“So what do we do now,” asked Ivy. “Wait here and hope they sneak in and answer you?”

  Laz used the stick and underneath his message he wrote,

  Talk to us!!!!

  “Good use of exclamation points,” said Ivy.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to shout,” said Laz.

  Suddenly Ivy grabbed him around the waist and clung to him, pressing her face into his shirt. It popped into his mind that he must have grown, because she used to be closer to his height. Or did they grow his cloned body taller in the coffin? He liked having her hold him like this, but what did she mean by it? What did she want?

  He decided not to ask. She’d tell him whatever she wanted him to know.

  “Laz,” she said.

  He noticed her voice was steady. She hadn’t been crying.

  “Laz, I think something is seriously wrong. I don’t know if these people are for us or against us. I don’t know if they’re leading us toward something or herding us away. I don’t know why we trust that they know a single thing that matters.”

  “That’s why I asked them to talk to us instead of sneaking around.”

  “Maybe they can’t,” said Ivy. “Maybe to time travel they had to give up their physical bodies so they’re invisible all the time.”

  “If they don’t have a physical body, Ivy, how did they pick up a stick to scratch out these messages? How did they move the leaves out of the way, and put them back after?”

  “I don’t know all the rules, Laz. I was just speculating.”

  “Well, it was smarter than anything I’ve been able to come up with,” said Laz.

  “You sure did think of reasons why it was a dumb idea pretty quickly.”

  “That’s been our whole story, Ivy. Thinking of reasons why the other one’s wrong. No, not just wrong,” said Laz. “Half-wittedly, spectacularly, uncombobulatedly wrong.”

  “I’m never that wrong,” said Ivy.

  “Then I must have been describing my own degree of wrongness.” He looked away from her, discouraged. “On average, you and me together are a half-wit.”

  “Good arithmetic,” said Ivy. She kissed him. “You’re doing fine, whatever it is we’re doing. It was your brilliant mind and initiative that kept us and four dogs alive in a ghost town.”

  “That was Z-Laz, but I admit he and I resemble each other.”

  “I haven’t loved eating tuna fish since they revived us. So I must have a pretty visceral memory of our predecessors’ adventures.”

  “They’re the only memories we have,” said Laz.

  “Here’s my new rule, Laz. If we remember doing it, we did it.”

  “Sensible rule,” said Laz. “And if we forget something?”

  “Then it never happened,” said Ivy.

  “How did you think of this?” asked Laz.

  “It’s the way most people function all the time,” said Ivy.

  Laz chuckled.

  Ivy’s eyes opened wider. Laz pulled out of her embrace and looked where she was looking. At the message Laz had just written. Only instead of “What the hell!” it said,

  What the heck

  At first glance, seeing that it now ended with “ck,” and the punctuation was gone, Laz leapt to the conclusion that the messenger had changed it to a word he never used. But then he saw that his original “he” was still in place. So now it was funny and cute. And completely baffling.

  “What does that mean?” asked Ivy.

  “I don’t know,” said Laz. “I was hoping for something clearer.”

  “The messenger was right here. Again.”

  “Or still,” said Laz. “Maybe he’s still here. Maybe he can hear us talking.”

  “Or maybe invisible time travelers can’t sense sound waves and can’t make sounds.” Ivy smiled.

  Laz smiled back. Was she joking?

  “No matter how crazy things get,” said Ivy, “we can always come up with something to say that’s even crazier.”

  Okay, joking. Sort of.

  Laz turned slowly, surveying the whole clearing. If a time traveler was actually here, waiting to see what got written next, or maybe listening, if he could hear speech like a regular person, where would he wait while he kept his eye on things? Laz ruled out a few obvious places—wherever he had walked the first time he was here, where he and Ivy had walked this time. Unless they could walk right through him, in which case, how could they ever communicate with somebody that ethereal?

  Laz marched over to the place he imagined was the most likely. He spoke to where he imagined this invisible timeheap might be standing. Or sitting. “You obviously care about what happens,” said Laz softly. “If you talk to us, maybe we can help.”

