“I didn’t really know them,” said Deborah. “And I’m trying to think what would happen if you went back and saved them.”

“If I went back, alone, then I would change your whole life. Everything you’ve done since the accident will unhappen. You won’t remember any of this, because the toddler who was saved from that fiery wreck will have her normal face and eyes, and her parents, and no reason to be so close with Uncle Georgia.”

“How do I know if that other life would be better than the life I’ve led? Yes, my parents were cheated out of raising me. Or maybe they were spared an ugly divorce. Or maybe I’d hate my serial killer little brother.”

“Such a dark imagination.”

“But if I went back with you,” she said. “You seemed to imply there were two alternatives.”

“If I took you into the past and you were causally connected to the change in behavior that saved your parents and the ­toddler version of yourself, then you would continue to exist, with all your memories. The two-year-old would also be you. There’d be two copies. The way there are two copies of me, this one on Earth and the one still back on Garden.”

“But Father?”

“Professor Wheaton would have no idea who you are. He wouldn’t have raised the little burned and blind girl who survived the wreck. He’d be a different man. And you’d be a stranger.”

“So I would survive, but I’d be lifted out of my own life.”

“Not really—you’d just be erased from theirs.”

Deborah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I must be a horrible human being, not to want to save my parents, but . . . this timeshaping thing you do, it can’t save everybody. Death still comes.”

“Eventually,” said Noxon. “But you’re right. My friend Umbo has always regretted that we couldn’t go back and save his little brother Kyokay, but it was his death that brought us together to discover what we could do.”

“Wouldn’t the two of you still exist?”

“Now I know that we would. There’d just be a copy of Umbo back in Fall Ford, getting beaten by his father until he either runs away or kills the man. And there’d be a version of me who didn’t meet up with Umbo and so had no idea of what it meant to see these paths.” Then Noxon shuddered. “And I would have gone back in time to save my dead father. That’s when I would have found out he wasn’t a man at all.”

“A woman?”

“Not human. An expendable.”

“But that’s illegal. For an expendable to pass for human.”