Ruins

“Of course it is,” said Rigg. “It’s got a parasite sticking to its head that’s trying to invade its brain.”

“Well, we brought it here,” said Param.

“I suppose we did,” said Rigg. “But it’s from this world and, if Vadesh is telling the truth—and about these facemask things he seems to be—then the parasites are natives here, just like old barbfeather. So if we hadn’t pulled him to now to run into this parasite, he might just as easily have had exactly the same thing happen to him back then.”

“Except that the world was just about to end for him anyway,” said Loaf. “Our ancestors were about to wipe him out along with all his cousins, right? We saved him.”

“I can see now that he ought to be grateful,” said Param.

“Look, if you gave him a choice between parasite on his face and dead, what do you think he’d choose?” asked Rigg.

“Look what he actually is choosing,” said Umbo.

Param nodded but she clearly didn’t like it. “Life,” she said.

“Animals that don’t cling to it no matter what don’t survive long enough to make babies,” said Olivenko. “We don’t want to die.”

“Then how do you explain suicides?” asked Loaf.

“I don’t,” said Olivenko.

“Wasn’t Father’s death a kind of suicide?” asked Param.

It took Rigg a moment to realize that even though Param was his full sister, she wasn’t talking about the man he had called Father—the Golden Man, the Wandering Man, the machine called Ram, who had trained her and Umbo and Rigg in how to use their time-altering talents. She was talking about their real father, whom Rigg had never met: Father Knosso, who had passed unconscious through the Wall on a boat, and then was dragged from the boat and drowned by some kind of manlike sea creatures in another wallfold.

“It wasn’t suicide,” said Olivenko angrily. As a young scholar in the Great Library he had been Knosso’s friend and assistant. “He didn’t intend to die.”

“No,” said Param. “But he knew he might, and he threw his life at it as if nothing else mattered. Not me, certainly.”

“He loved you,” said Olivenko.

“But he loved his experiment more,” said Param.

The barbfeather, Rigg noticed, had stopped beating and scraping its face against the tree. It was turning its gaze toward each one of them who spoke. And it didn’t just turn the eye that wasn’t covered by the facemask. It turned as if it had two good eyes. As if it could still see through the thing.

In the silence after Param’s last few bitter words, the barbfeather trotted straight toward Rigg.

“Rigg!” shouted Umbo.

“It’s coming at you!” warned Loaf.

Rigg reached out his hand and the barbfeather stopped and sniffed it. “He wasn’t charging at me,” said Rigg.

“Keep your hand away!” said Umbo. “Do you want the facemask to jump over to you?”

“Vadesh says they can only attach in water. And not after they’ve already attached to . . . something.” Rigg had almost said “somebody.”

“So we’re believing everything he says now?” asked Umbo.

“He didn’t lie about the facemasks,” said Rigg. “He might be lying about some things, but he’s not lying about that. And he didn’t follow us here, either, or try to prevent us from leaving. Maybe all he really did was lead us to safe water.”

“Staying suspicious is what keeps me alive,” said Loaf. “That survival instinct, you know?”

“I’m for suspicion, too,” said Rigg. “But at some point you have to place your bet and let it ride.”

The barbfeather was still sniffing his hand.

“I think he smells himself on my hand,” said Rigg. “That’s the hand I held against his back as we went through the Wall.”

“And there’s no reason he should fear the smell of humans,” said Olivenko.

The barbfeather abruptly turned its head, pressing the facemask against Rigg’s fingers. Rigg recoiled at once.

“Look at your hand!” shouted Umbo. “Is anything sticking to it?”

“What do you think, that the facemask just made my hand pregnant?” asked Rigg.

“They might have more than one way of reproducing,” said Umbo. “Vadesh said they were adaptable.”

“Maybe it makes babies on the surface of its skin,” said Param, “and rubs them off on you.”

“Or on tree bark,” said Olivenko.

Rigg considered this. “It felt dryish and a little rough. Like unglazed clay pots. And there is truly, absolutely nothing on my hand. Now let’s get back to the spot we picked and prepare some food.”

“What do we do about this . . . this . . . what did you call it, Rigg?” asked Param.

“Barbfeather. Just a descriptive name. And we’re not going to do anything about it.”

“What if it follows us to our camp?” she asked.

“If it lies down, don’t snuggle up to it,” said Rigg. “Those feathers really are barbed.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want me to do, Param, kill it?”

“Isn’t that what you and your father—I mean Ram—isn’t that what you did with animals?”

“We killed the ones whose fur we could sell,” said Rigg. “Do you want a coat made out of that?”

“Gloves,” said Loaf. “I think Leaky could use gloves like that—for punching some of our customers who drink too much and won’t leave the roadhouse quietly.”

They left the barbfeather and set about making camp. But soon it joined them again. Their provisions were meager, but they had been on the road for a while and they were used to them. Rigg offered some of his food to the beast. It sniffed and then wandered away. “Must not smell like anything edible to him,” Rigg said.

“Doesn’t taste like anything edible to me,” said Olivenko.

“Wonder how that barbfeather would taste,” said Loaf, “if we could talk him into climbing into a stewpot for us.”

“I don’t think our bodies could make much use of his meat,” said Rigg, “even if we could keep it inside long enough to digest it.”

“Pretty image while I’m eating,” said Param.

“I had no idea you were so fussy,” said Rigg, with a grin. Param rolled her eyes.

“Why couldn’t we eat it?” asked Umbo.

“When they were testing me to see if I should get access to the library,” said Rigg, “I met a scientist in Aressa Sessamo who was separating out the plants and animals that came to this world with our ancestors—which is most of them—and the ones that evolved here, which is only a few. Every single one of them, Father and I had already identified as plants and animals that we can’t eat. Even dead, only certain carrion eaters will go after them. It’s as if we had two separate ecologies twined together. Father called them ‘mildly toxic’ and my guess is he knew.”

“So maybe that parasite can’t use our bodies either,” said Olivenko.

“But Vadesh says it can,” said Rigg.

“And yet you touched it,” said Param.

“Tomorrow let’s go back in time,” said Rigg. “When we’re rested and fresh. Come on, we passed through the Wall today. People tried to kill you and Umbo not that many hours ago, Param! Can’t we get some sleep?”

But when they finally cleaned up supper, laid out their dosses, and took up their sleeping positions, with Loaf on first watch, Rigg couldn’t sleep. Because as soon as he knew what the facemask’s path looked like, he began to find the same kind of path riding along with humans ten thousand years ago. Vadesh was telling the truth—humans had been infested with facemasks.

And the more of them Rigg followed, the more certain he became of a pattern. At first the facemasks had been rare and were never inside the city. Then they came along with humans when they approached the city in