have lost your arms.”
“Ouch,” murmured Umbo.
“So what happens when a fly passes through you?” asked Loaf.
“Or a gnat, or dust?” said Rigg. “It must have happened, over and over. Apparently her body is able to repel them, or absorb their small amount of mass. Who knows? She’s spent hours at a time that way, and I’ve seen flies and bees and moths pass right through her. She has to have come out of it with one of them inside her before this.”
“It makes me sick,” said Param.
“We have to talk about it,” said Rigg. “We’re all trying to understand it.”
“I mean,” said Param, “that coming out of it with a fly inside me literally makes me sick. Feverish. It takes time to heal the spot where the fly was. Painful and hot for hours. But dust isn’t a problem. Not even a little sand. The only problems are living things, thick walls, metal, and stone.”
“And I’m the only one,” said Loaf, “who can’t do a single interesting thing.”
“You just vanished,” said Rigg. “Even if you weren’t in control of it, you were still invisible, and that’s interesting, that something your size could disappear.”
Loaf glowered and then chuckled. “All right, that’s good enough.”
“You might also be able to do something else that’s very, very important.”
“What’s that?” asked Loaf.
“Get us out of the city,” said Rigg. “There are troops everywhere, and the mobs are dispersing except where they’re fighting fires. Plus, there’s still lots of traffic on all the roads and on the river.”
Loaf put his mind to the problem, as did they all. He thought of going downstream and then changing to a boat coming upstream, but then objected to his own idea. “They don’t know where we’re headed, so they’ll catch us downstream or upstream, if they’re serious about looking for us.”
Param slept again while they talked. Umbo suggested taking her back to their lodgings so she could sleep on a bed, but Loaf reminded him that that was the one place they couldn’t possibly go. “If this General Citizen was spying on us all along, he’ll certainly have somebody watching our rooms.”
Finally they settled into glum silence which turned into mere dozing in the shade, until, after more than an hour, Rigg spoke up. “Soldiers are coming this way. We need to move.”
“They aren’t on to us, are they?” asked Umbo.
“No,” said Rigg. “But they’re patrolling and this is a small enough group that I don’t think they’re doing riot control. They’re going to look for a group of people like us.”
“Can’t we just disappear?” asked Loaf.
“If we have to,” said Rigg. “But as Param already found out, if you have a different way of not being seen, it’s better not to do the invisibility thing. Right now, we can be unseen by walking around that corner there.”
“People are going to start coming out of their houses and shops soon,” said Loaf.
“That’s right,” said Rigg.
“If only you’d come back and warned us sooner,” said Umbo. “We could have left town yesterday.”
“The three of you could,” said Rigg. “But I’d still be stuck here.”
They walked at a leisurely pace up to the corner and rounded it, while Param yawned repeatedly. “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” she said.
“Rigg has that effect on people,” said Loaf. “Wears ’em right out.”
“Why not leave the city yesterday?” asked Rigg.
They looked at him like he was crazy. “Didn’t you just tell us it was impossible?” asked Loaf.
“But what if it isn’t?” asked Rigg. “I attached Param to the past by having her hold your hand. However these abilities of ours work, when human beings join hands they become like a single unit-they move through time together. Who’s to say that I couldn’t have joined you in the past at the same time Param did, by simply continuing to hold her hand, too?”
“But that never happened before-you never actually went into the past,” said Umbo. “Or not completely-part of you stayed here.”
“I never linked to anybody,” said Rigg. “I took a knife, but I didn’t hold on to the man. Did you ever link with somebody in the past?”
Umbo thought back. “I never touched anybody at all, except Loaf, and I brought him with me.”
Rigg was still thinking it through. “I think it’ll be best if we don’t try to find an earlier version of ourselves. I know that causal flows are preserved, but I don’t like tying the whole stream of time into knots if we can help it. We don’t understand the rules so I’d like to keep it simple.”
“So… we just pick somebody randomly out of the past and say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I and my three friends hold on to your body parts for a few minutes?’”
“Not randomly,” said Rigg. “Someone we can trust.”
“Oh, right,” said Loaf. “Aressa is full of trustworthy strangers.”
Then Rigg remembered somebody that he could trust. Somebody who was not part of Mother’s world at all.
“I have a friend,” he said.
Olivenko came out of his small flat and rumbled down the stairs toward the street. Time for a decent breakfast for once, before joining his unit and standing his watch.
As he reached the landing before the last flight of stairs to the street door, he saw Rigg Sessamekesh standing there.
“Rigg,” he said. “How did you get out of-”
Rigg shook his head.
Olivenko immediately nodded. Just speaking Rigg’s name aloud might attract attention-fortunately, he had not spoken loudly and few people in the building rose as early in the morning as he did.
“Olivenko,” said Rigg, “you remember all we talked about. You remember the danger that I’m in.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, I know-it’s not a guess or a logical deduction or even spying, but I absolutely know that in two days, Flacommo will be killed, his house invaded, my mother arrested, and my sister and I will hide and become fugitives, along with two other friends of mine.”
“And you want me to help you get away?”
“I do,” said Rigg.
“But they’ll be watching for you.”
“No, they won’t,” said Rigg. “Because they already know where we are.”
“What?”
“Param and I, at this moment you’re living through, are in Flacommo’s house, being observed.”
Olivenko knew enough to wait for the explanation.
“You think I’m going to explain, and I am, but not right now, because in about five minutes somebody else is going to come down those stairs and I don’t want him to see you talking with me.”
“So let’s go find your friends,” said Olivenko.
“Exactly right,” said Rigg. “Only it’s not as simple as you think. But it’s much quicker. All you have to do is stand right here, without moving another step. It might be better if you close your eyes. But if you open them, then you have to promise you won’t shout or run away or anything. Just take it calmly. Trust me that there’s a rational explanation.”
“For what?” asked Olivenko, baffled and a little bit annoyed at all the mumbo-jumbo.
“For this.”
Rigg disappeared. Just vanished.
And then, about ten seconds later, he reappeared-holding hands with Param Sissaminka, the heir of the royal house, and two strangers, one of them a tall old soldier, the other a short boy nearer to Rigg’s age, perhaps younger.
Olivenko didn’t even gasp. Instead, he just stood there thinking: If only Knosso could have seen this.
“Rigg,” he finally said, “if you can jump around like this, what do you need my help for?”
“Because we can’t jump through space, only through time. And we aren’t completely here, we’re also still in the future-two days from now, with rioters and soldiers all over the streets of Aressa, with General Citizen’s
