“What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and he finally got me calmed down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took awhile, but finally I was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccuping occasionally.

“I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”

“No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.”

He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said, “All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”

Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the Fourth Level — it was on the Fifth.

The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical — Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration. Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals and weeds — it’s where they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to being human.

I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking — not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment longer.