Away across the Valley, Leader Harry and his eight guards were climbing up towards the Dark. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and everything felt strange, like we were dreaming and awake both at the same time. But this was a happy time, full full of hope.

And good news seemed to keep coming. Little Suzie wasn’t so ill now: she cried and squirmed about again, when a waking ago she’d been limp and unconscious on the edge of death.

At last Marius came out. We all knelt and bowed, like people do when a high person appears, and an excited murmur went round the watching crowd outside the fence. He looked embarrassed, waving to us to sit up again and squatting down with us, without even seeming to notice the crowd. He had a stale weary smell to him, and he looked just as tired as he did when he went to rest.

‘How long ago was it that you were on Earth?’ Trueheart asked him.

‘About twenty days,’ he said, using that old Earth word again. ‘It seems much longer when you’re living through it, but I think that’s about right.’

We were all amazed. These people were still on Earth, standing under its blue sky, when the Johnfolk set out across the Pool!

‘That seems hardly any time,’ I said. ‘We thought Earth was far far away.’

‘It is far away,’ Marius said. He pointed up at the great wheel of Starry Swirl above us. ‘That’s far away. All of it. Further away from here than any human being can really imagine. And it’s bigger than anyone can imagine too. Earth is deep inside it. We only got here so quickly because we kind of cheat and don’t go through space at all, or only a bit of it, anyway, and then take a kind of shortcut. You see, we . . .’ I was still fixing torn bodywraps, and Marius picked up a scrap of buckskin lying in front me. ‘Imagine this is space,’ he said, and then folded it over, so that the two opposite ends of it lay side by side. ‘We jump across from one side to the other, instead of going through what lies in between.’

That made no sense at all to me, or to Tom or Clare, or to any of the other Michael’s Place grownups that were listening. But I noticed Trueheart watching Marius with bright eyes. It was like he was talking about things that she’d never heard named before but had somehow known were there.

‘This is . . . what? The skin of an animal?’ asked Marius, looking at the scrap in his hands. ‘What an interesting texture. I’d like to see some animals soon. That’s what I study, you see, animals and plants, and—’