Zenith (10 page)

‘Of course I didn’t.’ Ruby is patronizingly calm. ‘The wind took it. But it would never have happened if you hadn’t tried to snatch. Anyway, it’s time an adult took charge.’

With that, Ruby marches into the control cabin of the ship. Mara stares after her, dizzy with rage. The crowd melts away, avoiding her eyes. Only her Treenester friends remain. Even Rowan has turned away with a frown.

A Tale of Two Cities
lies broken-backed on the deck. Mara picks it up and smoothes the book’s damp and crumpled pages with trembling hands. Anger seeps away, leaving her shaken and weak.

I’ve had enough.

Broomielaw puts a hand on her shoulder. Mara lets out a shuddering breath. She will go below deck, curl up and escape into
A Tale of Two Cities
until it’s time to go cyberwizzing. Then she’ll zoom into the Weave and wait for Fox to meet her at midnight on the broken bridge.

He’ll be there tonight, she tells herself. He must be. He promised.

Ruby and the other adults can see to everything else.

Was the book the only proof of land you ever had?

Rowan’s question hangs in the stale air and even with her eyes shut it won’t go away.

‘It’s not safe down here, Mara.’

Mara knows it’s not. Tight shut eyes can’t block out what is going on in the hold of the ship. It has turned into a brawling, violent, hellish place. She didn’t dare take out her cyberwizz in case someone snatched it. She has kept it in her backpack, tucked under her head.

‘You’re coming up on deck with me. Now,’ says Rowan.

Mara turns on him.

‘You’re the one who always goes on and on about books. Every winter on the island, when we were stuck inside, you
lived
books and stories.’

‘I never said it was all real. I never believed everything I read.’ Rowan shoots a nervous glance over his shoulder. A man is yelling abuse at a group of urchins. ‘Never mind that now. Stop sulking and come with me. That guy has a bad look in his eye.’

Mara gets to her feet.

‘Don’t look around, just get to the stairs,’ Rowan warns her as screaming erupts.

‘Rowan, what’s happening?’ But he grabs her by the arm and yanks her up the stairs before she can see.

‘The urchins—’

‘Those kids can look after themselves. The other lot,’ says Rowan, meaning the refugees from the boat camp, ‘have been trapped in hell for too long.’ He draws a big breath of air as they burst out on to the deck. ‘Now they’re trapped here and they’re going crazy. The barrels of beer don’t help.’

Mara staggers over to the edge of the deck and stares at the wilderness of ocean, willing land to appear before the tension in the ship’s hold explodes.

‘Look.’

She spins around, wondering what bedlam is erupting now.

‘No,
look
.’

Rowan takes her chin in his hand as if she’s a child and tilts her face to the evening sky.

Pearls are scattered over the clouds. They catch the sunlight as they move across the sky in unfolding patterns of such grace and power that the pattern itself seems to be a living thing.

The September geese.

The flight of the snow geese always marked the turn of the season. The geese would fill the skies above Wing, following an invisible corridor in the sky. Each September, time out of mind, the corridor led them from the lands in the Far North to a warm winter home in the South and back again in the spring.

‘If they’re still flying from the North, then – then—’

‘Then there must be land in the North.’

Rowan’s taut, thin face creases into a sheepish smile.

‘And the South. Because they’re flying south. There’s still land in the world, then. The geese know there is.’

‘Yeah.’ Rowan’s blue eyes meet hers. ‘Sorry.’

‘In the netherworld,’ Mara tells him, ‘I learned to read what was left of the world, anything I could find. The sky, birds, trees, books. I learned to read every echo from New Mungo, every scrap of the old world. That’s how I survived. That’s what we have to do now – read whatever comes our way.’ She grins at Rowan. ‘And you’re the best reader I know.’

The snow geese have given her necessary hope, but there’s a snag in that hope that she cannot ignore. Once the North Wind coughs the geese out of their summer home and those pearly white flocks fill the skies, that’s when winter begins to finger the days.

Her book on Greenland said that winter at the very top of the world is one long, dark season of night.

Time is against them. That’s the message the September geese are writing on the sky.

The sky crackles.

A curtain opens in the darkness and a great chasm gapes in the night. The chasm widens, seems to fill with blood. The bloodlight drains and the sky is shot with lilac and indigo. Now golden pillars tumble, a rainbow wall rises, falls. A whole theatre of colour and swirling shapes erupts, crackling and whistling with static.

‘There’s a land in the sky!’ Gorbals points. ‘I can see towers, the great arch of a bridge, pillars and the noise – what’s the noise? Guns! We’re under attack.’

‘No, no,’ laughs Mara, then bites her lip, seeing the panic on the faces around her.

‘The – the sea—’ stutters Ibrox, as the waves reflect the cascade of green and pink now streaking the sky.

