Firespark (23 page)

“I thought the
Arkiel
was your home.” His forehead scrapes on a sudden lowering of the cave roof. His heart bangs. This is what he feared most, the mountain caving in. Now he has to walk sideways
and
stooped.

“Oh no,” says Mol. “My home was a scrap of land in a netherworld at the foot of a sky city. We lived on the Hill of Doves, among the trees.”

Mol's voice breaks on the last word. Tuck hears it. Driftwood comes from trees, he's sure, though he doesn't know what a tree is. Mol seems very keen on them though. He knows Mol and her people call themselves Treenesters but he's never thought to ask why. It's just who they are, as he is a gypsea. Or was. What he is now, he doesn't know. A true Lander wouldn't have such a terror of Earth.

“Why did you leave?” he asks Mol, to keep his mind off his terror.

“The water kept rising. We had to leave before our Hill of Doves drowned just like Mara's island in the sea.”

“Mara's from the sea?”

“From the island of Wing in the Atlantic Ocean.”

Tuck imagines an island on the world's ocean shaped like a Great Skua's wing.

So Mara has the ocean in her blood too. She lived surrounded by it on an island called Wing. That must be what draws him.
Something gypsea about her
. They have breathed the same salt winds. And she gives Tuck the unnerving sensation he had when he first sighted Land, as if she is a missing piece of something he hadn't ever known he'd lost.

Mol sniffs the air and tugs his hand. “It's not so cold. The air's turned soft and damp, like the breath above a mushroom bed.”

“What's a mushroom?”

Mol giggles. “I suppose you don't get mushrooms on the sea. They grow in dark Earth places. They're good to eat.”

Mol's presence is solid and grounded; she settles him down. But Mara, ah, she's like an ocean heartwind. Tuck knows the very one. The heartwind that would come at the far end of winter, in the deepest folds of night, and haunt the lagoon and the boat masts with whispers of summer. The one that unsettled him with its secrets and unknown scents and tucked dreams in the pockets of his windwrap. A wind that made him want.

Tuck bangs into the person in front, who has stopped. He looks up ahead. The torch has stopped too, he can just see it, and Possil's hazy, moon-white face in its flame. The tunnel suddenly opens out and with an intake of breath—as if he's been underwater and just broken to the surface—Tuck steps into a wide cavern.

The air is warm and thick with vapor clouds.
Everything looks hazy and soft. Tuck stares around, amazed.

The roof is as high as a boat mast, and when the torchlight flickers up the walls of the cavern they glow like a fogged moon.

“What is it?” he asks Mol. Her hair shivers with the luminous glow.

“A moon cave!” She stares up through the steamy haze at the cavern roof. Crusts and fronds of rock hang down. “If I half-close my eyes they could almost be the branches of trees in moonlight.”

Tuck looks up at the dim-glowing fronds of rock.
That's what trees are like
?

There's a crash of water. An explosion of splashes, shrieks, and yells. Mol pushes past him, struggling out of her sealskin coat and the crackly layer of knotted plastic she wears underneath. She jumps into a steamy, bubbling pool that's tucked into a nook of the cave.

Tuck's banging heart calms. Each lungful of warm air relaxes him and his Earth terror lifts.

“Come in, Tuck!” Mol shouts. “It's lovely.”

Mara is already sitting at the side of the pool, her feet in the water, her eyes closed. Rowan crashes in, soaking her, and she laughs. The urchins are splashing up a storm. Tuck throws off his fears and his windwrap and under the strange, steamy moonglow, he plunges into the most blissful warmth he's ever known.

“Come on then,” says Fox
.

His tawny eyes and hair glint in the flickering lights of the Weave
.

She follows him off the broken bridge, down the ruined boulevards that stretch as far as she can see. Unraveling carcasses of data-worms slither across great heaps of cyberjunk. Fox takes her past the junk mountains into a wide boulevard stacked on each side with tumbledown towerstacks—sparking, crumbling Weavesites crammed with the rotting electronic data of the drowned world
.

“
Don't you remember this place
?”

Mara looks around her, at the flickering towerstacks, at the cracked and buzzing street name. After the cold, dark tunnels and the unearthliness of the moon cave, it's a relief to plunge back into the familiar world of the Weave with Fox
.

BOULEVARD OF something, says the flickering ice-blue sign. Mara peers hard and sees that the unlit last word is DRE\AMS. A crack runs right through the word and the blue light has died in that part of the sign, as though the dream is dead
.

“This is the boulevard where I first saw you,” says Fox
.

“
It was
?”

Mara remembers the creeping Fox presence that haunted her Weave visits when she would zoom down the boulevards for fun, her realworld self safe in her bedroom in Wing. Now, that not-so-distant past seems like someone else's life
.

Fox has stopped outside one of the Weavesites
.

“
In here
.”

“WORLD WIND.” Mara reads the faded name that flickers on the the towerstack
.

“It's a wind that blows you all around the world.” Fox pauses. “I found it the other night when you didn't come. Spent half the night just wandering the Weave. Most of this boulevard's rotted or dead, but this site's ace. You ready? Here we go …”

The Weavesite crackles and Mara gasps as she's sucked into the whirl of a cyberstream. In the second it takes to yell Fox's name, she has whooshed right through the cyberstream and shoots out into calm black space. She draws a breath, swallows, blinks
.

Looming up before her is a vast glowing gem
.

“Planet Earth,” says a voice in her ear
.

They are floating in black space. Mara wants to grab Fox's hand, then remembers she can't. She stares up at the amazing vision
.

