“Probably not,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“You’d be surprised how closely they watch.”

“You forget that I’ve walked these rooms and halls for years now,” she said.

“Turning and turning,” he said.

“What?”

“You can’t hold still or you reappear. So you walk in small circles when you want to stay in a room without being visible. Your whole path is full of curlicues.”

“Yes,” she said. “Around and around. I’m so sick of it.”

“So why not reappear?”

“Because they’ll kill me,” she said.

“I thought it was just—they said it was a man who—took your clothes.”

“I was putting up with nonsense like that my whole life. No, this was a man with a knife. I didn’t have time to do anything but rush toward him—I call it ‘rushing’—and then pass through him. He didn’t know where I’d gone. Back then I hardly ever did it—rushing, I mean—and they might not have known I could do it. Now they know, though. Mother told me about the spies. They know everything.”

“They know only what they see and hear,” said Rigg.

“I can’t hear anything when I rush,” she said. “You were so clever to—the slate, I mean. Even Mother never thought of writing me messages and holding them really still.”

“We have to go. But first—can you see any mechanism here that seems to lead outside the room? Any connection to some trigger that might open the door from the outside?”

They both examined the walls of the passage, but there was nothing. The lever that opened it from this side was rooted in the wall, and everything else was hidden.

“I can go into the wall if you want,” she said, “but it’s pitch black in there. I won’t see anything and I certainly can’t feel anything. Except the heat and the thickness of it.”

“No, no, I don’t want you to do that. But . . . I’m such a fool . . . somebody had to build these passages, right? Somebody built the mechanism. If I go back to the beginning, I can find his path. Their paths. I can see where they went when they were hooking everything together.”

“You mean the paths don’t fade?”

“Not really,” said Rigg. “They get fainter, sort of, but it’s more like they get farther—but it’s not actually distance—they’re still there. They never go away or move. Shhh. Let me concentrate.”

It took five minutes for him to find the right time. Long ago there had been another building here, and as he struggled to find exactly the right path, Rigg realized that they must have built this portion of Flacommo’s house while the old house was still standing. To hide what they were doing from view.

Once he had the right paths, the answer was clear. “The trigger is in the ceiling of the corridor,” he said. “Too high up for us to reach, even if we jump. But if we had a broom, or a sword, or . . . anything with a handle . . . he worked in spots right at the corners of the wall panel. Maybe you have to push both. Or maybe one opens it and the other closes it.”

“Let’s go out and see,” she said.

Rigg reached for the lever.

“Wait!” she said. “What if somebody’s out there?”

“I’d know it if they were,” said Rigg. “There’s nobody.”

“When we go out, we can’t talk any more.”

“But there’s always tomorrow. And the next day.”

“Rigg,” she said, and hugged him again. “You know I’ve gotten younger, waiting for you,” she said.

“Younger?”

“When I rush, the rest of the world flies by. When I’m going really fast, whole days can pass in what seems like a few minutes to me. Most of the time I don’t rush so hard, but—”

“How do you know how much time has passed for you?” asked Rigg. “How do you measure time when you’re rushing?”

“Let’s just say . . . it’s a pretty accurate method. I know how many days have passed in the regular world, and I can—I measure my time by the month. Do you understand? I know when a month has passed for me. And since I went into seclusion, it’s only been two months for me. Everybody else has aged more than a year. But two months for me. So they think I’m sixteen now, but my body has barely lived through fifteen years. At this rate I’ll live forever—only I’ll have no life at all.”

She was crying. Not like a child, face bunched up and whining noises, but like a woman, silently, her shoulders heaving as he held her. “Param, we’ll get you out of here.”

“Getting out of this house isn’t enough. They’ll hunt us down in the city, in the library, wherever we go.”

“Umbo and Loaf will come,” said Rigg. “We’ll find a way. You’ll get your life back. We both will.”

“You’re my little brother,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the one making promises to you.”

“I know,” said Rigg. “You can tell me bedtime stories when we’re out of here. But we’ve got to go now, while there’s still time to figure out how to close the door from the other side.”

In the end, they didn’t look for a broom or anything else. Rigg just cupped his hands and boosted her up. With Param leaning against the wall while stepping onto his shoulder, she could reach the corner. Naturally, they tried the wrong spot first. Nothing happened and Rigg was ready to despair until she pointed out that they were probably pressing the spot that opened it. Sure enough, when she pressed hard in the other corner—and he knew just how hard, since her feet pressed downward into his shoulders—the wall slid silently back into place. There was no sign that it was any different from the other walls.

When she was back down on the floor, she kissed him on the cheek and then she was gone.

In the whole time he had barely caught a glimpse of her face. The silvery mirrored light in the secret passage, the flickering candlelight in the corridor—Rigg wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her if he saw her in broad daylight.

But she was real and alive and he had finally done what Father told him to do—he had found his sister. And she was expecting him. Father had said that he would set her free.

Father trusted me.

She trusts me now.

I’d better not let her down.

CHAPTER 18

Digging in the Past

“We have nineteen starships,” said Ram. “And only one world.”

“That gives us nineteen times the chance of success,” said the expendable.

“Nineteen times the likelihood of terrible confusion between colonies that have exactly the same personnel,” said Ram. “Nineteen times the likelihood of deadly rivalries, adulteries, even murders. Constant comparison between the lives of persons bearing the same names, DNA, even fingerprints. And in the end, our nineteen ships will still end up populating only one world.”

“We have no likely target worlds for the remaining ships,” said the expendable. “And we have only the one captain.”

“One of the best things about settling the human race on a new planet is that a disaster that strikes one human world won’t affect the other, so the species can’t be extinguished by a single event.”

“Except the explosion of the galactic core,” said the expendable helpfully.

“Yes, there is that chance, but there’s not much we can do about that.”

“Yet,” said the expendable.

“Meanwhile,” said Ram, “I think there’s another benefit we might enhance a little. The plan was always for the human race to exist on two planets. What no one planned was for our colony to be separated by more than eleven thousand years in time from the starfaring culture we came from. There is no chance of interbreeding between Earth and this world. It’s a true Galapagos opportunity to see where genetic drift takes the two versions of the human race in complete isolation for more than four hundred generations.”

“Technically, only this world will have 447 generations, using the average of twenty-five years,” said the expendable. “Earth will have had no time elapse at all.”