Firespark

by Julie Bertagna

  For the first time in his life Tuck wants to know. And there’s something else. He wants to know why. Why did the seas rise up and drown the Earth?

  Grumpa could have told him, but Tuck never asked.

  Mara pulls off the cyberwizz with a sigh and stuffs it in her pack. She gives Tuck a wan smile and goes over to her sleeping mats where she makes her backpack her pillow, as she always does, lies down, and closes her eyes.

  But she’s forgotten to seal up her bag. Tuck can see the gleam of the cyberwizz globe through a gap.

  Mol said the cyberwizz holds the secrets of the past and she was right. He’s just seen that with his own eyes. Great Skua, it holds a whole secret Earth inside! Who knows what else? Tuck waits until he’s sure Mara is fast asleep, then slips his hand into the gap in the backpack. He feels the curve of the globe, smooth as glass. If he could just ease it out without waking her …

  “Hands off, pirate,” says a voice at his back.

  EARTH’S GREAT WHITE WHALE

  Mara is awakened by a spur of rock in her ribs and an idea spiking her dreams. Blurry with sleep, she rummages in her backpack, finds the cyberwizz halo and wand, but can’t feel the globe. She takes her backpack over to the fire and peers inside, but it’s not there. In cold-sweat panic she searches the craggy floor of the cave.

  “This what you’re missing?” There’s a rustle close behind her. Rowan sits up. He unearths the globe from his sea-grass pillow and hands it to her. “I caught pirate boy stealing it.”

  “Tuck?” Mara frowns then laughs, relieved. “Oh, it’s okay. I took him on a trip into the Weave. He was probably trying to sneak another look at, um—”

  She stops. Rowan doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She has always kept the secrets of the cyberwizz close to her chest. She is trying to work out how to explain when he shrugs and flops back down on his mat.

  “Just keep your stuff safe,” he grunts.

  And turns away. Mara stares at his back, stung. Why has he become so cold and strange? Maybe it’s only now that they’re stuck here in this dark hole in the Earth that he has been hit by the full misery of his twin’s death and the loss of his parents. Mara remembers how she felt in the netherworld when the terrible loss of her family sank in. Now that Rowan has had time to think, is he blaming her?

  Well, she blames herself. It was her idea to travel to the New World.

  But if they hadn’t, a voice inside pipes up, what would they have done? Stayed on Wing and let the ocean swallow them up? Everyone thought the North was in meltdown, that any land would be sunk; there was no way to survive there.

  Whether they were right or wrong about survival, time will tell.

  Mara picks up the cyberwizz, opens the globe, and puts the halo over her eyes. She can’t wait for Fox. She’ll do this alone. With the wand, she scribbles a series of hieroglyphs on the tiny screenpad inside the globe and …

  … dives into the ruined boulevards of the Weave. She whizzes through the crumbling network until she finds the site she needs and tumbles into the World Wind, zipping through crackling blue ether into black space where the vast, glowing gem of the planet looms up. A glinting, winged craft flies toward her. Mara boards the wind-shuttle and begins to zoom toward an immense blueness of ocean.

  A name glows beneath its surface.

  The Pacific.

  The names of lost lands and cities begin to flash at the faraway rim of the planet but the ocean is so large it covers this whole face of the Earth’s sphere. Mara keeps a high altitude so that the images and echoes of the horrible history flags, planted all over the planet by old-world wind-shuttlers, are weakened by distance.

  There’s a wide scatter of islands like pebbles upon the serene ocean. Solomon, Phoenix, Starbuck, whole shoals of names flash and fade as she zips past. A green and brown terrain looms up beyond a firework flash for Hong Kong. She follows the wriggling line of the River Ganges, skirts the purple peaks of Himalayan mountains, India and Sumatra behind her, the highlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan ahead, the River Volga shimmering far in the distance and cluttered plains of low-lying cities as far as she can see.

  One name, flashing in the distance, catches her eye and a memory flares of sitting by the fireside with her mother in her lost home on Wing. Mara stares at the faraway nameflash. ARARAT. Why does she know that? Mara dredges through her memories and she swallows hard when she remembers. Ararat was the mountain in the story of Noah and the Ark, an ancient legend of a flood. So that is where those long-ago people saved themselves from a drowned world.

