The world was ending. They were slicing time right through the coming of the Destroyers.

Rigg had kept count of time. He had been expecting them. He had shaken his head to tell her not to stop slicing.

The forest all around them had been knocked down by the distant blast, but the wall of the pit had sheltered them. The heat had been so intense that the fallen trees burnt up like paper, and even the metal inside the pit had grown soft, had bent and collapsed toward the ground like sugar candy melting in the rain.

But they had only endured a few microseconds of the heat before it passed away, and so they were not consumed like paper or melted like sugar.

This is the end of the world. And we, the unwarned ones, must continue to exist like this, surviving what killed most others.

But not all. For the people who had written the Future Books to the Odinfolders had hidden somewhere to write of what happened and then send the books into the past to give warning. So . . . how did they die, those who managed to survive the first blast? What would happen now, to end their lives?

Rigg pulled on her gently and they walked away from the edge of the pit, whose lee had protected them. They did not walk back into the ruins of the house. Param wondered why they did not simply return to regular time. Why keep slicing? There were no archers at the edges of the pit now. They had been blown away by the first shock wave of the blast, and no doubt quickly burned when the heat arrived.

Out of the lee of the pit wall, they had a good view of sky in all directions, and Param joined Rigg in scanning the sky for . . . for something. Had he somehow used the knife or the jewels to summon a flyer from the buried starship? No, impossible. The Destroyers would have found the buried ships right away and eliminated them. The Visitors from Earth might have been surprised by the nineteen wallfolds, each with an exact copy of what had left Earth as a single starship. But the Destroyers came already knowing. The ships were gone; the expendables and flyers and orbiters were gone.

But there were people in caves who might still live. People in pits. Were the Destroyers so thorough that they would now come to search for the survivors and kill them, too? Were they so angry or fearful of the inhabitants of Garden that they could not bear the thought of even one staying alive? Even this brother and sister who survived one assassination attempt already?

There was something moving across the sky. Far too fast to be a bird. Yet it looked nothing like the flyers from the starships. It was smaller—that became clear as it came closer.