Firespark (18 page)

Mara shuts her eyes as the firebomb explodes. When she opens them, her friends have been thrown to the ground but a large rock seems to have sheltered them from the worst of the blast. One of them—in the confusion she's not sure who—staggers up and begins racing to the
sea, flames streaming from his arm. A spark from the firebomb has caught the raggedy plastic clothing that hangs in tatters from the sealskin coat. The figure trips over a rock and crashes into the sea.

Gorbals
.

He flails about in the water. The others try to reach him but a hail of gunfire from the shore halts them in their tracks. Gorbals is struggling against the waves but the others can't make it through a line of gunfire, and there's nothing Mara can do. She is about to look away, unable to watch, when her eye is caught by a blue wisp, racing toward Gorbals. The wind whips the tail of the blue wisp high into the air. Mara screws up her eyes. What in the world is
that
?

The telescope
.

Does she still have it? Mara rips open her sodden backpack, rummages, and it's there. She grabs a thick handful of her hair and scrubs the lens clean, then leans as far as she can over the rocky ledge and focuses the telescope with shaking hands.

The blue wisp is a boy or a man in a garment that's wound around his head and body and flutters into a long, wind-frittered tail. He runs into the sea, unwinding his garment, and flings its long tail into the waves. Gorbals disappears under a wave, but when he resurfaces the blue tail is thrown once again. He grabs it and the wisp, now soaked to a deep blue, hauls him out of the sea.

They disappear in the smoke of the firebombs. When the wind shifts the smoke there's no sign of them, only the shell of an overturned boat.

Mara looks all across the shore to the spot where she last saw the others. They're gone too.

She scans the whole of the eastern shore, the rocks and the foot of the mountain.
Where are they
? Shoving the telescope in the pocket of her sealskin coat, she hurries down the mountain steps, toward the battle that rages in the bay.

Tuck lifts up the edge of the upturned gondola and peeps out.

The gondola is the only thing protecting him and the half-drowned ragbag he's just rescued. Not that a wooden gondola will be any good if it takes a direct hit from a firebomb. Behind those car doors in the mountain, that's the place to be.

But Tuck can't make his legs move toward the mountain even though he knows that he'll be safe there. Pomperoy will loot and steal every boat it can, and burn and sink every one it can't. What a true gypsea will never do is set foot on Land.

But the Landers don't know that.

Up close and underfoot, Land has turned out to be such an overwhelming thing that Tuck only dares look at it in glimpses from under cover of the boat. When he and the gondola crashed onto the shore, he tried to get up and staggered so much he fell over, his head swimming as if he'd been glugging seagrape beer all night.

Only the gangly man-boy rushing into the sea, his arm afire, brought Tuck back to his senses. He didn't mean to
rescue anyone, it's not his kind of thing at all, but someone screaming and drowning right in front of him made him think of Ma in her last moments on
The Grimby Gray
. Almost without thinking, Tuck found himself in the ocean, yanking the drowning ragbag back onto shore and under the shelter of the upturned gondola.

All around him Land rises up in mountainous waves that seem to surge and swell, threatening to break like gigantic sea rollers upon his head. Tuck knows the Land is not moving and neither is he, for the first time ever in his life. What if his gypsea heart is so wired to the beat of the ocean he's not meant to be still? What if the sea-swell in his head never settles and calms? What if he's stuck forever here on Earth but never finds his Land legs?

Ocean is a moving, live thing, but Earth's so still and solid it doesn't seem right. Maybe it's dead. What if that's why the Land sunk down into the sea—because it died? Tuck picks up a pebble and feels the deathly cold of the stone, with no beat of life in it at all.

“Th-thank you.”

The scraggy one sprawled on the ground beside him grabs Tuck's hand and, though his grasp is almost as cold as the stone, Tuck is grateful for the touch of another moving, live thing. He finds a strand of wet seaweed and wraps it around the boy's burned hand.

“My name's Gorbals.” The ragbag winces.

“I'm Tuck,” says Tuck.

A firebomb explodes nearby and a hard rain of stones falls upon the gondola.

“Is that a place?”

“Is what a place?”

“Tuck.”

Tuck narrows his eyes.

“Oh, never mind.” Warily, Gorbals lifts the boat and points to the mountain with his good hand. “See, there's a cave. I think that's where my people are. If we make the boat our shell and run—”

Tuck sees the crack of darkness at the foot of the mountain.

His heart hammers.

“Safer in there than out here,” says Gorbals. He rises to a half-crouch, balancing the boat over his head as if he's a human snail. His burned arm makes him wince again.

“Give a hand,” he urges.

Tuck stands up on shaking legs. He should have ignored that impulse on the
Waverley
, when he felt the first roots of Earthiness stirring inside. Now look what's happened to him.

Instead of pirate, he's turned Lander.