  There is high land above the oceans, scattered across the Earth. How much is barren mountain rock? And how hot has the Earth grown? It’s hard to believe the rest of the world is warm while they are stuck in cold caves. But Fox has trawled Weavesite ruins and what he found there has made him sure, he said, that the sunless winter at the top of the world is at odds with the searing heat farther south, where no one can live, not even in a sky city. One thing has given Mara heart: Fox’s certainty that once the long Arctic winter night is over and the sun returns, the mellow spring and summer of a warmed world awaits them.

  If only he’s right.

  If only they can survive until then.

  For the first time in a while, as she scans the oceans and lost lands, Mara wonders about the other ships that escaped the sky city with the Arkiel. Did they survive and find land?

  Mara stalls the wind-shuttle, lost amid her thoughts and the names that flash all around her. Where in the world is she? She could zip back into realworld and ask Rowan, who spent entire winters engrossed in old atlases and books, but she can’t face another of his rebuffs. No, she’ll do this herself. She can’t make up for the deaths that have already happened but she will do everything in her power to save the people she’s brought to the top of the world.

  Mara wings a prayer of hope across the Earth to wherever the other ships might be and focuses on the task at hand. She casts her mind back to the tattered atlas that used to lie on Tain’s cottage table. If only she’d paid more attention when he’d tried to teach her about the world beyond the island, instead of twitching to be out playing in the wind with Rowan and Gail.

  Wing was in the North Atlantic, a pinprick in the seas beyond the land mass of Europe. That she knows for sure. She closes her eyes to block out an insistent red SOS from Bangladesh, as the wind-shuttle flies over it, and tries to remember more. Europe leaned on the shoulder of Africa. That was the dead continent with the HELP flags she saw on her trip with Fox; she’s almost sure of that. Far west, across the Atlantic Ocean, was the huge mass of North America, trailing its southern lands on a string.

  Mara takes a guess and zooms east, back across the Pacific Ocean, until she sees a gigantic golden archway with a banner flashing USA in red, white, and blue. It bridges the entire land mass that lies to the northeast. And, yes, there are the southern Americas attached to the northern land mass by a thin string of land.

  Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia flash past. She zooms over the string of land—and jumps with fright as a crowd of orange ghosts rises like distress flares from a bay on a long island that is the shape of a wrenched arm. The name of the island, Cuba, flashes but there is no message flag or blog from the bay of the orange ghosts.

  Unnnerved, she speeds on to the ridges of the Rocky Mountains, where a roll of beautiful names echo the undulations of the land. California, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma. Dizzied by flashing towns and cities, she heads for the calm blue of the ocean that lies beyond the lowlands of Mississippi and Florida, now surely drowned.

  The Atlantic! The name shimmers on the surface of the ocean and Mara’s excitement grows as she veers sharply north, following the eastern seaboard toward the part of the world that is home.

  A rumble vibrates the wind-shuttle. Far below, two towers, as tall as any sky city, implode into dust.

  Mara rushes onward, following the flashes of Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec along a trail of waterways that lead her north, tracki
ng the line of the coast. As the wind-shuttle takes her over the huge water bowl of Hudson Bay, she remembers something and glances back west. But there are too many lakes, scattered like shattered glass across the rugged terrain of the North. Somewhere among those lakes and forested highlands lived the Athapaskans, whose story first inspired her to find a homeland in the Far North. She hopes the Athapaskans survived.

  Now all her hopes and wishes fly north, like a spur of boreal wind, because there it is at last, like a great white whale at the top of the world.

  Greenland, the biggest island on Earth.

  A patch of island, a cuttlefish beside Greenland’s giant whale, comes as a shock because it’s due north, surely, of where Wing, her home island, must lie. Mara peers out of the wind-shuttle window.

  The name flashes up.

  Iceland.

  She remembers tales of an ice land full of molten fire. The oldest island folk swore the tales were true. Mara digs into her memory. Wasn’t there a mention in her Greenland book of a volcanic island in the northern Atlantic? The old people’s stories were of a violent land, so hot it melted the soles of your feet and guarded by a people so fiery they could burn a stranger’s eyes to blackened sockets with a glance. Not a soul on Wing suggested they go there, not even when the sea reached their doorsteps.

