Firespark

by Julie Bertagna

  A small girl sits alone, hugging her knees. Every so often her face twitches. Mara goes over and tries to talk to the child but there’s no response. The girl stares at the floor, lost in her own world. Better there than in this nightmare, thinks Mara.

  She buries her face in her arms and tries to find her own escape. Sleep comes at last, ragged with dreams of her family and her old island home. Dad, clattering milk buckets in the barn. Her little brother, Corey, chasing the chickens and running through billows of bed sheets that Mom is hanging out to dry. Rowan is a lone, distant figure among the crazy whirl of the field of windmills. And there’s Tain, bolting the storm shutters of his stone cottage against a rising storm. His white hair is wild in the wind; he’s bellowing about the rising sea but the weather drowns his words.

  And she dreams of Fox, just for an instant. Fox, alone in the drowned ruins below the towers of New Mungo. Fox, with nightmares in his beautiful eyes.

  When a surge of the ship slams her head against a crate, Mara tries to hold on to him but he crashes out of her dream. She’s awake and he’s gone, just as he crashed out of her life.

  Mara sits up with a jolt. What time is it? She rushes up on deck into darkness, blasted by wind. There’s no moon, not one lone star to help track the passage of the night. Has she missed midnight, when she promised to meet Fox in the Weave?

  Mara slips into the control cabin to escape the wind. She unzips her backpack, opens the waterproof seal within, and takes out the cyberwizz globe, feels the electric tingle as she nestles it in her hands and it powers up. She shoves the halo over her eyes and clicks open the globe. With the tiny wand, she scribbles a series of symbols on the small screenpad.

  And in the flash of a thought, she’s there …

  … magicked out of realworld and dropped into the vast, glittering cyberscape of the Weave.

  Mara zooms along the familiar wrecked boulevards lined with buzzing, sparking towerstacks that store the lost data of the old, drowned world. The boulevards end in a crumble of tumbledown stacks, rotting mountains of cyberjunk. There’s a strange, flickering beauty, danger too sometimes, in these heaps of decay.

  Deep in the ruins looms the arm of a broken bridge. Mara slows up, steps onto the bridge, and stares at what lies beyond—an electric blue ocean of cyberhaze.

  Fox? Her voice crackles with static. Are you here?

  This is where he promised to be, on the Bridge to Nowhere. But he’s not here. There are a hundred reasons why he might not have made it.

  Maybe she’s too late. Maybe he came earlier and she wasn’t here. Maybe he gave up on her. Maybe he fell asleep.

  But what if he never made it out of New Mungo? What if he was caught by the sea police? Or drowned in the filthy waters of the netherworld as he tried to swim across to the old university tower?

  Fox? Are you safe? Please be safe. Please come.

  Panic-stricken, she waits and waits.

  But Fox doesn’t come.

  FOX

  The fluttery light of the old woman’s lantern illuminates her dark eyes and canyons of wrinkles in a moon-pale face.

  She’s calm and quiet. It’s what Fox needs. He’s too estranged to talk and Candleriggs seems to know. Instead of talking, she’s given him tasks. Find eggs, she told him and sent him searching by lantern light through the crumbling stone rooms of the old tower, after showing him what an egg is. A nest is such a cleverly crafted thing he can’t believe it’s made by a bird. He’s yet to see a real one of those. In New Mungo, even the birds are fake.

  Fox is beginning to understand what Mara tried to tell him: that the birds, the trees, the food, and so much else in his city are synthetic versions of what used to exist on the Earth before the seas rose. Down here in the dank ruins of the drowned world, in the shadow of New Mungo’s vast towers, life is so raw and harsh it shocks Fox to his core. He can’t see how anyone could survive. Yet Candleriggs has, ever since his grandfather, Caledon, threw her out of New Mungo all those years ago. Caledon betrayed her, the woman he loved, abandoning her here so that he could follow his dream.

  The tower rooms are crammed with collapsing book-stacks. Even the winding stairway between the floors is strewn with wind-tattered pages covered in feathers, bird mess, and spiders’ webs. At last, atop a tumbledown book heap, Fox finds an egg. Candleriggs said they are good to eat. Fox cups the hard shell in his hands and wonders how they will eat that.

