Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

  “I don’t believe you,” says Mara flatly. “They’re here. They must be here.”

  “And do you think if they were here they wouldn’t have ransacked every boat by now to find you?” says Quinn, softly. He puts his arm around Mara.

  Now Mara has no way of controlling her terror and grief. Before they set out from Wing she had imagined all sorts of horrors; had even imagined them all lost at sea—but not this. This is far worse. Her family and best friend are dead; yet she is still here, alive in a world where they no longer exist.

  “You’re young and bright and strong, Mara,” whispers Ruth, holding her hand tight. “You’ll be all right, I just know it. You’ll have a good chance in the Pickings. You’ll make it into the city. But come and be with us for now. We’re your own people. And the baby’s almost here. It’s due any day now. Stay with me. You’re so good with little ones…”

  Mara hardly hears her. She looks blankly at Ruth, then at the boatful of familiar faces. They are no comfort. Nothing can comfort her. Suddenly she is furious—with herself and the whole world. She has never felt such anger. It gets her to her feet.

  “Kate and Alex and Rowan are around the north side of the camp,” she manages to tell Ruth. “Gail died. Please help them.”

  Mara pulls herself away from Ruth and clambers out of the boat. She begins to jump from boat to boat once again, until she reaches the outermost point of the refugee camp. Sea stretches in front and the immense city wall rises high behind. Mara crouches at the rim of the very last boat, tense and ready. The sound of a thousand voices moaning in sickness and despair carries around and around the boat camp on a breath of night air and merges with the ghostly whispers of the city’s wind spirals.

  Now all her fear and grief vanish because, suddenly, Mara is very clear-headed about how she is going to get out of this nightmare. It’s easy. All she needs to do is jump. The sea will do the rest because, as she has discovered, the skin that separates life from death is a fragile thing, easily torn; a membrane as thin as a moth wing.

  And she will tear through it now.

  A sudden burst of laughter makes her start—a high, rough, childish laugh. An urchin spins past on a round metal vessel. Masses of sea urchins are splashing around the bridge legs and just for a moment Mara can’t help peering through the dimness to watch their antics. Behind their noise is another sound, one that she heard last night but couldn’t begin to think what it was—a savage, tribal beat that, she now realizes, clanks and clangs from behind the city wall. The sound raises the hairs all over her body.

  Mara stares up at the massive wall. What lies behind it?

  A thunderous racket erupts close by. A colossal, rhythmic, metallic crashing, like a hundred garbage can lids bashing against a brick wall—a noise so loud the shock of it almost topples her into the sea. Yet Mara feels she has been longing to hear such a sound even though she has never known anything like it. It’s the heart-stopping clang of something that defies the world and refuses to stop—the answering crash of the sea urchins on the bridge legs to the mysterious beat behind the city wall.

  Again, Mara peers through the midsummer dim and sees the urchins, their fists gripping the oddest assortment of metal junk, attacking the hollow legs of the sea bridge.

  In the instant she jumps into the filthy ocean Mara doesn’t know if she wants to live or die—but she jumps toward the noise of the beat.

  NETHERWORLD

  Through me the way to the grieving city…

  Through me the way among the lost people…

  Abandon every hope, you who enter.

  Inferno, Dante Alighieri

  SPIN TO THE CITY

  Mara swims; she can’t help it.

  She tries to stop herself, to still her arms and legs by sheer willpower, but every time she slips beneath the waves some stronger impulse commands her limbs to move and she finds herself swimming across the dark sea.

  It’s not so easy to die, after all. So Mara gives in to the stronger impulse and begins to swim, hard, until she reaches the great legs of the bridge. All at once she is surrounded by a clattering, crashing wave of sea urchins. They spin around her on car tires and garbage can lids, plastic bathtubs, and old doors, splashing in her face, prodding and tormenting on and on and on, until at last exhaustion blunts their bullying. Mara feels her body grow numb, her eyes close and now it’s easy to slip down beneath the waves.

  There is a hard yank on her hair and the pain of it brings her back to her senses. She thrashes out, grabs at something solid, and finds she is face-to-face with a small urchin in a battered metal raft. Mara recognizes it as an upturned car hood.

