Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

  “Fox?”

  “Here.”

  His touch becomes the whole world. His mouth, hands, hair, every limb and muscle, every cell of his body, becomes part of her own. All thoughts of the past and the future scatter. The outside world and the sky city all around them, everything beyond this moment and this room, seem distant, fragile, unreal. All that exists, all that Mara feels, is the power of now.

  MEENIES IN NEW MUNGO

  Mara wakens as darkness is lifting. Drowsily, she watches light ooze into the room from some unknown source, like a gently breaking sunrise. Yet there are no windows in the room, just the undulating walls. Fox is still wrapped around her, his face soft with sleep.

  She still can’t believe she has found him. As she gazes at the face that, until last night, she had never seen, studying his features, learning him by heart, he yawns and opens his eyes, wide awake in an instant. For a second he looks bewildered to see her there, right beside him. And all of a sudden Mara feels shy and strange to be so close in the bright morning light to someone who is, in so many ways, unknown. His face mirrors her own clash of emotions. Then he closes his eyes again and, slowly, kisses her. The kiss rushes through her like a live current. Her body knows with an astonishing certainty what her mind still struggles to comprehend—that she has never felt such a strong connection with anyone or anything in the world.

  They lie together, close and silent, for a while.

  “I’m starving,” he suddenly grins.

  He jumps out of bed and grabs a jug of juice and a bowl of the large, soft bread rolls that seem to be full of air. But Mara tucks in ravenously. Fox gulps juice, watching her, as if he hasn’t a clue what to do about this girl who has fallen out of the Weave and crashed into his life.

  “What about your parents?” she asks, to break the tense silence. “Where are they?”

  He mentioned them only briefly last night, Mara noticed, though they talked for hours.

  “They head the start-up team for new cities, so they’re always away on business—but we meet up almost every day in the Noos.” Fox frowns, swallows a mouthful of bread. “My other relatives are over in New Texaco. Apart from Caledon, my grandparents are dead.” He sighs. “I’ve always felt different, hankering after the past instead of living for now, like everyone else does. Maybe it’s because that old Treenester woman should have been my grandmother. Maybe I really belong to the old world. No, no, that doesn’t make sense either,” he bursts out. “I loved my own grandma. She was the only one who was always here for me. Always. I can’t believe she knew about all this brutality, I just can’t—”

  He breaks off, chucks his bread roll on the bed, and sinks his head in his hands. His devastation tears at Mara’s heart.

  “But it’s not your fault,” she tells him. “You didn’t know.”

  “But now I do and if I don’t stand against it, then I’m part of it,” Fox counters. “Caledon’s cruelty becomes mine. From this point on, for the rest of my life, I’ll be guilty too.”

  “Not if you help me rescue everyone that we can.”

  “I’ll do that. I’ll do whatever I can to help you. But even if we rescue every slave and every refugee and set them free, that doesn’t change the fact that this world of mine is rotten at the core. How can I live in a world that, day by day, I’ll hate more and more? I’ll begin to hate myself too, if I live in a place that’s built out of other people’s misery.”

  Mara’s heart leaps. She has hardly dared to hope for this. The future—that black, terrifying thing—is suddenly shot through with light, as if the sun just broke through the heaviest storm.

  “Don’t stay here—come with me!”

  He doesn’t answer.

  Mara fumbles on the floor to find the book on Greenland. She picks it up and hurriedly flicks through the pages till she comes to a map. “Look! There’s land here, I’m almost sure of it—high lands that have been freed from mountains of ice in the arctic meltdown. They should be within reach if we have good, solid ships—like the supply ships.”

  Fox studies the page, sighs, and lays the book back down.

  “You must come with me,” Mara murmurs. “Now that we’ve found each other. You must.”

  Fox turns his head away. “I can’t.”

  He sounds broken. Mara stares at him in bewilderment.

  “Why can’t you? You can’t stay here. You hate this world now, you said so. If you come with me, we could try to build a world that’s better than this one, the kind of place you’ll be proud to live in, not full of hate and shame. That’s the kind of future you want, isn’t it?”

