Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

“Seeing what you saw, you have a soldier’s eye,” said Loaf. It was the most generous thing he had ever said to Olivenko. “But the mask has clarified all my senses. Overwhelming for days. Too much. And it was trying to take control. Manipulate me. But I would not obey. And now it doesn’t try. But I see far and clear. I hear everything. I smell everything. The mask helps me sort it out. It’s a gift.”

“What did I tell you?” said Vadesh. “That’s how I designed it to work!”

“Even the original facemasks probably made their victims feel that way,” said Umbo sourly. He turned away from Loaf. For weeks, he had been holding the man’s hand, guiding him; now it was as if Umbo couldn’t bear to see him or be near him.

“We’ll have plenty of time to sort out who and what Loaf has become,” said Rigg. “Right now we have a few hundred people waiting to greet us on the other side of the Wall.”

“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty, including the babies,” said Loaf.

“You counted them?”

“All the ones who can be seen,” said Loaf. “There are more behind the hill, since a few dozen people have left and a few others have come out since we’ve been watching.”

“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty is a suspiciously round number,” said Umbo.

“It’s an estimate,” said Param.

“It’s the exact count,” said Loaf. “Someone just left, so it’s three thousand, two hundred and nineteen now.”

“Counting the babies,” said Olivenko drily.

“When people make up numbers and want them to sound exact,” said Rigg, “they usually make sure the num

ber doesn’t end with zero or five. But in the real world, there’s a twenty percent chance that a random number of items will end in either zero or five.”

“So you believe him,” said Param.

“There are several hundred people behind the hill,” said Rigg. “I see their paths. And while I can’t say if Loaf’s count is correct, I have no reason to doubt it. We all saw how the facemasks fought in the battle we watched. Their precision, their accuracy. Facemasks enhance the abilities of the people who wear them.”

“The people controlled by them, you mean,” said Umbo.

“Loaf says he isn’t controlled,” said Rigg, “and we have no evidence to contradict him.”

“So you’re just going to believe him while he waits for a chance to plant baby facemasks on all of us?” said Param.

“I won’t do that,” said Loaf.

“They don’t reproduce that way,” said Vadesh.

“You don’t know half of what they do,” said Loaf, turning on Vadesh. “In all your years of studying them, you didn’t know they can give off spores within fifteen minutes of deciding to?”

“How can you possibly know that?” said Vadesh. “Humans and facemasks don’t communicate.”

“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”

Vadesh stood in silence.

“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.

“Then don’t,” said Param.

“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.

“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”

“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.

Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.