Exodus (11 page)

“Here, over here!” It's Ruth, her island neighbor, almost unrecognizable now. Frantically, Mara clambers over the boats to get to her.

“My mom and dad—are they here?” cries Mara as Ruth hugs her, with difficulty—she is so heavily pregnant.

Ruth bites her lip and shakes her head. “But you are,” she cries. “That's good news.”

“But they'll be here somewhere, Ruth, won't they?”

Ruth looks away.

“We have to tell her, Ruth.” Quinn, her father's old friend, stands up. “There's no use in her keeping up false hopes.”

“Tell me what?” gasps Mara, though all her instincts tell her that she doesn't want to hear the answer.

Ruth still can't meet Mara's eyes. “I'm so sorry, Mara. It was on the second day of the journey here. We tried to turn back for survivors, really we did. But the waves were like mountains.” Mara stares at her, remembering those terrifying waves. “Your mom and dad's boat overturned in one of those waves,” Ruth continues in a broken whisper.

“It sank. Oh, Mara! One moment it was there and then it was—it was gone.”

Jamie would have panicked. Inexperienced Jamie, the novice skipper. He wouldn't have had Alex's skill to steer through such seas.

“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.

 

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

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 urchin'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.