Nor could she easily stop her time-slicing and reenter the normal timeflow. For then her feet would occupy the same space as the mice underfoot. It would not kill her, but she would be crippled. In agony. Her feet would be unable to hold her. It might take weeks for her feet to heal. And the mice themselves would be quite dead.

Why should she care if mice died? Someone was using them to try to kill her!

And they would succeed. Any moment they wanted to, they could put the cylinder into her body space and, when she came back into momentary existence, it would be sliding downward through her body, drawn by gravity while she was not there, then suddenly stopped and cradled by the skin and bones of her body when she did reappear with the cylinder inside her.

I’m going to die, she thought, and her stomach went sick and her head felt light and she was filled with more terror than she had felt before, more than the fear she had felt when she and Umbo leapt from the high rock and slowly fell downward toward the metal being waved around by Mother’s men.

The difference was that then she had Umbo with her—Umbo, who could jump backward in time and take her with him.

Who would save her now? Even if Rigg or Umbo showed up, they couldn’t see her; Rigg could see her path, but even he could not reach into the slices of time and take hold of her.

Why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t they go back to an earlier time and give me one of Umbo’s trademarked visions of his future self, saying, Get out of this room! Or simply taking her by the hand and moving her to another time or place.

Maybe they can’t get back into the library. Maybe when they found out I was dead, the Odinfolders kept them from coming here, where they could intercept me and prevent this terrible moment and save my life.

But then, they could always go back to a time before we came to the library. Back when we first came to Odinfold, but before the Odinfolders knew that we were here. Why didn’t they?

She knew the answer. If they went back and warned the whole group that Param would be murdered here, nearly a year after they arrived, then they would turn aside and would not learn all the things that they had learned. They wouldn’t know about the Visitors and the Destroyers. Nor would they know about the high technology of the Odinfolders and the billions of people who lived in these vast ruins when they were still mighty cities.

They had to choose between what they had learned in Odinfold, and saving my life at the cost of never learning it. And they chose correctly. What was her death, compared to the need to know about the end of the world and save it?

I am like a soldier who dies in battle. Regrettable, but an unavoidable loss.

Unless . . .

They didn’t have to warn her. They could come back and simply take her. A warning would make them all turn away, change the past, annihilate the months they had just lived through. But if they came back to the moment of their first arrival, they could take her away and drag her into some other time, earlier or later. She would be prevented from learning anything she had learned, but they would keep the knowledge that they had, because they would still have lived through all these months and would keep their memories when they shifted in time.

But they didn’t do it.

No, no. They didn’t do it in this timeflow, because they couldn’t possibly know to do it unless they found out that I was killed. It is my death that provokes them into going back to change time and save me. So I have to go through this whole process, I have to see my death coming and then, most terribly, die.

Only then can they travel back in time and interfere with the forward flow of it, snatching me out of time before I can be murdered in this way. That version of myself will never live through these terrible minutes. Because in that version of time, I didn’t die.

But in this one, I will die. I won’t remember it, in that other timeflow, but it has to happen in order for them to save me, so my death will still be real, because it will still have its residual effects, even though a version of myself, a copy, will move forward into the future without this death.

To that version of me, this death will seem unreal, temporary; it will seem to have been avoided.

But it will not be avoided. I will live through it. I will die, and I will stay dead, I will; this version of me will be extinguished and I don’t want to die.

The cylinder disappeared again, and almost immediately Param felt a searing agony in her throat, the heat of billions of molecules being torn apart, some of them becoming radioactive as atoms collided and tore each other apart and then reassembled. She lived just long enough to feel the heat pulse through her entire body, every nerve screaming with the pain of burning to death in a searing moment.

Param noticed the room was full of mice. They were scrambling up onto the table, swarming all over the floor. Annoyed and a little frightened, Param was proud of herself for not time-slicing by simple reflex. No, she would get up and leave the room.

But before she could even push back her chair, Rigg appeared in the air above the table, his feet a few inches above its surface. He dropped to the table, crushing mice under his feet. He reached out his hand to her.

Something terrible must be about to happen, Param realized. Rigg is coming back to save me.

She held out her hand and clasped his.

And suddenly the mice were gone.

Rigg pulled her to her feet, then jumped off the table. “Come on,” he said. There were several mice in the room.

“They can see us,” said Param.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Rigg. “We have to get outside, to the flyer.” He took her hand again and began drawing her after him, out into a corridor. “We should never have let ourselves spend so much time in these underground rooms. It’s devilishly hard getting in and out.”

They turned a corner and there was Mouse-Breeder, coming down a flight of stairs.

Rigg squeezed her hand and she saw him give her a warning glance.

“Mouse-Breeder!” Rigg called out. “I hope there isn’t a rule against running in the library!”

“None that I know of,” he said cheerfully. “Where are you headed?”

“Up for sunlight!” said Rigg. “I had a sudden need for air, and my sister decided to join me.”

“Have fun,” said Mouse-Breeder.

They ran past him up the stairs.

“He doesn’t know.”

“It’s six months ago,” said Rigg. “But the moment he runs into one of us in this time, he’ll realize that he saw us running because we came from the future.”

“What does it matter?” said Param. “Wherever we go, whatever we do, they can use their time machine to send something to kill us—a sword in the heart, poison into our bodies, we’ll never be safe.”

“Stop talking and run again,” said Rigg. “And don’t worry, they won’t do it.”

“How do you know?” asked Param.

“Because there is no machine,” said Rigg.

“But . . .”

“Run,” said Rigg.

She was utterly out of breath, her lungs on fire and her legs leaden with exhaustion when they reached the surface and came out into sunlight.

There was Umbo, watching intently. And suddenly a flyer appeared behind him, and Loaf and Olivenko stood beside it.

They must have transported Rigg back in time the way they used to do it, when they worked together. Rigg must have found a path that would take him to the exact time he wanted to reach. Then Umbo must have slowed time down so he could take hold of that path. Umbo waited here so that he could bring them back into the present when Rigg returned to the out-of-doors with Param in tow.

By the time Rigg and Param reached the flyer, Olivenko and Loaf were already inside it. Umbo waited till they arrived. Then he reached out and took, not her hand, but Rigg’s, and drew them up the ramp into the flyer.