everything heavy for us so our bodies don’t get sick because Mars is too light for us.”

“Excellent,” said Gale. “Why don’t I?”

“Because your body is built for Mars and wants everything to be light, so you won’t get sick without one.”

Yuan, a few months after Gale had become Consul, had needed a few surgeries to correct the internal injury and stress on several organs that had occurred as a result of being first-generation Natural.^[2] They’d explained to him that bodies could get sick if the environment had more or less gravity than the body was expecting, and Yuan taken it very seriously. When he’d recovered enough to walk around in his new cage, he’d gone up to all the staff and asked them what heaviness their bodies needed, and told them whether they needed a cage or not to keep from getting sick. Everyone was charmed by it.

“And sometimes we take the cages off to loosen up,” added January. “What happens when we do that?”

“I can fly!” said Yuan, which was basically true. If he jumped while January boosted him with his hands, he could get up to ten feet in the air and tag the dance studio’s ceiling.

January smiled. “What else?”

“We can’t go near anyone else because we’re too strong if the cages aren’t being heavy for us,” said Yuan with the patience of a child who had memorized a rule long ago. “I know that. But I don’t want to take off the whole cage, I just want to hold hands like you do.”

“I know,” said January, starting to detach his own gauntlets, “but you have to remember that the gauntlets are a part of your cage, so even just taking off a part means that part is going to get really strong.” He set the gauntlets down next to him on the table and flexed his fingers for a moment, picking up a chopstick from the table very carefully and feeling the slight bend before setting it down. “See for yourself – can I help you take these off?”

Yuan nodded, and together they freed his hands.

“Okay,” said January. “Can you use your chopsticks to get that piece of carrot?”

Yuan picked up his chopsticks, and then his eyes went wide as they bent into little wobbly U-shapes under the pressure of his hand. He dropped them with a clatter. “Whoa,” he said, then he frowned. “But I was being careful!”

“I know,” January assured him. “But taking off any part of your cage is always going to throw you off a bit, so you have to be careful to reset your expectations every time.”

Yuan’s frown got a little deeper as he stared at the bent chopsticks. “I don’t – I don’t want to hurt Gale’s fingers.”

“That’s why you’re going to practice with January,” said Gale, and they offered their palm to January, who took it as carefully as he had years ago in the pool, and laced their fingers together. Yuan watched hungrily, with desire and fear warring on his little face, and January waited until desire won out and offered him his other hand.

“You can’t hurt me,” January said, and winked. “That’s why I’m good practice.”

Yuan reached up and took January’s hand like he was trying to hold a butterfly, and January felt a surge of tenderness in his heart that he didn’t quite know what to do with.

January considered the relative pressure coming from Yuan’s hand and Gale’s and then leaned a little closer to Yuan and said, “That’s a very good start. If we practice the rest of the week and do a couple extra exercises when we loosen up, I bet you can try holding hands at our next dinner.”

Yuan beamed, and Gale gave the small smile that was real and just for them, and January tugged the hands of the two people he loved best a little closer together and bumped their knuckles together in a carefully light touch.

Since Yuan hadn’t learned the periodic table yet – and in a rare show of alliance Dr. Okonkwo and January were both deliberately dragging their feet on teaching it to him – January had taken over a lot of the responsibility of looking after Yuan. All of the staff helped out at various points, of course, but January was the only who could properly supervise Yuan’s ‘loosening up’ time.^[3] As a result, January spent at least several hours a day with Yuan doing exercise, education, and enriching activities that Anansi had grudgingly recommended after Gale argued them into a standstill over time dilation in hypothetical faster-than-light travel.

January loved spending time with Yuan, even if he had a regularly scheduled panic roughly once every two months about doing it right,^[4] but Gale had talked him out of his most recent one just last week so he was all set to throw himself wholeheartedly into this newest project.

The next day, January walked Yuan to the dance studio after a lunch where Yuan had read a picture book on his tablet that was designed to help him memorize Mandarin characters and January had patiently co-written a speech with Mx. Francis for him to deliver that evening about the citizenship process.

January carried an apple and several tennis balls, as well as an empty balloon, and when they entered the dance studio he locked the door behind them.

January had carried Yuan’s key for him ever since he’d sat him down and explained what it meant, and Yuan had very solemnly given him his cage key. The next day, a #EarthstrongHonor t-shirt appeared in Yuan’s closet, and though nobody owned up to putting it there, Yuan had worn it all the time until the shoulders of his cage put holes in it.

