"- Tapa infanticides uncredited babies."

"The whole time I was growing up I repeated this as 'we moved because Tapa was too expensive'," shudders Katin. "It was real fucking alarming when I got into an Internet argument about population control and, yep, fun fact..."

"And I thought I could pull the money together so I didn't have an abortion but it wound up tighter than expected so I joined the army but it wasn't certain that the war would last long enough to cover it, and nobody else in the neighborhood was looking to spend that much on a partial share of a baby, especially once it got to be summer - aftermarket credits are so steep -"

Shiver.

"Is that the law as Aitim means to enforce it here? Taking babies from rape victims and sterilizing them for - for what, not having a knife on them -"

"Oh wow I cannot begin to describe how much it would not have helped anything if I had stabbed orange boy," says Peka.

"Anitam puts perpetrators' assets towards credits. And there's charities for it," says Ana.

"There are charities for it in Tapa too, just, we were red," says Katin.

"Do you want me to kill him," says Michael, "I wouldn't mind at all."

"Why would it matter to the charities if you were red?"

"I do not especially want it," says Peka. "There was like, any charity that made it to reds, but it wasn't well funded in the first place and it got embezzled a lot because who's going to check and it was for things like medicine, the only stuff that's free is the public health stuff, vaccines for anything contagious in case we sneezed at work. An abortion would've been free. So would've birth control if he'd warned me."

" - so you were just, like, not allowed to apply for normal charity? Because of the cleanliness thing - but that hasn't got anything to do with the cleanliness thing -"

"Oh, if I'd gone to one of the websites for it it wouldn't have said 'no reds', just, they would've laughed at me as soon as they realized."

" - why?"

"'Cause I was red and the charities were for people."

"...uh..."

"There wasn't any stuff for us. Somebody would have had to put it there. Nobody felt like it and nothing happened if they didn't, except to reds, and who cares, right, so."

"I think maybe the Amentans we've talked to have downplayed this thing. What the actual fuck."

"There's a statue of Isel in Miolee," says Peka.

"Whatever for?"

"She did a lot of stuff. She helped. They've got statues of important ex-reds like the first batch of three, and Shasali, and some Mioleens too, and probably there's some born-clean people from other countries I don't know about because when I was there I wasn't mostly taking in museums, but she was really important. More publicly than Telkam or Aitim."

"Aitim's great," says Tiko again.

" - I mean, it sounds like the standard was pretty low, and yet he did not merit statuary."

"He wasn't doing anything public facing," says Peka. "It's sort of a reputation killer. Isel didn't want a political career."

"Okay. So he got everyone agreed that you weren't, actually, unclean, which didn't fix the thing where they think being unclean would justify - any of that - but I guess solved the immediate problem - what did Shasali get a statue for -"

"...people didn't agree we weren't unclean they agreed it was possible to clean us," Peka says.

"Shasali was the first ex-red blue," says Katin. "Most countries didn't allow ex-reds to choose blue at all, or keep the land the neighborhoods were on, or anything, but she went blue, and managed to not seem fake blue or snap under stress or anything, and that mattered."

"Huh.

She's the one who's been ordering the executions in Britain."

"She's a judge," says Peka. "She was red for eleven Amentan years and she's a judge."

"And that's a big deal."

"Yes."