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“The culpeo,” Nana says, “is a fox who lives in the mountains close by, but no dogs or foxes or wolves can live on the salt plains.” She is smiling at Alain, comforting him with this confirmation that the salt plains are unlikely to shelter wild dogs. Alain is Chance's best friend and was bitten by a dog last year. He has a scar on his left hand, between his fingers.

Chance and Alain have talked about joining when they get old enough and then living together forever. Nana says good friends make good joins. But when he's fifteen, Alain will move away, and he and Chance will lose touch.

Chance watches his shadow and raises a leg up to his side. His shadow moves as if it's a giant. He stomps his yellow Soxters down onto the salt and then grinds them to make the crunching louder. “Arh! Arh! Arh!” he says. His shadow is enormous and manic. Alain is laughing at it.

Nana says, “Chance has a giant!” And here memory works its magic. Chance's name at this time was Javier. Nana's actual words, if she did say something like this, had to have been “Javier has a giant!” But Javier has joined with Chance, so Javier is Chance. Chance's memory readjusts the name.

There's delight in Nana's voice. Chance is as big and confident as his shadow. “Arh! Arh! Arh!” he yells, and raises his fists from his sides. His shadow becomes a cleanly etched, tall, and thin giant throwing a tantrum on the flat ground. Other children have noticed and are pointing. Some are laughing, and a couple are imitating him, making their own madly dancing giants. Chance loves the crisp air against his cheek, the smell of salt, and the laughter of the other children.

“Chance, look at me!” someone calls, but he's busy now rocking side to side and making his long shadow tip swiftly back and forth. He moves his arms so the shadow has long snaky arms. “Chance, look at me!” Someone else calls. Then other kids are calling, “Chance!” “Chance!” But he keeps imagining his shadow getting bigger and bigger.

A few kids are pulling and pushing on his shoulders, and their shadows merge with his. Others notice and start to merge their shadows with his on purpose, and suddenly there's a long shadow mass quivering at the edges, and kids are pushing and laughing and everyone's calling his name, “Chance!” “Chance!”

On the ride back to the mining base, Nana sits next to him. She smells clean, and he scooches over on the bus seat to be closer to her parka. He leans against her, and she puts her arm over his shoulder and smiles down at him. All the Nanas are kind and always smiling, but he likes this one best because of her face. One of the other kids from a couple of seats back says, “Chance, I liked your giant.” Chance is proud. He made something special that the other children remember. He grins and pushes his face into Nana's parka.

Another Nana is walking down the aisle of the bus making sure everyone is belted in. Another is driving. Another is sitting in the back of the bus playing patty-cake with a girl named Lucita, whom everyone likes. The seven Nanas are all the same person. They care for all the children of the other joins who live on the mining base.

When they first met, Javier
was impressed by Chance's design—the complementary skills of Chance's four drives. Chance One was a researcher, with specialties in risk analysis and macro-weather modeling. With the advent of megastorms and sudden storms, weather modeling became a prestige profession, responsible for saving lives and guiding economic activity. Chance had a reputation for being very good at it.

As an airline pilot, Chance Two was in another profession whose status was rising as the weather worsened. Even with the aid of advanced AI, Chance's specialty was viewed as critical infrastructure—a challenging and highly technical career.

But the clincher was Chance Three, an actual join doctor. Short of a Vitalcorp executive, a join doctor was the single most useful profession to take on.

Chance Four, short and sinewy, with long dark hair, was handy, mechanical, and martial—a valuable balancing influence. She was also good looking. He didn't want his attraction to her to influence his decision, but it was hard to discount.

As Chance, Javier would gain all of those professions. If he chose one of them for Chance Five, he'd start with years of practice and expertise. Or he could add something new to the join.

And Chance's attention flattered Javier. Five is regarded as a significant number for a join, because it's the next step after the so-called middle-class join. Joins often start with a solo couple in love, a “honeymoon join.” As the drives age and the join becomes more comfortable financially, it begins to worry about losing a drive. Because young solos can be wary of joining with mature drives, the next step often combines two honeymoon joins, an older and a younger. The younger join gains financial stability; the older adds an increment to its life span.

Licensing fees increase with each active drive. The fees get so high that going from two to four can mean several years of paying down a large loan. The term “middle-class join” is meant to recall paying on a mortgage. When a join finally can go from four to five, choosing the fifth is considered its first truly free decision. Chance's choice of Javier as number five validated years of hard work.

After Javier had joined, Chance felt the experience of each of the five drives, including the new one, with equal intimacy. It would have been strange to keep the name Javier, a name that fit only one life's experience. The joined individual preferred to be called Chance.

