Laz turned around and realized that Ivy was crying, sitting on the couch with her face buried in her hands, her body shaking silently. Had that little ceremony meant that much to her?

  But no, Laz knew better. He sat beside her on the couch and rested his hand gently on her back, where her hair brushed against the fabric of her shirt. “All those Tesseran soldiers,” said Laz.

  “I hate the ones who killed those children, who beheaded so many, the children watching in terror as their schoolmates were beheaded. I hate them. But as Riffle’s men were so efficiently cutting the Tesserans down, I thought, there’s another mother with a broken heart, another sweetheart, another wife who will have to raise their children without a father.”

  “In the words of a slightly insane American general, ‘War is hell.’ ”

  “And nations that don’t prepare for war will not have peace,” said Ivy. “I know all the adages.”

  “I love your compassionate heart, Ivy. I want you beside me forever.”

  She still spoke into her hands, but the sobbing had stopped. “Laz, if you want me beside you, you’ll have to speed up, because I’m already three strides ahead.”

  They both laughed a little and then got up and set about preparing for more after-battle debriefing.

  “Should we eat first?” asked Ivy.

  “They’ll have food for us, and we won’t have to do the dishes.”

  “These are serious meetings,” said Ivy. “We might learn something about how to prevent wars like that in the first place.”

  “When we arrive, I’ll mention that you haven’t had breakfast. They’ll either escort us to the buffet, or bring us plates of food, or scramble about trying to get something for us to eat by the time the meeting ends.”

  Ivy poked him in the chest. “You’re beginning to feel entitled to the special treatment we always get.”

  “No,” said Laz. “I think you’re entitled. Under pressure, you found a way for us to side step to a different location in space as well as time. You deserve to be waited on and offered the best food this miserable imitation city has to offer.”

  “Miserable? Imitation?” said Ivy, mock offended.

  “They remember what cities used to look like, and they keep trying to create facsimiles, but cities grow from the needs of the people. Neighborhoods grow because of the people who live in them, the work they do, their needs and desires. I don’t think there’s a real neighborhood in this whole town. The town doesn’t even have a name!”

  “It’s Central Time,” said Ivy.

  “The name of this whole timestream, and the only name we have for Ron’s shadow government, and also the name of this city, which isn’t a part of any nation. But it’s the timestream where the children of Nantes were killed by men who pretended to be soldiers but instead were just murderers.”

  “Ron told us they have all their faces on video,” said Ivy. “They’ll be found and punished for their war crimes.”

  “I don’t want to dignify what they did by the name of war. There was no declaration of war. No provocation, nothing. So what they did does not fall under the heading of ‘war.’ They should be prosecuted as murderers. They don’t belong in prisoner of war camps. There is no human civilization that should have to tolerate their presence.”

  “One of the preferred arguments for capital punishment,” observed Ivy.

  “There should be no repatriation of captured murderers as prisoners of war,” said Laz.

  “There can’t be,” said Ivy. “Tessera no longer exists.”

  “They’ll try to recreate it. A new nation with an old name, born with a grudge.”

  “They can try. But Laz. Hasn’t there been enough killing?”

  “You think the kill-ometer is full, with no concern about who died and why?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. Killing these monsters won’t bring back any of the children they assassinated for the crime of attending school too close to the Portal to timestream Six.”

  “You want specific retribution for the exact people who carried out each specific crime,” said Ivy.

  “I want each of them to be sealed up in an empty oil can, which is then suspended over a low fire for a week, after which whatever’s left of their bodies should be fed to pigs and then the pig shit gets thrown into the ocean so sea slugs can recycle the last dregs of their monster bodies into plankton and krill.”

  Ivy put her arms around him, buried her face in his shirt. “Laz, I’ve never seen you filled with—”

  “You’ve seen me angry lots of times,” said Laz.

  “Filled with hate and fury.”

  “Is that what I’m feeling? Okay, I’ll own it. I hate them and I want them—”

  “You want them spectacularly dead,” said Ivy. “But let’s put this in a broader perspective. This is the first war since the Migration, since the human race was divided among all these timestreams, connected to each other only through the Portals. The first war that took place across a Portal. So everything we do now will be a precedent for the next war, and the next.”

  “Good,” said Laz. “After every war, let’s execute all the soldiers who murdered babies, who wiped out unarmed civilians—”

  “Not every war will be won by the good guys,” said Ivy.

  Laz thought about that for a few minutes, and understood. “When the bad guys win, they can hold war crimes trials, because that’s how it’s done, because we did it that way.”

  “They roasted the convicted criminals for a week and then fed their bodies to the pigs and dumped all the pig poo into the ocean,” said Ivy. “Is that the precedent we want to set?”

  “There would always be war crimes trials against the losers in a war, and they would always be found guilty,” said Laz, “and their deaths would be even crueler than the perfectly insane punishment I just described to you.”

  “That’s why I think there shouldn’t be war crime trials at all,” said Ivy.

  “So they just walk away.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Ivy. “I think we take all that footage that shows who killed the children, and we put it up on the webs for everybody in every timestream to see. We can say we haven’t identified the actual murderers, so we’re not able to arrest anybody and put them on trial.”

