“Sleep well,” Marguerite whispered.

Tess curled into her comforter and arched her head against the pillow.

Marguerite closed the door. She crossed the hall to her office — a converted third bedroom — determined to get a little more work done before midnight. Each of her department heads had flagged video segments for her to review from the last twenty-four hours with the Subject. Marguerite dimmed the lights and queued the reports to her wall screen.

Physiology and Signalling was still obsessed with the Subject’s lung louvers. “Possible Louver Gesturing in Social Interaction,” the subhead proclaimed. There was a clip of the Subject in a food well conclave. Subject stood in the dim green light of the food well in apparent interaction with another individual. The Subject’s ventral louvers, pale whitish slits on each side of his thoracic chamber, quavered with each inhalation. That was standard, and Marguerite wasn’t sure what the Physiology people wanted her to notice until new text scrolled up. The louver frills palpate in a distinct vertical pattern of some complexity during social behavior. Ah. Yes, there it was in an enlarged subscreen. The louver frills were tiny pink hairs, barely visible, but yes, they were moving like a wheat field in the wind. For comparison there was an inset of Subject breathing in a non-social environment. The louver frills flexed inward with each breath but the vertical quaver was absent.

Potentially very interesting, Marguerite thought. She flagged the report with a priority notice, which meant Physiology and Signalling could send it up to the compilers for further analysis. She added some notes and queries of her own (Consistency? Other contexts?) and bumped it back to Hubble Plaza.