“
This is Earth
?”

She can hardly breathe as she takes in the beauty of the glowing, gemlike planet: the stunning blue of the oceans, the brown and green of its lands and ice-crusted mountains and white ice caps, all wrapped in swirls of cloud. It's hard to believe that in realworld she is sitting in a cave deep in the mountains in the dark of winter at the tip of such a vivid world
.

Fox is watching her, not the planet. The glow of the Earth reflects in his cybereyes. But she can feel his real self looking at her. Can he feel her too
?

“But—but how is this possible?” she whispers. “To see the Earth …?”

“Satellite images,” says Fox. “Remember, the old satellites all around the Earth that hold the Weave? This is an image of the Earth taken from the moon, long ago. Look, there's the date.” Above them, a label hangs in the ether. “THE EARTH PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE MOON, JULY 20, 1969.”

Mara laughs. “People went to the moon? And I suppose it was made of cheese?”

“Cheese?” Fox looks at her askance
.

“When I was small,” Mara explains, “my mom used to tell me the moon was made of cheese. People thought it was, once.”

“Once upon a time,” says Fox. “In a time out of mind.”

They float in space, the bright Earthgem in front of them, the words tingling between them
.

Mara breaks the spell
.

“
People really did go to the moon
?”

“Once upon a time, they did.” Fox's voice drifts. He's staring at Mara, and she knows he's thinking of their once upon a time. He looks away and when he speaks it's with a forced matter-of-factness. “Okay, there's a wind-shuttle here somewhere that we can navigate with and if I can just instruct my godgem—”

The slow-spinning planet and the disorienting whirl of black space have begun to make Mara feel queasy
.

“
Fox
.”

“—
we can go for a whirl around the Earth
.”

Mara swallows her queasiness as a craft that looks like a shiny beetle with wings zooms toward them. They board
the wind-shuttle and begin to orbit the Earth, crossing blue expanses of ocean, surfing the undulating plains and mountains of its lands, speckled with the cluttered mosaics of cities
.

Fox zooms in closer and now the occasional shock of noise, an image or a disembodied voice flashes up from the planet below
.

“What was that?” gasps Mara, as a rumbling line of tanks appear and vanish
.

“TI-ANAN-MEN SQUARE.”
Fox reads the sign that flashes up with the tanks. “It's old message flags. Historical stuff.” He shrugs. “Don't really know. Wind-shuttlers—people of the old world who used this site—left all sorts of blogs and flags and messages. Wow, did you see that?”

A mushroom cloud billows up. In the distance, a tidal wave crashes on a raft of islands, obliterating the land. Ahead, cracks appear in the mountains and the Earth shudders
.

“Nuclear bomb, tsunami, earthquake.” Fox reads the flags at each event. They pass over the bombed ruins of several countries. Mara can't read the messages on the tattered flags but a great wail of despair rises from the smoking remains
.

“
Fox, stop, this is
—”

He veers away. Far beneath the wind-shuttle, a great wall crashes down
.

“—
horrible
.”

A vast continent in the middle of the Earth seems dead. There are no noisy messages from the past here, just a mass of silent flags
.

HELP
, they say,
SEND AID
, and a solitary one,
TOO LATE
.

“Stop,” Mara pleads. “I've seen enough.”

Fox nods, his mouth set in a grim line. He pulls the
wind-shuttle back from the Earth. The planet looks calm and beautiful once more
.

“We'll go north,” he says, sounding shaken, and revs the craft to full speed
.

The empty blue of the ocean is a relief. Mara's stomach settles a little as they zoom across it. She draws breath as the white-capped top of the world comes into view
.

“
Is that really what the old world was like
?”

“It's not all like that,” says Fox. “I promise. We must've been at the wrong altitude and picked up all the bad stuff. There are loads of amazing things too. Just wait.”

“… ice caps melting twice as fast as feared …” A disembodied voice crackles in the ether, then fades
.

“What was that?” Mara almost grabs Fox by the arm. “Go back.”

Fox pulls the wind-shuttle into reverse and tracks the lone voice
.

“… we may be on the edge … not much time left …” The voice seems to be coming from one of the satellites marked NASA. This one hangs above the northern hemisphere
.

“… all countries must stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide … can't wait, must act … flooded Earth would be an alien planet … armadas of icebergs, rising oceans … the end of civilization … how long have we got?”

Fox revs the wind-shuttle
.

“They knew,” says Mara
.

Another surge of nausea hits her
.

Fox leans closer. “It was a hundred years ago, Mara. It's history.”

“But they knew. They could've done something but they didn't. They knew. They didn't think about the future, did they? They never thought about us.”

The nausea turns violent. Mara doesn't know whether it's Fox's zip-zooming navigation or all those terrible message flags from history, but she needs to get back to realworld, fast
.

“
Fox. Stop
.”

His electronic eyes flash at her
.

“
I need to go back
.”

“
Go back? Where
?”

“
Home. I mean, realworld. Out of here
.”

“
Why
?”

He looks as if he'll grab her if she tries to leave. Then remembers he can't
.

“
Mara, there's beautiful stuff too—the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China. The patterns of the old-world cities are stunning. I've seen things that are more amazing than anything in the Noos. The sun rising over the Himalayas. A massive river that slides through a jungle like a silver snake. A land full of castles and towers and forests and lakes. A million pink flamingos sweeping across a lake like a flame. And elephants—Mara, elephants and animals you can't imagine were ever real. A black pool of penguins on an ice shelf at the bottom of the world. And I was going to show you Greenland. We're nearly there
.”