The form of the sabotage was having reds touch the food as a statement about it being fine if reds touch things.

Ugh, fuck all caste systems. 

...

She looks up slavery. 

Slavery has been abolished the world over, barring comparisons to Yvaltan contracts.

How long ago, what group or groups, is there lingering inequity. 

Typically prisoners of war, mostly purple but sometimes grey or other castes. Slaves were usually not allowed to have children, which whatever its other consequences didn't leave them with much multigenerational damage. The last country to abolish slavery was Spen in 3395 (it's currently 3423), and at the time Spen had literally four slaves alive, all of whom moved to Shi Alassei.

...Hrm. Well, that is in fact sort of the opposite problem her ancestors had, yeah.

Any human--Amentan--trafficking problems? 

Immigration is so rigidly controlled that getting cheap labor over a border is virtually never worth it, though she can turn up one story from four years ago about some oranges smuggled into the Maniten Republic where they provided black market medical care (locally out of caste, too, Maniten doctors are green!) for people who didn't want their heritable conditions to be reported to the eugenics board. They do have the occasional issue with fraudulent adoptions; people will pay through the nose for a baby if they can't have one of their own and the demand is not met by babies taken from population-control-flouting parents.

Sooooo no then. Wow, and she thought the border patrols in her country were bad. 

...Eugenics board? 

Most places have them. Even Voa has one. There are things that will make your credit more expensive (in credit countries) or get you blacklisted outright. There are also incentives for using donor gametes with socially desirable traits like mild springs.

Ah huh. 

Mild springs? 

Amentans are only fertile in the springtime, unless they move somewhere without seasons and their hormone systems panic and assume that they might need to be able to reproduce at any moment. (This is unpopular.) Springing makes them hornier (not a big deal, mostly) and baby-crazier (a huge driver of their otherwise large but not quite so crushing drive to have unreasonable numbers of children). There is much hand-wringing over how to select for mild springs to better the future of the species when this has the perverse effect of supplying children to those who want them least.

Huh!

Okay, she tentatively approves of the mild-springs charity. She's still not happy about eugenics boards, though. 

She keeps an eye on the time until the appointment. 

Kamuor has collected her bag and is ready to usher Rhonda out the door as soon as she looks up from her everything!

Cool. Rhonda allows herself to be ushered. 

They go on the subway. There's a nicer car in front; they use that one. They go two stops and go up and take an elevator up and check in with a security desk and then continue more up.

Rhonda and McElroy look perfectly serene and do not gawk at all. 

Still, Rhonda has to appreciate the sheer height of the skyline. 

It's super tall!

They go to the fortieth floor and get off the elevator and go in to Kamuor's great aunt's office. Said great aunt says, "Close the door." Kamuor does so.

"This is my aunt Delin Yanusho," says Kamuor. "Auntie, these are Rhonda Wallace and James McElroy."

"And you're under the impression they're aliens," says Delin.

She turns her hair black again and replaces her clothes with an array of chitin plates that cover all the relevant areas for a moment before swapping back to her Earth-style clothes. 

"- ah. Is that what you normally look like?"

"Yep," she says. "I'm as surprised that we seem to be mutually low-budget as you are." 

"How did you come to Amenta?"

"I'm familiar with--two other kinds of aliens, who give humans powers in an attempt to wage war by proxy. I was dealing with someone who was using his powers to hurt people, when it turned out one of his followers also had powers and sent me here." 

"I see. So it isn't reproducible."

"Not as such, but my own power is nothing to sneeze at either. Anything under my dominion, I can change nigh-arbitrarily. A building I own, I can create pocket dimensions inside; a person who swears fealty to me, I can physically alter them--make them younger, cure incurable illnesses. If I have sex with someone sworn to me, they get a magic tattoo and powers of their own. I don't know why it works like that, and the powers tend to be lesser in magnitude than the powers the aliens give out, but..."

"Lesser in magnitude like...?"