Even the urchins are hushed, hanging over the ship’s rail, entranced by the spectacle in the sky and its weird reflections in the sea.

It’s the Northern Lights, Mara explains. The memory of the last time she saw them is so vivid it prickles her scalp. She was standing on the doorstep of the farm cottage with Dad and her little brother Corey. The skies over
Wing were crowded with peaceful ghostlights that suddenly whirled into demon green.
Dancing dragons!
cried Corey,
slithery snakes!
Dad put Corey on his shoulders, telling him all about the lights.
Roaring Boris
, Corey called it because he couldn’t say the real name. Mara thinks hard. The
aurora borealis
, wasn’t that what Dad said? She was too busy staring at the sky, dreaming, to listen properly. There was so much that Granny Mary and Tain and her parents told her about the world, but half the time she wasn’t listening. It didn’t seem important, then.

Now, she could kick herself. With so much lost under the ocean, knowledge is the most precious thing in the world.

‘It’s – um, it’s just something that happens in the northern sky,’ she falters. ‘It’s a good sign, it means we’re close to the North.’

And she remembers something else; the old Norse name for the lights.

Skauf.

Fox fire.

The lights were said to look like the brush of fiery fox tails in the sky. Mara gazes up at the fox fire with her heart in her mouth.

‘Look, Clayslaps.’ Broomielaw holds her baby up to see. He wriggles with excitement, his fingers opening and closing like sea anemones, trying to catch a tail of light.

Then he gives a wail. As suddenly as they appeared, the night sky closes its curtain and the lights are gone.

Mara sits down on deck. She doesn’t know how close to midnight it is and she doesn’t care. The fox fire in the sky has lit a touchpaper inside her. She needs to see
her
Fox. She pulls out the cyberwizz globe, halo and wand, powers it up and falls, fast as the flash of a skauf . . .

. . . into the heart of the Weave. The ether crick-crackles as she whizzes down the boulevards until she finds the broken bridge.

Fox!

Her cry rips through the static like a jag of lightning.

A cyber-fox slinks along the bridge towards her. He’s here. The Weave-lights glitter in the fox’s eyes. They shimmer in the smooth coat and the brush of its tail.

Can’t you be yourself? she murmurs. It’s the real, human Fox she needs, though she knows she can’t have that, not here in cyberspace. With Fox, Mara has always been a cyber-mirror of her real self.

The tremble in her voice sends a ripple through the ether. The fox blinks. Vanishes. Mara could bite out her tongue for giving him such a cold greeting. She’s been so worried he might never make it here at all. Her heart thuds as she stands alone on the empty arm of the broken bridge.

Here. Best I can do.

His voice. Husky, edgy, skin-prickling. She spins around and he’s there – an electronic version of Fox stands within arm’s reach. His tawny hair shimmers in the ether light, just as messy with static as his real tousle-head, and the eyes that lock with hers are so unnervingly his own they send a hot lightning-bolt down her spine. Mara steps forward to kiss him, reaches out to touch his face–

NO!

Sparks fly. Electrons sizzle. Cyber-cinders fall fizzling at their feet. There’s a scorch mark where she touched his cheek. And a rip in the ether between them.

We can talk, but not touch, says Fox.

Oh. Right, I forgot.

No way around it, he shrugs. Dumb old world technology, this Weave.

He kicks the broken bridge and scuffs up a shower of electronic grit.

You’re safe? she asks. You got down to the netherworld all right?

He nods.

Candleriggs is here.

Mara lets out a long breath. Candleriggs will look after him. That’s something.

Where are you?

The top of the university tower, says Fox.

In her mind’s eye, Mara sees the vast gothic steeple that tops the tower and looks like a great black wizard hat floating on the dank netherworld sea.

You? he says.

Oh, me, says Mara. Somewhere in the middle of the ocean.

Her head droops.

We were stupid, she blurts out. This is too hard. You should’ve come with me
. . .

Misery darkens his face and haunts his beautiful eyes. She can’t go on at him like this, she shouldn’t. It’s all too late anyway. She’s already an ocean away.

I know, he begins. He stops and sighs. Who said we had to save the world?

That was you, she reminds him, with a bleak grin.

It breaks the awkward distance between them.

He lets out a laugh.

Could have sworn it was you, he retorts.

Well, we’re not saving the world, says Mara, just the little bit we can.

That’s all, he agrees, catching her smile. We can do that.

His face drops again. I feel lost here, Mara. You have people. Here, it’s just me and Candleriggs. I can’t go back home. I feel stuck.

But what about all your plans? Mara steps closer, is careful not to touch.

Fox shrugs. Since I crashed the system the rooks have put security blocks everywhere. Haven’t found a way around them yet. Can’t start anything until I do.