  The urchin sits in his strange craft like a muddy oyster in an open shell, baby-faced, with dangerous eyes. The skin of his unclothed body is sleek with mud and sea slime. A small sparrow perches on his shoulder. The urchin paddles his car-hood shell with an upended sign that says STOP in peeling red lettering. Again, he grabs Mara’s hair and now she grabs her own handful of the urchin’s hair and pulls, good and hard.

  He lets out a loud wail and the sparrow flutters off in fright. The other urchins stop bashing and prodding her with their makeshift vessels and paddles. And now Mara has a chance to think.

  This sea is full of disease. It’s an open sewer for the boat camp. I have to get out of it quickly.

  Urgency gives her an idea. She pulls off her iceberg pendant—the white quartz stone hung on a plaited strip of leather that Tain made for her. Mara dangles it tantalizingly in front of the child’s nose. The urchin gives a yelp and tries to snatch the quartz, almost toppling from the car hood in his eagerness, but Mara has the leather plait wound tight around her fingers.

  “Oh, no you don’t. Not yet.” She raises the stone toward the city in the sky. The urchin stares, mesmerized by the tiny glowing iceberg.

  “Do you want it?” Mara whispers urgently. “Do you?”

  The urchin squeals and stares at Mara with large, bright eyes. Mara takes her chance to clamber aboard his metal raft. She places the pendant around the child’s neck, and he chirps with pleasure.

  “If you get me into the city …” Mara points to New Mungo, “you can keep this pretty stone.”

  The urchin follows the gestures she makes to accompany her words but he looks blank, as if he doesn’t understand. He grunts and pats Mara once or twice as if she is a strange pet he has fished out of the water. Then he grunts again and begins to paddle them across to the bridge leg that is closest to the city gates. He lifts the iceberg quartz to catch the glow of the night sky, gabbling contentedly to himself in high, babyish sounds that don’t seem to be words. Mara watches and listens, aching inside as she remembers Corey as a toddler.

  In sudden tears, she turns away from the chirping child. He falls silent as her sobs grow. Mara is frightened by the violence of her grief. She never imagined it was possible to feel so afraid, so alone.

  And yet, some instinct as strong and powerful as the one that made her swim against her will, says go. Keep going and never stop. It’s the only way.

  Mara grows calmer. When she scrubs the tears from her eyes she sees the urchin is trying to catch a solitary spider that is weaving a web in a small crack of the bridge leg. Weeds and wildflowers sprout there, and the toxic green algae that breed on the water reach up toward it too. And there’s a single blue forget-me-not. It’s a tiny miracle, all that life bursting out of such a barren little space. Mara remembers the junkheap she once stumbled across in a tumbledown towerstack of the Weave. In among the junk she had stopped to listen to the disembodied head of a Weave ghost describing a massive volcanic explosion that had devastated a whole island. Krakatoa, wasn’t that the name? All life became extinct after the eruption—yet nine months later a spider was found quietly weaving its web on the barren island.

  Deep in the night, the bridge leg begins to vibrate. The air fills with the engine noise of an approaching ship. Mara looks across the water and sees the ship’s lights.

  The ur
chin’s eyes gleam and he fastens Mara’s fingers tight to the rim of the raft and pushes her flat. When she protests he bites her, viciously.

  I am in charge, the child’s eyes and bite tell her.

  Chaos breaks out as the ship slices a path through the boat camp. The urchin starts to paddle furiously. Giddily, the makeshift raft begins to spin toward the ship, faster and faster, until they are right alongside it. Wave upon wave drenches Mara and she is sure she will drown or die of sheer terror. Gunfire is close and relentless. But all at once the city wall looms up right in front, stretching high into the night sky. Mara closes her eyes tight just as the great gate begins to slide open—but they’ll never make it, they’re too close to the ship. The noise of its engines and the force of its movement are terrifying. If they don’t crash into the ship, they’ll crash into the wall. It’s far too late to turn back now. They are caught in the churning foam of the ship’s wake. Mara can only hold on tight and scream.

