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mouth feels immediately dry.
    This is not natural, Gwennie thinks.
    The Halycon Balcony is, to her mind, no mere balcony. The entire thing is textured glass, and it extends out toward the sunset and horizon on every side. Beneath her is the Heartland, miles below her feet, the retreating sun smearing the land in liquid fire and pooling shadow. And all around her is the other thing that’s not natural: the people .
    Gwennie’s used to the Harvest Home Festival—a hundred people on the street of Boxelder, getting more ornery as the night tumbles forward. Folks laughing and singing. Drinking bottles of fixy or bowls of chicha beer. Some folks fight. Newly Obligated fondle and explore each other. By the end of the night, with the Obligations and all, somebody ends up crying. But thepeople of Boxelder, well, Gwennie knows them. She knows them not just intellectually but emotionally, because she is them.
    And these people are all strangers to her. Strangers in so many ways.
    This single event is already bigger than Harvest Home by a magnitude of ten. People as far as the eye can see. That word she used earlier, ostentatious ? Saying these people looked “ostentatious” is like calling a piss-blizzard a “little dust storm.” At a quick glimpse she sees men walking around in suits made from ribbons of reflective metal, tuxedos of raven feathers, hats that somehow hover just above their heads. Women wear suits and dresses that to her seem utterly absurd: feathers and flashing lights, translucent panels that swirl with blooms of color, see-through dresses of metallic lace or plastic beads or fabric made to look like a series of delicate hands covering inappropriate spots. Some ladies waltz around in not much more than underclothing—clothing far skimpier than Gwennie’s own bra and bloomers. Heat rises to her cheeks.
    Seeing all these people makes Gwennie even dizzier. In fact she suddenly wishes the whole balcony would crack like an old barn board and drop her through. Anything to get away.
    Balastair spins her around and looks her in the eye. He raises his voice so he can be heard above the dull roar of the crowd. “We will now begin the social circuit. You and I will walk the party, and we will stop and see those you need to see, and the circuit will culminate in a visit with the Grand Architect of the flotilla, Stirling Ormond. Do you understand?”
    “I want to go home,” she says.
    He’s about to say something else—not a rebuke, it seems, bythe soft, even sympathetic, look on his face (that says to Gwennie he doesn’t want to be here, either)—but he doesn’t get the chance to speak.
    Hands grab Gwennie’s shoulders and whirl her around.
    “Let me look at you!”
    There, a beautiful woman—elegant, almost as if sculpted out of stone, skin like milk, hair like spun gold, and a dress of such grave immodesty that Gwennie feels her eyes bug out of her head. The dress is entirely see-through—a plastic dress whose only obfuscating feature appears to be that water is running down over every inch of it. And yet it doesn’t spill and pool beneath her. It reveals everything: the roundness of the breasts, the dark shadows of her nipples, and the triangle between her legs, all of it blurred just slightly by the cascading water. Gwennie knows she’s gawking.
    “The dress!” the woman says. “Yes, yes, do you believe it? I went off-flotilla for this one. You know the designer? Arnaud Spark? You know he has a yacht, right? He never moors at a dock! Such independence.”
    “Ahhhh” is all Gwennie can say.
    Suddenly Harrington darts in—and the woman gives him a dire stare. Gwennie sees Balastair almost shrink in deference. Not physically, but . . . something about him crumples inward.
    “Gwendolyn, this is the praetor’s wife, Annalise Garriott.”
    The praetor. The administrator of the entire flotilla. Ashland—wasn’t that the name she’s heard time and again? The woman confirms this quickly: “Ashland is