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territory.”
    â€œThe scientists learned how to change things,” Annie said. “Long, long ago. Plants, animals—everything except people. It was genetic engineering, and cloning, to improve the crops we grew and the herds we raised. But it also produced some awful mutations—and those are kept in here, in this high-security Wilderness. Creatures and plants that would never have evolved on their own.” She sighed. “It’s like everything else they’ve done! The arrogance! The stupidity!”
    Bryn said, “Sit down, Trey. You need to know more than this.”
    I squatted down on a fallen branch, and he looked down at me with an odd expression, as though he were apologizing.
    He said, “We are fighting an underground war, some of us here, against our own kind. Sometimes we call it the Greenwar. The human race is the most powerful that exists, but it is stupid, deaf, blind, and it is killing Pangaia. For gain and greed it has cut down the forests, poisoned the rivers, fouled the air. It pulls down mountains to grind metals out of the rock, it forces rivers to become lakes, to harness the power of the water. Its technology gallops ahead for the sake of more gain and greed—and sometimes, as in this Wilderness, it goes terribly wrong.”
    Annie said, “You saw the city. That’s the image of Pangaia now. The balance of the gases in the air that surrounds this planet has been changed, and the rays of the sun shine through uncontrolled, so that the ice that has covered our poles has begun to melt, changing climates, changing the growth of all green things, changing the level of the sea. In the last fifty years the oceans have risen enough to drown whole cities. Our lowest islands have all disappeared, and the lowest coasts are kept from the waves only by great seawalls. But all the time, the paving of the planet goes on. On they go, our masters, cutting down trees, destroying farmland, building, building, building.”
    I sat there listening to their quiet angry voices, and it seemed to me that this Pangaia place might just as well be our world, because what they were saying sounded very much like the things Grand complained about all the time. But then I began to hear a difference.
    Bryn squatted down beside me, folding his long legs. He picked up a twig and began breaking it absently into little pieces. He said, “So we fight our Greenwar to stop this dance of death, to save our planet from the darkness. Long ago we tried to be reasonable. We pleaded with politicians, we lay down in front of bulldozers, we sang songs. When that didn’t work, we tried violence. We blew up the worst polluters we could find: oil refineries, chemical factories and the like. When that didn’t work either, we went underground.”
    â€œAbout a hundred years ago, it would be,” Annie said.
    I blinked at her. “A hundred years?”
    â€œOh yes. My grandparents’ time. We literally went underground—into the labyrinth of tunnels and pipes that makes the underpinning of all these great linked cities. And into the desert lands too, and the forbidden areas, like this one, where normal people don’t go. I was born underground. So was Gwen there.”
    I glanced over at Gwen, who was standing near Math, wringing the water out of his jacket. She looked like a pretty normal teenager to me, not someone born under the ground. She grinned at me.
    Lou was sitting very quietly, listening. I wondered what he was making of all this.
    Annie said, “And—we came to know Pangaia as our ancestors had known her. We learned to hear. To think. To understand things long, long forgotten. We learned—stories. And prophecies.”
    She hesitated, and looked over at Bryn, as if she was having trouble saying what she meant.
    Bryn got to his feet and came toward me, making me look at him. He said, “Listen carefully to this, Trey. It will sound strange. Pangaia is a