Firespark (24 page)

“
I need to go. I'm sorry
.”

He looks at her blankly as she exits the wind-shuttle and spins away through black space into the crackling cyberstream
.

Just in time, Mara yanks the halo from her eyes and crashes back into realworld. And promptly throws up.

“Mara?”

Mol puts a cool hand on Mara's forehead. “No fever. What's wrong?”

“All this seaweed and fish. Doesn't agree with me,”
Mara croaks. She goes over to the hot spring to scrub herself clean. Poor Fox. She remembers the bewilderment in his eyes.

“But you're an island girl,” says Mol. “You must have eaten lots of seaweed and fish.”

Mara lies down on her seaweed mat. Mol is right, but she's too sick to try to answer. She closes her eyes and tries to quell the queasiness by imagining she has zipped out of realworld and is with Fox again, gazing at the vast, glowing gem that is Earth.

Mara yawns and stretches, soothed from a long dip in the hot spring after a sleep so deep it might have lasted a month. As she dries herself on one of the scratchy seaweed mats, she sees Tuck studying a dim nook of the cave by the light of a torch flame. There's an intensity about the way he is peering at the wall that makes Mara go over. For the first time she sees there are carvings etched in the rock.

“There were rock carvings on Wing,” she remembers. “Circles and spirals all over the standing stones. Ancient stuff—nobody knew what it meant.”

“These are old but not ancient.”

Tuck rubs the words that are carved into the rock and shows her the charcoal stain on his fingertip. Mara hears the trembling in his breath. She looks at the words in the rock.

THE WRECK OF THE WORLD.

Mara takes the torch from Tuck.

The carving shows a vision of the sun beating down on
what must have been a great city. There are towering buildings, streets crammed with cars and people, a sky crisscrossed with winged objects and their smoky trails. Mara remembers the broken bird on the mountain. Planes. Beside the city, tall chimneys in a field belch a dirty cloud. Mara moves the torch flame along the wall. The city seems unaware of what is rolling toward it—a wave, seething with people and animals and the debris of a destroyed city. Mara peers into the wave. Carved into the great swirl of water are what look like bits of paper, each one marked with (Mara peers even closer to be sure) the very same sign that is branded on her arm.

The snake on a stick.

Mara tries to think what the sign could mean but she has no idea.

The torch flame flickers on a bus full of people. The luminous cave wall makes them glow like ghosts. Yet the carving is so detailed that Mara can see the open, screaming mouths of the people as the great wave threatens to swallow the bus. She remembers the wrecked bus the urchins played in on the remains of a sunken bridge in the netherworld.

It's as if the world is a wrecked ship and all that is left is the flotsam of the past.

Mara drops the torch and leans her head against the rock wall, nauseous once again. Her imagination reels with the horror of what it must have been like.

A hand pulls up her chin. The wet lip of a bottle touches her lips.

“I'm all right,” she mutters crossly.

Tuck picks up the torch from the floor and blows gently on it to revive the flame. “Don't throw up on me again, eh?” he teases.

Mara shakes her head and manages a smile. She takes a gulp from Tuck's water bottle, catching his eye as she hands it back.

“What's sickening you?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she retorts. “There's nothing wrong with me.”

“You're sick a lot.”

“The sea made me sick. Now the food—”

“You've been Landed a while now,” Tuck persists. “Two, three moons?”

Even the rise and fall of his gypsea voice makes her feel seasick.

“How do I know? It's all this fish and seaweed, it's turning my stomach. And the eggs.”

Mara steers her thoughts back to the carvings on the cave wall. Even they are preferable to the thought of an egg.

But, like Mol, Tuck won't swallow that.

“An ocean girl from an island can't stomach fish and eggs?”

Tears prickle Mara's eyes. “I don't
know
what it is.” She takes back the torch, scrubs her eyes with her sleeve. “Let me see the rest of this.”

Beyond the great wave is a carving of a child. The hair suggests it's a girl. Mara peers closer and traces the faint outline of a halo around the child's head.

“It's your magic machine.” There's a crackle of excitement in Tuck's voice as he points. “See?”

Mara stares at the cave wall, unnerved. The child is cradling a globe. Ah, but it's not
her
globe. Mara touches the intricate patterns carved into the child's globe and knows what it is.

“It's the Earth.”

“The Earth?” Tuck's eyes glitter. The torch flame catches the salt crystals that seem to be ingrained forever in his hair, on his eyelashes, even in the down of his face. “It really is round like Grumpa said.”

