“I’m older than you are,” said Square.

“You know there’s no way to prove that,” said Umbo.

“Not my fault you skip around in time so much you have no idea how old you are. But I’m taller than you.”

“That’s heredity. I’m not overly tall and I was slow to grow. You must have had tall parents.”

“I think you know who my parents are.”

“I know they must have been annoying and stubborn, which is probably why they got killed.”

“ ‘Stubborn’ just means you don’t want to do something somebody else wants you to do, and ‘annoying’ just means somebody else is frustrated that you won’t obey them.”

“Excellent on vocabulary, failing grade on getting the point,” said Umbo.

“Before you try to change the subject,” said Square.

“Too late.”

“Look at this.”

“At what?”

Square didn’t show him anything. Umbo checked both hands, glanced around the meadow where they were sitting. When he turned back to Square, the young man was pointing at his own face.

Except it wasn’t his own face. It was Rigg’s face. Not Rigg’s real face, not his original face. It looked exactly like Rigg’s face with the mask on. It had grown a lot more normal looking in the past year, but he still deserved the moniker “Captain Toad,” and Square’s facemask was shaped exactly like Rigg’s.

This was especially surprising because Square didn’t have that abnormal facemask look. The facemasks that were applied to babies didn’t look toadlike and deformed. By age three, they looked like perfectly normal children. There was no way to guess whether they looked the way the child would have appeared if no facemask had ever been applied, but they didn’t look strange, and they didn’t all look like each other, either.

“You can change the way it looks?”

“I’ve been working on it for a few weeks,” said Square. “I made my pal memorize Rigg’s face the way it looked the last time he was here, and then shape himself to fit. I’ve been checking every reflective surface and tweaking it where it needed, and now I can pop into Rigg’s look whenever I want, and stay that way without even thinking about it.”

“Just because you can look like Rigg doesn’t mean you’re ready to—”

“I can sound like him, too,” said Square, in a voice that was identical to Rigg’s. “I have his voice inside my head, and also the way he talks.”

“Rigg has led men in battle,” said Umbo.

“He did it a first time, didn’t he?”

“The men will know you’re not really him because you don’t even know them.”

“Don’t lie to them,” said Square. “Tell them who I really am.”

“A boy from another wallfold, with a facemask like Rigg’s?”

“Who I really am,” said Square. “They all know Loaf and Leaky. They know Loaf is a great warrior. Tell them I’m their son.”

Umbo was so unprepared he couldn’t answer for a moment, and that was all the confession that a man with a facemask needed.

“Did you think that I’d never guess? I’m taller than you or Rigg, and besides, you don’t look at me the way Loaf does. I’m his height now. He’s proud of me when I put in a good day of combat training with him. And don’t kid yourself that he’s not really training me. Loaf doesn’t know how to do anything halfway.”

“I’m not confirming or denying anything,” said Umbo.

“Come on,” said Square. “You and Rigg can visit me back here two hundred years before the war, because you can both timeshape however you want. But Loaf can’t. Why does he come here, then? One of you always has to send him, and then pick him up and bring him back. I wondered about it when I was little, but when I got as tall as him, it’s the only story that made sense.”

“I told you the truth,” said Umbo.

“I believe you did. I believe you stumbled on a future where Loaf and Leaky had been killed, leaving a baby behind, and that was me. You went back and prevented their deaths, but you took me with you so I wouldn’t be wiped out in the causal shift. But Leaky didn’t want me.”

“Square, that’s not something—”

“Loaf wanted me and so he chose to have me raised by Vadesh and the nursewomen brought here to Vadeshfold. He visits me a lot—as often as he can get one of you to send him. He’s as good a dad as he can be. And you and Rigg are helping him so I never feel alone. But if Leaky wanted to visit me, she could, and she doesn’t, so she doesn’t.”

Umbo had his own inner debate now, about what was right—to keep his promise, or to break it because it was right for Square to know the truth. Truth won. “Square, she had the son she bore out of her own body. That she remembered bearing. His name is Round. But you were a baby who came out of nowhere. She didn’t doubt my story, but it wasn’t her, it was another woman in another timestream. That’s how it felt to her.”

“I already forgave her long ago,” said Square. “If I had a mother who loved me, would you have been able to put a facemask on me?”

“Rigg and I loved you,” said Umbo. “If the facemask had been disastrous, we would have gone back and prevented the attempt.”

“How do you know it wasn’t disastrous?” asked Square. “How do you know I’m the human baby all grown up, and not a facemask that had a real chance to control the human it was given to control?”

“Is that what you want me to think?” asked Umbo.

“I just wondered when you became sure that you had made the right choice?”

Umbo had no answer for that.

Square began to laugh. “By Silbom’s right buttcheek, you haven’t decided yet, have you!”

“Mostly,” said Umbo. “We mostly think you’re mostly human.”

“Except when?” asked Square. “What are my inhuman things?”

“Nothing. Just . . . Loaf only has doubts because he says you’re way smarter than either him or Leaky, and Rigg assures him that you aren’t smart at all, and I tell them everybody’s smarter than them.”

“When it’s really just because my pal helps me remember things,” said Square. “I know the difference between me and him. He’s not in control.”

“I know he’s not,” said Umbo. “I know that you really are yourself. It’s not that we ever picked a day and said, ‘Today we decide whether Square is human or not.’ You’re as human as Rigg or Loaf, or anybody else who made it through the facemask as an adult. Only you and the other babies, you didn’t have any struggle over it. It was peaceful all the way. Which is why we finally believe Vadeshex isn’t a failure. Yes, the first few generations here wiped each other out, but those weren’t these facemasks, and they didn’t get them as babies, the way the Larfolders do.”

“So we’re the real Vadeshfolders, right?” asked Square. “Me and the children, here, now. Not those adults a couple of centuries from now who took on facemasks to become supersoldiers like Loaf and Rigg.”

“That’s right. In fact, we’re talking about offering you and the other kids a chance to go back to a time soon after humans in Vadeshfold became extinct, and let you have almost the whole eleven thousand years. You just have to promise to leave this area empty, so they don’t interfere with us bringing you here.”

“When are you going to offer that?” asked Square.

“When the other kids are old enough to decide,” said Umbo. “And when you take a mate and we find the best way to get facemasks on your babies.”

Square got solemn. “These are my sisters,” he said.

“We’ve been worried about that.”

“I need to find somebody from outside. Somebody who takes the facemask as an adult.”

“They won’t be pretty,” said Umbo.

“You think I haven’t seen Rigg and Loaf? I don’t care about pretty, I care about not mating with somebody I grew up with.”

“I agree with your sentiments. So does the whole civilized species.”

“So my plan really is the best one.”

“I’m shocked that you think you’ve proven your point when I’m not aware of your having done any such thing.”