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“Ram’s left elbow,” exclaimed Rigg in his relief.
“No, it’s my left elbow you’ve got,” said Olivenko. “Where did you come from? I thought you were over talking to those women.”
“You disappeared,” said Loaf. “I thought Param had done whatever it is she does.”
“No,” said Param. “I almost did, but I stopped myself.”
“But I felt you slip out of my control,” said Umbo. “Like having a loose tooth pull away. I’d been holding you so tightly, it hurt when you vanished. I lost you.”
“I know,” said Rigg, and then he grinned foolishly. “Umbo, it was me. Param figured it out. I’ve been learning how to jump without even realizing it. I felt what you were doing, I think I was even helping, but I didn’t know how to make it happen only I did by reflex, when she tried to stab me.”
“Param?” asked Loaf, alarmed.
“No, the woman we were talking to, we scared her, she was in the middle of a war, she was armed, so of course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do, we do—”
“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”
“I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became real and—”
“And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”
“Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.
Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her weeks and he got it with the first lesson.
Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught him nothing.
“They’re all lying snakes,” she said.
The others looked at her. “The men with those facemasks on them?” asked Loaf.
“How could they lie?” asked Rigg. “They can’t even talk.”
Umbo had understood her, though. “She means the expendables. Vadesh and Ram. Your father, Rigg.”
“All I gave you was the first fifteen seconds of the very first lesson your so-called father gave me when he first started teaching me to control my timesense,” said Param. “Why didn’t he give you those fifteen seconds?”
Rigg’s excitement gave way to realization. “He taught me everything he wanted me to know.”
“Just like Vadesh,” said Param. “They think they’re gods, they think they have the right to just decide, regardless of what we want or need—they think they know best about everything.”
“Maybe they do,” said Olivenko.
Param whirled on him. “Yes, just like Mother, she thought she knew best—she thought she had the right to kill me, the way Vadesh betrayed the people of the city—”
“He did what?” asked Loaf.
“He burned a gap in the stockade,” said Rigg. “He let the facemask people drive the uninfected ones out of the city. He chose one side over the other and it was the parasites he chose. He calls them ‘natives’ but he claims they’re still human.”
“Does it matter?” asked Olivenko. “They’re all dead now.”
“He picked,” said Param angrily, “and he chose the parasites over the human race.”
“We can’t trust him,” said Rigg.
“But we already didn’t trust him,” said Olivenko.
“Now we know he’s our enemy,” said Param.