  “And you think—”

  “I think the people who know them will recognize them, and I think they’ll want them punished for bringing the wrath of Central Time down on the Tesseran people’s head. I think they won’t live long, or rather, I hope they won’t. I hope Tesserans want to believe that regular people from Tessera would never do such things, so they need to purge those criminal impulses in order to take away Tessera’s shame.”

  Laz blinked. “So when you say there’s been enough killing, you’re still counting on the Tesserans atoning for their atrocities by killing the ones who did those crimes.” Laz held up a hand before Ivy could protest. “By purging them. Sorry.”

  Ivy shrugged. “It wouldn’t be Central Time executing them. There wouldn’t be war crimes trials.”

  “Just the release of inflammatory pictures to the public,” said Laz.

  “Telling the truth, that’s what it is,” said Ivy.

  “But who says that it’s only other former Tesserans who might decide to hunt the killers down and erase them?”

  Ivy took a step back, and then went to get a lightweight jacket for a warm but windy day. “We don’t want to be late to the debriefing,” she said.

  “We’ve already been debriefed three times,” said Laz.

  “Not by these people.”

  “Should we wear our medals?”

  “Not this time, Laz. But you can carry it in your pocket, as long as you promise not to accidently drop it somewhere so somebody else will pick it up and say, ‘This looks like the Royal Order of Dutch Heroes,’ and then the secret’s out.”

  “Fortunately, nobody will recognize it.”

  “Don’t take it with you, then,” said Ivy. “Really. We have to go.”

  “What I think is that you don’t want to admit that you’re really counting on them being assassinated by the families of their victims.”

  “I can’t foresee everything. I can’t really foresee anything.”

  “We’re going to have to protect those scumbottles, aren’t we? Side stepping them away from harm.”

  “No,” said Ivy. “We just won’t release the videos to the public after all.”

  Laz grinned. “Just to law enforcement and military groups in every nation in all the timestreams.”

  “Have to let them know who might be loose in their territory, ready to harm their citizens.”

  They walked out of the house and up to the bus bench.

  “In the histories, the wars are fought, battle after battle,” said Laz, “and then one side wins, and that’s it. Who knew there was still so much mess to clean up?”

  “Laz,” said Ivy. “You didn’t kill anybody. You’re not responsible for any of their deaths. They started the killings, and you helped to stop them. But you didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You think that’s what I’m going through?”

  “Guilt, inappropriate guilt,” said Ivy.

  “Ivy, I’m ashamed that I wasn’t holding a rifle, that I wasn’t picking off Tesserans, that none of those dead bodies had my bullet in them.”

  Ivy just stared at him.

  “All I did was open the Portal, and then watch better, braver men than me, real men, do the work.”

  “You’re a good man,” said Ivy. “And you’re also the only active stepper in the world today, so your life has to be protected. You had to stand back from the flying bullets.”

  “It’s the perfect excuse, isn’t it? I’m a precious resource.”

  Ivy took both his hands. “Especially to me,” she said. “I’m glad that we’re a team, that we can do these extraordinary things together, things that tie worlds together and help save cities that are beleaguered by monsters.”

  “We’ve been given medals that belong to heroes,” said Laz. “What did we do that was heroic?”

  “It’ll come to you, if you think about it,” said Ivy.

  “I’m doing stuff I’ve always done. Side stepping. It’s like giving me a medal for hitting the toilet when I pee.”

  “That’s a medal I know you don’t deserve,” said Ivy.

  Laz had to laugh. But he wasn’t sure, a moment later, whether it had been a laugh or a sob.

  The bus approached. They stepped on. It had a bunch of people on it this time, so they stood and held on to dangling straps and didn’t talk much at all, except for a few words about where to get lunch if by chance they didn’t get a meal at this meeting.

  21

  WITH NO NEW assignments, Laz and Ivy decided that they should hold off on making more Portals until the inevitable rumors about the Tessera War died down. Not that there were any written reports that mentioned Laz and Ivy. But some of the most important news stories were considered to be perilous to put down in print—freedom of speech and press had not been universal principles in the Old Place, and even though most countries in the timestreams had made it a law, the places where speech and writing were never dangerous were closer to zero than anybody would admit.

  Too many people had seen Laz and Ivy during the battle. They had made no attempt to disguise themselves. And even though Colonel Riffle’s men were as reliable as human beings could be, something could slip out. Some reference to a new Portal—something that could only have been produced by Laz and Ivy. Or one of their names, dropped during a story about something else.

  A publisher or writer, hearing the rumor, would not dare to assert that Ivy and Laz had been seen, or had opened a Portal. When it’s something that happened in the middle of a battle, there were security concerns and the risk of annoying somebody high up in some government.

  But the stories could spread, word-of-mouth, the way they always did, before and after the invention of printing. So if Laz and Ivy suddenly became highly visible, it would only remind people that yes, they were alive, active, nosing into things in whatever timestream they pleased. And they wouldn’t have to go through any existing Portal. They could show up anywhere, at any time. Lie low, said Ivy to Laz. And Laz replied, Become invisible.

