More people were running into the clearing now, and there was shouting all round us, in the clearing itself, and back through the trees. A bunch of high people in dyed fakeskin wraps had come over the bridge from Brooklyn. I saw that one of them was David Strongheart, who’d sometimes come to the shows that Mary did at Davidstand. He looked much fatter and older than I remembered him, but he was wearing a fine red wrap that would trade for a hundred sticks at least in Veeklehouse. Normally I would have knelt to show my respect, but somehow that didn’t seem to be needed right now: I guess the veekle from Earth was there to remind us that all of us were the children of one man and one woman. There were several other high men with him – one of them I recognized as Leader Harry, who was Strongheart’s second-oldest son, and the boss of Circle Valley – and there were also a couple of women, one of them tall and about my own age, wearing a lovely blue wrap.

And suddenly I realized I recognized her as well! It was Starlight, my old friend Starlight from Knee Tree Grounds, whose dead body I’d been told had been found on poolside, full of water and run through with a spear.

A strange dread filled me. Perhaps the visitors from Earth were bringing all the dead people to life again? Perhaps right now, the dead of Circle Valley were waking up over there in the Burial Ground like they’d only been sleeping, pushing aside those stones they were lying under like you’d push aside a buckskin sleeping wrap, and making their way towards the clearing? Perhaps they were waking up all over Eden, swimming to the surface out in the bright water round Knee Tree Grounds, clawing their way out of the ground in forest near Michael’s Place? Perhaps bones and scattered ashes were flowing towards each other, up and down the forests of Eden, to join together and rise up again as living human beings? It seemed as if every single thing I thought I’d known up to then had turned out to be completely wrong – the dead were not really dead, lanterns were not really bright, high people were not really high – and now the world was beginning again, or beginning for the first time, or appearing at last as it had always really been.

But then I thought, Wait! If Starlight has come back from death, how come these high people are with her, and seem to know who she is?

‘Starlight!’ I called out, and she looked towards me at once. I could see she was surprised, and she was about to call something back to me when a sound came from the veekle and we all turned back towards it.