“He won’t,” Josiah said.
“But what if he does?” Freddy retorted. The old man seemed to be breathing only about three times a minute. The early doubts she’d had about the whole time-travel thing were all popping up again. Josiah always acted as if there were no danger things would ever go wrong: as if they should just coast along and trust that everything would turn out all right.
“Well, we may be in trouble at that point,” Josiah said, “but he won’t.” And in the end, he didn’t. Three was thinking something or other, even as he was dying.
She hated seeing people die, but she had learned she could live with it. It was never something she’d had to learn in her real life. All four of her grandparents were still alive.
Now Filbert nudged her. “Noontide farce.”
“You mean truce?” said Freddy.
“Yes, mayhap,” said Filbert. “Truce. Noontide truce. Grub?”
She handed Freddy a sandwich. They still had sandwiches here, though they called them “borks.” Unfortunately, they didn’t have butter or much meat. This bork was spread with the futuristic equivalent of Marmite. At least it was food.
“I’m reasonably certain this stuff is made from bugs,” said Josiah, but he took one, too. “Tell me where the other me is.”
He had a habit of doing this to future Threes. Presumably, he was trying to catch them off their guard. It never worked. Filbert smiled at him. “English is puzzlefying lingo. You stay here and learn yourselfs real words.”
“Bah,” said Josiah.
He would learn them someday, though, thought Freddy. Everybody died, except not Josiah and Cuerva Lachance. They went on and on and on.
She wondered if that was sometimes maybe a little lonely.
*
Her watch read “Aug. 17” the day she and Josiah stood with a deliberately anachronistic version of Cuerva Lachance who said he was an Egyptian corporal named Sven outside the mouth of a cave in what would someday be New Zealand.
Freddy shivered. They were close to the water, at the bottom of a low cliff topped by a lush green landscape, and the sun was going down, taking the day’s faint warmth with it. She peered dubiously into the cave. “Three’s in there?”
“He doesn’t really come out much,” said Sven. “When we try to go in, he throws rocks at us. I think he lives mostly off raw fish.”
“I remember.” Josiah rubbed a hand wearily over his forehead. “I’m sulking by the river, am I?”
“You find this boring,” said Sven. “I don’t. It’s very exciting to try to guess what he might do next.”
Freddy was still looking into the cave, straining her eyes against the darkness. “Why’s he in there?”
“He was part of one of the first groups to migrate here,” said Josiah. “It was also one of the smallest. It didn’t do very well. A lot of his people died of illness or injury, until only he and his sister and one of their cousins were left. A few months ago, the sister and the cousin went foraging and never returned.”
“It happens sometimes,” said Sven.
Josiah nodded. “There are other settlements on the islands, but he doesn’t know they’re there. He hasn’t seen anyone but us for more than a year, and he doesn’t like us. He says we’re not his people, so we don’t count.”
“You’d think he would appreciate some company,” said Sven, shaking his head, “but no … it’s all ‘You’re not my people’ and ‘You’re probably here to kill me’ and ‘I don’t need anyone eating all my fish.’”
Behind them, the sound of the waves was continuous. Freddy knew she was more or less on the other side of the world from home, but this place was not unlike the coast of British Columbia. The wind blowing in from the sea, tossing the waves and tangling itself in Freddy’s hair, had the same feel, even the same smell. One of her rare surges of homesickness rolled through her belly.
Josiah sighed. “We’ll have to sit this one out. I hope you brought something to read.”
Freddy was opening her mouth to reply when a man walked past her into the cave.
He was brown-skinned and cheerful-looking, clad only in a sort of grass skirt but apparently not bothered by the chill in the air. He carried what looked like an enormous fish hook over one shoulder. He was also slightly transparent. Freddy could see the stone of the cave mouth through his skin, though only barely. He vanished into the darkness of the cave more quickly than he should have.
She said, “Who’s he?”
She had seen Cuerva Lachance talking to see-through people before, but usually from a distance, and rarely when Josiah was around. Now Josiah was pointedly looking in another direction. “It’s going to be cold tonight,” he said.
Freddy turned to Sven. “That guy who just walked into the cave…”
“Oh, that’s just Māui,” said Sven. “Don’t worry about him.”
“But he wasn’t real,” she said, “was he?”
She peered into the cave. The blackness farther in seemed unbroken, but she could hear someone muttering in an unfamiliar language. The words were almost rhythmic; she felt a beat behind them.
“The boy tells stories about Māui,” said Sven, “but he has no one to tell them to, since his people are gone. It’s too bad. They’re good stories. They’ll survive through other tellers, but he tells them best.”
“So he tells stories about Māui, and Māui walks into his cave as he’s doing that?” asked Freddy. She probably, she reflected, would have been more upset about this half a year ago.
“No,” said Josiah. “That’s ridiculous. Māui’s a culture hero. He’s not real.”
“But I just saw him,” said Freddy.
“You need to stop drinking the water without boiling it first,” said Josiah. He turned on his heel and marched away in what seemed to be an entirely random direction.
Freddy bit down on a stab of irritation—Josiah was just like that sometimes—and looked sidelong at Sven. “Are you going to avoid telling me about Māui, too?”
“Why would I do that?” said Sven brightly. He took two steps to the right and just wasn’t there any more.
The see-through people hadn’t really struck Freddy much before this, as they’d just seemed to be a natural by-product of Cuerva Lachance. Maybe she should have been paying more attention. He told a story about Māui, she thought, still staring into the cave, and Māui was there. Did Sven do that? Why would he? What good does it do this kid to have an imaginary culture hero sitting in his cave with him?
Was Sven being kind? He wasn’t incapable of it, but it still seemed wrong. There was something else happening here.
Before she could try to figure out what, Three emerged from the cave.