  He finds five eggs in all and breaks two. They’re not as hard as they seem and what’s inside doesn’t look good to eat at all.

  The tower rooms are as confusing as a maze but at last Fox finds his way back. Candleriggs is gathering up loose pages from the heaps of books that litter the stone floor. This room is a good place to settle, she says. The windows face south and will catch the sun when it rises over the city walls. In winter, they will have some shelter from the brutal wind that blasts from the North.

  Fox thinks of Mara on the ship, heading toward the home of the North Wind.

  Candleriggs has taken two stones from the pocket of her cloak and strikes them against each other. Sparks shoot from the stones. Fox watches them fall on the dry pages of the books. One of the sparks smolders into a tiny flame and the paper begins to burn.

  He has never seen fire; not the real thing. In New Mungo fire is an illusion of lumen light. But real fire is made by striking stones on dry paper. It’s strong enough to warm you right through to your bones. He never knew.

  Candleriggs tends the fire, rubbing her hands in the heat of the crackling flames.

  “Aah … that’s better, isn’t it?”

  She snuggles inside her cloak. It’s made from the strangest material Fox has ever seen and steams gently in the heat of the fire. A strange smell emanates from it.

  “Are you on fire?” he asks, bewildered.

  Candleriggs frowns then chuckles. “Just damp.”

  Then she explains simply, as if he’s a child.

  “The fire warms my cloak and the dampness turns to steam. The moss weave of my cloak absorbs the damp air. Stops it seeping into my old bones,” she adds. “Now, watch. I’m going to cook the eggs.”

  She’s brisk and kind, but the fact that she has to explain everything means she knows how ill-equipped he is to survive.

  Candleriggs cracks the eggs on the stone floor and pours the clear and yellow stuff that’s inside onto the hot stone close to the flames. Fox watches the eggs cook. For the first time, he understands how scared and disoriented Mara must have been in New Mungo, having only known the world outside. This world.

  His heart turns over. How could he have known? Nothing in the gleaming towers of a sky city could ever prepare him for the sheer earthiness of the world outside.

  Once they have eaten, it’s Candleriggs’s turn to wonder when Fox takes his godgem from a watertight wallet attached to a belt around his waist.

  “Godbox,” he explains. “Power at my command.”

  She peers at the minuscule box as he clips it on to his shirt, close to his heart.

  “Headgem. A magnetic mind’s eye.”

  She stares as he sticks the green gem to the front of his head.

  “Godbox, headgem—godgem.”

  “This is what computers have become?” The old woman’s eyes can’t grow any wider. Now they crinkle as she laughs. “And I thought Mara’s cyberwizzard was—” She breaks off and her forehead furrows into deep lines. “You can speak to Mara with this?”

  “Hope so,” says Fox.

  He hurtles into the Weave and zips through the electronic boulevards to the Bridge to Nowhere. Mara is not there. He waits, but she doesn’t come.

  When the exodus of ships fled through the city walls, the pain of losing Mara was shot through with astonishment at the salty sea wind, the fire of the stars, the dark of night, and the thunder of the ocean beyond the city walls. Loneliness hit like a hammer blow as he looked up at the vast towers and sky tunnels of the city he abandoned. Then he saw the strange netherworld he
’d landed in. Fox peered through the darkness at the dank black sea that lapped around the trunks of New Mungo, at the dark shadow of the high walls that enclose the city’s towers. He saw the remains of the drowned city in the water—humps of small islands topped with trees and steeples and ruins. A great black steeple loomed in the darkness—the old university tower.

  This was the place where his grandfather dreamed up the sky cities that rose out of the waters of a drowned Earth. And this is where Fox hopes to spark a revolution that will break the dark forces that control the New World. Down here is the misery his world is built upon. The vast boat camp and an army of slaves on the sea bridges are just beyond the city walls. How many of those desperate people, he wonders, escaped with Mara on the ships? She begged him to go with her but he stayed here to start his battle with the New World.