  Mara pauses the wind-shuttle. Now that she’s here, she knows it’s been in the back of her mind to do this all along.

  Just to see.

  She descends to a speckle of islands that lie south of Iceland and north of the British Isles. She’s using up too much of her precious power but she doesn’t care. She circles the speckle of islands. It’s the largest, most southerly one.

  Mara stares at the island. Her vision blurs and her throat tightens.

  In realworld she scrubs tears from her eyes. In the cyberworld she swoops low over the old satellite image of Wing, her island, her lost home.

  How long ago did some satellite orbiting the Earth capture this image of what no longer exists? Was it when Mom and Dad were young? Before they were born? A century ago, before the seas rose, when Granny Mary and Tain were young? Mara zooms deeper into the satellite image, as close as the World Wind allows, until she is no higher from the ground than a sky city tower. That gray clutter near the sea must be the rooftops of the old village—before the sea forced the villagers farther inland. There’s a scattering of farms on the hillside that didn’t exist in her lifetime. It was the field of windmills. Mara’s heart beats painfully as she follows the coastline of her island until she finds the horseshoe shape of Longhope Bay.

  There it is. She can hardly believe her eyes. Far below is the gray rooftop of a farm cottage. Her own home. And there, farther up the hillside, is Tain’s cottage roof.

  Mara can hardly breathe as she gazes down at this lost world, her world, from a time long before she was born, before the Earth drowned.

  Two specks are outside Tain’s cottage. They could be rocks. Or they could be people.

  They might be Granny Mary and Tain.

  She can’t take anymore.

  Mara revs the wind-shuttle and zooms away as fast as she can from the ghosts of the past.

  HERE, NOW

  Mara takes the wind-shuttle up the eastern side of Greenland, across endless fjords. In realworld, their mountain could be in any one of the fjords that fritter the edges of the great white island like frosted ferns.

  She zooms over the ridge of the mountains that enclose the mass of ice and snow in the interior. The snow is melted now so the mountains must surely cup a lake so vast it would seem like a sea.

  Mara thinks of the dead tree root in the cave roof and wonders. She remembers the Athapaskans who lived among the boreal high lands and lakes. Anything is possible, she reminds herself. It’s a thought she hasn’t had in a while.

  She is about to pull the wind-shuttle back from the Earth to find its parking bay in electronic space when she pauses. Thinks hard. Then scribbles on her screenpad and hits the message flag button on the control panel. Maybe no one will ever see it but Wing, her island, deserves a flag of its own.

  Now she revs up the wind-shuttle, ready to exit Earth. She’s seen what she needs to know, and far more. Of one thing she is sure.

  They need to go through the mountains. They need to find a way through to the interior sea.

  SNAKE IN THE BOOK

  Tonight, at long last, he found Mara on the Bridge to Nowhere. Fox replays the precious moments in his head. She seemed so lost and upset. When he asked her what was wrong, she hardly made sense. Before she left, she asked him such an odd thing.

  Have you ever seen the sign of a snake coiled around a stick?

  She described a symbol she’d found among the carvings on a cave wall. The same sign, she murmured, was burned onto her arm.

  Burned? By who? Fox demanded, appalled. Not now, she muttered, she’d tell him another time.

  He has only seen her for a few snatched moments since her sudden, strange exit from the World Wind. Now he’s too worried to focus on his own task. Who could have done such a thing to her? The gypsea? Yet Fox remembers, all too clearly, how fondly she speaks of him.

  Finding out about the snake sign is the only thing he can think of to do, so Fox searches the tower bookstacks, trying to calm his spiraling fear. The image is niggling at the back of his head. It’s only when he turns over a book on serpents and spots a tiny snake coiled on a stick on the corner of the back cover, that he realizes what it is.

  Of course! It’s all over New Mungo and the Noos.

  It’s a dollar sign. The trading symbol of the New World.

  Fox grips the book. The sign of a dollar is branded on her arm?

