Now she’s looking down at the smooth surface of the black-bottom pool. I sense that as she sits here watching a water bug crawl across the mirrored branches, in her mind she’s flashing forward through the centuries to the world she found herself in when the Dannites saved her life.

I take her hand. “Tell me what you saw.”

When Eko finally speaks, it’s in a haunted whisper. “Ground so parched that every step was fire-walking. Hot oceans boiling up endless typhoons with winds strong enough to knock down mountains. Air that could not be breathed, and unfiltered sunlight that could kill.”

“How did it get that way?” I press. “How could cutting down trees in the Amazon do that to the future earth?”

Her fingers close around my hand. She speaks very softly: “If we were flying through space right now, looking down at the earth together, we would see that it has two thin and vulnerable layers, the oceans and the atmosphere. Both are crucial for life. When we destroyed Dargon’s trawler fleet, we saved the oceans. So the colonel has come back to the Turning Point to attack and destroy the other layer—the atmosphere.”

I recall photos of the earth from space—the shimmering blue oceans and the puffy white clouds. It makes sense—his son targeted one, and now he’s come back to destroy the other. “How does cutting down trees in the Amazon destroy the atmosphere?”

“Along with the destruction of the oceans by bottom trawling, the greatest damage to the earth at the Turning Point was to the atmosphere,” Eko replies. “Great quantities of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, were released.”

“Sure, I studied global warming in school,” I agree. “But even now people are trying to find ways to reduce gas emissions and repair the damage.”

“And nature has its own defenses, its own cleaning system,” Eko tells me. “The trees of the rain forest cleanse the air of carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. If you burn the rain forest, the trees can never do their cleaning job again. At the same time, you convert millions of them into vast clouds of carbon dioxide.”

“It’s a double whammy,” I suggest softly.

“Yes. At a certain point, the earth just gives up.”

“You make the earth sound like a person.”

She nods. “It is, in a way. And that’s what Kidah was going to do. He couldn’t fight the colonel on his own, either. He was going to try to find the spirit of the rain forest, and harness its force, just the way you partnered with Firestorm. But only you could locate Firestorm, and only Kidah knew where the spirit of the forest dwells. And we can’t wake him. So it’s over.”