  They surge and spin until Mara feels she must have whirled right out of the world. At long last the terrible spinning calms. Mara opens her eyes to see where they have ended up, but her head is reeling so violently she can still only grip the raft tight until the dizziness settles. Once it does, she gasps in shock.

  The gentle dimness of the midsummer night is gone. The huge wall and some new, vast darkness overhead block out the sky and all light.

  Disoriented, Mara looks up and sees a patch of still-blue midsummer sky and a single star twinkling through a gap in the great darkness above. Now she knows where she is—right underneath the thick network of New Mungo’s sky tunnels. They made it through! She is inside the city wall!

  “You’re a genius,” Mara exclaims to the urchin, staring all around her.

  The supply ship is already far beyond them. Mara peers across the great dark sea lake inside the city walls. The ship’s lights allow Mara to follow its progress across the water. Judging by the distance it has traveled, the world inside the walls is much more expansive than she ever imagined from outside. She watches the ship slow down, then disappear into some harbor that’s impossible to see in the darkness. But now, as her eyes adjust, she begins to pick out the vast trunks of New Mungo’s central towers. The supply ships must harbor in them. And somewhere at the foot of those great towers there must also be the entrance to the sky city. Heavily guarded, no doubt. She’s probably safe at this distance, but she feels overwhelmed by such vast, surrounding darkness.

  Amazingly, the urchin’s little bird friend has kept with them during their precarious spin through the city gate and now it hops nervously about the raft. With a shock Mara realizes that the child lies in a heap beside her, unconscious. What happened? She leans over him, struggling to see in the dark. A shadow stains his face. Mara touches it—blood. Now she sees the nasty gash on the side of his head. Don’t let it be a bullet wound, she panics. Maybe some bit of junk was churned up in the waves and hit him—or perhaps he lost his balance and dashed his head on the metal raft. She feels for a pulse in the child’s thin wrist. It’s weak and shaky, but thankfully he’s alive.

  As she rips up a T-shirt from her backpack to stem the rush of blood from the child’s head, Mara wonders what on Earth she is going to do now, in this dark and alien place. The one thing she knows she can’t do is abandon a small child who risked his life to get her through the city wall.

  WITHIN THE WALL

  Desolate, Mara paddles through the dark waters of the netherworld that lies under New Mungo. She tries to think what to do. She never thought beyond her sudden impulse to get through the wall with the urchin, and now that she is here she is badly in need of a plan of action. Should she head for the great towers and attempt to make it up into New Mungo as soon as the urchin recovers? Mara remembers her filthy clothes and hair, feels the thick layer of grime on her skin. Looking like this, she wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Once again, she feels the urchin’s pulse. He hasn’t moved, but the pulse is stronger, she’s sure. Mara reaches down and tickles his toes. The child’s eyes snap open in surprise, though he still lies in a daze in his metal shell.

  “You’re alive then,” says Mara gently. “Welcome back to the world.”

  The urchin looks at her with limpid eyes. He touches his head and whimpers.

  “It’ll get better.” Mara pulls a strand of his long, matted hair from his face. Warily, wordlessly, he watches her every movement. Then, shakily, he sits up.

  “What’s your name? Say something,” Mara urges. “You look about Corey’s age. What age are you? Five? Six?”

  He doesn’t answer, just chirrups weakly to his sparrow. Mara peels off the blood-soaked T-shirt to have a look at his head but it’s almost impossible to see in the dark. His injury can’t be too serious or he wouldn’t be sitting up, surely? Now the urchin grunts.

  “Speak to me,” she pleads. “Don’t just grunt. Can’t you speak at all?”

  Has he had no one to teach him to speak? No one to look after him? How has he survived?

  Now he chirrups, urgently, and stares out in front as if he sees something. Mara looks ahead but sees nothing. Yet as they move deeper and deeper into the netherworld her eyes adjust to the dark and she is able to pick out strange, unfathomable shapes.

