Zenith (25 page)
Authors: Julie Bertagna
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 on 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 keep-pocket, 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 bag. 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 wakening her . . .
‘Hands off, pirate,’ says a voice at his back.
Mara is wakened 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 OK. 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.
‘Just keep your stuff safe,’ he grunts.
And turns away. Mara stares at his back, stung. Why has he become so cold and strange? Maybe it’s only now
that they’re stuck here in this dark hole in the Earth that he has been hit by the full misery of his twin’s death and the loss of his parents. Mara remembers how she felt in the netherworld when the terrible loss of her family sank in. Now that Rowan has had time to think, is he blaming her?
Well, she blames herself. It was her idea to travel to the New World.
But if they hadn’t, a voice inside pipes up, what would they have done? Stayed on Wing and let the ocean swallow them up? Everyone thought the North was in meltdown, that any land would be sunk; there was no way to survive there.
Whether they were right or wrong about survival, time will tell.
Mara picks up the cyberwizz, opens the globe and puts the halo over her eyes. She can’t wait for Fox. She’ll do this alone. With the wand, she scribbles a series of hieroglyphs on the tiny screenpad inside the globe and . . .
. . . dives into the ruined boulevards of the Weave. She whizzes through the crumbling network until she finds the site she needs and tumbles into the World Wind, zipping through crackling blue ether into black space where the vast, glowing gem of the planet looms up. A glinting, winged craft flies towards her. Mara boards the wind-shuttle and begins to zoom towards an immense blueness of ocean.
A name glows beneath its surface.
The Pacific.
The names of lost lands and cities begin to flash at the faraway rim of the planet but the ocean is so large it covers this whole face of the Earth’s sphere. Mara keeps a high altitude so that the images and echoes of the horrible
history flags, planted all over the planet by old world windshuttlers, are weakened by distance.
There’s a wide scatter of islands like pebbles upon the serene ocean. Solomon, Phoenix, Starbuck, whole shoals of names flash and fade as she zips past. A green and brown terrain looms up beyond a firework flash for Hong Kong. She follows the wriggling line of the River Ganges, skirts the purple peaks of Himalayan mountains, India and Sumatra behind her, the highlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan ahead, the River Volga shimmering far in the distance and cluttered plains of low-lying cities as far as she can see.
One name, flashing in the distance, catches her eye and a memory flares of sitting by the fireside with her mother in her lost home on Wing. Mara stares at the faraway nameflash. Ararat. Why does she know that? Mara dredges through her memories and she swallows hard when she remembers. Ararat was the mountain in the story of Noah and the Ark, an ancient legend of a flood. So that is where those long-ago people saved themselves from a drowned world.
There
is
high land above the oceans, scattered across the Earth. How much is barren mountain rock? And how hot has the Earth grown? It’s hard to believe the rest of the world is warm while they are stuck in cold caves. But Fox has trawled Weavesite ruins and what he found there has made him sure, he said, that the sunless winter at the top of the world is at odds with the searing heat further South, where no one can live, not even in a sky city. One thing has given Mara heart: Fox’s certainty that once the long Arctic winter night is over and the sun returns, the mellow spring and summer of a warmed world awaits them.
If only he’s right.
If only they can survive until then.
For the first time in a while, as she scans the oceans and lost lands, Mara wonders about the other ships that escaped the sky city with the
Arkiel.
Did they survive and find land?
Mara stalls the wind-shuttle, lost amid her thoughts and the names that flash all around her. Where in the world is she? She could zip back into realworld and ask Rowan, who spent entire winters engrossed in old atlases and books, but she can’t face another of his rebuffs. No, she’ll do this herself. She can’t make up for the deaths that have already happened but she will do everything in her power to save the people she’s brought to the top of the world.
Mara wings a prayer of hope across the Earth to wherever the other ships might be and focuses on the task in hand. She casts her mind back to the tattered atlas that used to lie on Tain’s cottage table. If only she’d paid more attention when he’d tried to teach her about the world beyond the island, instead of twitching to be out playing in the wind with Rowan and Gail.
Wing was in the North Atlantic, a pinprick in the seas beyond the land mass of Europe. That she knows for sure. She closes her eyes to block out an insistent red SOS from Bangladesh, as the wind-shuttle flies over it, and tries to remember more. Europe leaned on the shoulder of Africa. That was the dead continent with the
HELP
flags she saw on her trip with Fox; she’s almost sure of that. Far West, across the Atlantic Ocean, was the huge mass of North America, trailing its southern lands on a string.
Mara takes a guess and zooms East, back across the Pacific Ocean until she sees a gigantic golden archway with a banner flashing
USA
in red, white and blue. It bridges the entire land mass that lies to the north-east. And, yes, there are the southern Americas attached to the North land mass by a thin string of land.
Peru, Ecuador and Colombia flash past. She zooms over the string of land – and jumps with fright as a crowd of orange ghosts rise like distress flares from a bay on a long island that is the shape of a wrenched arm. The name of the island, Cuba, flashes but there is no message flag or blog from the bay of the orange ghosts.
Unnnerved, she speeds on to the ridges of the Rocky Mountains where a roll of beautiful names echo the undulations of the land. California, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma. Dizzied by flashing towns and cities, she heads for the calm blue of the ocean that lies beyond the lowlands of Mississippi and Florida, now surely drowned.
The Atlantic! The name shimmers on the surface of the ocean and Mara’s excitement grows as she veers sharp North, following the eastern seaboard towards the part of the world that is home.
A rumble vibrates the wind-shuttle. Far below, two towers, as tall as any sky city, implode into dust.