Sure, I say. But once you remove the source of the pollution, the river gets cleaner and cleaner.

Right. And when you used Firestorm to save the oceans, a thousand years in the future things did start to get better. The oceans became cleaner. Extinct species began to reappear. Whales, wiped out for eight hundred years, started singing in the depths. Dolphins leaped from the surf after half a millennium of stillness. Coral reefs began to bloom like vast undersea gardens, and serve again as the crucial breeding grounds for millions of species. As the oceans healed, conditions on land got much better. The Dark Army began to lose its grip. The People of Dann were proven right, and were on their way to being triumphant—the caretakers of a new Eden.

Great, I say. That’s what I imagined after you and Eko disappeared. That’s the justification I clung to when I sailed back to America on a tramp steamer. Night after night I sat on the deck alone, and I told myself that even if I had lost everything I valued in my own life, at least I had done some good. So what went wrong? What Pandora’s box did we open up?

The dark storm clouds we’re flying through blot out the sun. Gisco’s eyes gleam for a second as lightning flashes near us.

The Dark Army became desperate, he explains. Its leader realized that if the Turning Point could be used to tilt the future one way, it could also be used to turn it back in the other direction. He borrowed a page from the playbook of the People of Dann, and he came back to the Turning Point to attack the earth at the crucial moment and turn the future back to darkness.

We must have entered a new level of stratosphere. The air suddenly seems even thinner. Or it could be the cumulative effect of Gisco’s explanations. I can barely see straight. So this commander in chief of the Dark Army came back himself?

Yes. You look like you’ve heard enough for one day, Jack. It’s cold up here. And the way the wind is spinning us is not conducive to clear thinking. Perhaps we should curl up together and take a snooze.

I shiver and struggle to my knees. I’m not going to take this lying down, I tell the dog. So the Grand Poobah of the whole Dark Army is here, in our world? That’s why we’re heading south? To find him?

I wouldn’t call him that to his face, if you ever meet him. Jack, don’t try to stand up.

I pull myself to my feet and gasp in several quick breaths. What damage is he doing down there?