My head was swimming with the strangeness of it all. Here was my friend Starlight, alive and well and wrapped like a high woman, when I’d thought she was dead and lost forever. If it had happened at any time before now, that would have been the weirdest and most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. Yet right now I could barely give it any attention at all!

‘Thankyou,’ I heard the Earth woman say. As she came towards me and Trueheart from under the veekle, she raised one hand and the lights stopped shining again. It was as if that whole huge mass of metal was a living thing that she could give orders to as a skilled rider gives orders to a buck.

Again, for a few moments after the lights had gone, whole forest seemed completely dark, like we’d only imagined there was any light there at all, like we’d only imagined this beautiful woman had come back to us from Earth. And then we saw her again, not in the bright Earth light, but in our own dim Eden light that was hardly light at all: Gela, solid and real as anyone you might meet out in forest, standing right in front of me.

‘Hello there!’ she said gently, speaking kindly and slowly slowly, like I was a child. She held out her hand to me, and I took it. I could feel her warm skin against mine. ‘You don’t know me of course,’ she said, ‘but I’m your cousin. One of my ancestors was a woman called Candice Young, and she was the twin sister of a woman called Angela who must be—’

‘You’re not Gela then?’

She frowned as she looked down into my face. It was a kind, troubled frown, like she pitied me, like she thought I was sick and wished she could help.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you said?’

‘You’re not Gela?’

‘Yes, I’m Gaia,’ she said. ‘My name is Gaia.’

‘Gaia,’ I repeated. I looked at Trueheart. I was still confused. Was this a different name, or was it perhaps just a different way of saying Gela? All her other words sounded strange, after all.

Still she frowned, gently and pityingly as she watched my face. ‘That’s right, Gaia. And you are . . . ?’

‘Angie.’

‘Angie. That was what people sometimes called . . .’

She stopped, and instead asked me something that I couldn’t make out at first because she said it too quickly. The way she spoke was far more different to what I was used to than even the speech of people from across the Pool, and that could be hard enough to follow in itself. Every sound seemed to be in the wrong part of her mouth.

She looked at Trueheart, and Trueheart told her her name.