"Yeah," Seph said, a little embarassed — he'd completely forgotten about the pile — he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, and then suddenly burst out, "Wait! How can I get rid of it?"

"How can you...?"

"Yeah! How do I — you know — dispose of it —"

"Do...you not even know —" She cut herself off, and then looked at the pile of trash again, and then skimmed the apartment; then walked, clup clup clup, and hooked her thumb on a rather incongruous handle in the wall.

"In here," she said. "Just dump it all in here."

"In...there?" He had fiddled with that handle before, and found nothing but a sort of compartment, the size of a fireplace, if it were vertical.

"Yes. See how it glows?"

"No," he said, and she grimaced.

"Well, you can't tell so much because of the light, but it glows." She went back and retrieved a thin, cracked clay plate from the trash pile and then tossed it into the compartment. There was a faint whistling noise; the plate vanished in a flash of purple.

"It's lined with diluted opalite," Boula explained. "That takes trash to one of the middens, where it's dissembled, remade, or devoured."

"Of course," Seph muttered.

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