“When Mr Nadkal had, in fact, just offered Reet the thing he had always wished for and always known he could never have: a history. An identity that was part of something else, not just Reet, solitary.”

Reet has never felt a strong sense of Familial Belonging. Even though he has three loving parents, he feels that Mr. Nadkal is giving him access to a new kind of community that he has never before been able to access. It is because this feeling is so intense that Reet is willing to ignore political and logical red flags in Mr. Nadkal’s story.

“The first Middle I saw opened up was an unpopular, inoffensive creature whose only crime, I thought, was being weak. Now I suspect their real crime was being not sufficiently zealously protected by those Adults who’d cared for us when we were Tinies and Littles and Smalls.”

The casual violence that Qven refers to is standard in eir life as a Presger Translator juvenile. Although Qven does not yet understand this, e belongs to a prestigious clade, which gives em a kind of Familial Belonging that guards and protects em as e grows up. Presger Translator upbringings are difficult for humans to understand.

“You know, your genes aren’t your destiny. You in particular. You have what you have, whatever you were born with, but you get to decide what to do with that. There’s nobody telling you what those genes mean, what they’re supposed to make you.”

Istver’s words connect to the theme of Self-Determination and Personhood. Much of the book involves characters grappling with what it means to be a person and what it means to belong to a group. Istver’s argument foreshadows Reet’s later assertion that he is human by culture and by belonging if not by genetics.