Motif · Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

Race and class

The third-floor choice that can never be unmade. Donut stays a cat and tricks Mordecai into being her manager by picking Former Child Actor; Carl turns down Hobgoblin and Sasquatch for Primal — a blank slate with every skill unlockable to 20 — and Compensated Anarchist. Eighty per cent of crawlers stay human.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — The Ghosts of Earth
• Chapter 19 — What's in the box
• Chapter 46 — The Reminiscence Hydra
• Chapter 48 — Mass Layoffs
• Chapter 51 — Residuals
• Chapter 52 — Two of five
• Epilogue — Homecoming Queen

Progression

Donut's Character Actor skill is powerful now (ch. 1); a Havana brown's Toxoplasma (ch. 16); Carl cannot be the daddy because he is a primal, nor Bautista because he is a Thundercat (ch. 19); charisma no longer buys rations (ch. 20); a skin skellie, and an Ifrit (ch. 23, ch. 52). The word primal runs through the floor in its other sense: the mantises' belief that a primal engine runs the centre system (ch. 46), Orren's Primal Engines and the Macro AIs installed in them (ch. 48), Paulie's kind, who wait for the AI to go primal (ch. 51), and the AI going primal, which must wait (ch. 52).