Marius went up into the veekle to fetch something to help Suzie, while Gaia squatted down and looked at the huge dark swelling that had puffed up the little girl’s shoulder and arm to twice their proper thickness. I noticed as she gently touched it that Gaia was wearing a ring on her finger, made of two metals, one white and one yellow, like the one the Johnfolk stole in the old old story. I was about to point it out to Starlight when Marius came back again, carrying a big box made of some hard smooth red stuff, and he and Gaia began to search through the strange things that were packed inside it in neat neat rows.

‘Here it is,’ said Marius. Whatever he’d found was wrapped up in some kind of thin covering that you could almost see through, a bit like people sometimes wrap up pieces of stumpcandy in the skin of a bat’s wing.

Gaia tore off the wrapping and a tiny metal thing flashed. It was white metal, like the white metal in her ring, not red like the metal from New Earth. All round us people pushed and shoved to see, but if anyone so much as whispered, the whole crowd round them hissed at them to be quiet. We wanted to hear every single thing the Earth people said.

‘This is a knife,’ Gaia said. ‘It’s completely clean. Will you let me use it to let out the pus?’

Flame nodded, and Gaia, carefully carefully, pushed it into the horrible swollen wound on the little girl’s shoulder. The pus came bursting out at once, splattering over Gaia’s face, so she had to wipe it off with the back of her hand. And more kept coming, its yellow colour streaked dirty brown and purple with stale blood. A kind of sigh went up from the people all round us, while Gaia carried on prodding and probing with the knife, all the while gently pressing the flesh round the wound to get all the poison out.

‘Now I’ll clean it with this,’ she said, setting aside the knife and taking something else out of the red box: something soft, a bit like a piece of fakeskin, only completely white. She carefully wiped the gash in Suzie’s shoulder, pushed more soft white stuff inside it, and then wrapped even more soft white stuff round it and under her armpit, so that her shoulder was covered up.

‘And now,’ she said, taking another thing out of her box, ‘I’ll give her . . .’ She said some words that she could see that neither Flame nor anyone else there could understand, so she tried again. ‘I’ll put something in her blood to make her better.’