The world reels and spins but he grips the gondola hard over his head and runs with the raggedy stranger across the rubbish-strewn shore like a fast, four-legged snail, toward the terrifying crack of darkness that will take him to a place he's never imagined in his wildest gypsea dreams.

The inside of Earth.

Mara reaches ground at last and is hit by a pelt of hot stones as a firebomb explodes on the shore. All she can do is crouch and put her arms over her head, while the stones rain on her back. She stands up, shaken and bruised. Every large rock has been commandeered by the mountain people to launch their counterattack, so there is no shelter. She runs away from the battle toward the far end of the bay. The rockways down the mountain were so winding she's lost her bearings. The overturned boat, her one landmark on the shore, has vanished, so she can only guess at the spot where she last saw the others.

The sun is low, without the energy to rise any higher. It's hard to tell what time it is. So much has happened it seems like an endless day. The smoke from the firebombs has cast its own gloom but Mara is sure daylight is beginning to fade. She must find the others before night falls. There's a lull in the firebombs and Mara pauses, shivering in the icy wind. Winter comes early in the Far North. Her own island, Wing, only had a few hours of daylight in deep winter. Here, at the top of the world, the sun disappears
below the horizon until spring. All too soon, they will plunge into a season of endless night.

Mara looks up at all the cave doors, at the sheer steps and rockways of the precarious metropolis the people have made of the mountain.
They've found a way to survive. But will we
?

It's not the homeland she hoped for, this harsh, barren place.

The war in the bay is ferocious again.
We'll be lucky
, thinks Mara,
to survive to the end of the day
.

Something trips her up and sends her sprawling onto the pebble shore. Mara curses and rubs her raw knee, then sees it's not a rock or driftwood but a child crouched on the ground.

“Wing!”

He's alive, if not safe. Wing smiles but squirms away from her frantic hug, more interested in the great heap of shiny pebbles he is piling up. A rabble of urchins comes running out of a fold in the mountain. Mara sees Hoy and opens her arms to hug him too, but like Wing he only throws a quick smile at her and rushes to add his armful of pebbles onto the growing pile.

There's a tug on her arm. It's Scarwell, the urchin girl who once ripped Mara's face in a fight. They gauge each other warily, then Scarwell breaks into a grin as she points to the lifesize apeman model, lying on the shore.

Mara has to laugh. Somehow, Scarwell has stolen back her beloved apeman from the wreckers.

Another explosion, followed by screams, reminds Mara that they are an easy target here in the open. Used to the siren squads of sea police in the drowned city, the urchins seem unperturbed by the noise of the battle in the bay.

Mara grabs little Hoy and points toward the mountain. “We need to hide. Come with me, come on.”

“Oy,” grunts Hoy, wriggling free. He puts his handful of colored pebbles on the heap.

“Hoy, it's dangerous—” Mara blinks as the sun flashes on the pile of pebbles. Bloodred, sea green, and sunset amber, the stones are gemlike, polished by ice and sea and time.

Yet another explosion, far too close, rains a painful hail of stones on their heads.

“Quick! Follow me.”

She grabs Hoy again and stops. The whole world seems to stop as Mara sees a face in the stones.

Wing is picking gems from the heap they've made, gently placing them upon the almost-buried face.

Mara grabs hold of Wing. “What are you doing?”

He looks up at her and smiles.

Mara sinks to her knees and forces herself to claw the gems and pebbles off the ashen face. Then reels back in shock when she sees who it is, sees the garish splash of blood on the stones.

Merien.

Mara lets out a wail. She can't speak. The urchins could not have done this, they couldn't. These children are wild but surely they couldn't
kill
…

But
she
killed a man, didn't she?

Wing crouches down beside her. He points a finger at the face and imitates the sound of a gunshot, then points back at the battle.

Of
course
. It wasn't the urchins. Abandoned here on the open shore, still bound by the wreckers' ropes, Merien was trapped in the blast of the battle.

Mara feels shamed. Merien was the urchins' friend.
How could she think they would harm her? But it's hard to keep trust in anyone or anything anymore. The world has become so strange, everything so precarious, shifting, and unreal that it's hard to gauge what anyone will do, including herself.

When the gun was at her head, her only thought was to save herself and her cyberwizz. In that instant and in the fear rush that followed, she never gave a thought to her friends.

Wing and Hoy begin to replace the stones that Mara has clawed off Merien's face, pebble by pebble, gem by gem, chanting under their breath. Mara kneels down beside them and listens, wondering what it is these wordless children are saying. The rest of the urchins join in, all chanting together.

They're counting.

Death, smoke, and fire fill the bay. The wind howls around them, full of ice. Still, the urchins keep counting,
one, two, three, four, five
, over and over, just as Merien taught them to on the ship. Except now they are burying her gently beneath the Earth's beautiful stones.