Ruins

“We each have the power to shut down our own protective field. But the Wall consists of two fields, pushed up against each other. I could make the Wall half as wide, but I could not bring it down.”

“Unless the other expendables agreed with you,” said Rigg. “But they didn’t, did they?”

Vadesh once again said nothing.

“Silence from you is a lie,” said Rigg.

“They would not let me import a new population,” said Vadesh.

“If the other expendables regard you as so much of a failure that you can’t be trusted with more people,” said Rigg, “why should we contradict their superior wisdom?”

“Expendables must bow to the will of humans,” said Vadesh. “You can contradict us whenever you want.”

“Millions of people must have wished they could get through the Wall,” said Loaf. “It never came down for them.”

“Wishes are not informed decisions,” said Vadesh.

Rigg chuckled. “But who can possibly inform us, except you expendables?”

“Exactly,” said Vadesh.

“So we only know what you tell us,” said Rigg. “Which means that by choosing what to tell, you can shape our decision however you want.”

“And how did Ram shape your decisions?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg and his companions were not pretending; they had to think about it.

“He sent us to the Wall,” said Umbo.

“He prepared us to come through it,” said Rigg.

“So both he and I,” said Vadesh, “wanted humans to come through the Wall.”

“No,” said Rigg. “Father wanted us to have power over the Wall—and other things. Maybe he wanted to trigger General Citizen’s revolt against the People’s Revolutionary Council. But he never did anything to suggest he wanted us to come to you.”

“I’m what’s beyond your Wall!”

“In this direction,” said Rigg. “But we saw the globe in the Tower of O. If we had gone through the Wall in a different place, we might have come to a different wallfold.”

“But you came to this one. Did Ram turn you away from here? He knew you might come, and that if you did, you’d talk to me, and he did nothing to warn you against me, did he?”

“Oh, he warned me well enough,” said Rigg. “He taught me to notice when I’m being lied to and manipulated, and to resist it.”

“Show us how to shut down the Wall,” said Loaf.

Rigg looked at him, startled. It felt like betrayal.

“I want to shut down the Wall,” said Loaf. “These Walls have kept the human race divided into little pieces. In this wallfold, the human race wiped itself out. Who knows what happened in the other seventeen? It’s time for the Walls to come down so we can inform ourselves.”

“If we bring down the Wall,” said Olivenko, “people will come here and be infected by the facemasks.”

“We warn them,” said Loaf. “Filtered water only. They’ll find a way. People always do.”

“We don’t know enough yet,” said Rigg. “We can’t just bring down the Wall when we don’t know what people will find in the other wallfolds.”

Loaf laughed at him. “You say you don’t want responsibility, but here you are appointing yourself as the guardian of the whole human race.”

“They murdered Knosso in the wallfold he crossed into,” said Olivenko.

“Murder, massacre, warfare, disease, parasites,” said Loaf. “It’s the world. We should have the freedom of it. But no, Rigg thinks he can decide everything for everybody, keep everybody safe until he decides the human race is ready. Tell me, Rigg, how are you different from these expendables? Except that you’re not as well-informed?”

“You can’t just—”

But Loaf was not disposed to listen. “I can. You’re not in charge, remember? Each of us can go off on our own, if we want.”

“I thought you said we should stay together,” said Olivenko.

“Until it no longer makes sense,” said Loaf. “The rest of you can stay with each other—I advise it. You’ll be safer. But I want to get back through the Wall. I want to go home to Leaky. But then maybe I’ll come back. This is a vast empty land. It’s not just this city, it’s the whole wallfold. Who knows what could be built here? Vadesh is a lying snake, but the more people who come, the less attention we’ll have to pay to him. He wants the Wall to come down so immigrants can come in? So do I.”

Vadesh made an elaborate shrugging motion. “But it’s not just a person I need. It’s the jewels.”

Loaf looked at Rigg and held out his hand.

Rigg wanted to say, No, they’re mine, Father gave them to me, they’re my inheritance! But he knew he had no right to keep Loaf here against his will. So he drew out the bag with the stones and handed it to Loaf.

Loaf opened the bag and poured out the jewels into his hand.

“Ah,” said Vadesh. “This one is the key to Vadeshfold.” He picked up a pale yellow stone. “With this, a human can turn off this wallfield.”

“This wallfield is only half the Wall,” said Loaf.

“The other stone isn’t here,” said Vadesh. “The one that shuts down the field protecting Ramfold.”

“The one we sold,” said Rigg, realizing.

“The one that the People’s Council stole from us,” said Loaf.

“This one?” asked Umbo. He opened his hand, and there in his palm lay a red stone. Just like the one that Rigg had entrusted to Mr. Cooper, the banker in O.

“Where did you get that?” asked Olivenko.

“After all the times we tried to break into the bank to get it back, you had it all along?” said Loaf.

Now Rigg put things together. “He found it yesterday, when we first arrived.”

“It was just lying there at the edge of the woods where we slept,” said Umbo. “I picked it up.” He turned to Rigg. “You saw me, but you didn’t even ask me what it was.”

“I figured you’d tell me when it mattered,” said Rigg. “And you did.”

“So much for Rigg always trying to be in charge of everything,” said Olivenko.

“I never said that!” said Umbo.

“Yes you did,” said Olivenko. “About a hundred times, in a hundred ways.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Rigg. “Is that the right stone?”

Vadesh looked at it, then handed it to Loaf, pairing it with the yellow one from Vadeshfold. “These are the two you’ll need to bring down the Wall between Ramfold and Vadeshfold.”

“You put it there,” said Rigg. “For Umbo to find.”

“I did not,” said Vadesh. “I couldn’t.”

“Don’t all the expendables have a complete set of all the jewels?” asked Rigg. “This is one of yours.”

“You couldn’t use any of mine,” said Vadesh. “They can only be used by humans who grew up in the same wallfold as the jewels. They imprint on you. What would be the point of leaving one of my jewels for you to find? This jewel is from the Ramfold set.”

Vadesh spoke so confidently. Yet he seemed untroubled by the question of how the jewel got from Ramfold to this grove of trees. “Who put it there?” Rigg demanded of the others. It was plain Vadesh was not going to tell them, even if he knew, which he probably did.

“Maybe you did,” said Olivenko.

“Me?” said Rigg. “I didn’t have it!”

“Maybe you came back from the future, when you do have it, and you put it there,” said Olivenko. “Isn’t that possible?”

“Or Umbo did,” said Rigg. “And put it where he knew that he alone would find it.”

“But that would mean that in the future, I go back to Ramfold, somehow get the jewel, and then come back here and leave it for myself,” said Umbo. “Why?”

“We’ll never know,” said Loaf. “Because that version of the future is destroyed by the very fact that you now