  Ivy came up behind him. “You think he’s here?”

  “Here in this clearing? Possibly. Here like where I’m looking right now? I’ve got no idea.”

  Ivy walked quickly toward the spot where Laz had been looking and almost immediately tripped and fell onto her hands. The breath was knocked out of her, so she couldn’t talk at first.

  And where she had just stepped and tripped, Laz could see the shape of a young woman coalescing, solidifying. About the same size as Ivy, and even looking like her. But not exactly like her. Had to be one of the Zee children.

  “Ivy,” said Laz as he helped her to her feet. “We have company.”

  Ivy saw the girl now. “Sorry I stepped on you,” Ivy said.

  “You had no way of knowing I was going to pick that moment to materialize,” said the girl.

  “Did you write that note?” asked Ivy.

  “The first one? Stopping Laz from opening a new Portal? Fui eu.”

  Laz held out his hand. “I’m Laz Hayerian the third, the most useless and ignorant of the various Lazzes that are infesting this world.”

  The girl shook his hand. She was solid enough.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said the girl.

  “Neither do I,” said Laz.

  “Could you listen to us? Hear us?” asked Ivy. “I mean, before you… materialized?”

  “I’m a fabulous lip-reader,” said the girl. “And my name is Nasty. Well, that’s my nickname. My real name is a kind of flower. Nasturtium. Nasty is just the obvious nickname.”

  “Your parents are us, right? Only older?” asked Ivy.

  “They didn’t tell you about me?” asked Nasty.

  “They mentioned a son and a daughter,” said Ivy. “Twins? I got the impression of twins.”

  Laz watched and listened as Ivy worked at making friends with this woman who could be invisible when she wanted. It was like Ivy talked to invisible people every day and it was no big deal.

  “My brother and I never shared a womb,” said Nasty. “Not twins.”

  “Ivy and I were never in a womb,” said Laz.

  Nasty glanced at him and then returned to talking with Ivy. “My parents were clones, too, but you know that.”

  “At least they were given citizenship,” said Ivy.

  “My parents are on strike,” said Nasty. “They’re not good citizens.”

  “Hiding and spying,” said Ivy. “Are you spying?”

  “When I need to,” said Nasty. “What I can’t spy on are people’s minds and hearts. What they do or say, that I can see. And hear, mostly. But nothing about why they’re doing it. Just a bunch of petty mysteries, and now and then something that actually matters.”

  Laz smiled and reached out his hand—not for another handshake, obviously, but to take Nasty’s hand and hold it lightly in his. “Thank you for coming to visit with us.”

  “I’m not supposed to. My brother and I agreed not to talk to you or let you see us. We’re not supposed to let anybody know who we are and who our parents are and what we can do.”

  “I wish we had that choice,” said Ivy. “Everybody already knows what we can do.”

  “I realized that you needed to know more than a couple of scratched words magically appearing near you,” said Nasty.

  “Does your brother have a name?” asked Laz. “If you can’t tell us, we’ll keep referring to him as ‘your brother,’ no harm done.”

  “When we last changed our aliases, we decided to go with flowers,” said Nasty. “I chose Nasturtium so my nickname could be Nasty.”

  Laz laughed. “Clever,” he said.

  “Your parents went along with that?” asked Ivy.

  “They didn’t get a vote. All that matters is that they know what names we’re going by at all times in case they need to summon us.”

  Laz tried to think why they would be summoned at all. What were their powers?

  “And my brother chose to be Chrysanthemum,” said Nasty. “Nickname Mum.”

  “Not Chrys, of course,” said Ivy.

  “Of course,” said Nasty. “But his first choice was Daisy and then Iris, and I put my foot down about names that are never given to boys.”

  “But you settled on Mum?” asked Laz.

  “We settled on Chrysanthemum, because it wasn’t loony and I thought the nickname would be Chrys. I thought that because I’m kind of an idiot. I love my brother but he doesn’t like being told what to do or even being second-guessed. He knew I’d object to Mum and that’s probably why he chose it.”

