Mother and Haddamander walked to the center of the room. Mother held up a paper. “Here is our instrument of surrender. For all of us to sign.”

“Perhaps if we had a table, Mother,” said Param.

Haddamander turned and shouted toward the other door. “Bring in the table!”

“We wanted the room empty when you arrived,” said Mother. “So you’d see there was no trap.”

“Which means,” murmured Param, “that there’s a trap.” She spoke so softly that she couldn’t hear her own voice—but she knew that Rigg’s facemask would let him hear.

He squeezed her hand in reply.

A servant came into the room, carrying a very small table with only a single leg. He fitted it into a prepared notch in the floor.

Param wasn’t a genius of mechanical reasoning, but even she could see that the table would easily serve as a lever now, if there was some sort of control embedded in the floor. But could they really expect she and Rigg would fall for such an obvious device?

Well, yes, they could, because they were falling for it, not in ignorance, but with eyes wide open.

“What a clever little table,” said Param. “Mother, you planned for everything.”

“Come and sign, my dears. When the war is over, I hope we can sit and have a wonderful conversation.”

“That would be very nice, Mother,” said Rigg.

Param and Rigg now stood right up against the table.

Haddamander, reached across the small table, gripped the side nearest Rigg and Param, and pulled the whole thing toward himself.

There were sounds of shifting metal from the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

“Good-bye, Mother,” said Rigg.

Param took that as her cue, and began slicing time, not the way she used to, but so deeply that Mother and Haddamander were barely a blur as they threaded their way out of the room.

No one else came in. No one had to.

For the shifting metal had been a series of counterweights and controls. Thick slabs of metal rose up out of the floor and down from the ceilings. None were right where the table was—nothing would have struck their bodies immediately. But if Param were still slicing time the way she used to, she would have recoiled from this metal, because the pain of trying to pass through it would have been excruciating.

It was possible to thread their way out the way Mother and Haddamander had gone, but Param was quite sure there were archers ready to shoot them if they appeared through that door.

To go through any other door, however, would have forced them to pass through metal.

Even at this level of slicing, there was some heat from passing through the metal bars. But it was trivial—rather as passing through plaster walls had been, back in Flacommo’s house.

The only problem with slicing time at this pace was that their movement across the floor was maddeningly slow. Especially considering that only moments after Mother and Haddamander had left, the house caught fire.

The wood of the house must have been soaked in something highly inflammable. The fire seemed to start everywhere at once.

Param sliced time even more sharply.

The fire was out in only a few moments, though they felt the searing heat of it, like one blast of hot air from standing too close to a furnace.

The ceiling collapsed onto them—with all its metal bars and the heavy framework holding it together from the top. But slicing time this drastically, even the frame caused them little pain.

Days and nights passed by in flashes of light and dark. It rained and then stopped raining, but only a little water got to them. It occurred to Param that she ought to be thirsty. But no. She had only been slicing time for a few minutes. The world around her might have gone through half a year by now, but . . .

Snow fell around them and lingered for a few minutes. Then again, deeper, and staying longer. When winter ended, they were only halfway through the forest of metal bars and burnt wood.

How had this looked to Umbo? They went into the house. A few moments later, it burst into flame . . . and they never came out. Umbo would know, of course, what they were capable of doing, and that her time-slicing could easily take all this in stride. Still, there was a limit to how long he would wait.

Had he gone back to join the others and decide what to do? Or had he already decided to warn them not to go in? Fire and an elaborate metal framework—not worth the effort? Perhaps Param and Rigg had already been warned, had not come into the house this time through. But this iteration of Param and Rigg had not been warned, and so they would continue in this futile evasion of a danger that their alternate selves would never face.

I was once murdered in the Odinfolders’ library, by the mice, Param remembered. She remembered it as information she had been told, for Rigg had shown up to rescue her before the mice could bring in the metal bar to kill her. But there had been a version of her that died. Rigg had seen the body. Her corpse. Nobody in this timestream had ever had to deal with burying that body, because this was the timestream in which she did not die in the library. Instead, this was the timestream in which she would die here in this burnt-out, metal-lined pit. For there were archers stationed around the edges of the pit, and torches burned every night to make sure they did not escape under cover of darkness. Mother was not giving up. She and Haddamander had learned their lesson back at the Wall, when they had waited for days and yet Param and Umbo had never come to the ground where they jumped from the rock. Mother was going to have her assassins wait till the end of the world, if that’s what it took.

The end of the world.

Winter again, as they reached the edge of the burnt-out building and passed beyond the metal frame.

And still the archers waited, watching. Still there were men with heavy metal swords waiting just beyond them.

They were into their third summer of slicetime as they faced the spot where once a wooden stairway had carried them down into the pit. The stairway was gone, taken away as the observation platform had been. The walls of the pit were cut sheer, unclimbable—especially unclimbable as they were, clasping hands. If they let go of each other to climb, they would become visible to the archers. If Rigg jumped them back in time, they’d either be buried over their heads in undisturbed earth, or surrounded by the workmen digging the pit or building the house.

Rigg turned to face her, and winter came again as they changed hands and stood facing the other way, toward the south now, their faces into the sun as it rose, fell, rose, fell, sliding across the sky like butter across a hot pan.

She could see that Rigg was shaking his head and tightening his grip. She did not understand why. Until there was a sudden bright flash and a wave of heat washed over them. Far more intense and longer-lasting than the heat of the burning house.

The world was ending. They were slicing time right through the coming of the Destroyers.

Rigg had kept count of time. He had been expecting them. He had shaken his head to tell her not to stop slicing.

The forest all around them had been knocked down by the distant blast, but the wall of the pit had sheltered them. The heat had been so intense that the fallen trees burnt up like paper, and even the metal inside the pit had grown soft, had bent and collapsed toward the ground like sugar candy melting in the rain.

But they had only endured a few microseconds of the heat before it passed away, and so they were not consumed like paper or melted like sugar.

This is the end of the world. And we, the unwarned ones, must continue to exist like this, surviving what killed most others.

But not all. For the people who had written the Future Books to the Odinfolders had hidden somewhere to write of what happened and then send the books into the past to give warning. So . . . how did they die, those who managed to survive the first blast? What would happen now, to end their lives?