"Yeah, not that. But - if there's something that's a bigger deal, or isn't just us. Or when other people are thinking about what they can get away with."

"What is it you want people thinking about what they can get away with?"

"That the chance that anyone involved in responding to violence against cousins might think of us as people isn’t zero."

"I guess even if they give you a hyperspecialist desk job having you on the payroll at all does that, doesn't it."

"Yeah! And I guess the other thing I’m worried about with this plan is - I don’t think there’s anything else I could do that would matter as much, I don’t think I can invent a way for people to season on Katme or become governor but - I'm not sure there isn’t something I'm overlooking?"

"Money's - all the same once it gets where it's going, but it's still important. You'd be in an early batch, since you're sane and healthy and haven't got much of a family, so it'll matter if you can put cash back into the cleaning program."

He smiles lopsidedly. "If you can call me and my plans sane. I - guess I could work rotations but Voa has too many purples as it is, I could try programming just because it’s so recoverable if I suck but I do think I suck at it - if I were trying to maximize how much money I eventually make there are a lot of good orange jobs but mostly ones that require a lot of education and I'm not sure how much more it’s worth to be faster."

"I don't know either. I think it's too complicated for anybody to be sure, really. What would you do orange?"

"I don't know but it's the too-many-options kind of not knowing, maybe I'd be a paramedic or a medical lab tech or an occupational therapist or - I think 'social worker' is actually a euphemism when it's referring to, uh, anyone we've ever met and the thing it is when it's not a euphemism might be nice - and it doesn't seem completely absurd to imagine teaching math to purple three year olds or something. And if there are that many options that I was able to figure out with Citrus and a couple days of thought then there are probably others."

"Kind of sounds like you should be orange."

"Wouldn't be a bad fit or anything, there's just a lot of lead time."

"You could probably do some of it while you were in decontam. And it's not like having a - if you're not going to be stealth, I mean, either way, it's not like having a cousin social worker or a cousin schoolteacher is much less symbolically powerful than a cousin cop, just differently."

"Seems like there must be someone doing that already."

"Probably. Yeah."

"It seems like there'd be a bigger difference between one and zero than one and two but I don't really know. - I guess also if I went orange and realized I'd made a terrible mistake I'd have an easier time swapping into Miolee and then probably going grey from Miolee wouldn't be hard."

"Oh, yeah, that'll be pretty easy, somebody's going to go into porn and get a nasty case of stalker or something."

"I don't know that it's - helpful? Grey is the high-variance option that makes me want a backup plan, and the worst that seems likely to happen with orange is I sink some time and money into education that doesn't actually let me get a job and that's not something I can fix by switching castes again."

"That's true."

Sigh. "Anyway. Thanks. I think you’ve helped."

"Anytime, Val."

He grins. "I’d offer you the same but I bet your plans are sensible."

"Oh, no, I'm going to take this one with me," he pats his kiddo where she's sleeping on his back sighing into his shoulder, "and we are going to be positively ridiculous pretending that six different cartoons have collided for no reason at least until her mama's home."

Slightly melty smile. "See? I have no constructive criticism of that plan at all."

And off goes Gazari and kid.

And - he does some back-of-the-envelope math about the likely rate of decontamination and orange salaries and so on, to try to come up with a list of orange jobs that seem interesting and would let him actually help fund the project before it's probably all done with anyway.

And then he spends an unreasonably long time composing an email to the one police department he found that was openly open to hiring ex-reds, asking about their vision for the program. It needs to sound polite; it also needs not to use any turns of phrase clean people don't use.