  “So when you say you need to talk to Mum,” said Laz, “people don’t know if you mean your mother or your brother.”

  “Fun, isn’t it?” asked Nasty. “Except I don’t know anybody I’d talk to about him.”

  “Nasty,” said Ivy, “what are the warnings about?”

  “Mum and I figured that you were trying to do something important—make secret doors so communication could continue between the timestreams even if the official Portals are broken. We don’t want to stop you, we just don’t want you to open a back door that’ll let the fox into the henhouse, so to speak.”

  “That is our plan,” said Ivy, “if we agree the government is the fox. Though we have no control over what the government will do with the secret Portals.”

  “Then our purposes are aligned,” said Nasty. “Peace on Earth, good will among the timestreams.”

  “Okay,” said Laz. “This is great, this helps us so much, you have no idea. But what now? Are you going to go invisible again so we have to go back to leaving notes to each other?”

  “I don’t know how Mum is going to react to what I’ve already done,” said Nasty.

  “If he doesn’t like it, then screw him,” said Laz. “He’s your brother, and he’s kind of our nephew, but there’s nothing to be gained by not talking to each other.”

  Nasty nodded. “He’ll probably agree with that. Especially because you didn’t go berserk when I materialized right in front of you.”

  “Nasty,” said Laz, “we need to be able to reveal the secret Portals when a group needs to escape a timestream.”

  “As long as you don’t reveal our identity,” said Nasty.

  “Our identity was exposed when they woke us up,” said Laz. “Ivy and I get recognized everywhere.”

  “We can’t do anything secretly now,” said Ivy.

  “Except open secret Portals,” said Nasty.

  “My dear niece,” said Ivy, “this is all very useful and practicable. But sometime very soon, you’re going to have to teach me all the strokes and help me swim into the lagoon. Laz, too.”

  “I assume that’s a metaphor,” said Laz.

  “We can find a place to rest somewhere out of sight,” said Ivy. “And then you can tell us what your powers are and we can try to learn them. That’s what my mother urged me to do—learn all that I can, and then do all the right things with that knowledge.”

  “Do you know what the right thing is?” asked Nasty.

  “I know that we can decide on the right thing once Ivy and I have learned what we can about your additional powers,” said Laz. “Because that vanishing trick, I could use that.”

  “I’m not really vanishing, not the way you think,” said Nasty. “That’s just a byproduct.”

  “And Mum can do all the things that you do?” asked Ivy.

  “Oh, yes, keep that worshipful attitude. Mum loves to be worshiped, so you’ll get along just great.”

  “I’m not a worshipful guy,” said Laz.

  “He’s too vain to notice as long as you go through the motions.” Nasty took Laz’s hand in hers again. “I’ve been watching you, and I don’t want to go back to silent observation, guessing at motives.”

  Ivy reached out and detached Nasty’s hand from Laz’s. “He’s spoken for,” said Ivy.

  “She’s my niece,” said Laz, resenting Ivy’s suspicion.

  “She is not your niece, because Zero-Laz isn’t your brother.”

  “Then what’s the—”

  “Genetically, her father is you,” said Ivy. “She’s genetically your daughter.”

  Laz put his hands in his pocket. “You’re pretty possessive, for a woman who never said yes to my proposal.”

  “Are you withdrawing it?” asked Ivy.

  “Absolutely not. I’m just trying to pressure you into giving me a definite yes.”

  “No, I shouldn’t accept an offer of marriage from a guy who still flirts with his own daughter right in front of me.”

  Laz didn’t bother arguing. What would be the point? “Nasty,” said Laz, “since we’re already falling into monstrously incestuous love, according to Ivy, would you find it in your heart to tell us what would have happened if I had made a Portal right here?”

  “How should I know?” asked Nasty.

  “Why did you tell me no, then?”

