“If I thought your voice was part of my dream,” said Laz, “I would never want to leave that dream.”

  “You sometimes say the nicest things, Dim,” said Ivy.

  “And sometimes you’re mean just for fun,” said Laz. He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Is this room cold, or is it just me?”

  Ivy chuckled. “I thought I was always the cold one.”

  “I started searching in a panic,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing.”

  “Still, you managed to find a whole range of streams I hadn’t been aware of,” said Ivy. “So let’s examine them together, methodically.”

  They did, and this time Ivy set her watch to alert them to take a break every twenty minutes. Even then, they had to take a longer break every two or three hours.

  “I don’t remember this being so tedious when the Zees were searching for the Safe Place,” said Ivy. “I started with no method at all. I was—Ivy-Z was finding thousands of places that were all the same, in the sense that I couldn’t tell if—she couldn’t—”

  “Forget the pronouns, I understand what you mean,” said Laz. “They couldn’t detect Shiva anyway.”

  “Ivy-O claimed she could, I recall,” said Ivy. “Something about gravity.”

  “Don’t know if that was a lie or a delusion,” said Laz. “But it wasn’t true.”

  “I don’t remember which of us thought of looking for the reaction of the techs until we saw that they were happy, which had to mean Shiva wasn’t in that timestream.”

  “Now we’ll certainly be able to see if both me and Mumbo are alive and uninjured,” said Laz.

  “But both of you are still yourselves,” said Ivy, “so it’s hard to find a timestream in which you two aren’t at each other’s throat.”

  “Because there isn’t a timestream in which Fecis isn’t a complete shit.”

  “Fecis totalis,” said Ivy.

  “Summa cum Fecis,” said Laz.

  “And no timestream,” said Ivy, “in which you don’t feel a desperate need to protect me.”

  “Can’t help that,” said Laz. “You’re such a fragile blossom.”

  “And I don’t even wear perfume.”

  “Or deodorant,” said Laz.

  “You should talk.”

  “Want to have another go?” asked Laz.

  “But let’s think first. Talk first.”

  Laz was fine with that. He let her do the talking.

  As she talked, she showed him—indicated to him—certain timestreams and ranges of timestreams they had already examined. Talking and listening while searching taxed him enough that he twice had to ask her to repeat something, and she slowed down so he had time to digest what she was saying.

  “What about looking for a timestream in which Mumbo wasn’t naked when he showed up?” asked Ivy.

  “The first time? Or the last time?”

  “The first time, if we can find one.”

  Ivy moved them to a range of timestreams in which Mumbo didn’t wake her up in bed by touching bare skin. But in every stream, Mumbo was naked as a jaybird.

  Laz was wondering why jaybirds, which definitely had feathers, were his brain’s go-to simile for nudity, when Ivy said, “He just hates clothing.”

  “He loves exposing himself to women,” said Laz. “He was perfectly clothed when I first met him on the VTOL.”

  “So how could he have showed up naked in my bed without making you murderously angry?” asked Ivy.

  “If you hadn’t sounded so scared and upset when your shouting woke me up,” said Laz. “I came in there ready to slay whatever monster had you in its grasp.”

  “I always wondered why dragons waited around to parley,” said Ivy, “instead of just biting the knight in half.”

  “I always wondered why dragons didn’t bite the maiden in half. Did they have some deep yearning for interspecies sex?”

  “Why do you have to spoil it with something gross like that?” asked Ivy.

  “It was the obvious next thought.”

  “And the thought after that could have been, ‘Will it make Ivy happier if I don’t say this?’ ”

  “Is there a timestream,” said Laz, “in which you don’t wake me up at all?”

  “What, do you think there’s a timestream in which I found naked-stranger-boy in my bed and I got all turned on and made it with him?”

  “Is there such a timestream?” asked Laz.

  Ivy shuddered and started scanning the timestreams in which she did not scream. It was never because she desired Naked Boy, but only because he covered her mouth instead of caressing her first. He was strong.

  Laz was getting the same timestreams along with her, and when the twenty-minute alarm went off, he said, “So I guess now the difference between timestreams is how you told me about it.”

  “If I told you,” said Ivy.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Laz. “Though why would you not tell me?”

  “Maybe to avoid murder?” asked Ivy. “That’s what this is about, not plumbing the depths of our relationship.”

  Along those streams, Mumbo didn’t turn up the second time until days after, and this time not naked. No, his genitals were still hanging out of his fly.

  Ivy commented, “Doesn’t the zipper snag at your skin down there?”

  “In hopes of getting some,” said Laz, “pain seems like such a paltry obstacle.”

  They found that along that timeline, Laz laughed instead of getting angry. This pissed off Mumbo and he disappeared.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Ivy. “If you can take Mumbo to that timestream, keeping all he remembers of this one, won’t that work? Knowing that you could have killed him with a punch in the face, and now you’re in a timestream where none of that happened?”

  “It might work,” said Laz. “It’s worth a try.”

  “Even if it only almost works,” said Ivy, “it might change his attitude.”

  “If we’re both alive.”

  “Well, if he’s dead,” said Ivy, “it’s all moot.”

