Zenith (7 page)

I’ll learn how to spark a fire.

The sun breaks over the city wall. It finds a gap in the trunks of the sky towers and streams through the gloom of the netherworld. A tablet of light lands on the stone floor. Fox stares at it in wonder. In New Mungo, even the sun is a lumen light, a bland imitation of this astonishingly real thing.

He stands in the sunbeam and feels its power on his skin. It’s the shot of energy he needs to fire him into action and take his first, tentative steps in the battle he means to begin with the powers of the New World. Fox grabs his godgem and makes a cyberleap into the universe of the Noos.

The northern ocean is still deep in night, but a slab of sunrise gleams in the East. Someone speaks to Mara and she turns away from the sun, but it takes a moment for the glare to fade from her eyes before she can see the tall young woman who has joined her at the front of the ship. Molendinar’s face is half hidden by the fall of hair that almost touches the ground, but a blast of wind and the eastern light reveal a cut and swollen mouth.

Mara stares. ‘Mol, what happened?’

Molendinar shakes her head, angry tears in her eyes. ‘It’s madness down there. People fighting over food and water. Not just those savage little urchins of yours, Mara, it’s everyone. Everyone’s out of control.’

‘But there’s plenty, isn’t there?’ Mara is suddenly uncertain. She has been so caught up in her own turmoil that she hasn’t thought to check supplies. ‘And they’re not
my
urchins,’ she mutters. ‘They’re from
your
world. My people would never abandon little children to the sea—’

Mara stops, stricken with shame. No, it was the old ones her people abandoned to the sea because there wasn’t enough room on the boats.

‘There’s enough to eat and drink for now,’ agrees Molendinar, overlooking her mutters. ‘But we don’t know how long this journey will last. How long, Mara?’

Fox tried to estimate, but he couldn’t be sure. The old map of Greenland in Mara’s book shows an immense island. It’s impossible to know, if they reach it safely, how far along its vast coast they might go. Fox has programmed the ship to sail due North until they hit that coastline. Then, they will have to steer the ship themselves. Mara is counting on Rowan’s boat skills for that, though she hasn’t told him yet.

‘Days,’ says Mara nervously. ‘Maybe a week.’

‘Even if we do find land soon,’ Molendinar rushes on, ‘the first thing we must do is make shelter, build homes. We don’t know what kind of land or food we’ll find at the top of the world.’

‘We’ll fish,’ says Mara. She’s an island girl; she knows how to survive. ‘We’ll stay close to the sea and fish. And there’ll be bird eggs, seaweed. We won’t starve.’

Broomielaw, who has been listening in, nods, but she looks uncertain. ‘There are so many of us, lots of children, and we’re heading into winter.’

And winter in the Far North will be dark and deep, Mara knows; even darker and deeper than winter on her island home. Molendinar is right, they need to make supplies last.

‘A lot of people are sick and don’t want to eat, the others eat and fight all day long because there’s nothing else to do. The sick will grow weak and the greedy will be slugs, none of them any use. We need everyone strong and good for work if we’re going to survive.’ Molendinar throws a long rope of hair over a shoulder and glares at a
group of urchins who barge past, stuffing their mouths with food. ‘It’ll take a summer at least to grow my crop.’

‘Crop?’

Mara stares at Molendinar’s hair, wondering what she means. But Molendinar unfastens a deep pocket in her clothing and shows Mara and Broomielaw the seeds she grabbed before they fled the city.

Broomielaw gives a sigh. ‘All I managed to grab was Clayslaps. I left all my inventions behind.’

‘Well, you’d rather have him, wouldn’t you?’ says Molendinar, unusually sharp.

‘Mol, you’re a wonder,’ says Mara. Her mood lifts. Somehow, the tiny seed crop has given her hope.

‘It’s not just me,’ Molendinar protests. ‘We can’t seem to stop being Treenesters. Ibrox came with his firebox and pockets filled with fire-making stones.’