  “Oh, right. There were people in this exact spot in two of the timestreams. Your arrival would have been noticed and gossiped about, and the authorities would know there must be a secret Portal.”

  “What were the people doing?” asked Ivy. “That he would have run into.”

  “In one of the timestreams, it was a surveying team, because they’re planning to build something close by,” said Nasty. “No good making your secret Portal in some parking lot.”

  “And the other timestream?” asked Ivy.

  “It’s a favorite make-out spot for some of the students in the college down there.” Nasty’s gesture didn’t point to anything at all, not in this timestream. “You would have interrupted a couple of kids trying to help build up the local population.”

  “Then they wouldn’t have noticed Laz’s arrival at all,” said Ivy.

  “I imagine they probably would have, even if they didn’t let it interrupt them,” said Nasty. “But I’m not an expert on their whole future history.”

  “Didn’t you come back from that future to warn me?” asked Laz.

  “Future?” Nasty laughed. “You think I’m a time traveler!”

  “How else would you know all that stuff?” asked Ivy.

  “I’m a scryer, like you, only I can see a little farther afield.”

  “Scryer?” asked Ivy. “There’s a name for my job?”

  “It’s an old magic term,” said Nasty. “A person who can find things.”

  Laz and Ivy had nothing to say.

  “I can see you’re disappointed,” said Nasty. “Because I’m not a time traveler?”

  “We were hoping you could teach us,” said Laz.

  “To travel in time,” said Ivy.

  “Come on,” said Nasty. “Mother and Father told me and Mum that time travel was impossible.”

  “How would they know?” asked Ivy.

  “Because the first Laz—OrigiLaz, Mom and Dad call him—he was the smartest scientist in the world.”

  Ivy put a hand on Laz’s shoulder. “Does this look like he’s going to grow up to be the smartest guy in the world?”

  Laz ignored the teasing and said, “If he was so smart, how did he disappear and where did he go?”

  “You seem to think that Mum and I know something,” said Nasty. She laughed. “My dear Uncle Laz and Aunt Ivy, we don’t have any more information than you do.”

  “You know how to be silent and invisible,” said Laz. “Can you teach us?”

  “It’s really useful for us to be able to do it. But I can’t think how your knowing how would help me and Mum in the slightest.”

  “Then I guess we’re done here,” said Laz.

  And at that exact moment, he side stepped into another timestream. He grabbed Ivy’s hand.

  “Laz,” said Ivy. “You just side stepped us out of the timestream where we can get out of this valley.”

  “I didn’t like her spying on us,” said Laz. “She can follow us, invisibly, if she wants, so it’s not like we can hide from her.”

  “Who knows what she can and can’t do?” asked Ivy. “Maybe she scries and doesn’t side step. Like me.”

  “You’ve side stepped several times,” said Laz.

  “I don’t make a habit of it.”

  “Let’s get down to the airport area before we step back into the timestream we were just in.”

  “Does it matter? Do we have to hide from her?” asked Ivy.

  “I don’t like thinking that I’ve got a spectator for everything I do,” said Laz.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Ivy. “I already watch everything you do.”

  “That’s different,” said Laz. “You’re invited.” In that moment, he side stepped them back to the timestream where they’d met Nasty.

  “I was watching you long before you proposed,” said Ivy.

  “If I minded, I wouldn’t have asked you,” said Laz. “We are going to be together for, kind of, ever, right?”

  “You of all people should know that marriages don’t last forever,” said Ivy.

  “What I know is that marriages are supposed to last a lifetime,” said Laz.

  Her arms went around his neck, and with their faces close together, she whispered, “Yes.”

  “Yes to making that happen?”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you. For the long haul.”

  Nasty was beside them again. “I thought you had run away from me,” she said.

  “You’re the one who disappeared,” said Laz.

  “So now you’re engaged,” said Nasty. “Congratulations, Aunt Ivy and Uncle Laz.”

  “I figured you’d still be here,” said Laz.

  “As long as you’re with us,” said Ivy, “you might as well come home with us for a visit.”