  “What’s that?” she gasps. A huge black arm rises high out of the water. As they pass beneath she realizes it’s a broken bridge that ends in midair—a bridge to nowhere. Mara catches her breath. It must be a ruin of the old, drowned world that lies beneath New Mungo. Could there be more? She leans over the side of the raft to peer into the black water and jumps back in terror.

  Ghosts! There are ghosts under the water!

  Mara steadies herself. Now don’t be silly, there are no such things. Keep calm and look again.

  Gingerly, she peers once more over the side of the raft. But they are still there—luminescent, ghostly things moving under the water. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to keep looking, her eyes straining to see in the dark, because there’s more, much more. Beneath the silver darting things are all sorts of ghostly shapes and lines of luminescence that glow eerily beneath the waves. Something shifts in Mara’s perception and all of a sudden she knows what she is seeing—rooftops and towers and crumbling walls. Right below her is an old, drowned city. It glimmers like a ghostly presence in the sea. And the darting ghosts are only fish, lit by that same, strange luminous light.

  “Who?” demands a sudden loud voice. Mara screams in fright. “Who you? Who!”

  It’s right behind her. Mara cowers in the raft, gripping the urchin, pulsating with fear. Again, she forces herself to look, searching the dark for the source of the voice.

  “Who!”

  The voice is directly overhead now but still she cannot see anyone or anything. Then all of a sudden she does—it seems to swoop out of nowhere—a white, spectral face with wide, piercing eyes. It moves swiftly and silently through the darkness above her.

  “Who!”

  “Mara! I’m Mara!” she cries in terror. “Please—what—who are you?”

  But there’s no answer. The spectral creature vanishes as silently as it came, its ghoulish cry fading into ghostly echoes. Trembling, Mara stares out into the dark. What was it? Some strange creature that belongs to this world within the wall? Or was it—her heart stops at the thought—some phantom of the drowned city?

  They paddle on for ages, passing all sorts of shadowy shapes that Mara can’t identify. Suddenly the urchin bursts into excited chirps. Mara peers fearfully into the darkness but there’s no sign of any more shrieking phantoms. The raft clangs against a pole that sticks out of the water and, as Mara steers away from it, she sees another shadow looming above the water right in front. She blinks, her eyes strained to their limit by the depth of the darkness, her imagination overwrought. What is it? Her heart thumps loudly—then, as before, her perception shifts and she sees that the shadow is nothing to fear. It’s just a great hump of land, a solid mass of earth. An island in the
drowned city? Does the urchin know something about this place? But he can’t tell her, even if he does.

  When the raft knocks against the land mass they climb out. Mara reaches down and touches grass. A large building sits on the island’s hilltop. She can just make out a soft, flickering glow—this one as warm as the undersea glow was cold—that lights it from within. The urchin has erupted in another burst of delighted, wordless babble.

  “It’s a church,” Mara tells him as they climb up the hill and she recognizes the solid, familiar outline. But as they draw closer she sees the size of the building and knows it is no ordinary church.

  The child is tense, listening to something. Now Mara can hear it too. He twitters and yelps, pulling Mara toward the building’s huge wooden doors. But she stops for a moment to read the name carved there:

  Glasgow Cathedral

  Wondering about the name, Mara follows the urchin through the heavy doors. Once inside, she gazes around at the huge stone interior. Its size reminds her of the Weave towerstacks—all those vast, abandoned halls littered with rotting mountains of electronic junk. But she has never known such a place in realworld. Now, as she stands in the great stone hall amid tall pillars and smashed stained glass windows and alcoves full of statues, Mara sees that a cathedral is a massive church. And Glasgow must be the name of the drowned city.

  The cathedral is alight with small bonfires. Swarms of dirt-caked, naked urchins perch upon high window ledges, scramble across tombstones, and scamper among tall pillars. A cathedral full of sea urchins! Mara is laughing, yet her eyes fill with tears as she takes in the sight of all these lost little ones who have made a chaotic home here.

  Her own urchin looks up and gives a sudden bright smile. Mara scrubs her eyes clear of tears and lifts a lock of his long, mud-packed hair to look at the head wound in the firelight.

  “You’ll live,” she tells him.