Chance owns the fourth and
fifth floors of a spire at the edge of the Pine, a two-square-mile park in the center of New Denver. Chance's spire is one of several in a large community. The spires are widely spaced, and the land between is filled by “greensward,” unmanicured brush crisscrossed by narrow footpaths. Rare surface roads slice through the greensward like unwelcome discipline.

Elliptical at its base, with slightly wider lower levels tapering asymmetrically toward narrow heights, Chance's spire looks almost like an enormous blade of grass. Planted balconies that include a pod-docking space skirt most of its levels.

The front of Chance's dining room is a curved picture window, with a view of the park's forest canopy. The rear of the room transitions to an open kitchen. Light mellowed by high clouds soaks into the browns and mottled grays, filling the room with a composed and casual warmth.

After his night in the bar, Chance Three has had four hours of fretful sleep, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of tomato juice. He is now in the shower.

Chance One and Chance Four are fixing breakfast in the kitchen, their two bodies moving with an efficient and complementary calm, a choreography of shared intention. Of Chance's drives, One and Four have the most disparate histories.

Chance One is forty years old and a hair under six feet tall. His parents were Reform Individualists, committed to life as solos. As a teen, Chance One was sensitive to how unusual that made them within their social circle.

Chance One came to believe that his parents' determined intellectual independence was linked to the fact that they were a black couple in professional settings where they were considered minorities. When he felt his own life being pressured by that aspect of his identity, he cast about for alternatives. At the time, he was also in love with Chance Two. Joining preserved his identity and gave him others.

Chance knows those parents struggled with feelings of abandonment when he joined, though they never said as much. Chance wishes they had been more accepting of life's potential.

Chance Four, on the other hand, was always expected to join. She was a child of the erroneously named and mostly abandoned “cloning” movement. She's not a true clone but rather the result of an early, successful attempt at human genetic engineering. Her genes were contributed by more than two people.

Physically, she's the healthiest of all of Chance's drives, with seemingly inexhaustible energy, flawless brown skin, and long, straight black hair. Her agility and swift reflexes have earned Chance a string of Jai Kido championships in her weight class.

She's also a carpenter, crafting modern, custom furniture from heirloom materials. A recent issue of
InSpire Sense, A Magazine of Modern Living
, featured an extended holographic exploration of her work.

After his shower, Chance Three
walks behind Four and massages her sore shoulder for a few moments. The sex between Three and Four this morning evoked memories of their year together as Solace, a join of two. Then they tweaked Four's shoulder, reinflaming a minor sparring injury.

Chance Three is wearing gray slacks and a thin green sweater, though the day is warm and the house is comfortable. He runs a little colder than the other drives. He also smells a bit musty to the others, but when he's alone Chance can't detect his body odor. He's warm from his shower and lightheaded.

He'll go to the morning meeting with Rope. It might have made sense for Four to go, but Rope has probably looked Chance up online. Chance doesn't want to risk an implied insult by arriving with a drive Rope hasn't met. Chance Four will stay close and do whatever research is needed. If Rope does actually get unpleasant, she can help save the day.

While Chance Three digs into breakfast, Chance focuses attention on One and Four. One and Four both have great mouths with complementary taste maps. They're eating eggs with avocado and Sriracha (spicy food tastes better to the two of them than it does to the others), along with fried bread and dark-chocolate chia-seed butter. Chance likes to synchro-eat with them, chewing and swallowing in tandem.

Chance Five is out walking in the Pine, after which he'll return to sleep. Because of the cancer, Chance has suspended his studies at the university and is keeping Five to a very minimal routine: meals, walking, sleeping, exercise, some socializing at the Spares Club—mostly pool and cards.

Despite the stress from Five's diagnosis, the morning has started in one of those floating periods of satisfaction and easy tranquillity. All of Chance's drives are smiling—even Two, who's in flight with Leap. It's nice to look around the dining room and see smiling faces.

The path Five is following skirts a gully. A jogger, also smiling serenely at some internal prompting, runs by, and Five notices her long legs in black spandex. Chance Five and Chance Three are both a little aroused. On the airplane, those sensations prompt Chance Two to tell Leap how beautiful the park is this morning. Leap flicks an index finger through the air (Chance imagines her advancing a diodrama on her retinal screen) and says, “Mind on your job, cowboy.” Leap is also happy this morning.

Without distracting Chance Two, Chance moves the left index finger of every other drive onto the same drive's right radial vein. Five's pulse won't sync because he's walking, but Chance still feels the profound percussive echo inside Five's body as the other three hearts start to synchronize their beats. The combined rhythm of the others highlights Five's pulse, making it easier to hear against the sounds of the morning walk—the slow breeze through aspen and pine, the crunch of Five's feet on gravel, the crinkling of his windbreaker, the ringing of a birdcall.