January gave Yuan his key and unlocked his own, stepping out and rolling his shoulders a bit as he got used to the gravity adjustment. Yuan was still at the age where the odds were fifty-fifty on him overcompensating and falling over when he stepped out of his cage, so he was always careful to unlock on the dance mat to avoid scuffing his knees.

Yuan did fall forward today, but he didn’t get as flustered as he used to, and stayed for a moment on his hands and knees, pressing lightly into the ground to get a feel for the gravity before he carefully picked himself up. Together, January and Yuan walked around the room, and then they got the tennis balls and did the exercise January had learned in the factory, tossing them carefully from hand to hand and refamiliarizing themselves with the lightest pressure needed to throw and catch.

“Okay,” said January. “Do you want to start with the extra exercises for Gale?”

Yuan nodded eagerly.

“Hold your tennis ball out like you’re about to drop it on the floor,” January said, demonstrating. He kept the palm of his hand above the tennis ball, so the only thing keeping it from falling was the slight pressure of his fingers.

Yuan copied him. January dropped down to his knees to look at it. “See how the ball is starting to get squished around your fingers?” There were little ridges bulging out where Yuan was gripping it. Not hard enough to crush it, but hard enough to have a firm hold on it.

“Yes,” said Yuan, and then he loosened his grip so much he dropped it. January caught it.

“That’s okay,” said January. “The challenge is to see how lightly you can hold it without dropping it. Try again.”

This was an exercise that January did almost every morning, sitting in his cage and clothes when he was waiting for Gale to finish getting dressed – his hair, which had eventually decided to grow at a rate of about one inch every Martian year, took significantly less time to neaten than Gale’s. January did the exercise with apples, oranges, balled-up socks, the bath sponge, and any other random things he could find on hand. What could he say? He liked holding his spouse’s hand, and he felt better doing it when he’d prepared.

January sat with Yuan patiently as he alternated between holding the tennis ball and fetching it when it dropped, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he worked out how to fractionally loosen his grip without overcorrecting.

Eventually, Yuan said, “How’s that?” and January looked. There was no sign of pressure deformation on the tennis ball, and it rested safely in Yuan’s palm.

“That looks really good,” said January. “Hold it just like that while I poke it, okay?” He gave the tennis ball a gentle poke downward between Yuan’s fingers, and it slipped out of Yuan’s grasp. “That’s perfect,” he told him. “One of the big signs that you’re holding too tight is if they can’t pull away. So that amount of pressure, where you can hold on but they aren’t stuck is absolutely perfect.”

“Okay,” said Yuan, still looking at his hand with concentration.

“Commit how that feels to memory, and when you’re ready we’ll do something else and do this again in a little bit to practice getting that pressure again.”

For the next few hours, they inflated the balloon and played with tossing it between them, and passing the apple back and forth without making apple juice, and jumping around and doing reduced-gravity ballet, which was an art form January was quietly trying to develop. Every half hour, they paused whatever they were doing to hold the tennis ball gently, and by the end of the loosening-up time Yuan could hold the tennis ball safely in about two minutes.

“Great work today,” January said as they left the dance studio, tucking Yuan’s key into his pocket with one hand and ruffling Yuan’s hair with the other. “We’ll do that for the rest of the week, but you’re definitely on track to holding hands with Gale.”

“What?” said Sasha, who was often walking by at the end of loosening-up time. January was fairly certain they still harbored some concern that someday January or Yuan would forget to put the cages back on now that they were taking them off daily, but he couldn’t fault them for well-intentioned paranoia, and they did always look several shades of apologetic whenever he saw them. “Who’s holding hands?”

January stuck his tongue out at them over Yuan’s head, and then told Yuan that he could go help the gardeners who were weeding the enclosed gardens as long as he put on his gardening pants. Yuan ran off, and January explained the situation to Sasha.

Sasha was not pleased, and when Gale came back from the city that evening it took both Gale and January to argue down most of the senior staff about taking unnecessary risks.

