Firespark (2 page)

And Great Skua, he gets it. The clang of feet on the bridge to the next-door barge tells him the Salters are moving on.

The stolen salt cakes are making a hard pain in his side. Tuck shifts on his stomach and swallows a groan as the cakes begin to crumble under his weight. He feels the sack burst and deflate. Salt pours out over the shack roof.

Still he dare not move. A stray Salter might have lagged behind. Tuck listens so hard his ears tingle and once he's as sure as he can be that the gang are all gone, he sits up.

What a waste of a night. Chased all across Pomperoy by a gang of Salters and all for a burst sack of salt. Tuck scoops up as much of the spill as he can stuff into the pockets of his windwrap.

“Gotcha, scummy barge rat!”

There's a hard scrape of a laugh and a burning grip on his foot. A Salter's got him by the ankle and he's not letting go.

The worst crime in a city whose roots are pirate is not killing (there's often a reason for that). It's looting. Tuck has seen people rope-lashed and hung from the Middle Bridges, all for a loot gone wrong. Ransack and plunder were once the lifeblood of Pomperoy, but there was a time when boats of prey grew scarce and the city's taste for piracy turned in on itself. Pomperoy almost ate itself up.

So every night that Tuck goes out on the loot, he's risking
his
blood, if he's caught.

Tuck kicks hard against the Salter's grip. He doesn't want to be rope-lashed or hung. It doesn't matter that he's only taken a single sack tonight—looted night after night and resold on the barges, Tuck's stolen sackfuls have been undercutting the Salters' market price for weeks now.

They've been keeping Tuck and his ma in style, those little salt cakes. Great Skua, so what? Tuck kicks harder. After Da died the Salters took their boat and he and Ma ended up in a barge shack so he's only taking back a
snitch of what's his. He and Ma have gorged on every delicacy he could spy on the market gondolas: sugar-kelp snaps, tangles of ocean noodles, rainbow baskets of briny cucumbers, the finest seaweed bread, crisp-baked anemones. For the first time in a while, Tuck's started to see some flesh on his skinny bones.

The Salter yanks on Tuck's ankle so hard he's brought crashing onto the deck. Tuck chokes as his neck is locked by an iron grip. Blood rushes to his head. The sting of a knife grazes the skin of his throat.

Tuck feels his looter's luck running out, faster than a trickle of salt.

Dawn reveals a brutal ocean, a roaring gray desert of sea.

“Mara.”

The ocean is so loud it almost drowns out Rowan's voice.

Mara turns from the ship's bow where she has been all night, though there's been nothing to see but the dark. And now, as day breaks, there is nothing but gray. She tries to smile at Rowan, but the blasting wind has made her face feel as rigid as stone.

Rowan throws a dirty blanket around her shoulders and hands her a plastic packet full of powdery yellow stuff.

NOOSOUP, she reads on the garish label.

“Gulp it down fast with some water.” Rowan makes a face and hands her a water bottle. “Horrible. But it's food. There's crates full of it below in the hold.”

Mara wipes her wind-streamed eyes with the blanket, smearing her cheeks with its dirt. She scrapes a dark tangle of hair from her face and grimaces as she puts the packet to her lips, recoiling from the synthetic smell. But she's weak with hunger so she forces it down.

“Now,” says Rowan, as she wipes her mouth, “tell me what happened. You vanished from the boat camp. I thought you must be dead. But here you are with a fleet of ships in a mass break-out from the city.” His haggard face breaks into a grin. “I'm impressed.”

Mara returns a wry smile, but it disappears as she begins her extraordinary tale.

After the loss of her family on the journey to the New World, then more deaths in the boat camp around the city walls, Mara wished she were dead too. She was the one who convinced her people to flee their sinking island and make an exodus to the sky-scraping city of New Mungo. But inside the city walls she found a drowned netherworld at the foot of New Mungo's great towers. There Gorbals, Broomielaw, Candleriggs, Molendinar, and the others survived as Treenesters in the ruins of a lost city. Mara saw the rooftops glimmering with ghostly phosphorescence under the sea. When Gorbals and the urchins were snatched by the sea police, Mara stole into the sky city to find them. And there she met Fox, the grandson of Caledon, the architect of the New World.

“Fox didn't know about the boat camp,” Mara insists. “He knew nothing about the outside world. The City Fathers make sure of that. Up in New Mungo,” she remembers, “it's like living on an island in the sky. You forget about the outside world, just like we did on Wing.”

“If refugees arrived on Wing, we wouldn't have built a great big wall to keep them out,” Rowan retorts.

“What if thousands landed on our shores? What would we have done?”

After a long moment, filled by the roar of the sea, Rowan returns to the here and now.

“How on Earth did you steal a fleet of ships?”

“Fox wiped out the city's communications. It was a big risk but he—he—”

Mara bites her lip, hoping the noise of the wind and the ocean drowned out the tremor in her voice.

“The grandson of the man who created the New World helped you break out of the city?” Rowan looks puzzled.

“Fox wants to change his world. That's why he had to stay.” She feels Rowan's eyes studying her face, trying to read the meaning behind the catch in her voice. Mara rushes on; there's plenty more to tell. Rowan looks increasingly bewildered as Mara tells him about the statue in the netherworld that is her image and the story the Treenesters say is carved into the drowned city's stone. It's a promise left by their ancestors, they believe, that one day they would be rescued from the deathly netherworld. When Mara arrived and they saw her face, the face in the stone, they were convinced that she must be the one to do that.

And strangely enough, she has. Though whether they will all find a home in the world, luck and fate will decide.

Mara has still to tell the tragic story of Candleriggs, the ancient Treenester, but Rowan looks exhausted and so is she. It's far too much to tell all at once.

And there are some things too painful to tell.