The Treenesters have as many waterproof pockets as anyone could ever need in their odd but practical clothing made from a knot-weave of the plastic bags they dredged up out of the litter of the netherworld sea.

‘Ibrox is making fires?’ Mara imagines the ship going up in flames.

‘No.’ A smile flickers across Molendinar’s bruised mouth. ‘But he’ll start one as soon as he sets foot on land. And I’ll start planting my seeds. Possil and Pollock will hunt and Gorbals will make a story of our lives. Just as we always did.’

They’re holding on to being Treenesters, Mara understands, to keep a grip of who they are in the world.

Not poor Gorbals though. He’s too seasick to be a poet right now.

Mara follows Broomielaw and Molendinar down below deck. The stench in the hold is terrible, getting
worse by the hour. Several hundred sick and dirty people, crammed together with no fresh air and few toilets, have made a midden of the place. They’ve thrown litter everywhere, gorging on whatever they find.

‘Speak to them,’ says Molendinar.

‘Why me?’ Mara looks around. Tension frets the stale air. Would they listen? So many of the refugees are adults, much older than she is. Shouldn’t one of them take charge?

‘You’re the one who saved them,’ urges Broomielaw. ‘If it wasn’t for you they’d still be trapped in that horrific boat camp. We’d be left to drown in the ruins. All of us were shut out of the world without a chance. You brought us here so you should lead us. Speak up, Mara, don’t be scared.’

Mara steps forward. She doesn’t know these people; she
is
scared. Her voice barely makes a dent in the noise. She swallows, tries again. ‘Listen, everyone. We need to be careful with the food. We need to share it and make it last. We don’t know how long we’ll be on this ship. We should be fishing. There’s no shortage of fish out there.’

As her voice grows stronger, heads turn and people quieten.

‘There must be netting or rope – something that we can use to fish.’ Mara looks over at Possil and Pollock, the hunters, thinking on her feet. ‘We need to organize.’

A tall woman stands up. ‘You’re this Mara girl, eh?’

Steely eyes in a pinched face appraise her in a way that makes Mara’s cheeks burn. The woman’s face and voice take her back to the day she entered the horror of the boat camp outside the sky city’s walls. It’s the same hostile woman, she’s sure, who tried to turn away their boat.

‘You’re the one who’s trailing us all across the ocean?’
The woman sets her hands on her hips. ‘But you don’t know where to, or so I’ve heard.’

The woman makes Mara feel small and childish, but a little knife-edge of anger is sharpening inside.

‘We’re headed for the top of the world.’ Mara raises her chin and meets the woman’s eyes with her best don’t-mess-with-me stare. ‘To
Kalaallit Nunaat
, the land of the people.’

‘Never heard of it.’ The woman looks around her. ‘Anyone else ever heard of such a place?’

‘Its other name is Greenland,’ Mara persists, ‘though it’s been frozen for thousands of years. If the ice cap has melted, it might really be a green land now – somewhere we can maybe make a home.’

‘Maybe, eh?’ The woman raises an eyebrow and addresses the others. ‘That’s a whole lot of ifs and maybes.’

Mara rummages in her backpack and finds the book on Greenland. She holds it up in a shaking hand and tries to tell people more, but the tall woman is talking over her, contemptuously blocking out her voice.

‘So we have a slip of a girl in charge of this ship who has no real idea of what she’s doing.’

Molendinar steps in and challenges. ‘Do you know any better? It was Mara who rescued you – did you want to stay and die in that boat camp outside the city walls?’

‘Maybe she did.’ The woman glances around for support. ‘The point is we need adults in charge now.’

There’s a muttering among the refugees. Whether they agree or not, Mara can’t tell.

And suddenly Mara finds she doesn’t care. She is so tired. She never wanted to be in charge of a ship full of refugees.
Let
an adult take charge.

But all around her friends have risen to their feet in
outrage. An elderly woman steps forward and touches Mara’s arm. There’s something in her shrewd eyes that Mara instantly warms towards. She turns to Mara’s challenger.