Mx. Ren, after everyone had admitted grudging defeat to the combined power of January-and-Gale, capped off the meeting by projecting a video they’d taken earlier that day, of Yuan carefully pulling a flowering weed from an enclosed garden by pinching his caged fingers around the stem, and then carrying it to the section of the enclosed garden that was set aside for Yuan to do whatever he wanted and replanting it into the soil. Mx. Ren zoomed in on the weed once Yuan wandered away – the stem wasn’t broken, and neither were any of its leaves, and the little section of garden was full of thriving weeds that were usually yanked from any other part of the garden.

“Given that the Consul is rather more sturdy than a flower,” said Mx. Ren, “I think they’ll be perfectly safe with Yuan. If that’s all the kerfuffle for today, I’m going to call the house for dinner.”

After the full-house group dinner in which January encouraged Yuan to use his chopsticks without the gauntlets - Yuan only bent them a little, and January bent them back into shape before following Gale and Yuan to eavesdrop on that night’s story - January televised his speech, and Gale revised two bill proposals and video-messaged a senator before they finally went to bed.

Pulling up the covers, Gale said, in a tone that meant they’d been considering this for a while, “You seem to be taking this really seriously. Are six-year-olds really so strong? You were the one who told me that there’s not as much difference between an elderly Earthstronger and a resistance-trained soldier as we think.”

January rolled on his side to face Gale. “That’s right. Yuan without his cage is probably only as strong as an athletic fifteen-year-old here. If he squeezed your hand right now, I don’t think he’d break anything.”

Gale propped their head on their hand to listen, and January’s heart ached with the full force of River Gale’s attention on him. Sometimes he didn’t know what to do with all the things his heart felt. So he didn’t think about it.

“When I was little,” January said, “Like Yuan’s age, I was a really solid kid. My dad was six foot and played rugby with friends every week, and we could tell really early on I was going to grow up to be tall, too.” Gale raised an eyebrow, and January rolled his eyes and gently pushed at Gale’s chest. “Shut up, I’m tall for an Earthstronger. So I was just a dense little kid. Not fat, really, just a lot of muscle and mass because I was going to do a lot of growing and I spent a lot of time running around and climbing trees and stuff.”

January realized that his hand was still on Gale’s chest, and he started aimlessly tracing the patterns of Gale’s nightshirt, feeling the smooth fabric around the metal fingerpad of his cage.

“My grandma,” he said, “came to visit us about twice a year, and every time I saw her at the end of the lane I would sprint down and throw myself at her and grab onto her legs. It was funny. She always laughed, and told me how big I was getting, and then we’d walk back to the house together.”

January paused and bit his lip. “She had osteoporosis,” he said quickly. “There’s a genetic component, you know, and my mum had some hip trouble toward the end, so I’m probably going to get it eventually. Mars might help me avoid a serious injury, though. Less chance of hurting myself when I fall.”

“January,” said Gale, all sadness and caring and regret in that one word. They caught his hand and held it, and January shook his head fiercely, eyes stinging suddenly.

“Anyway, that’s- that’s not the point, I don’t mean to restart anything, it’s just- you have to know for the story, that she had osteoporosis.”

“Okay.”

“So when I’m eight, and I see her at the end of the lane, and it’s been six months since I’ve seen her, I do what I always do, right? I run at her full tilt, and I throw myself at her with everything I’ve got, but I’ve been getting stronger, right, and playing rugby with the kids at school, and this time, when I run into her, she falls down.”

January felt a cool fingertip run gently beneath his eye, and he realized he was crying. Gale didn’t say anything, just listened.

“Because – nobody had taught me to moderate my strength,” he said. “I was used to just putting my whole effort into things, but I didn’t realize that my whole effort was getting bigger and bigger. I mean, I’d noticed, kind of, that my mum would have to take a step back when she caught me and she didn’t used to, but my dad would still always win whenever we wrestled, so I didn’t- realize.” January shook his head. “I mean, it was still my fault, obviously, my mum had been telling me for years to be careful with her. It was just lucky that she only broke her wrist. She fell a few years later and broke her hip and she never really got better after that.”

“I see,” said Gale. “You’re not worried about six-year-old Yuan. You’re thinking about eight-year-old Yuan, and fifteen-year-old Yuan, and twenty-year-old Yuan.”

“Yeah,” croaked out January. “If he accidentally hurt you, later, I think it would destroy him. He loves you.”

Gale folded their arms around January and tugged him in to kiss his forehead. “You’re a good parent, January. He’s going to be fine.”

