Ruins

It made little difference. The women drew together as they shrank back from Param and Rigg. “Liars,” said the old woman.

“Spies,” said the young one.

But the tall one, though she was as frightened as the others, still cast a hungry, appraising gaze upon them. “The future? Then you know. Do we win this war?”

Rigg turned to Param and addressed her in the elevated language of the court. “I have learned all that I think we can. Let us get the others.”

Param glanced at the women. They had not been through the Wall; they didn’t know the language Rigg was using, and it must be frightening to hear speech they couldn’t understand. “Aren’t you going to answer her?” said Param.

“I don’t know the answer.”

“We know that the city is empty!”

“But is it this war that empties it? Telling her might change things.”

“All of her people are dead for ten thousand years. Any change would be better.”

“I can think of worse outcomes,” said Rigg. He glanced toward the stockade—toward the battle raging beyond the stockade. “What if these people despair, knowing they do not win, and so they give up and those people, the afflicted ones, survive?”

“What are you saying?” demanded the old woman.

“That isn’t language,” said the young one. “It makes no sense.”

The tall one now had a knife in her hand, long and sharp. “They’re spies.” She lunged at Rigg.

Instinctively, Param grabbed Rigg’s arm and took a leap toward what she thought of as her “hiding place”— invisibility. But as she did it, she realized she mustn’t. If she detached herself and Rigg from the timeflow that the others were in, there was no guarantee that Umbo could bring them back. So she stopped herself in the very moment of her panicky shift.

But she stopped herself too late. The women had already disappeared.

It was night. They stood in ringlight, just herself and Rigg.

She cursed her habit of hiding; she should have pumped her arm, signaling to Umbo to bring them all back, but that would have required thought, and she acted before thought was possible.

Then she realized—her talent didn’t work like this. People didn’t disappear when she sliced time, they merely sped up and stopped being able to see her. She couldn’t change day into night.

“What did you do?” asked Rigg in a fierce whisper. “When are we?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, trying to stay calm. “I stopped myself almost at once, we should only have jumped a moment or two.”

“We can talk, so we’re out of it now, right?” asked Rigg.

“I didn’t really go into it. We never disappeared.”

“Obviously we did,” said Rigg. “Vanished right out of their time. But how far, and in which direction?”

“I can’t move backward in time, not ever,” said Param. “I just make little jumps forward.”

“This wasn’t a little jump. It got us all the way into night. Or two nights—or a hundred years, into some distant night.”

“The stockade is still here,” said Param. “And the fires are burning.”

They went to the stockade, Rigg holding tightly to her. A few patches of grass were still burning, and there were bodies lying here and there, but there was no more fighting.

“Who won?” asked Param.

“What matters is that we’re still in the past. Does that mean Umbo has lost us, or that he still has us? If he lost contact with us, wouldn’t we bounce all the way back to Umbo, to the time we came from? Or are we stranded here and he can’t find us to bring us back? I wish I understood how any of this works.”

But Param had seen something else, not out on the battlefield, but closer to the city. “Rigg, a section of the stockade is down. It’s broken through.”

“No,” said Rigg after a moment, “it was burned through. That bastard betrayed them.”

A loud cry sounded in the dim light. It was not language. Nor were the cries that answered it. The shouters were not close by, but neither were they very far.

“I think that answers our question about who won,” said Rigg. “Those shouts came from the direction of the city.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us? I think the cries are coming closer.”

“I can’t see anybody,” said Rigg.

“But maybe they can see us,” said Param. “Those facemasks made them quicker, sped up their reaction time. Maybe it gives them better eyesight, too.”

Rigg held up his arm, pumped the air, signaling Umbo.

Nothing happened.

“He’s lost us,” said Rigg.

“He can’t see us,” said Param at the same time. She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice, but Rigg seemed so calm.

“Let’s get back to the spot where Umbo pushed us into the past,” said Rigg. “We jumped half a day into the future, so I should be able to find Loaf’s and Olivenko’s paths.” He drew her away from the stockade.

Now Param could see the facemask men who were shouting. They had clubs and spears and they were running straight toward Rigg and her. It was a terrifying, fascinating sight.

“I think this would be a good time for you to make us disappear,” said Rigg.

“But Umbo will lose us!” She knew how stupid that was even as she said it. Umbo had already lost them.

“We won’t be able to figure anything out if we’re dead,” said Rigg. “They have nothing made of metal. Make us disappear.”

This time there was no jump, just the sudden silence from the sectioning of time, the mental buzz she always felt.

But the facemask men showed no sign of having lost sight of them. They showed no confusion. They were still coming straight for Param and Rigg, as if she had done nothing at all.

All Param could think to do was push harder, make the buzz more intense and more rapid, so time was getting sliced into thinner bits, and she was leaping forward farther between moments of visibility.

It made the enemy seem to be even faster—far faster—so they were instantly upon them. But to Param’s relief the facemask men were confused now, looking around, swinging clubs and jabbing or sweeping with spears. They raced back and forth, some of them running off in different directions to search, some of them remaining in place to stab or slice the air.

Unlike Mother’s soldiers, though, they had little staying power. Having lost sight of Param and Rigg, they soon gave up. Well, perhaps not so soon as it appeared to Param, since she was pushing herself and Rigg into the future at a headlong pace, so that the few moments the facemask men kept searching might have been a half hour, an hour, more.

Most of the facemask men went away, but some stayed as sentinels, and as soon as morning came—only a few minutes, at the pace Param was keeping—the rest came back. Now they knelt and examined the grass, and in only a few moments they had found Rigg’s and Param’s footprints in the grass. Not the footprints they had left behind them—the grass there had long since sprung back up. What they found were the footprints Param and Rigg were making right now, for the grass had little chance to spring back up during the microseconds of their nonexistence between the tiny jumps she was making into the future.

The facemask men probed the footprints. When they used their fingers or clubs, it was not a problem, but the stone heads of the spears could damage her, Param knew. She pressed harder on her sense of time, shoving herself and Rigg farther and farther into the future with each tiny jump, so the stone spear points coexisted in the same space as their feet for ever-shorter slices of time. The buzzing sense was now a deep, rapid throbbing. The day ended, the facemask men were gone. Then it was day again and they did not come back, then night, then day, then night, day, night, day . . .

Gasping, she eased up on the pressure inside herself. Her heart was beating so fast. She was exhausted. She