Loaf was a soldier. People had pushed foreign objects into his body from time to time. He had borne pain and horror, and yet kept fighting, kept control of himself. Umbo wasn’t exactly a big baby about such things, but he could not stop himself from leaping to conclusions—wrong ones—and acting on them in irrevocable ways. It had got Kyokay killed that day. It had kept Umbo saying things, doing things that showed his pathetic yearning for Param, his childish resentment of Rigg. He knew these things made him look foolish, and yet he had not been able to stop himself.

Rigg was able to plan and calculate. Umbo did everything he did in a rush, on impulse. Even learning to travel in time, to send himself messages—he had done it by brute force rather than by thinking it all through and understanding it. Oh, he tried to think, and maybe his thinking helped. Somehow. But mostly it was just taking his power to manipulate people’s timeflow and trying to use it in a new way. That’s why it had taken months to learn to use it on his own, without Rigg—he had no idea what he was doing, he just flung himself into it, trying different things until one worked.

I learn like a squirrel, thought Umbo. No analysis, no finesse—I just keep leaping until I finally land where I want to.

I will never have a facemask, and I’m perfectly happy. I’d rather be my second-rate self than go through what Loaf and Rigg went through—and then wear that trophy of a face the rest of my life.

But if he said to Leaky, You’re better off this way, Umbo had a feeling that her response would cost him a significant portion of his hearing, if not a limb. Because it was true. Leaky did not have self-control. That’s why it had taken him so many tries before he was able to prepare her properly to meet Loaf again, in his new condition. She could not stop herself from raging long enough to hear the whole message, not until he found exactly the right way to approach her.

Which, of course, he had learned by flinging himself into the past, finding out that one method of telling her about it failed, and then trying again. Rigg probably could have succeeded the first time.

Still, I did figure out how to jump into the future, in a limited way, and I did it without a facemask. Just because I’m not Rigg doesn’t mean I’m nothing.

“What you don’t know,” said Loaf gently, “is whether that midwife was right. It’s easy to say, You’ll never bear children, but what did she know? If she was a good midwife the baby might have been delivered alive.”