“I just want him to be- better than me,” said January wetly. “Oh, this is ridiculous. I’ve just had my cry about parenting, I should be done for a while.”

“It’s fine,” said Gale. “You can have another one. I won’t tell anyone.”

In the middle of the night, January woke up briefly when Gale’s prosthetic clicked into his cage as they crept back into bed. They were restless, sometimes, and January had gotten Dr. Molotov to install a switch in their bedroom that killed all internet and haptic connection just within the room. January slept without his glasses on, so he never really noticed one way or the other, but Gale had developed the habit of randomly flicking the switch.

Especially if they woke during the night.

“Good?” January murmured, reaching around for Gale’s arm without opening his eyes.

“Hăo.” Gale tucked the covers back around January, and January captured the covers and their arm with a contented sigh.

January was nearly back asleep when Gale said, “You told Yuan that you started ballet at eight.”

“Yeah.” January’s mind was slow and tired, but he knew that he’d told Yuan that years ago. Trust Gale to remember everything. “It taught me how to control my strength.”

Just before he fell asleep, January felt a kiss being pressed softly to the back of his neck.

One week later, January and Yuan took off their gauntlets for their private family dinner, and Yuan was wiggling with excited energy the whole time. January kept an eye on Yuan’s chopsticks, which remained unbent despite Yuan’s excitement, and at the end of the meal January cleared his throat and said, “Well, I am happy to announce that Yuan has graduated from the Official Handholding Academy. He did his exercises this afternoon beautifully, so he has my seal of approval.”

Yuan beamed and swung his legs.

“Good job,” said Gale. “Shall we?”

They offered their palm to Yuan, and Yuan reached out with his to press down like January had taught him. First he barely rested his hand on Gale’s and then, when Gale nodded, he pressed down as Gale pressed up until Gale said, “That’s good.”

They pressed their knuckles together next, Yuan concentrating, Gale smiling, and then Gale offered their palm again. Yuan very carefully took their hand and held it, and then smiled. “I thought the cage made you cold, but you’re just cold!”

Gale laughed. “Maybe little children are warm, hm?” They squeezed Yuan’s hand and his face was delighted. “You can squeeze me back,” they prompted.

Yuan shot a nervous look at January. “I’m doing the tennis ball pressure,” he said.

“That’s good,” said January. “That’s your usual pressure. But you can squeeze a little harder if you go slow – just stop when they tell you.”

 Yuan bit his lip and his fingers curled in a fraction.

“That’s very nice,” said Gale. “It’s like a hug.”

January tapped Gale’s knee before Yuan squeezed to his full strength, and Gale, who was starting to display mind-reading tendencies that would have been concerning if they didn’t go both ways, said, “I think that’s a good stopping place. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just a very firm hug.”

January smiled. In the coming years they’d have to help Yuan recalibrate his sense of how much pressure he could use, but they’d set a good baseline to have him not expect to use his full strength on Gale. “Good job, little bear,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

Yuan relaxed his grip and said, “Now you two hold hands so we’re all holding hands,” and January took Yuan’s little hand and Gale’s long-fingered one in his own.

“We’re a circle,” said January, looking at their family.

“We’re a planet,” said Gale.

“We’re House Gale,” said Yuan, and beamed.

That evening, when January went to lean against the doorframe and eavesdrop on Gale’s story, Yuan had his gauntlets off and one little hand tucked into Gale’s and his cheek pressed into Gale’s shoulder while Gale read.

Yuan’s eyes were two-thirds closed when Gale tugged their hand free of his and slipped off the bed to pull the covers close around him. Yuan murmured something sleepy that was probably “Good night,” and Gale crept over to January to flick off the light.

They walked into the hall together, heading back down to Gale’s office – it was a quiet evening, so no further press obligations or meetings, just meeting preparation for Gale and press release reading for January – and January noticed that Gale’s expression was glassy, as if they were somewhere else.

“What is it?” January asked, bumping Gale lightly with his shoulder.

Gale blinked. “He’s got little calluses. Or the start of them. The same places you do.”

January smiled. “From the pull-up bars, probably. He’s getting better at those.” He waited. There was something else going on here beyond calluses.

“It’s like Kali,” said Gale, who rarely spoke of them. “We didn’t have the same type of relationship like you and I do with Yuan, but I could still see pieces of Kali in- my sibling. And myself, sometimes. And now I’m seeing us in Yuan, and- I don’t know. It’s good. It really is, it’s just-”

“It’s different,” offered January. “It’s one thing to know it’s going to happen, and it’s another to actually see it.”

