Firespark (30 page)

Mol holds out the Tupperware box for the others to see. It's full of seeds. The cold and the Tupperware seal have preserved them. Most still look good enough to plant.

Mara crouches beside Mol, ignoring her aching back.
She hugs her friend tight. It's not just the lost cuttings or this unexpected gift Mol is crying for. All the pent up grief inside for her lost life and for the loss of Candleriggs and Broomielaw and Clay and Partick has come pouring out over the box of seeds.

“They must have been left here for you.” Ibrox puts a fire-grizzled hand on Mol's head then pulls her to her feet. She seals the lid of the seedbox and tucks it securely inside her seal-skin coat.

The skull light catches on words that have been gouged into the cave wall, right above the nook where Mol found the box. Mara peers at the message left in the stone:

THIS IS NOT HERE

But the seedbox is.

“A sign set in stone,” Mol exclaims. “What does it say?”

Mara reads it out and they puzzle over the odd words.

“Was it written by the people who died here?” Mara wonders out loud. “Or by those who made it through?”

A jittery silence falls once again and Mara wishes she hadn't voiced her thought.

Pollock goes first. A hundred heartbeats pass before they hear him yell.

“Okay?” Possil shouts into the ice tunnel.

“Ooooo,” Pollock's voice echoes back.

Possil sits back on his heels. “He's through. Who's next? Hey, one at a time. No shoving, you lot!” he barks at the urchins. “Scarwell, you can't take
him
!”

But Scarwell is already shoving her apeman into the hole in the ice. Where she goes, he goes too.

The urchins scrabble through the tunnel after her,
rattling with all the old-world junk they have stuffed into the pockets of their clothes. One by one the others crawl through, with the caves' hoard of pots and utensils strapped to their backs. Tuck counts them as they go.
Twelve Treenesters, seven urchins
. Now only Mara, Rowan, and Tuck himself are left.

He shifts anxiously from foot to foot.

“Mara, you go now.” Rowan gives her a quick hug. “Take it easy. You'll be fine.”

She crawls into the tight space. The frozen air nips her face. Her back aches with the baby's weight. The tunnel presses in on all sides and she can only move slowly, her hands and knees slipping on the ice. Behind her, the light from the skull lanterns grows dim. She comes to a dark bend in the tunnel. Can't seem to get around it. Can't move forward or back. Can't see a thing. She panics.

“I'm stuck!”

Rowan calls to her and though she can't hear what he says the sound of his voice calms her. She begins to slide her body around the curve of the bend, to push herself forward limb by limb. Before she knows it, Gorbals and Pollock are pulling her out at the other end.

Gasping and sweating, she leans against cold rock.

Starlight stings her eyes. The moon is in full sail above dark peaks. Mara stares at the enormous sky. They are at the other side of the mountain. They have made it through!

“All right?” Pollock is gripping her arm. “But don't move. We're on a little shelf. Five steps from here the Earth falls away. I threw down a stone and it took ten fast heartbeats to land. If those ratkins don't stop squabbling, they're going to fall over the edge.”

Down beyond the ledge is a darkness so dense it might
be made of rock. Mara speaks sharply to the urchins to make them sit still. Rowan emerges from the ice and now there's only Tuck to come.

As they wait, the niggling thought that sleep nudged out of Mara's mind pops up again—the thought that Tuck must have been rummaging in her bag and looking at all her things. How else had he known she had a box with a broken mirror inside?

He can't go into the tunnel. He just can't.

The skull light glints on whorls of water stunned into ice. It looks like a frozen wave. Waves don't stay still, every gypsea knows that; they come crashing down. Every time Tuck tries to push his head into the tunnel fear sends him ricocheting back into the cave like the band that pinged off Mol's box of seeds. There is not a sniff of salt or sea in the air.

He can't go through. He's too much of a gypsea to live deep in the Earth, so far from the sea. But not much of a pirate or he'd be able to kill his fear. Yet he
must
force himself through the tunnel or he'll be left behind on his own.

To stir up his courage, Tuck rips his cutlass from its scabbard and clangs it once, twice, three hard times on the ice then lets out his best pirate yell.

The frozen waterfall answers with a deep, rumbling growl.

“Where's he got to?” Rowan is down on his hands and knees at the tunnel. A clang echoes through the ice. “Tuck, what's up? Come on!”

“Listen,” cries Mol. “What's he saying?”

Tuck is yelling something from the other end, but they can't hear what.

The Earth gives a roar so fierce Tuck's knees give way.

THIS IS NOT HERE
, say the words above the nook of rock in front of him. It's the last thing he sees before the skull lantern is smashed by the fist of the Earth.

“He's scared,” Mol cries, “You've seen how he is. The tunnels and caves terrify him, just like the ocean terrified us because we were Treenesters, used to our netherworld. It's the other way around for him. He must have taken fright. We need to go back and get him.”