  Fox still doesn’t answer, just looks wretched beyond words.

  “Is it because of your family—you can’t leave them? I understand that, of course I do, but you said you hardly see them.” Mara feels desperate. Her self-control breaks. “What will you do? Fox, what is there in this world for you now? If Caledon could throw Candleriggs out of his world then he’s ruthless, he’s capable of anything. He might be just as ruthless with you, if he knew you were his enemy.”

  Fox gets up. Restlessly, he paces around his room.

  “What are you thinking?” Mara pleads when she can stand his silent pacing no more.

  He stops and faces her.

  “I’m thinking that for good or for bad, this is my world. I can’t abandon it—or I’ll be just like him. He abandoned his world for this one, didn’t he? And that’s what we’re blaming him for. I need to understand the past, Mara. I need to understand exactly what happened and why. Then, maybe, I can begin to change the future.”

  “You’ll change the future now by helping people escape. You don’t need to do any more,” urges Mara.

  “Yes I do,” Fox responds. “Because I won’t have changed the way this city is. It’ll still be rotten at core. And what about the other New World cities? What about the corruption in them? Won’t they use slaves too? Won’t they have walls to keep out refugees?”

  “But what can you do about any of that?” cries Mara. “They’re so far away.”

  Fox sits down beside her. “You told me that Candleriggs believed there were lots of good-hearted people in the New World and that they probably only acted as they did out of fear. I want to believe that she’s right. I want to…”

  He reaches out and takes her hand.

  “I want to be with you. But I’m the only one who can restart the battle that Candleriggs never got a chance to fight. See, this is your battle, Mara. Mine is to come, and it might be even worse than yours because I’ll be fighting my own people, my own family. Can you imagine that?” Mara can’t. “I want to come with you but if I do …” Fox gives a huge, shaky sigh, “well, I think this world will haunt me forever. What I might have done will haunt me till the end of my days.”

  He’s on the verge of tears. Miserably, Mara wraps her arms around him and holds him because she knows he is right about the haunting; the ghosts of her own lost world will always haunt her.

  “But how can you start a revolution all on your own?” she demands tearfully. “Once Caledon finds out he’ll lock you up—or worse. It’s not possible.”

  “It is possible.” Fox frowns, thinking hard. “Caledon won’t be able to do anything to me because I’ll already be gone. When you escape, I’ll go down to the ruins of the old world and I’ll take my mobile godgem with me. It’s all I need. They’re satellite powered so I can make my own connection from the ground. I don’t need to go to any other city. I don’t need to go anywhere. The whole of the New World meets in the Noos every day—I can reach people there, plant seeds of dissent, and gather support. I won’t be caught. I’ve got endless tricks. I’ll be as careful and clever as a fox.”

  He gives her a shaky grin. “I’ll hide away in the ruins, and there are plenty of places for a fox to hide in the Noos—you know I can run faster than anyone. They’ll never catch me. And then one day …” his face grows still and serious, “one day, when I’m ready, I’ll come back and I’ll begin th
e revolution—the one Candleriggs wanted, and fight to make this world a fairer place.”

  Mara bites her lip till it hurts to stop herself from crying. She can’t bear to think of him alone in the netherworld when he could be with her. She can’t bear to lose him when she has only just found him. She can’t bear any more loss or pain. She will tell him that. She’ll sob her heart out, then he’ll see that they cannot be parted, not for anything in the world.

  Mara takes a deep breath, and swallows hard.

  “If only you could meet Candleriggs,” she says softly, her voice barely under control. “She could help you. It’s so strange, as if—as if you really are her grandson, more than you are Caledon’s.”

  He nods. His eyes look hot, his fingers grip hers. He is just as tormented and torn apart as she is. She hears him take a deep breath, hears him swallow hard too, feels him rein in his emotions, just as she has.

  “Right,” he announces. “You need to find your friends. You need ships. That’s the first thing. So let’s get to it.”