  Panic swamped him as he stood in the darkness of the first real night he’d ever known. Thinking he could start a revolution in this grim place seemed a crazy idea. He was a fool not to go with Mara. Yet he can’t go back home to New Mungo. He wrecked the city’s communications and orchestrated a mass breakout. Now he is a traitor; harsh punishment awaits. Even worse is his family’s fury and shame.

  A soft light appeared in the darkness. The old woman had come to find him; he wasn’t all alone. The other Treenesters were gone with Mara but, like him, Candleriggs had stubbornly chosen to stay.

  It was a struggle to steer her raft, Fox swimming alongside, through the flooded halls at the foot of the old tower. The fluttering light of her lantern illuminated the vaulted chambers, pillars, and archways of the undercroft.

  Once past the undercroft, he dragged the raft through a smashed door then up onto the grand sweep of stairs that led up to the halls of the museum. Walking through the great halls, exhaustion took hold of the old woman. Fox could see she was struggling to go on. So they stopped right there in the middle of a hall, sank down on the floor, and slept, wet and shivering, under the shadow of some strange, looming thing.

  Fox woke to the sound of a laugh. Stiff and sore, he got up from the floor—and yelled with fright at the long-nosed beast that was staring him in the face.

  “Keep calm, it’s long dead,” Candleriggs chuckled.

  “What is it?” he asked, stunned.

  “An elephant,” she said. “No elephants, eh, in your brave New World?”

  It took them much of the day to search for the book rooms at the top of the tower. Mara said they were so hard to find they’d be an ideal hideout. At last they found the small door to the tower. Through the door, said Mara, was the climb of a thousand and more tight-winding stairs.

  How would he ever get old Candleriggs up a thousand stairs?

  And when he did, how would they live, way up there in the tower?

  They had to stop many times but they got there. The stamina of such a bent and gnarled old woman amazed Fox.

  Now he sits by the fire beside this strange old woman who looks as if she is made of the same cracked stone as the tower walls.

  “Did you ever come here with my grandfather,” he asks, “when you were young?”

  She drops her eyes from his face and nods.

  Fox gets up and walks over to the smashed tower window. He leans his head against the cold stone wall.

  “You’re very like him.” Candleriggs’s voice creaks like the ancient wood door of the room. “You look just like he did at your age.”

  “I’m nothing like him. I could never do what he’s done.”

  “What he did was amazing,” says Candleriggs softly. “The sky cities are wonders of the Earth. But Caledon’s dream ruled his heart and made him believe that all kinds of cruelty were necessary to build his New World. You’ve a better heart, I think. But you’ve got his spirit and I’m glad about that. You’re going to need it.”

  It’s not just the old woman’s words that spook him. He can hear the whoop of the windspires that whirl on New Mungo’s towers. Fox draws back from the window. The sound unnerves him though he knows the spiregyres only turn wind into energy, and there’s nothing spooky about that. Now Candleriggs’s odd lantern is giving him the creeps. Its light is a strange fluttering thing.

  “What is that?”

  “Moonmoths,” says Candleriggs.

  He crouches to peer at the huge moths fluttering inside the twig lantern. Now he looks closer, they’re not spooky at all. They have the same mesmeric glow as the bedside motherlights in New Mungo.

  “Candleriggs,” he says, after watching awhile.

  She doesn’t answer. He turns around in a panic. But she’s not gone, just rolled up in her thick, mossy cloak on the stone floor, fast asleep. She has made a nest of sorts from the heaps of wrecked books.

  Fox lifts the lantern and looks around him. Library. That’s what these tower rooms used to be. In the New World there are no libraries or books. There is the Noos.

  The Noos is the brain of the New World, a stunning cyberuniverse bursting with the information and ideas that are traded between sky cities all across the Earth. Everything you could ever want to know, and wonders beyond dreams, exists in the ever-expanding Noos.

  Or so Fox used to think.

  Once upon a time, libraries and books were where people stored knowledge and ideas. Later, they used the electronic towers of the Weave too. This wrecked library in the old university tower is where Mara found the book that gave her the idea of finding land at the top of the world. Maybe here Fox will find what he needs.