From deep inside the mountain comes a rumble. In moments it has grown into a ferocious roar.

“
Urth
!” Pollock steals Tuck's favorite curse. “Everybody move! Keep close to the rock wall but get away from here!”

“What's happening?
Tuck
!”

Possil grabs Mol and forces her to follow the others around a sharp bend. Mara is crushed between Rowan and the mountain as rock and ice hurtle down onto the shelf of rock they all stood on just moments before. Beyond the roar of the landslide, they hear the rocks and ice falling into the black abyss. They land so very far below they sound as harmless as a handful of pebbles chucked onto a shore.

It feels like an age until the Earth roar ends. Once the last broken echoes die in the abyss, Ibrox begins calling out the names of the Treenesters, Mara and Rowan, and the urchins.

“Are we all here? Is it only Tuck that's missing?”

Mol erupts.

“
Only
Tuck?”

“I didn't mean—Mol, I just meant that
we're
all here.”

“We're
not
all here.
He
isn't.” Mol pushes past Ibrox and runs back around the bend.

Mara follows her, ignoring the others' warning shouts.

Around the bend, she stops dead. The ice tunnel and the frozen waterfall are gone. Starlight pours down upon a fallen slice of mountain, a great clutter of rock.

Mol is on her knees at the place the tunnel mouth should be.
Tuck
, she sobs, again and again. Echoes of his name spill into the abyss.

With axes and bare hands, they all try to shift the huge rockfall. They pull away what rubble they can until there's another rumble and the land begins to slide once more.

Ibrox calls an urgent halt. “We're going to bring it all down on our heads.”

They stand in stricken silence and wait for the Earth to settle. Then Ibrox kneels down beside the rockfall and calls Tuck's name one last time.

There's no answer, only a trickle of rock.

“He rescued me from the sea.” Gorbals's voice shakes. “I should rescue him from the Earth.”

Mol turns to the mountain and batters her fist on it with a wail.

Mara feels numb. She knew Tuck was scared but was sure his curiosity, like hers, would overcome his fear. She can't believe that the very thing he dreaded has come true. She should have spoken to him before she went into the tunnel, but she was keeping her distance. What happened between them last night replays in her head. She begins to tremble as she feels the ghost of Tuck's cold kiss on her lips.

The baby kicks and turns inside her, oblivious to the world outside.

“Look,” says Rowan.

His eyes glitter with starlight or tears. Mara turns to see. Far away, a thin red fire burns in the black night.

“What is it?” Mara whispers. She imagines a phantom fleet of fiery pirates, all coming for Tuck.

“The sun,” says Rowan. He sounds choked. “Tuck just missed the sun.”

The sun never rises above the mountains but its fire kindles in a twilight sky. The wind is flint-sharp after the vaporous fug of the moon cave. Starlight shocks eyes used to the darkness of the mountain caves. More shocking still is what the stars reveal.

The path they edge along is a wrinkle on the rim of a vast abyss. Far below, what remains of a glacier glimmers with a cold blue light. Mara can't begin to imagine the eons of ice that gouged out such a deep, wide gorge.

When they stop to rest, she wonders how much longer she can go on. The pain in her back is grinding but every time she wants to cry or complain, she remembers poor Tuck. She can hardly bear to think of him crushed under so much rock. She must fix her mind on something else. Is there anything to give her hope? Mara scans the sky for the Star of the North. At first, she can't find it. Then she sees her sky markers: Queen Cass's zigzag crown and the Long-Handled Ladle. And there it is. The jewel that is dropping off Queen Cass's crown into the Ladle. The North Star, the sailor's steering star, the wanderer's lodestar.

Her anchor in the world. And for the first time she sees that the star is not pointing north. Now it's right overhead.

We're here at last
.

THIS IS NOT HERE
, say the words that are gouged into the rock above his head.

Tuck wondered what they meant when Mara read them out. Now he knows.

The Earth has roared and smashed its fist. Now Tuck is trapped in that clenched fist. He thinks of the box of seeds that Mol found here in this very nook of the cave. Maybe he, like the seeds, can survive until they dig him out. Surely they will.

Tuck makes his windwrap into a tent and huddles inside, trying to ease a trapped foot from the rubble.

This is not here
, he decides,
and neither am I
.

He reaches into a pocket of his windwrap and feels the cold curve of the one thing that might have the power to keep him safe. He hugs it close, hoping any trickle of power that remains will save him from this savage Earth.

The moon is like a breath-misted mirror among the clouds that cling to the western peaks.

Mara slips a freezing hand into her backpack and finds the little wooden box. She pulls it out and opens the lid that Tuck tried to mend with his grumpa's triangle of mirrored glass. Stars glitter in the cracked mirror until her breath clouds it. Mara closes the lid, wishing she could capture a boxful of starfire to keep herself warm.