Mara nods. She runs across the cave to dig out her backpack from the heap of mats that are her bed. She has had an idea. “Tuck, listen …”

She hesitates. What would happen if they bumped into Fox? But would they? It's hard enough to find him when she wants to. She has been trying endlessly to find him in the Weave to explain about her odd exit from the World Wind. But she can no longer gauge, so deep in the mountain in this season of endless night, whether long days or even weeks have passed since then. It's long enough for her nails to have grown again though she keeps chewing them down to the quick. Surely they are unlikely to bump into Fox if she avoids the bridge.

Anyway, Tuck is just a friend, isn't he?

“I'll show you the Earth,” she decides.

Tuck looks blank, of course, and she tries to explain. “It's a place I can go with the cyberwizz, a site that shows the Earth the way it used to be. People took pictures of it from the moon over a hundred years ago.”

Now Tuck looks at her as if she's crazy. Mara laughs.

“That's what I thought but it's true. People once went to the moon.”

“They had wings?” Now he's laughing with her.

Mara pulls the cyberwizz from her bag and begins to power it up.

“Oh no.”

The globe should charge up right away, at a touch, but it takes a long, dead moment to work up a pitiful glow. Mara's heart sinks. The power is running out. The solar
rods inside the globe need a blast of sun, but she is deep inside a mountain and the outside world is in the thick of the longest night of the Far North, a night that spans the whole winter, without a glimpse of sun. Blankets of icy fog make it hard to see the moon or the stars from the cave mouth. It's impossible to keep track of time. Finding midnight, that single point in the night, when the world around her is
all
night, has become a blind guess in the dark.

She owes Tuck something, she tells herself, because of his mother. And sometimes …

Mara clasps the globe in her hands, a snippet of temper heating her blood.

Sometimes a cyberfox is just not enough. It's his living, breathing self she wants, the one she can touch, and he's not here. The real Fox is as unreachable as the sun. He
could
have come with her. But he didn't. He chose to save his world instead. And she chose to save her friends instead of staying with him.

There's a disconnection between them that has nothing to do with missing midnight or fading solar rods.

Mara knows
his
reality, she can picture exactly where
he
is in his world; she knows the book rooms of the university tower, she's been there. But Fox has no idea, and she can't find the words to tell him, what it's like to be here, entombed in a freezing mountain at the bitter end of the Earth. Now they're no more than spirits in the ether and it's never enough.

Tuck's right here though. Mara can hear the fear in his breath as he sits beside her; the fear of a lone gypsea deep inside the Earth. The World Wind might, for a few moments at least, blow away that fear.

It'll only take a few minutes, only a tiny bit of power, to show Tuck …

And how long has it been since she had any
fun
?

Earth
!

Not deadly and dark like the inside of the mountain but a blue-green pearl hanging in black space among the stars. All alive and aglow. Tuck blinks away tears as he watches clouds swirl across the tattered shapes of Land. And the oceans, what oceans of blue
!

He could look at it forever but already Mara is digging him in the ribs. She warned him he could only have a glimpse
.

Tuck takes an extra moment to fix the image in his mind. He shouldn't be scared of the dark innards of Earth, not now that he's seen this
.

He crashes back into the dimness of the moon cave. The silver halo is taken from his eyes. He leans against the cave wall, dazed, and tucks the Earth-pearl into a keep-pocket of his mind, wondering, as he watches Mara's soft mouth break into a smile as she slips on the halo, what other wonders exist in her magic machine.

The glow of the halo illuminates a patch of the story-carving on the cave wall behind Mara's head. It's the arm of a bridge exploding under a furious fist of ocean. A shock of grief hits Tuck, just when he doesn't expect it, as he remembers the
Arkiel
smashing the bridgeways of Pomperoy. He hurls the memory to the outermost corner of his mind. He can't think about that—not least because Mara, the one who made it happen, is right here beside him, so close that he can breathe in the warm, musky scent of her hair. Instead, he takes a peek into his mind's keeppocket, where he has stashed the memory of the blue
green gem of the Earth.
This
Earth, the one that he cowers inside. Does it still hang so peacefully in space? Did all the drowning and destruction dim its glow? Those tattered shapes that were Land, full of cities like the one carved on the wall: are there any left? Or are they all sunk, like Ma and
The Grimby Gray
?

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.

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.