  Mara nods bleakly. She remembers the slogan that the cybercath hackers scrambled.

  “All right,” she says bitterly. “Let’s do it. Let’s be meenies in New Mungo.”

  The first thing they must do, says Fox, is find a way to disable the city. If they don’t, the whole plan is a nonstarter.

  “Security is so tight that once you found the slaves you’d never get them out of the city. You wouldn’t stand a chance of escaping.”

  “I know. But how can we disable the whole city?” Mara despairs. “I’ve thought and thought and I can’t see a way.”

  Fox shoots her a red-hot glance from beneath the scarecrow mess of his hair.

  “You know a way?” Mara’s face lightens.

  He just grins as he clips on his godgem.

  The rooks are their main threat. Rooks, says Fox, are secret police who live like normal Noosrunners among the citizens of the New World, but are on constant lookout for any deviants or criminals that might undermine the smooth running of the system. Occasionally, someone disappears and everyone assumes they’ve had to leave in a hurry for a work placement in another city, but often they’ve been taken by the rooks. And even if anyone did suspect that the rooks were involved, says Fox, they would probably just tell themselves that that person had it coming. They must have been up to something that was a threat to the rest of the New World.

  You never know who the rooks are, says Fox, but they’re everywhere, trained to look and act just like anyone else.

  Dol could be one, thinks Mara. Tony Rex could easily be one.

  “You could be one.” Fox shoots her another of his lightning-bolt glances. “You could be an elaborate trap to root out the meeny in New Mungo that is Caledon’s grandson.”

  “Or you could be a rook out to catch me,” Mara returns.

  He laughs. Excitement lights his face; his eyes are beautiful with it, as he gears up for a cyberleap. She hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. But he grabs her hand, squeezes it tight, and his husky voice is breathless with excitement:

  “I feel like I’ve been waiting to do this all my life.”

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY GHOST PARADE

  “Who are they all?” Mara gasps.

  They come in cyberwaves, one after the other, on and on and on—life-size lumenbeings that move, talk, sing, and shout right in the middle of Fox’s room. He has the lights down low to let them see the figures more clearly, and each glows with a ghostly aura. They are so real that Mara can see sweat gleaming on one face, emotion in the eyes of another.

  “They’re twentieth-century icons,” says Fox. “A ghost parade from the last century. For years I’ve collected them from derelict sites and dustbins in the back alleys of the Weave and hidden them away. And now I’m bringing them all back from the dead.”

  Mara sinks back in her chair and lets the twentieth-century wave wash over her. The tide of faces and voices is hypnotic. Shakily, she reminds herself that they’re not real, only lumens.

  “Wow, who’s she? Can you slow this thing down?”

  Fox reverses the images, stopping on a blond woman. “This one?”

  Mara nods, entranced by the woman, who is so beautiful she seems to be made from the stuff of dreams. She captivates the watcher with a seductive charisma of eyes and mouth and movement.

  Fox calls up a biography and it scrolls at the woman’s feet. “Marilyn Monroe, film star. Death by suspected suicide at the height of her fame.”

  They reel through more. Tens of faces reel into hundreds. Mara begins to feel dizzy.

  “I think I’ve had enough—no, wait a minute. Who’s that?”

  But Fox has already stopped on the solitary figure of a young man in a spotlight. A guitar is slung over his shoulder and a slick lock of black hair falls across a shy, sullen face. A beautiful face. He looks uncertain, endearing. Silently, he raises his arm with the intensity of a coiled spring. Now he’s dangerous, utterly magnetic. What is it that’s so compelling about him? Mara wonders, as she stares open-mouthed at the life-sized lumen just a step in front of her. Then she knows what it is.

  Electricity; he’s full of it—he could explode.

  And then he does. Mara jumps in her seat as his hand hits the guitar and he lets rip in a song. A ghostly frenzy of screaming teenagers fills the room, almost drowning out the raw, hungry voice. Now he’s like a tiger; lean, savage, and graceful, prowling an invisible cage.

