“Warning won’t help,” said Loaf. “I know what it’s like to have this thing come over you, get inside you. It was hard for me, and that’s with the discipline of a soldier’s training. And Rigg, he was schooled by Ramex, taught a kind of self-mastery we can only guess at. It’s nothing wrong with you, Leaky. Humans weren’t designed to have a thing like this attached.”

“It makes you stronger! It repaired everything—even your scars are gone!”

“We don’t even know that your body is the reason we haven’t had a baby,” said Loaf. “Let’s go back and see what happens.”

“I do know!” she cried. “Because I had a baby once.”

Loaf did not move.

“Before we married,” she said. “When I was barely a woman. I was too young. The baby was breech and it died trying to be born. They cut it out of me. And I was so torn up inside the midwife said I’d never be able to bear.”

“You never told me,” murmured Loaf.

“You said you didn’t want children, that you couldn’t raise children, being liable to go on campaign at any moment. So it didn’t matter. But then you left the army and it did matter after all.”

“You could have told me.”

“I was ashamed!” She wept for a while.

Umbo wondered if he should leave. This was clearly a time for husband and wife. Yet by leaving he’d call attention to himself. Of course, he could simply skip forward in time and let them have their privacy. He had to admit to himself that he simply didn’t want to. He was fascinated, even though he felt sorry for her pain. Their pain.

He noticed that Loaf did not ask who the father had been, or whether Leaky had been married before.

“And now I’m ashamed again,” Leaky said more quietly. “Because I have so little self-control that I can’t master this thing that a child like Rigg was able to control.”

“Rigg’s not a child now,” said Loaf. “And even when he was a child, he was . . . unusual.”

This made Umbo realize that he should be feeling resentful of Rigg for being able to bear a facemask when it was certainly out of his own reach.

But no, Umbo might be envious of Rigg for many things, but not for the facemask. Not now. Yes, it made Loaf an astonishingly effective soldier. It gave Rigg and Noxon so much more control over their timeshaping. But the thing was so repulsive and deforming. Umbo had gotten used to seeing it on Loaf. Definitely not on Rigg and Noxon. And the thought of having that thing crawl over his own face, push into his ears and nose and mouth, breathing for him, probing every aperture, taking away his eyes: How did they bear it? The horror of such an invasion?