“I thought you told each other everything,” said Rigg.

“Eventually, yes.” Then Vadesh added, “Or at least I tell them. I think they are not all candid with me.”

“Nevertheless, these people seem to have known we were arriving, and they’re here to greet us,” said Olivenko.

“Or they’ve come to rush through if we bring down the Wall,” said Rigg.

“Bring it down,” said Vadesh. “This wallfold needs people.”

“People to wear your happy little facemasks?” said Param.

Vadesh made no answer.

Rigg was scanning the distant crowd, not with his eyes—the distance was too great to pick out individuals with any clarity—but with his path-sense. “They didn’t all come from the same place,” he said. “They’ve come from many places, and some of them very far away. They must have been traveling for days.”

“Well, I don’t want to cross here, then,” said Olivenko. “Who knows what they have in store for us?”

“Feels like a trap,” said Umbo.

“They seem to be waving to us,” said Param. “Cheerfully. Beckoning.”

“Laughing,” said Olivenko.

“You can’t possibly hear any laughter,” said Vadesh.

“But you can,” said Olivenko. “And I can see enough of their body movement and attitudes to see that they’re on a frolic. I don’t think they have any hostile intent.”

“Or that’s what they want us to think,” said Umbo.

“No danger,” said Loaf.

Everyone turned to him at once. Loaf had not spoken since he was possessed by the facemask weeks before.

“No weapons,” said Loaf, still looking across the grassy expanse of the Wall.

“Is this you talking?” asked Umbo. “Or the facemask?”

“Me,” said Loaf.

“The facemask would make him answer the same way,” said Param.

Loaf reached up a hand and rested it comfortably on the facemask, the way a pregnant woman might rest her hand on her swollen belly. “Husband of Leaky, soldier, innkeeper, it’s me,” said Loaf. “But yes, the mask is happy to have me say so. The mask is glad that I’m speaking now.”

“Why haven’t you spoken before?” asked Umbo, still suspicious.

“Nothing to say,” said Loaf.

Rigg laughed. “Yes, it’s Loaf,” he said. “Same sense of humor. Or at least it’s as much of Loaf as we’re likely to get. I don’t suppose you can take off that thing now?”

“Don’t want to,” said Loaf. “I see so clearly now. I see all the faces, all the hands, what they’re wearing. No weapons. All unarmed. And happy, interested, excited.”

“You can see that?” asked Olivenko.

“Seeing what you saw, you have a soldier’s eye,” said Loaf. It was the most generous thing he had ever said to Olivenko. “But the mask has clarified all my senses. Overwhelming for days. Too much. And it was trying to take control. Manipulate me. But I would not obey. And now it doesn’t try. But I see far and clear. I hear everything. I smell everything. The mask helps me sort it out. It’s a gift.”

“What did I tell you?” said Vadesh. “That’s how I designed it to work!”

“Even the original facemasks probably made their victims feel that way,” said Umbo sourly. He turned away from Loaf. For weeks, he had been holding the man’s hand, guiding him; now it was as if Umbo couldn’t bear to see him or be near him.

“We’ll have plenty of time to sort out who and what Loaf has become,” said Rigg. “Right now we have a few hundred people waiting to greet us on the other side of the Wall.”

“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty, including the babies,” said Loaf.

“You counted them?”

“All the ones who can be seen,” said Loaf. “There are more behind the hill, since a few dozen people have left and a few others have come out since we’ve been watching.”

“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty is a suspiciously round number,” said Umbo.

“It’s an estimate,” said Param.

“It’s the exact count,” said Loaf. “Someone just left, so it’s three thousand, two hundred and nineteen now.”

“Counting the babies,” said Olivenko drily.

“When people make up numbers and want them to sound exact,” said Rigg, “they usually make sure the number doesn’t end with zero or five. But in the real world, there’s a twenty percent chance that a random number of items will end in either zero or five.”

“So you believe him,” said Param.

“There are several hundred people behind the hill,” said Rigg. “I see their paths. And while I can’t say if Loaf’s count is correct, I have no reason to doubt it. We all saw how the facemasks fought in the battle we watched. Their precision, their accuracy. Facemasks enhance the abilities of the people who wear them.”

“The people controlled by them, you mean,” said Umbo.

“Loaf says he isn’t controlled,” said Rigg, “and we have no evidence to contradict him.”

“So you’re just going to believe him while he waits for a chance to plant baby facemasks on all of us?” said Param.

“I won’t do that,” said Loaf.

“They don’t reproduce that way,” said Vadesh.

“You don’t know half of what they do,” said Loaf, turning on Vadesh. “In all your years of studying them, you didn’t know they can give off spores within fifteen minutes of deciding to?”

“How can you possibly know that?” said Vadesh. “Humans and facemasks don’t communicate.”

“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”

Vadesh stood in silence.

“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.

“Then don’t,” said Param.

“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.

“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”

“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.

Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.

“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.

Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”

“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”

The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”

Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”

Rigg immediately remembered the crushing despair, the utter terror, the agony of his minutes—his decades, it had seemed—inside the Wall.

“This time we wouldn’t have General Citizen trying to kill us,” Param said helpfully.

“And now you know how to go back in time and then return without my help,” said Umbo.

“Maybe someday we’ll need to do that—go back in time to put off our confrontation with the people of Earth,” said Rigg. “But right now, since nineteen days ago, any two of us can simply walk through the Wall.”

“So let’s go back nineteen days to dodge the crowd,” said Olivenko.

“I can’t calibrate it like that,” said Umbo.

“Neither can I,” said Rigg. “It’s not like the paths have calendars attached.” But even as he said it, Rigg realized that he could do it well enough. He remembered that when he first discovered that the paths were actually people in motion through time, he had been standing on a clifftop with Umbo, unbeknownst to him, slowing time so that he could see the people instead of the paths. Couldn’t they simply go back a day at a time? Or count back? By picking one animal’s path, and then another’s, Rigg could work his way back to the exact time, then attach to that animal and bring the others with him.