More and more voices called out. Who doesn’t have aches and illnesses, or at least know someone that does? As Gaia and the two Earth men looked round at these people and then glanced back at one another, I noticed something in their faces that maybe most people couldn’t see. I noticed they were scared. And I noticed once again how tired they were, tired tired, like they hadn’t slept for many wakings.

I caught Trueheart’s eye. She was standing by her mother, Clare, looking at Gaia’s face, then down at the red box, then at the two Earth men, then at me, as she took everything in. She could see, just as I could, that there was only so much stuff in there, that there was no way the Earth people were going to be able to fix all the sores and rashes and wounds of everyone here in Circle Clearing, let alone in all of Eden.

‘I guess you can’t help everyone,’ she said.

Marius looked across at her, the shyer of the two men, the one with yellowy-brown skin like we had in Eden, and dark curly hair.

‘No, we can’t,’ he said. ‘We just haven’t got enough stuff.’

The people standing round us bent towards one another as those who’d understood what Marius had said repeated it to those who hadn’t.

‘Never mind,’ said the woman with the sore leg. ‘There’ll be plenty for everyone, won’t there, when you take us all back to Earth.’

Again, I saw the three of them glance at one another. How strange and scary this must be for them, I thought, to be three Earth people, tired tired by travelling across the stars, surrounded by hundreds of people from Eden.

‘Do you need to sleep?’ I asked them.

That made them all smile at once. ‘Do we need to sleep?’ asked Deep. ‘I’ll tell you what. I could happily sleep for a weak!’ No one really knew what he meant by that exactly, but we could tell he meant he could sleep a long time.

‘Well, you must come to my shelters,’ said David Strongheart at once, ‘and I’ll have my helpers—’

This was our Head Guard, remember, a man who only had to ask his guards to do it, and people would be speared, or beaten, or tied to spiketrees to die, a man with twenty-three shelterwomen and a hundred kids, a man whose Great Shelter in Davidstand was as tall as a tree and wide as whole of Circle Clearing. This was the great-great-grandson of Great David. This was one of the people who knew they’re already in a story, even while they’re still alive. But next thing I knew I’d interrupted him!