He stood on the bank, then decided that he’d better do this sitting down. And not just sitting, but sitting inside the boat, holding on to the knife with one hand and the rim of the boat with the other. Just to make it clear to whatever force in the universe controlled time-shifting that this was his stuff and he wanted it with him.

Then he slowed down time—sped up his perceptions—and found the marker he was looking for. He sharpened his awareness even more, and then chose a time a little bit this side of the time when he left Loaf and Leaky to come on this errand.

And then he jumped.

He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened.

Well, that was disappointing.

He sighed and rose to get out of the boat.

The boat shifted and slid awkwardly under him. He nearly fell.

The solid ground at the riverbank was muddy now. It hadn’t been muddy when he landed. He looked at the sky. It was sunny, but he could see the clouds that must have just finished dumping rain here not an hour ago.

It had rained two days before they got to Leaky’s Landing.

Of course everything looked unchanged. He was sitting on the riverbank looking at the river. What, exactly, had he thought would be different?

But his timesense didn’t lie. When he checked to see when this moment was, he could sense the marker looming only a ­couple of days from now.

Since he didn’t know how far upriver he was from Leaky’s Landing, if he was going to arrive when he said, he would have to hurry.

Then he laughed at himself. If he arrived late, he could easily jump back to the right time.

I jumped into the future. Not slicing, jumping. To the time I chose. Nobody else can do that. With no external paths, only the map of time I unconsciously formed while doing all this jumping, I was able to jump into a future I had already lived through.

As he got the boat back out into the middle of the stream, he checked his markers again. The end of the world was the farthest in that direction. And in the past, the farthest he had gone—well, the farthest he had pushed anybody—was to almost the exact time when Ram Odin’s nineteen ships crashed into Garden, destroying native life almost as thoroughly as the Destroyers would. Rigg had chosen the moment by attaching to the path of the last animal to pass through the space where the Wall would be. Rigg had chosen the animal thinking that it would be the last moment before the Wall was created, but no. After the crash of the nineteen ships, there were no large animals to leave paths through the wall. So Rigg had inadvertently taken them almost to the exact moment of the previous destruction of life on Garden.