  He sets down the lantern and the light of the moon-moths flutters across Candleriggs’s face. His grandfather is just as old, yet his face has not been ravaged like hers. Caledon lives in luxury. A lifetime’s struggle to survive is written on Candleriggs’s face. And it was Caledon who made that her fate when he threw her out of his world.

  That’s the kind of man his grandfather is. Merciless. Cruel. And that’s the kind of empire he has built as the Grand Father of All the New World.

  Now, when Fox looks out of the smashed tower window and up at the sky city that was his home, he feels as angry as the red sunrise that’s begun to rip up the night.

  It feels better. That’s what he needs, that anger, if he is to succeed.

  Soon, the mass of workers will start to arrive in the city’s cybercathedral where the business of the New World is done. The rooks, the secret police of the Noos, will have been working furiously to fix the systems he crashed.

  The thought of all that industry above his head focuses Fox on his own task. He sits against the cold tower wall, prods the fire with the toe of his shoe, but it’s almost dead and he doesn’t know what to do to bring it back to life. For an instant, he wishes himself back up in his safe, selfish world. At least he knows how to function there.

  I’ll learn how to spark a fire.

  The sun breaks over the city wall. It finds a gap in the trunks of the sky towers and streams through the gloom of the netherworld. A tablet of light lands on the stone floor. Fox stares at it in wonder. In New Mungo, even the sun is a lumen light, a bland imitation of this astonishingly real thing.

  He stands in the sunbeam and feels its power on his skin. It’s the shot of energy he needs to fire him into action and take his first, tentative steps in the battle he means to begin with the powers of the New World. Fox grabs his godgem and makes a cyberleap into the universe of the Noos.

  THE FLOATING CITY

  The northern ocean is still deep in night, but a slab of sunrise gleams in the east. Someone speaks to Mara and she turns away from the sun, but it takes a moment for the glare to fade from her eyes before she can see the tall young woman who has joined her at the front of the ship. Molendinar’s face is half hidden by the fall of hair that almost touches the ground, but a blast of wind and the eastern light reveal a cut and swollen mouth.

  Mara stares. “Mol, what happened?”

  Molendinar shakes her head, angry tears in her eyes. “It’s madness down there. People fighting over food and water. Not just those sa
vage little urchins of yours, Mara, it’s everyone. Everyone’s out of control.”

  “But there’s plenty, isn’t there?” Mara is suddenly uncertain. She has been so caught up in her own turmoil that she hasn’t thought to check supplies. “And they’re not my urchins,” she mutters. “They’re from your world. My people would never abandon little children to the sea—”

  Mara stops, stricken with shame. No, it was the old ones her people abandoned to the sea because there wasn’t enough room on the boats.

  “There’s enough to eat and drink for now,” agrees Molendinar, overlooking her mutters. “But we don’t know how long this journey will last. How long, Mara?”

  Fox tried to estimate, but he couldn’t be sure. The old map of Greenland in Mara’s book shows an immense island. It’s impossible to know, if they reach it safely, how far along its vast coast they might go. Fox has programmed the ship to sail due north until they hit that coastline. Then, they will have to steer the ship themselves. Mara is counting on Rowan’s boat skills for that, though she hasn’t told him yet.

  “Days,” says Mara nervously. “Maybe a week.”

  “Even if we do find land soon,” Molendinar rushes on, “the first thing we must do is make shelter, build homes. We don’t know what kind of land or food we’ll find at the top of the world.”

  “We’ll fish,” says Mara. She’s an island girl; she knows how to survive. “We’ll stay close to the sea and fish. And there’ll be bird eggs, seaweed. We won’t starve.”

  Broomielaw, who has been listening in, nods, but she looks uncertain. “There are so many of us, lots of children, and we’re heading into winter.”

  And winter in the Far North will be dark and deep, Mara knows—even darker and deeper than winter on her island home. Molendinar is right, they need to make supplies last.

  “A lot of people are sick and don’t want to eat, the others eat and fight all day long because there’s nothing else to do. The sick will grow weak and the greedy will be slugs, none of them any use. We need everyone strong and good for work if we’re going to survive.” Molendinar throws a long rope of hair over her shoulder and glares at a group of urchins who barge past, stuffing their mouths with food. “It’ll take a summer at least to grow my crop.”