“Yes,” said Gale. “He’s you and he’s me and he’s his own person. He’s fascinating.”

Gale said ‘fascinating’ the way other people said ‘perfect’.

January pulled Gale into their office and kicked the door closed as he pulled Gale into his arms.

“Take this off,” said Gale after a moment, fumbling for the release on January’s cage. “I just spent half an hour holding our child’s hand, and now I want to hold my spouse.”

“Okay,” said January, sliding back enough to let Gale press the release. Gale surged into him before January could even move, and January took a deep breath to settle himself to the changes in pressure his body had become intimately familiar with, and raised his arms to hold Gale back.

Eventually, they did return to work, but Gale brought their tablet to the couch to write, and January swung his feet over their lap to read the latest press releases. Gale rested a hand on January’s knee whenever they weren’t typing, and after an hour January was warm and comfortable enough that blinking was happening alarmingly slowly.

A hand squeezed his knee. “Bed, I think,” said Gale.

“Are you coming too?” January fought his eyes open.

Gale looked down at their screen. “This is as written as it’s going to get today,” they decided. “Yes.”

Yawning, January stumbled over to his cage, and then blearily followed Gale down the hallway, up the elevator, and to their room at the end of the hall from Yuan’s. He barely remembered changing into sleep clothes, but he did remember Gale settling into bed facing him with shimmering eyes.

“Do you want a turn?” January offered. “I’m not claiming a monopoly on having a parenting wobble.”

Gale’s eyes crinkled closed when they huffed out a laugh, and a tear traced its way down their cheek. “It’s not bad,” they said. “It’s actually really good. I just can’t stop seeing it now, the way he’s you and me and something new. And I can’t stop having some very strong feelings about it.”

“What kind of feelings?” January got a little closer and captured one of Gale’s hands to hold against his heart.

“Pride. Joy. Wonder. Curiosity. Nervousness,” Gale breathed and opened their eyes. “Love.”

“Yeah,” said January. “Me too. You’re not alone, I promise. Now c’mere.” He pulled them close and ran his fingers through their hair, over and over again until their breathing evened out and their whole body relaxed as they slipped into sleep.

When Yuan had his first public appearance at age eight – the facial filters respectfully blurred to protect children’s anonymity as it was for everyone under the age of sixteen^[5] - he sat between Gale and January and answered a few questions about the new schooling initiatives for Earthstrong children in Tharsese schools and how he hoped to meet some new friends when they visited at the program’s launching ceremony.

His hands were bare, and he held Gale’s hand the whole time.

The closeup image of Consul Gale holding their Earthstrong child’s bare hand was on every newscaster’s screen by nightfall, and it was the newest addition to the abundance of social media edits that clipped together every time January and Gale had ever held hands on camera.

Gale’s popularity with the Earthstrong population went through the roof.

A few weeks later at the full-house dinner, Mx. Francis mentioned how much Gale’s polling scores had improved, particularly in the Earthstrong and young parent demographics. Yuan, who had been moving a fork through his dinner with all the studious focus of a brain surgeon attempting to remove a few stray peas, looked up and said, “Does that mean it worked?”

“What worked?” asked Mx. Francis.

“Holding Gale’s hand,” said Yuan. “January holds Gale’s hand to make sure everyone knows how much he likes them, and I wanted everyone to know that I really like them, too.”

Gale set their chopsticks down with a click.

“Yeah,” said Mx. Francis. “It worked a whole lot, kid. Everyone knows you’re a fan of Gale.” They made slightly alarmed eye contact with January over Yuan’s head.

January grinned and said, “That, little bear, is called ‘influencing the court of public opinion’. I foresee a stunning career in politics for you. You take after your parent.”

“Thank you, Yuan,” Gale said, in a voice that sounded calm and not at all like they’d just kicked their husband in the shin like a child, “I’m honored, and I like you quite a lot, too. But you don’t have to worry about what everyone else thinks just yet – that’ll come when you’re older and you start getting more responsibilities with House Gale. Right now your only responsibility is learning.”

“I know,” said Yuan with a shrug. “I wasn’t worried about it. I just thought it was important for everyone to know. They know you guys chose me. I want everyone to know that I chose you back.”

