The River of No Return

even let us know about it!”
    Nick shook his head and fished a particularly dark, extra-crispy crisp from the diminishing pile. “You’re foaming at the mouth, Alva. How the hell does the Guild’s existence depend on war?” He crunched the crisp between his teeth. There is nothing, he thought to himself, like trans fats.
    Alva, meanwhile, was staring at him incredulously. “Surely you’ve figured that much out. War is the Guild’s recruitment machine.”
    Nick swallowed and gave her back her look. “Rubbish. The Guild might be greedy and secretive, but they want to ease the suffering. They pick us up and dust us off and teach us medieval Finnish. . . .”
    Alva threw up her hands. “Oh, use your head. You jumped from battle. I, too. I jumped from war—my village was sacked and I . . . well. It doesn’t matter.” Alva was quiet for a moment, making a line of crisps across the bar. When she looked up the passion in her eyes was banked and she spoke with quiet certitude. “What is the Guild without its thousands of workers, Nick? Without the drones who make it all run? Nine out of ten of us jump from war, did you know that?” She picked up a crisp from her line and broke it into pieces between her fingers, letting the crumbs fall. “War loosens our bonds to our natural time.” She broke another. “It sets us leaping like fish from the river. And the Guild is waiting for us with its nets. Some of us they keep, some they throw away.”
    “What the hell do you mean? They take everyone they can find.”
    “Oh, no, they most certainly do not!” Alva dusted off her fingers. “Think back to Chile. Who were your fellow inductees?” She sucked the salt and oil from her thumb. “Were any of them crazy? Homicidal?” She popped her forefinger in her mouth and gave it the same treatment. “Disabled? Maimed?”
    “No.”
    “Exactly. And those are the obvious things they weren’t. There are a lot of other filters, too. War traumatizes, and the Guild needs its members to be shocked and scared but not broken. Nor even breakable. Your run-of-the-mill Guild member isn’t an artist or a hermit or another lonely visionary type; the Guild wants team players. And they aren’t, for the most part, your ministers or your sea captains, either; the Guild doesn’t want too many inspirational or leader types. They fish the river for hard workers, followers, good-natured burghers. People who want to settle down and remake their lives as best they can.”
    “I suppose that describes me.” Nick picked up a cloth and began wiping down the counter. “But I had two friends there . . . one was a genius. I mean, he had a gift for languages like nothing I’ve ever seen. And he wasn’t a follower. Neither was the other one.”
    “Ah. But you see, they bait their hooks for another kind of fish, as well.” She reached across the bar and touched his ring. “Your kind of fish. Men and women who were powerful in their time. Either because they were born to power, or because they have extravagant beauty or a shining personality or great genius. You were a marquess. A prize indeed. Power. That was what they saw in you when you jumped.”
    “Beauty and genius too, surely.”
    She inclined her head. “Of course, my lord.”
    “And the ones who don’t make the grade? They are Ofan?”
    “No. Not necessarily.” Alva twisted her mouth in a regretful smile. “We are not saviors. We are simply a haven for those who manage to find us. We provide our members with, at the very least, a good pub.”
    Nick couldn’t laugh at that. What would it be like to jump . . . to nothing? To be deemed too weird or too impassioned for the Guild? And to never find the Ofan?
    Alva put her chin in her hands and watched him. “You’re judging us,” she said.
    “I’m sorry for the others,” he said.
    “It’s a cruel world. And the Ofan are selfish. We aren’t a secret, but we don’t advertise. If you find us you can join us. We will teach anyone who asks—just as I have taught you something today. And we will answer any questions. But you must find us and you must ask.” She shrugged. “At least we aren’t cannibals, feeding off the destruction of the world.”
    “And the Guild is?” Nick hung the two dry mugs on their hooks over the bar. “You’ve said they use war to recruit. What you call recruitment, surely they see it as saving people like us from the horrors of conflict among Naturals?”
    “Yes, that is what