‘Now, Ruby.’

There’s a grace and authority about this woman that makes Ruby shrug, ungraciously, and sit down.

‘Ruby’s very strong-headed,’ says the older woman. ‘But I see you are too.’

‘That one is
wrong
-headed,’ mutters Ibrox. He leans over and squeezes Mara’s arm.

The old woman doesn’t argue. Instead, she introduces herself as Merien. ‘You’re too tired right now to lead your own shadow,’ she tells Mara. ‘You need to sleep.’

Mara yawns. She should be in the control cabin, checking the ship’s progress. There’s a whole day to live through until she can try to connect with Fox tonight. She lies down, puts her head in her arms and escapes into uneasy sleep.

She wakens with a sharp pain in her shoulder. She has slammed hard against a pile of crates.

The ship gives a great lurch backward. Mara is thrown across the hold, feels bone crunching on bone, head cracking against head. The refugees are tossed about like sticks in a storm.

The lights flicker into darkness. There’s a vacuum of shock and pain.

‘My baby! Where’s my baby?’

Mara hears Broomielaw among the aftershock of screams. She feels about in the dark for little Clayslaps. She finds arms, legs, feet, handfuls of hair, but no baby. The ship lurches again. Mara is frantic to find the baby but she must get to the ship’s control cabin, at once. She
struggles through flailing arms and legs, feels herself step on something soft, hears a child’s wail and steps back, reaching down to search the darkness. Her hands are crushed by a stampede of feet.

The child is gone, rolled out of reach.

She feels sick. Was that little Clay?

Shaking, she makes for the stairs. Her legs throb with bruises. Her feet and fingers are crushed. She wipes the taste of blood from her lips, keeps going, feels her way up the stairs, clinging to each rung to stop the lurching ship flinging her back down.

Mara stumbles out of the dark hold into the shock of daylight. A raw sunrise streaks the eastern sky.

‘What’s happening? What have we hit?’

There’s no answer. The impact has scattered people all over the deck. The ship is still shuddering so violently that Mara gets down on her hands and knees and crawls to the edge of the deck. She pulls herself to her feet and stares.

There is no ocean.

Just a vast chaos of flotsam, all around the ship.

Her mind scrambles to catch up with her eyes. She can’t make sense of what she sees. From her vantage point she has a broad view and Mara seems to see glinting metal bridges, shimmering channels of sea that run through the flotsam like winding rivers. But it’s not flotsam at all, not junk. It’s an immense clutter of barges and boats.

The ship must have crashed into a seaport.

The urgent clangour of bells echoes across the boats, amid a rising siren wail – no, the wail is human. It’s the sound of terror. A mass of voices, raised in alarm.

What land is this?

Mara can’t think.

There’s a distant glint of ocean to the North of the
port. Mara frowns as she looks East and sees a glinting line of it there, and reflecting far to the West too.

The sea is all around. And in between the boats.

Now she understands.

This city is not made of buildings, but boats.

This is not land. The ship has smashed into a floating city. And horribly, the ship’s engines are still driving forward, smashing the city’s bridges and boats.

Now Mara sees the people. They race across the bridges, a great tide of them, running towards the ship to help another, smaller rush of people in nearby barges and boats who are trying to get away. The ship rips through another bridge. Stranded people are screaming, clinging to wreckage. Those with no other option jump into the violent sea.

Behind the ship, an old barge groans; a deathly sound that almost drowns out the screams of the people on its deck. It keels sideways, sinking fast.

Mara grips the ship’s rail as the barge goes down. Eyes tight shut, she wills it to be over. The awful sound of it shudders through her bones. With a great roar, the ocean sucks the barge down to its depths.

That was what they hit when she was down in the hold.

A barge full of people.

The ship rocks back and forth. Mara pushes through people, trips over them, stumbles into the ship’s control cabin.

This was not supposed to happen. A floating city was not in the navigation plans.