Zenith (29 page)

‘Mara—’

Rowan is on his feet, trying to hold her, to calm her down, but she flaps him away.

‘So just
how
many people have I killed? How many have I saved? Let’s count them up . . .’

‘
Mara
.’

Rowan grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. Raging, she shoves him in the chest.

They look at each other and stop.

They were like this as little kids, when their bad moods clashed. They’d end up blazing at each other and someone would have to drag them apart before fists flew – usually Mara’s, first.

Wonder where she gets her temper from?
Tain’s eyes would twinkle and Granny Mary would give him one of her looks.

In time, they learned to keep their tempers in check but it was easy back then, in their ordinary life. Now, nothing is ordinary. Everything familiar is gone. All they can depend upon is each other, yet here they are, brawling with each other, ready to fight like a couple of farm cats.

Rowan gives her another shake, gentler, a rough kind of hug, almost.

‘Mara, I’m sorry. I just needed to blast off at someone,’ he confesses, ‘and you’re – well, I
know
you, so you got it. What happened in the sky city,’ he looks bewildered, upset, shakes his head, ‘we’ll talk about that sometime. But Gail and our families – you’re not to blame. You’re right, we backed you all the way, all of us. I never should have said what I did, I just – I
miss
Gail so bad. It’s like I lost a bit of myself. It’s like—’ he screws up his face, ‘like chopping the leg off a stool. I feel . . . toppled.’

‘I know.’

Gail was his twin. Twinned in looks though not in nature, they were as necessary to each other as water to a wave.

‘I want them all back.’ Mara feels a terrible grief rising; her nails are puncturing her palms. ‘I want our old life back. Everything’s gone.’

She thinks of the specks of people on their island, the ones that might have been Granny Mary and Tain. There were other specks near the village that might have been Rowan’s ancestors. When the sun returns and she can power up the cyberwizz, she’ll show him then.

Rowan looks her in the eye. Like her, his temper is all burned out.

‘We’re all ripped up by what we’ve seen, what we’ve lost – and what we’ve had to do to get here. We’ve all got blood on our hands. Me too. There are things I did—’ Rowan stops and stares at the carving of the Wreck of the World on the cave wall. ‘We’ve survived a catastrophe like nothing else that’s ever happened. The seabed’s crowded with people who didn’t. How are we supposed to live with that?’

He rubs a hand over his eyes and turns away from the carving on the wall.

‘Maybe there’s still something out there in the world for us,’ Mara whispers. ‘Some kind of future.’ She’s not sure if she believes that any more but she can’t give up hope.

‘You’ve got your baby now,’ says Rowan. ‘You’ve got that.’

He says it softly but she knows him so well she can hear an edge in his voice. A strange, snaky feeling is uncurling deep inside.

It’s only the baby moving, she tells herself.

Too much has happened, too much has been lost. Too much hard life has junked up the innocent bonds they once had. He is not Rowan from the island any more than she is the same girl she was back then. Everything has changed. They are not the uncomplicated friends they once were. How could they be?

Their eyes meet in a confused glance.

But what are they now?

Possil bursts into the moon cave with a yell, his axe still grasped in his fist. At last, they have broken through to the other side of the waterfall! It was his axe, Possil boasts, that made the final chop.

Excited voices echo in the tunnels and soon the others pour into the cave. Tuck is woken by grateful slaps on the back when the ravenous ice-diggers see the seal carcass and the strips of meat sizzling on hot stones around the fire.

What a day this has been, they say, licking their fingers, although whether it’s night or day no one can tell.

Once they have slept, they will pack up and try to make it through the ice tunnel and the mountains into the interior of the land.

‘We can’t leave without Broomielaw and Clayslaps.’ Gorbals is hit by panic now it’s almost time to go. ‘They could be out there somewhere. We don’t know. We have to wait until the sun comes back and search the bay again.’

‘We
have
searched, Gorbals,’ says Ibrox firmly. ‘Many, many times.’

Gorbals stares at the ground and shakes his head.

‘I’ll stay and look for them,’ Tuck offers.

Everyone stares at him in surprise.

‘You? How would you know who they are?’ scoffs Pollock. ‘Even if you found them, you’d never bring them through the mountain. You only want to stay because you’re afraid, gypsea,’ he taunts.

Tuck clenches his fists and shifts from foot to foot.

Pollock raises his chin. His dark eyes are fierce. ‘Anyway,
I’m
staying.’

Gorbals’s face stiffens. ‘Why would
you
stay?’

‘Clayslaps is my baby. Remember? I searched the bay even when the firebombs were falling.’ Pollock turns on Gorbals. ‘Didn’t see
you
out searching at all, wordslug. Too busy digging in your thick head for poems? Too scared you’d get another finger burned? You go. I’ll search again for Broomielaw and my baby when the sun returns. Possil can mark a trail through the mountains and I’ll track you all down in the spring.’

Mol pushes between Pollock and Gorbals. Her mouth trembles and she twists her hands.

‘Broomie and I were like sisters. If I thought she was alive out there with Clay, would I have stayed in these caves all this time? We only survived because we found the hot spring. How long would we have lasted out there in the dark, any of us, alone? I’ve thought and thought about it and I know they must have drowned when the ship sank. The wreckers would have rounded them up with the rest of us if they’d survived.’ Mol covers her mouth with her hands to catch a sob.

After long moments, Gorbals steps towards Pollock.

‘No more fighting,’ Mol pleads.

But Gorbals only puts out his hand.

Shocked, Pollock looks as if he’ll refuse the outstretched hand.