  “What was that?” Mara gasps as the explosion of human energy ends.

  Fox grins. “That was rock ’n’ roll.”

  “Who was that?”

  “That was Elvis.” Fox doesn’t need to read the biography on this one; he knows it by heart. “Elvis Presley, the king of rock ’n’ roll, singing ‘Hound Dog,’ the song that shook up the world.”

  “Shook me up,” Mara grins back. Her heart is racing. “He self-destructed too,” she notes, scanning the biography text.

  “Watch this one.” Fox is calling up something else from his lumen ghost bank. “He led the world into an abyss before he self-destructed.”

  Mara finds herself staring into the most terrifying eyes she has ever seen. They lock with her own and seem to bore through her skull with a mesmeric, overpowering presence.

  “Stop it!” she tells Fox. “I don’t like this one.”

  “It’s only a lumen.” Fox puts his arm around her. “You must see this.”

  The man stands alone in a spotlight. His hair is black, and the fierce, ugly white face is slashed by a slab of black mustache. Somehow Mara knows that he is utterly dangerous.

  He raises his arm in silence—then explodes into frenzy. He barks out words with a ferocity that makes him foam at the mouth like a rabid dog. He’s a ridiculous spectacle, repulsive and undignified… and yet Mara cannot look away. The noise of a vast, invisible crowd rises like a tidal wave around him.

  It’s uncanny. Mara is spellbound by words she cannot even understand, hypnotized by the wild-dog eyes. The man’s passion infects her—it’s a savage possession of spirit; a chaotic sensation disturbingly close to the way she felt watching Elvis.

  Except the essence of one is joy, the other hate. One is fueled by the energy of life, the other by death. Somehow, she is sure of that.

  “Who is he?”

  “Hitler,” says Fox. “Leader of the German Nazi party. Responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions in the Second World War.”

  “One man did all that?” Mara’s heart is pounding. She feels nauseous and upset.

  “Well, one man sparked all that. He couldn’t have done it if lots of others hadn’t followed his dream, could he?” Fox looks at Mara meaningfully. “You can’t change the fate of the world all on your own.”

  “I don’t see the point of all this, Fox.”

  But he’s not listening. He stops on the echo of a voice and backtracks.

  “I have a dream!” shouts a voice.

  A young black man appears.

  �
�I have a dream!” he shouts again. The emotion in his voice is so intense, there’s an unsettling, almost musical tremor to his words. Mara yearns to know the dream that consumes him. It excites her even though she doesn’t know what it is. Then he tells his dream.

  “To be free at last! Free at last! Free at last!”

  It sounds like a shout from the future—yet it’s an echo from the past.

  “This is the one!” cries Fox. “Martin Luther King.”

  He reads out the short biography. “Human rights activist who fought for a fair and equal world. Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Assassinated at the height of his influence.”

  A better world—so that was his dream, thinks Mara. And he died for that dream.

  “And if a man has nothing to die for,” cries the strong, tremulous voice, “then his life is worth nothing.”

  Mara is magnetized. The words cut to her core.

  The image judders, fades, and Martin Luther King is replaced by a huge and vicious lump of metal—a lumen missile that looks terrifyingly solid and real. Mara screams and dives for cover behind her chair as it cruises toward her, slowly, with deadly precision. A handspan from her face it switches direction. There’s the deep, rising moan of a siren, a sound so petrifying it stuns the moment. Mara grips the chair as she seems to fall sharply out of the present to land with a jolt in some alien, bomb-blasted street. In the heart of the devastated street appear the figures of four mop-headed youths. “Help!” they sing urgently, over and over, as the missile weaves menace around their heads and the siren-moan dies and rises, dies and rises. There’s a loud crump and the street fills with smoke and dust.

  Mara watches open-mouthed as two more figures briefly materialize. A pigtailed girl in glittering red shoes and a bespectacled boy with a lightning zigzag on his brow race across the street. “Which way—which way to the wizard?” the girl in red shoes cries, as they fade into ghosts.