  “I’m not going to take him to a timestream where he’s dead.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s murder, in case you didn’t watch any lawyer shows as a kid,” said Laz.

  “So just side step him into one of these, and while you’re going to the hospital so you can be with him, I’ll try to see which of these timestreams is best.”

  It was a good division of labor, especially since they had worked through the night and Laz was feeling groggier than ever. It took him a ride on a crowded bus—people going to work in the morning—but Laz felt considerably more awake and alert by the time he got to Mumbo’s room.

  Mumbo closed his eyes as soon as he saw Laz.

  “I’m still here,” said Laz. “I think I might have a good timestream for us.”

  “I will till wan kill ooo.” I will still want to kill you. Mumbo’s speech was getting worse, not better. What surgeon could possibly work the miracle of giving this boy his face and speech back?

  Laz reached out for Mumbo’s hand, then realized that Mumbo probably wouldn’t cooperate. So he looked for and found an unbandaged region of Mumbo’s shoulder near the clavicle, touched it lightly, and then found the timestream that Ivy was passing to him. He side stepped. And there he was in that other timestream, Mumbo standing beside him, completely uninjured.

  It had worked.

  Had it? Because they were in the same hospital room, and lying on the bed was the body of Mumbo, his face ruined, and the hospital monitors showing him flatlining.

  Laz took the living, healthy Mumbo by the hand, and side stepped again, this time to a newly created timestream where they were already rushing down hospital stairs to avoid being seen by the medical people who were going to be scurrying around the dead body of Ruined Mumbo.

  Finally, out in the parking lot, out of sight behind a parked van, they stopped, leaned on the van, panted.

  “Thank you for not disappearing,” said Laz.

  “As soon as I realized I was in a good body again,” said Mumbo, “I didn’t think it would be funny to pull any pranks.”

  “But you died,” said Laz.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Mumbo. “I remember all of it, my stupid naked pranks, you punching me in the face and exploding it, our painful conversation afterward. I never had to face the consequences of my practical jokes before. I am so relieved to be out of that nightmare.” He faced Laz square on, took him by the shoulders. “Thank you,” he said. “When you punched me, you know, I was a half second away from inserting my hand into your body and blowing up your heart.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Laz.

  “So you would have had a right to kill me, in retaliation.”

  “I don’t think anybody would recognize a right of pretaliation,” said Laz. “I punched you before I had any idea you might be planning to kill me. But I also didn’t know what punching would do to you. I thought you were already fully materialized.”

  “How did you get me out of there?” asked Mumbo.

  “Ivy found us a place where…” And then Laz processed what had just happened, and none of it was possible. “Please, Fecis, would—”

  “Don’t call me by that childish name,” said Mumbo.

  “Done,” said Laz. “From now on, I’ll just call you Turd.”

  “Maybe I’ll think that’s funny after some time has passed.”

  “Mumbo, what just happened isn’t possible. I thought for a moment that Ivy chose a timestream where you were dead, because then instead of stepping you into your own body in the new timestream, your actual body got transported to a world where you didn’t exist. It was clever of her to spot that loophole, except—”

  “If you transported the body I was in at that time,” said Mumbo, “my face would still be a mass of throbbing pulp.”

  “Yes,” said Laz. “In both timestreams, you were already wrecked.”

  “Maybe your lady is smarter than you thought. Than I thought.” Mumbo ducked his head. “I thought it was so funny to get in bed with her. The way she jumped up. But I really scared her. Shamed her. And she still found a way to heal me?”

  They went back to Laz’s and Ivy’s house to find her waiting for them. “You look pretty good,” she said to Mumbo. “I prefer you with a face, and with clothes on.”

  “Me too,” said Mumbo. “I’m sorry, what I did, I wasn’t even thinking of you as a person, but you’re a good person, and you didn’t deserve to catch all that—”

  “That fecis,” said Laz.

  “From me,” said Mumbo.

  Nasty stepped into the room from the kitchen. “Ivy and I were keeping vigil together.”

  The brother and sister hugged and laughed and yelled at each other in a mock fight and in a few minutes Ivy led Laz out of the room, into his bedroom, where they sat on the foot of the bed. Laz took Ivy’s hand. “What you gave me, the timestream that—”

  “It wasn’t just a timestream,” said Ivy. “I searched for some way to make it right, and I realized that if I let you take Mumbo out of that hospital bed to a timestream where he was already dead, then instead of just switching him into another body, you’d transport his whole body with you into the world where he no longer existed.”

  “But his face should have still been smashed.”

  “I found a timestream where none of it happened, where Mumbo was completely whole and he hadn’t done any of his pranking to us and neither of you wanted to kill the other.”

  “That’s not where we ended up. Why didn’t you send us there?” asked Laz.

  “Because it would just be an overlay of memories barely covering his completely irresponsible self. Because he would not be changed. Once again, he would have escaped the consequences of his malicious pranks.”

  “But now he’s in a perfectly okay body so he still escaped the—”

  “Maybe, but there’s a better chance he’s learned something. Because he’s now living in a timestream where he did all that lousy stuff, and got his face blown up, and saw himself dead, and then got a decent body back.”