“It's crazy,” says Rowan. “Our life on Wing was so hard and there were people dying in the boat camp and living in trees. Yet all the while the people of the New World were … are …” He breaks off and swallows hard, beyond words.

“Living in castles in the sky,” Mara finishes. “In luxury you wouldn't believe, built by slaves the people know nothing about.”

“So who do they think built their walls and towers?
Who builds bridges all across the sea?” Rowan demands. There's a spark of anger in his weary eyes.

“They never think about that.” Mara grabs his arm. “If you'd ever been inside a sky city you'd see why. Rowan, it's
amazing
…”

In her mind's eye she sees the vast cybercathedral that seemed to be created out of light and air, the silver sky tunnels sparking with speed-skaters, the wild and savage beauty of the Noos.

Rowan is frowning into the wind. “This Fox …”

Mara's heart skips a beat, but she is rescued from questions she is not ready to answer by a sudden cry. She turns to see her friend, Broomielaw, struggling across the heaving deck with her baby in his papoose on her back.

“What if the world is all ocean?” says Broomielaw, crashing into Mara. They grip on to each other as the ship rolls up over a wave. The other girl's large eyes are shadowed and scared. “What if there's no land? What if this is all there is? Ocean and ocean and ocean. I don't like it, Mara. I hate this wild world. I wish we were all back inside the wall on the Hill of Doves, safe and sound in our trees.”

Mara keeps a steadying arm across the sleep-slumped baby on Broomielaw's back.

“You
weren't
safe,” she reminds her friend. “The sea was rising. Sooner or later, it'll swallow up the Hill of Doves just like it swallowed my island, and then what would you have done? There's land, Broomielaw, I'm sure there is, at the top of the world. It's in my book.”

“What if it's a drowned land too?”

It chills Mara's heart, that thought.

“And it's only the word of an old b—” Broomielaw grimaces as if she's swallowed an insect and spits out the
word
book
. “What's that worth? You shouldn't trust those
things
.”

“You trusted your whole future to a story set in stone,” Mara retorts. “It's your stone-telling legend as much as anything that's brought us here. You'll believe in an old stone statue but not a book.”

“You can trust stone.”

There's an edge of granite in Broomielaw's soft face.

“A vast land of mountains locked in ice.” Mara murmurs the words. She knows them by heart; she's been chanting them like a mantra, over and over, to make herself believe they're true. “If the Arctic ice is melted, the land must be free.”

But those mountains worry her. After all, the reason Mara's people abandoned their island, Wing, was because the rising sea had forced them farther and farther upland toward barren mountain rock. And they couldn't survive on that.

Broomielaw squeezes her hand. “Sorry, Mara. I'm just so tired and the sea is making me sick. Baby Clayslaps couldn't settle all night.” She gives Mara a look. “Like you.”

“Oh, me.” Mara pulls away.

Broomielaw grabs her arm. “Tell me about the sky city. What happened to you up there? Something bad, I can tell.”

Mara shakes her head. How could she describe the wonders and horrors of a New World city to a girl who has lived her whole life in the ruins of the drowned world? Yet Broomielaw knows all about the cruelty of New Mungo toward those beyond its sky-scraping towers.

She also knows the pain of a broken heart.

“Tell me,” Broomielaw urges.

Mara hesitates. Rowan has gone into the control cabin and is deep in conversation with some of the boat-camp refugees.

“I—I had to leave someone behind.”

And she killed someone, but she can't tell anyone that. There wasn't time to dwell on that in the panic to escape New Mungo but there was time enough on the ship in the depths of the night.

She is rescued from Broomielaw's probing by the ship lurching over a wave almost as sheer as a cliff. They hang on to the rail and hope for their lives. Clayslaps howls, hurled out of his sleep.

“Take the baby below deck!” The wind whips away Mara's words.

“Come with me,” Broomielaw yells back, fighting the wind to make for the stairs.

“I'll be down soon,” Mara promises.

She turns back to the ocean. The exhilaration of escaping the city is gone. All last night, blanketed in darkness, she still felt close to Fox, felt the ghost of him beside her, his kiss, the heat of his fingerprints on her skin. Now, in daylight, she is confronted with the ocean that lies between them. The adrenaline is gone and the only thing left is rock-hard grief that feels as if it is crushing her from the inside out.

The wind calms a little. And so does Mara. Head thumping, she scrubs her eyes, turns around, and rubs them again.

A long line of jagged gray teeth bite the horizon. The southern horizon. Not north, where the ship heads.

Mara races to the stairwell.

“Land!” she shouts.

A mass of sleepers rouses in an instant. When they
surge on deck Mara curses at the stampede she has caused. There's a dangerous rush to the ship's starboard.

Mara searches the mob and grabs Rowan. “It's behind us. We need to turn back.”

But Rowan is shaking his head. “No, no, that land's no good for us.”

“We've sailed too far!” The shouts go up all over the ship. “Back, turn back!”

“It's no good.” Rowan tries to make himself heard above the din. “It's all New World land.”

His voice is as frail as his body. No one hears—except Mara, who climbs onto the ship's rail to look over the heads of the other refugees.

“You sure, Rowan? How do you know?”

But Rowan is pushing through the crowd, still trying to be heard. Yes, it's high land, he's shouting, but it all belongs to the New World. Look! The sky above those mountains is swarming with airships. They take off and land all day and night. There's no chance of refuge there, he insists, not unless you want to be a New World slave.

Word spreads across the ship, and people slump on deck or troop dejectedly back below to the hold. Mara jumps down from her unsteady perch on the rail.

“I thought I'd got it all wrong again,” she confesses, “but why didn't we see it on the journey
into
New Mungo?”

She doesn't want to think about that journey, when the sea claimed almost everything and everyone she loved.