“Ah,” said Gale.

“Oh,” said January.

There was a sudden and alarming lump in January’s throat. A glance sideways told him Gale was suffering from something similar. Mx. Francis watched them both with a steely gleam in their eye for a moment, then pointedly began studying the virtual cascade of flowers on the opposite wall.

That evening, both January and Gale held hands with Yuan while Gale read a story, and when January and Gale got into their own bed, they shared a mutual moment of simultaneous loving delight and giddy terror as they contemplated their child.

“He’s got your flair for decisive political moves,” January said into Gale’s chest.

“He’s got your emotional acuity,” Gale said into January’s hair.

“But it’s alarming how well he can read us,” January said. “Did you teach him that? I didn’t teach him that.”

“No,” said Gale thoughtfully. “I think that’s all him. Did you know, Anansi actually likes him? He still mixes up the Lanthanoid series half the time, but he’s got them wrapped around his finger. I’ve caught them helping him break down compound characters of their own volition. Anansi hasn’t liked a Gale for years.^[6] I think it’s because he actually understands them.”

They both sat with that for a moment.

“Our kid is going to be a force to be reckoned with,” said January.

“Martian politics certainly aren’t ready,” agreed Gale.

This was true. Many years later, when Gale stepped down as leader of House Gale and let Yuan step up to lead their house into the future, Yuan hit the Martian political scene like a silver iodide dust storm.

While Gale mostly spent their retirement on mammoth research and language study while January taught kids’ ballet classes and looked after his chickens, they both set aside three afternoons a week to go sit in Gagarin Square with all the old people sitting in the sun with solar umbrellas^[7] and join in on the gossip about all the political drama Yuan was stirring up. There was always something new to discuss, and Gale cheerfully debated their child’s policies with anyone who was willing – half the time it was January.

Even amongst all his networking parties and legislation debates and Senate committees, Yuan still made time to have dinner with January and Gale once a week. Every time Yuan twisted off his gauntlets, and after they’d finished eating, they’d go settle onto a couch to keep talking, and Yuan would hold his parents’ hands.

1. This was the only time it was really practical for them to hold hands. Gale’s height made it frankly impossible to walk hand-in-hand with anyone under five feet. It was only fractionally less difficult for January to walk hand-in-hand with Yuan, so he just did it occasionally when he was particularly worried about Yuan getting excited and running off. The day that they’d taken Yuan to meet the mammoths had been fun, but by the end of the day January had pulled a muscle in his back.

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2. From what Gale and Dr. Okonkwo could figure, he’d gestated for most of the nine-month journey his mother had made on the Crossing, in as near Earth gravity as those ships could go. They’d never been able to find his mother, or any of the caretakers he’d mentioned beyond the deceased Mrs. Li, and guessed that he’d gone the first three years of his life without a cage. He’d mentioned, at one point, that heavy blankets were best in the cold, and Gale had speculated if the pressure of a blanket at night and the reduced Crossing gravity had kept him from suffering the worst of the effects of a slow, unintentional, unsupervised, and unmedicated naturalisation.

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3. They called it ‘loosening up’ time rather than ‘out of the cage time’ because January knew that the inevitable shortened nickname for ‘out of the cage’ was going to be ‘cage-free’ and as much as he’d once wanted to have a pedigree house chicken, he did not want to go about referring to Yuan as if he was one.

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4. This was probably related to his father. January didn’t feel the need to examine it any more closely.

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5. Several studies had agreed that childhood fame and being instantly recognizable in public before the age of ten generally had terrible effects on a person’s sense of self, mental health, and overall well-being, so the children of Great Houses only appeared in public after they got their first haptics – usually between eight and fourteen – and infrequently until they revealed their faces at sixteen.

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6. The last Gale that Anansi liked had been River’s great-great-great grandparent’s Artemis, and only then because they patched a nasty virus that was going around and updated Anansi’s emoting library with a whole host of microexpressions.

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7. Those unable to work now benefitted from aid programs, and no longer had to fight for a sunbeam with a solar umbrella to eke out a scraping of power to live on. Aid programs had not reduced the need of the elderly to gossip, however, and so there was a regularly rotating crew of wizened old Earthstrongers and Naturals who went to Gagarin Square to complain about people who drove their cars too fast and to show off photos of their grandchildren. January and Gale participated in both activities with aplomb.

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