Their hands locked, the sisters spun slowly around each other, their residual momentum expressing itself as a slow orbit. Complex starlight played on Drea’s smiling face, but her eyes were masked by the multiple membranes that slid protectively over their moist surfaces. Alia savored the moment. When they were younger the sisters had been the most important people on the Nord for each other. But Alia was growing up. This was a cusp of her life, a time of change — and the thought that there might not be too many more moments like this made this all the sweeter.

But Alia was distracted by a gentle voice, a whisper in her ear.

Her mother was calling her. Come home. You have a visitor…

A visitor? Alia frowned. Who would visit her that could be important enough for her mother to call? None of her friends; any of them could wait. But there had been a gravity about her mother’s tone. Something had changed, Alia thought, even as she had danced through the Nord. Drea clung to Alia’s hands. Alia felt a surge of love for this sister, companion of her childhood. But Drea’s expression was complex, concerned. She knew something, Alia realized. There was suddenly a subtle barrier between them.

They swam toward each other, and they Skimmed one last time.

Like a clash of cymbals their bodies overlapped, the atoms and electrons, fields and quantum blurrings overlapping. Of course this merging was frowned on; it was a dangerous stunt. But for Alia it was delicious to be immersed in her sister’s essence, to become heavy with her, everything about the two of them merged into a single cloudy mass, everything but some relic trace of separateness in their souls. It was closer even than sex.

But it lasted only a second. With a gasp they Skimmed apart, and drifted side by side. And with that moment of oceanic closeness over, Alia’s niggling worry returned.