  Which made them both think of Mumbo.

  “Of course they’ll never find him,” said Ivy. “What with strobing and all.”

  “We don’t know if he really had anything to do with the Tesseran invasion of Central Time,” said Laz.

  “He claimed he did.”

  “And so it must be true,” said Laz.

  “He seems to me to be something of a braggart. Couldn’t he lie about it just to seem important?”

  “Sure,” said Laz. “But who would he be impressing?”

  Ivy shrugged. “Himself, maybe.”

  “Narcissist?” asked Laz.

  “Remote psychoanalysis is notoriously unreliable,” said Ivy.

  “People do it all the time. Biographers.”

  “And the results are always somewhere between doubtful and ludicrous,” said Ivy.

  “Do you think he had anything to do with the atrocities?”

  “I have no way of guessing,” said Ivy. “But he didn’t seem to be… the type.”

  “I’m not sure that people who murder children and chop people up have an identifiable ‘type.’ ”

  “I’m pretty sure they do,” said Ivy. “I don’t think they’re playful like Mum.”

  “Playful? Right, he didn’t trash your stuff, so it looked like a prank to you.”

  Ivy rolled her eyes. “He didn’t hurt us—he could have. And if he really loved mayhem, why wouldn’t he do a little chopping on us, once he realized we posed a danger to his machinations?”

  “He didn’t realize it until we’d done it,” said Laz.

  “And then he didn’t choose a timestream in which Riffle’s surprise attack failed,” said Ivy.

  “He doesn’t side step, does he?” asked Laz.

  “If he did, surely he would have used it to undo our victory.”

  “Central Time’s victory,” said Laz.

  “Of course, maybe he doesn’t know what we did. Maybe he thinks his own dad did it.”

  “There’s no use speculating about what he knows and what he’s going to do,” said Laz. “Whatever he decides to do, we’ve got no way to prevent it. So we have to hope his purposes are benign.”

  “Unless you have a strobing pistol or garrote, that can move through time in sync with Mumbo, I don’t see any action we can take against him,” said Ivy.

  “And maybe he’s not our enemy,” said Laz.

  “Think so?”

  “No,” said Laz. “He’s definitely our antagonist.”

  “Or they both are.”

  “Or all four of them,” said Laz. “The parents, too. How can we be sure otherwise?”

  “Because they’re us,” said Ivy. “And I wouldn’t betray us.”

  “But that’s because we share their memories. The whole experience in Greensboro, the discovery of a Shiva-free set of timestreams.”

  “And they don’t share any of ours.”

  “Because we barely have any memories,” said Laz. “All we have are theirs, really.”

  “But Laz, they didn’t betray us, because there’s nothing to betray. Mumbo, Nasty, they never promised us anything. We had no agreement they could go back on.”

  “Do you think Nasty and Mumbo are actually adults?” asked Laz. “They’re full-sized, I know, but they seem randomly playful. Nothing specific, just the way Nasty talked. What Mumbo does. Prankish. Would he really help orchestrate a massacre?”

  “But he did,” said Ivy.

  “We think he did. We assume he did.”

  “And we have no reason to think he didn’t.”

  Laz gave up on it. “We go round and round on these questions and the only way we can answer them is to see what Mumbo and Nasty do next.”

  “And since we can only see them when they want to be seen,” said Ivy, “it’s doubtful we can learn anything even then.”

  “We aren’t even sure they gave us those messages,” said Laz.

  “Who else?” asked Ivy.

  “Several insane ideas. One or both of us write the message for ourselves to discover, and we don’t remember writing them. Or one hemisphere of our brain writes them, and then the other hemisphere deciphers them.”

  “Our brains aren’t that split,” said Ivy.

  “Or Mumbo and Nasty, or Mumbo or Nasty—though I have no idea how they know what’s going to happen so they can warn us.”

  “Ruling out time travel,” said Ivy.

  “So far, anyway,” said Laz.

  “And then there’s the parents—the usses before us.”

  “Usses,” said Laz.

  “We have to talk about them somehow,” said Ivy, miffed that he was mocking her.

  “I think it’s a brilliant word. You and me, we’re one ‘us,’ and Z-Laz and Ivy-Z are another us—”

  “And OrigiLaz and Ivy-O are us as well,” said Ivy. “Though I’m far prettier and more polite.”

  “You’re trying to goad them?” asked Laz.

  “I don’t think they’re listening,” said Ivy.

  “And I’m sure they are. She is. I think her gifts transcend anything we’ve yet asked her for.”

  “Can’t prove it, though,” said Ivy.

  Laz yawned. “Well, I can prove that I need a nap.”

  “It’s past your bedtime, Laz Hayerian.”

  “I have never had a bedtime in my life.”

  “You were so spoiled,” said Ivy.

  “It didn’t feel like it,” said Laz.

  “Now you’re going to tell me you were persecuted growing up?”

  “I was not,” said Laz. “But that doesn’t mean that everything went swimmingly.”

  “Of course it all went swimmingly. Because you would side step until you got to a timestream where everything happened as you preferred it.”