‘She’s right, Pollock,’ says Gorbals. ‘They’re gone and we’re still fighting over them.’

Pollock looks at the hand, gives a tiny shake of his head, as if he doesn’t know what to do.

‘We’ll come back in the spring,’ Mara urges, ‘and we’ll make sure. We won’t give up on them. But we need to survive. We can’t look for them if we’re dead. Come with us for now, Pollock.’

She sees the pain in Pollock’s eyes. He’s so practical and fierce in nature that everyone thought he felt little for the baby and Broomielaw. He’s been hurting all this time.

Gorbals has taken back his hand and stuffed it in the pocket of his sealskin coat. Mol grabs his arm before he turns away. She grabs Pollock’s arm too and forces them into a handshake.

‘Enough, you two,’ she says wearily. ‘Time to move on.’

Once everyone has had their fill of rich seal meat and is yawning, Tuck slides up close to Mara.

She turns to him with a tired smile. ‘There’s no power left, Tuck.’

‘It’s dead?’

‘Till spring. It needs sunlight.’

‘Me too,’ sighs Tuck.

He digs in his pocket and holds out a closed fist to Mara.

She looks at it, puzzled.

Tuck turns his hand over and opens the palm. Mara leans forward to see. A small, three-cornered mirror, the shape of a boat sail, lies in the palm of his hand.

‘The box,’ says Tuck. ‘Your little box with the mirror inside. Let me see.’

‘Why?’

Tuck only smiles, so she rummages in her backpack and finds the wooden box Tain made for Granny Mary so many years ago. He gave it to Mara for her fifteenth birthday, her last birthday on the island, the last of her
birthdays he’d ever see. She runs her fingers over the beautiful carvings on the lid, glad she didn’t know that then.

‘Open it,’ Tuck urges.

In the instant she opens the lid, Mara understands.

On the inside of the box lid is a broken mirror. Mara remembers the moment she kicked it by accident across her bedroom, in a fit of temper, soon after Tain gave it to her. The mirror was left with a jagged crack across one corner but all the crashes and bumps the little box has taken in her backpack since then have crumbled the broken corner into fragments.

Tuck takes the box and blows away the fragments of mirror. He presses his three-cornered mirror into the lid. It’s not perfect; he has to force it and there are gaps where the edges don’t quite meet and the dark grain of wood shows.

‘That’s amazing.’ Mara stares. ‘It almost fits. Where did you find it?’

‘My Grumpa gave it to me.’

Tuck pauses. ‘You keep it,’ he says. ‘It belongs there. It bridges the break just fine.’

Mara looks into his eyes. ‘Thanks, Tuck.’

‘The wizz machine,’ he hesitates. ‘Mol said it holds the secrets of the past.’

Mara nods, looking at her reflection in the broken mirror for the first time in months. Eyes like midnight, Dad used to say, but there’s an indefinable darkness that was never there before. The patched-up mirror makes a jagged tear across her face.

‘What are the secrets of the past?’

Mara looks up and catches the hungry look on Tuck’s face. She shrugs.

‘Things people used to know before the world drowned. I’ll show you when my power comes back.’

‘Tell me now.’ Tuck persists. ‘What kinds of things? I want to know what else is inside the globe. What do
you
know about the past?’

Mara’s heart jumps. The words are an uncanny echo of what Fox said to her the very first time they met in the Weave. She puts the thought from her mind and tries to answer Tuck, but that only takes her back to that disastrous trip with Fox on the World Wind and the chilling warning of the lone voice from the NASA satellite.

‘People knew the world was growing hot,’ she remembers. ‘They knew the ice caps were melting and the oceans would rise but they ignored it. They made it all happen, I think.’

‘The world’s not hot.’ Tuck touches her face with cold fingers and she laughs.

‘Not here, right now. But the top of the world used to be a land packed with snow all year round.’

‘This is the top of the world?’ Tuck looks amazed.

Mara nods, remembering what Granny Mary told her and what she has worked out. ‘Once upon a time the sea out there was solid ice. You could stand at the North Pole. It’s still freezing cold in winter because there’s no sun but it’ll warm up in summer. It must do or the ice caps wouldn’t ever have melted. In summer, there’s no night. Imagine it, Tuck. We can lie in the sun all night long.’

In the summer, she will be able to meet Fox on the bridge all day and all night if she wants and never run out of power.

‘Why did the world grow hot?’ Tuck persists.

Mara shakes her head. She cannot explain something she barely understands herself. Then she has an idea.

She picks up a skull lantern and takes it over to the carvings on the cave wall. Gorbals is snuggling down to sleep but Mara calls him over and lifts the lantern to light up the story preserved in the rock.

‘We should learn this story, Gorbals. The people who left this wanted us to know.’

Gorbals studies the carving with large, tired, owlish eyes. He scratches his head till his hair stands on end.

‘Can you make it into a story? Tonight? Before we go?’

Slowly, Gorbals nods. ‘Gather everyone around. I think I know this story. My mother told it to me.’

Once everyone is gathered, grumping and yawning, the urchins squabbling with tiredness, Gorbals begins.

‘Once upon a time, before the world’s drowning, people lived in cities that covered the lands of the Earth.’ Gorbals points to the picture of the city. ‘At night, the lights of the buildings and cars and buses and trains and planes sparkled like stars. But the sky grew dull with the dust and dirt from the city. Soon, it grew jealous of the city’s sparkling lights. So the sky cried out to its mother sun and brother wind and sister ocean and asked them to brew up a storm of weather to punish the people of the world who had stolen its glory. And so they did.