“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 ha
nd 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.”