  “What’s branded on whose arm?”

  Candleriggs is frowning at him.

  Fox could kick himself. He must have spoken the words out loud.

  The gnarled hand on his arm is like a claw.

  “What’s happening?” demands Candleriggs. “You told me they’d found land, that they’re safe and settled for the winter in caves by the sea.”

  He said exactly that. Fox has been very careful about what he has and has not said. Mara was adamant about that.

  “What’s happening?” Candleriggs repeats. “Is someone sick? Broomielaw and the baby, are they—”

  “They’re fine,” he says, too quickly.

  “What’s happened, boy?”

  Fox shakes his head. With Candleriggs’s owl eyes fixed on him so fiercely, he can’t lie anymore.

  When he tells all he knows, she doesn’t break down. She hunches deeper into her earthen cloak, says nothing at all, just walks away.

  Night has fallen when he hears her wail somewhere deep in the book rooms. Her cry mingles with the moans of misery Fox is sure he hears, carried on the wind, from the boat camp on the other side of the city walls.

  He couldn’t tell Candleriggs what else Mara said.

  If my power dies, don’t give up on me. If something happens, if we lose contact, don’t ever give up.

  What’s wrong? he kept asking. What happened that night you disappeared?

  I’m running low on power, she said. I’m—I—I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. Just don’t give up on me, promise?

  He promised, of course he did. There was nothing else he could do.

  Now he has found the snake sign, but when will he find Mara again? Fox is filled with a terrible foreboding. All he can do is wait on the Bridge to Nowhere and hope that she comes.

  ANGEL ON THE RISE

  There are skeletons in the nooks and crannies of the deep caves, and the scattered belongings of the people they once were. Broken watches, jewelry, unfathomable gadgets from the past, all kinds of useless stuff. Useful things too: clothes and shoes and blankets, pots and plates, empty cans, knives and spoons, plastic bottles and bags.

  The urchins have found a collection of small metal and colored plastic boxes, some of which still magic up a flame when a switch is flicked. Ibro
x sniffs the unfamiliar oil that fuels them, impressed at these ingenious fireboxes of the old world.

  Mara shudders at the thought that the skeletons were once the same people who carved the story of the world’s drowning onto the cave wall, though she overcomes her qualms and gratefully pulls on their warm clothes. Did they die here waiting for winter to pass? Their remains can’t be buried. The ground is solid rock. So the urchins play with the skulls and bones, turning them into bats and balls, guns and swords, and sticks to batter out a drumbeat bash on the rocks.

  The urchins make treasure hoards of the bright litter they find scrunched on the ground. They dress up in motley assortments of clothes, drape themselves in jewelry and broken watches, and take apart the gadgets to see what’s inside.

  Scarwell has moved into a cave of her own, a low cavern along one of the tunnels that branches off from the moon cave. She has filled it with precarious bone heaps, gruesome things that scare the other urchins off her treasure hoard, each one topped by a skull with a gleaming pair of firestone eyes. In the middle of them sits her constant companion, the apeman from the drowned museum, who is almost as big as she is. He looks strangely at home in his cavern, hunched over Scarwell’s treasure, surrounded by human bones.

  It was Scarwell who made the skull lanterns, by turning skulls upside down and burning small chunks of driftwood soaked in fish oil inside. Everyone was horrified, but the darkness of the mountain and the outside world had crept into the moon cave. It seemed to sap the thunder of the waterfalls and the soft moon glow that lives in the cavern rock. Now Scarwell’s skull lanterns are a welcome, if grotesque, source of light.

  Ibrox, whose fire-making tricks have been dwindling fast, hoards all the fireboxes that still have dregs of fuel. Every so often, he uses one of the fireboxes to spark the embers of the fire. It’s the signal for everyone to gather in a semblance of the Treenesters’ old sunup and sundown ritual. No one can be bothered to shout out their names anymore but they gather together and Gorbals reads from A Tale of Two Cities or a snippet from Tuck’s book, or he unwraps a poem or story from his own head and warms it by the fire. The ache of their empty stomachs fades a little as they fly on the wings of the words, escaping their entombment in the caves. They fall asleep with the story infused in their dreams.