"He doesn't know. I didn't actually realize Peka knew - I smuggled you out of Olvala because you needed a hospital very badly. The paintings were your mom's, and everything, but she was red."

"Makel told me but it was kind of obvious from the timing."

"I - but -" says Ladah.

"Sorry, if I'd gotten a heads-up I'd have explained in private. You're fine, and all the paperwork is airtight, even if someone were looking very closely they'd never learn, so I wasn't afraid for you. But now that it's super convenient it's good you can have the choice if you want."

"What about my grandfather -"

"He's really your grandfather. Went through decontamination. Your mother really died giving birth to you - your grandmother really did die the same day in the violence over the expulsion of reds from Olvala, just -"

"Oh," says Ladah softly.

Hug.

"Can you explain it real carefully for Ana -"

"Am I gonna turn into a birdy," says Ana.

"- no we're doing something else. We're going to make it so we don't have to - wash your hair so much."

"You can't acquire yourself by touching your own arm, it's not configured for that, I think Cene's planning a blood sample. If she wants it white she needs someone with white to acquire - if she wants green then same thing -"

"I did not plan ahead for that part. - There's also my sister but she didn't come today she doesn't usually come to these sort of things."

"Well, if she can manufacture an excuse to drop by that'd be great. I can give you morph now and you can do the rest at home with no time pressure and no chance the soldiers will bother us - they don't frequently or anything but they haven't tried to leave the impression they never would -"

Nod. "How does it work exactly?"

"It's a very intuitive interface. Touch someone and concentrate and they'll get a bit drowsy for a few minutes and then you can morph them by concentrating on it for a few minutes. It looks weird - less so if you're shifting among Amentan forms - but it's painless. Andalites can do three, maybe four a day before we get exhausted but the Cene Amentans who got it reported being able to do ten or so before the exhaustion caught up with them. Stay in a form longer than two hours and you're stuck. If you do animals you'll get very strong instincts off them, to avoid predators or to eat bugs or to defend your territory or whatever. To do a combination of forms just collect lots of samples of the right species and then focus on the morphological features you want the blend to have. Cene is dipping people in ink to make sure they fully morph but that's not actually necessary."

"So to fix our hair we can't actually keep it," Peka sighs.

"I mean, you could keep having morph and then if you're ever in an emergency situation where it is important to be able to demonstrate you got it fixed stick then, but I take it this is a horrible violation of the taboo on living a normal life while being descended from sanitation workers."

"I mean - will our dye stick -"

"If you morph with dyed hair it'll be the same color when you demorph, for the same reason you'll have the same haircut. It doesn't just go off genetic material or it would be fairly useless for impersonation, which was the original military use."

"My hair grows in purple," says Ladah, "I'm not sure what good having secretly done this does - I guess when I want kids, but I'd have to be fixing stuff I can't see or check -"

"It does alter DNA but I wouldn't know how to check if it altered it in a way that makes you unable to have red-haired kids."

"I mean I could get a test but then there'd be a record trail."

"This taboo sounds really very silly."

"My hair's naturally like this too," says Katin, "my birth father's some orange guy."

"If you'd like you could wait to settle on a form until there's information out of Cene about whether babies are being born with red hair."

"...yeah. Even Ana, maybe," says Katin, "since once she's stuck she can't fix it, right?"

"That's correct. And if you get morph now future experimentation won't require arranging to be alone with me."