  “How, Ivy?”

  “I triangulated him,” she said.

  “What is that?” asked Laz.

  “I set up a three-way swap. You know I learned how to side step. It’s just way harder for me, and more time-consuming than it is for you. But I can do it.”

  “I know,” said Laz.

  “I side stepped the guy in the hospital bed into a timestream where none of this happened and his body was fine.”

  “You didn’t need me at all,” said Laz.

  Ivy said, “It would not have been good for Mumbo or anybody for him to migrate to a world in which he hadn’t done the worst stuff. His memory of it wasn’t clear enough, and other people wouldn’t know what a complete jerk he had been.”

  “I take it you looked through the timestreams and saw that there wasn’t a good result,” said Laz.

  “Mumbo needed a real awakening. So then I stepped the undamaged-body version of Mumbo into the timestream where you landed, where bash-face Mumbo had just died. Because there wasn’t a living Mumbo in that timestream—”

  “His undamaged body made the step. Into a world where we all knew, and Nasty knew, the loony stuff Mumbo had done.”

  Ivy said, “And then I handed you that very same timestream, and you stepped into that one. He took over the perfectly healthy body that had already received an overlay of bad memories, and that added a whole new layer, doubling down, and I think that his attitude now shows maybe it made a difference.”

  “It’s very hopeful, yes,” said Laz. “Everybody here knows what he did, and that he’s sorry.”

  “I was afraid it wouldn’t work,” said Ivy.

  “Why? It all took place in the timestream where it did work.”

  “No, Laz. I was afraid I’d get the timing wrong and side step the obnoxious cretin into a timestream where the ruined Mumbo wasn’t quite dead yet.”

  “But you did it perfectly,” said Laz.

  “And I couldn’t check with you because you were at the hospital and I was here, and Mumbo-in-the-bed didn’t have more than a few seconds to live.”

  “Kind of a deadline.”

  “I knew you’d understand.”

  “Not really, Ivy. I’m completely lost.”

  “Why?”

  “Every change in his timestream changed yours. And the last one changed mine. There must have been a version of you and one of me already in that timestream, but we didn’t transfer all our memories and step into those bodies, we came with the bodies we already had. Are there extra copies of us in this timestream? There have to be.”

  “Three of each of us, not counting the Zees and Ivy-O.”

  Laz thought for a moment. “I thought—no, nothing that I thought makes sense because nothing makes sense, period.”

  Ivy was getting the problem now. “I didn’t take into account that this was an ass-backward way of cloning ourselves again. Twice.”

  “But those would be copies of us without our memories.”

  “Everything about this is ridiculous,” said Ivy.

  “But it worked. Mumbo has his face back, and he’s with his sister. You and I are here and there are no other copies of us living in our house.”

  “It’s our life’s work,” said Ivy. “Attempting the impossible.”

  “And succeeding.”

  “A time traveler couldn’t have done it better.”

  “Because, of course, time travel isn’t possible,” said Laz.

  “That’s a great comfort to me, Dim—Laz.”

  26

  “AS FAR AS we know,” said Ron, “there are no other copies of you anywhere in the timestreams.”

  Laz and Ivy had tried their best to explain what happened, without dwelling on the Wonder Twins and without explaining their abilities. But in telling it, they confused each other, and when Ron finally asked them to stop, they had no idea how he could possibly understand what they were even asking.

  But it was Ron. He probably knew what they were asking before they decided to go to him and ask.

  “I’m not sure if you just said yes or, you know, no,” said Ivy.

  “Ivy, I said no to the question of whether we have seen any clones of you anywhere. But not-seen does not mean nonexistent, so I gave you a weaselly answer—‘As far as we know.’ ”

  Laz was both disappointed and impatient. “So we just found out what we already knew—nothing about whether our last maneuvers created clones of us.”

  “Central Time’s agents see a lot of things in a lot of places. There are at least three hundred places where we know your clones were not seen.”

  “Which means,” said Laz, “that Ron has thirty agents, or three thousand.”

  Ivy had her answer ready. “I was thinking that it would be hard to define just how much territory there is in a ‘place.’ ”

  “I would tell you if I could,” said Ron. “But since you have never seen these purported clones, and nobody has seen you anywhere but here, I think that whatever else you did, this convoluted project of yours did not spawn any new copies of you.”

  “And I think you’re right,” said Ivy. “But I need to know.”

  “Actually, you don’t. If these copies of you have your abilities, they can keep dodging you all they want. And would knowing they exist tell you where they are and how to find them?”

  “No,” said Ivy.

  “Will they be hostile and angry?” asked Ron.

  “As far as we know,” said Laz portentously, “they’ll be exactly as nice and cooperative as we always are.”

  “We’re so open and honest,” said Ivy. “Our clones will be, too.”

  “You know what, Ivy?” asked Laz.

  “We’re done here?” Ivy asked.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Nice of you to stop by and brief me,” said Ron.

  “Nothing about our conversation has been brief,” said Ivy.

  “And I will continue to tell you everything I know,” said Laz, “as soon as I know it.”

  Ron nodded graciously and Laz and Ivy left.