Ram Odin nodded. “I’m listening,” he said.

So Noxon told him about the world of Garden, and all the things Ram Odin had done, and all the things Noxon and his companions had done. He didn’t hurry the telling. The story was spread across several days. When his memory was incomplete or inaccurate, the expendable prompted him, for all these stories were now a part of the ship’s memory.

When he was done, Ram Odin said, “I’m in.”

“You’re in what?” asked Noxon.

“I’m in the game. I’m with you. Let’s save the world. Your world. My children’s world.”

“Garden,” said Noxon.

“Right,” said Ram Odin. “Let’s save Garden.”

CHAPTER 12

Choosing Masks

Umbo could have avoided Rigg’s rule and taken Loaf and Leaky through the Wall by jumping back before it was created, then leaping forward again in time. But that would be showing off, and besides, who knew what dangers there might be in the world of Garden before the colonizers shattered the biosphere and replaced most of the native life with plants and animals from Earth? Rigg could always see the paths of creatures and avoid anything large and dangerous. Umbo could not.

And since Umbo and Loaf were together, they could pass through the Wall—but not until after Rigg’s rule of two-at-a-time went into effect.

Umbo chose the time right after Rigg went back to Vadeshfold, got his facemask, then killed and then unkilled Ram Odin.

Loaf and Leaky and Umbo traveled to the Wall, however, in the time before Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf had been arrested in O—a time when no one was looking for them. Though it probably wasn’t necessary. They would be looking for a boy the age Umbo had been, and a soldierly man just Loaf’s size—but with a normal human face. They would not be looking for Leaky at all.

But even if they weren’t looking for them as they were now, it was better to travel at a time when nobody was looking for anybody.

They hired a carriage for the part of the journey that went from town to town, but the last part could only be done on foot because no roads led to the Wall. It was then, at the verge of the Wall, that Umbo pulled the others forward into the future moment when Rigg, Noxon, and Ram Odin had just left to rejoin the rest of them near the shore in Larfold. The flyer would be gone, but Vadeshex would be at home.

Passing through the Wall with permission did not involve the agony of anxiety and despair that normally made it impassable. But neither was it completely absent. Several times Umbo saw Loaf take Leaky by the hand and reassure her, because even these pale shadows of the feelings the Wall evoked were clearly upsetting her. Umbo remembered watching Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf walk this half-league—though that time there had been soldiers coming to kill Umbo and Param as Umbo held the others in the past. Umbo also remembered making the walk himself, holding Param’s hand. They had just saved each other’s lives, and Umbo was in the first throes of falling in love.

All in all, it was a place that filled him with nostalgia, as well as dread.

Umbo half-expected Vadeshex to be there to greet them, as he had been the first time. What he did not expect was to meet himself.

Or at least the image of himself. Loaf was reminding Leaky to step only where he stepped as they came near the first stream, when someone cried out, “Stop!”

They turned and saw Umbo, and knew at once it was a message from the future rather than another copy of Umbo himself, because the background was different around him, and his hair was blowing in a breeze that didn’t exist where they were.

“It doesn’t work,” said the messenger. “Leaky can’t master the facemask. We waited a year but she never came out of it.”

Leaky was angry. “Are you saying that I’m weak? I’m too weak?”

“It’s not about strength of will,” said the messenger. “You’re plenty strong, but that probably makes it worse.”

“What is it, then?” asked Umbo.

The messenger clearly didn’t want to say it, but realized that he must. “Loaf thinks it’s a matter of self-control. Leaky doesn’t have enough of it, and neither do I. Rigg and Loaf do. Go back. There’s nothing for any of you here.”

And then the messenger—future Umbo—was gone. Gone completely, gone even from the future, because his message made it so that particular future would never exist.

Leaky sank to the ground, Loaf with her, his arm around her. “Why do we have to believe him!” she said.

“Because Umbo doesn’t come back and give false messages. Why would he?”

“What if I can do it this time because I was warned?” asked Leaky.

“Warning won’t help,” said Loaf. “I know what it’s like to have this thing come over you, get inside you. It was hard for me, and that’s with the discipline of a soldier’s training. And Rigg, he was schooled by Ramex, taught a kind of self-mastery we can only guess at. It’s nothing wrong with you, Leaky. Humans weren’t designed to have a thing like this attached.”

“It makes you stronger! It repaired everything—even your scars are gone!”

“We don’t even know that your body is the reason we haven’t had a baby,” said Loaf. “Let’s go back and see what happens.”

“I do know!” she cried. “Because I had a baby once.”

Loaf did not move.

“Before we married,” she said. “When I was barely a woman. I was too young. The baby was breech and it died trying to be born. They cut it out of me. And I was so torn up inside the midwife said I’d never be able to bear.”

“You never told me,” murmured Loaf.

“You said you didn’t want children, that you couldn’t raise children, being liable to go on campaign at any moment. So it didn’t matter. But then you left the army and it did matter after all.”

“You could have told me.”

“I was ashamed!” She wept for a while.

Umbo wondered if he should leave. This was clearly a time for husband and wife. Yet by leaving he’d call attention to himself. Of course, he could simply skip forward in time and let them have their privacy. He had to admit to himself that he simply didn’t want to. He was fascinated, even though he felt sorry for her pain. Their pain.

He noticed that Loaf did not ask who the father had been, or whether Leaky had been married before.

“And now I’m ashamed again,” Leaky said more quietly. “Because I have so little self-control that I can’t master this thing that a child like Rigg was able to control.”

“Rigg’s not a child now,” said Loaf. “And even when he was a child, he was . . . unusual.”

This made Umbo realize that he should be feeling resentful of Rigg for being able to bear a facemask when it was certainly out of his own reach.

But no, Umbo might be envious of Rigg for many things, but not for the facemask. Not now. Yes, it made Loaf an astonishingly effective soldier. It gave Rigg and Noxon so much more control over their timeshaping. But the thing was so repulsive and deforming. Umbo had gotten used to seeing it on Loaf. Definitely not on Rigg and Noxon. And the thought of having that thing crawl over his own face, push into his ears and nose and mouth, breathing for him, probing every aperture, taking away his eyes: How did they bear it? The horror of such an invasion?

Loaf was a soldier. People had pushed foreign objects into his body from time to time. He had borne pain and horror, and yet kept fighting, kept control of himself. Umbo wasn’t exactly a big baby about such things, but he could not stop himself from leaping to conclusions—wrong ones—and acting on them in irrevocable ways. It had got Kyokay killed that day. It had kept Umbo saying things, doing things that showed his pathetic yearning for Param, his childish resentment of Rigg. He knew these things made him look foolish, and yet he had not been able to stop himself.