Firespark (5 page)

A shot of envy hits Tuck as he watches Pendicle with his father, one of the city's most powerful men. He is a striking man, with a strong brown face and his dark head covered in elegant furrows of plaits. His windwrap, like Pendicle's, is emblazoned with the Prender family emblem; an old-world sign for power, Pendicle claims, though to Tuck it looks like an oily eel wrapped around a fishing rod.

But
his
da, Tuck reminds himself, was once just as important. He was one of the best bridge builders in Pomperoy. With hair as bright as winter sunshine and his windwrap with the Culpy crescent on its back, Jack Culpy was a striking man too. Da used to take Tuck along when he met the Prender brothers at the Oyster Bar; Tuck and Pendicle would play among the gondolas of sea junk while the men argued about bridges and oil.

Way back when Pomperoy was still at war with itself, the Prenders grabbed a share of the rig's oil. By the time the other gypseas had burned themselves out with pirating and wanted to be safe and settled instead, the Prenders had set themselves up as one of the city's oil families. Now they're one of the richest clans in Pomperoy. What does a bit of looting matter to them?

Tuck walks up onto a swaying arm of the Middle Bridges. He'd better steer clear of the Saltmarket at the head of the lagoon. The bridges are the highest point in Pomperoy, apart from the rig. Tuck looks across the city
to the ocean beyond. When he's overtired, like he is now, he sometimes gets spooked by a thought. What if a great storm uprooted the rig and unanchored the whole of Pomperoy? What if the boats were then tossed across the ocean until they slipped over the edge of the world?

The old people say the world is round. Even if the city's anchors failed, the boats would just keep floating round and round. You couldn't fall over the edge because there isn't an edge. If that's true, thinks Tuck, why don't things fall off? What keeps the sea on the underside stuck to the Earth?

Tuck yawns and shivers inside his windwrap as he looks at the line of the ocean where it meets the sky. It looks like an edge to him.

Once, people thought they knew the world. Not anymore.

No one even knows if there are other gypsea cities, like Pomperoy. The only signs of life upon the ocean, though there's plenty underneath, are lone refugee boats, lost and adrift, ripe for raiding. But even they're more dead than alive, full of bones or rotting corpses.

Wind scuffs the lagoon and a popple sea threatens, but soon the water is as sleek as a seal again. Way up on the oil rig's chimney stack, The Man in the Middle beams down on Pomperoy, his face aglow in the rising sun.

Years ago, The Man surfaced in the lagoon. A couple of kids spotted the large plastic board with its smiling face. They fished it out of the water and ran home with it to their boat. The very next day the sickness that had struck the city left the family's boat. The Man was taken to a neighboring boat where a mother and her baby were sick almost to death. Once again he seemed to chase the illness away. So they carried The Man across one of the
arms of the Middle Bridges to the oil rig in the heart of the lagoon. They hung the face of The Man high on the chimney stack of the rig so that he could watch over the whole of Pomperoy and keep it safe.

None of the old people believe in The Man. Bit of plastic junk, they say, and ramble about a chicken called Kentucky that people used to eat, before the world was sea. But the old people tell so many tall tales about the past, no one knows what's true and what's not. Anyhow, the Kentucky name stuck to The Man and The Man stayed on the rig as the luck-keeper of Pomperoy.

When Ma named baby Tuck after The Man, people said it was barefaced cheek. Ma, being Ma, didn't care.
But look
, they say,
what happened to the Culpy family when they took The Man's name. Jack Culpy died a horrible death, followed by his father and the little girl. Then Tuck and his ma end up in a slum shack
.

Tuck's name has ruined his family. That's what everyone thinks. Tuck hears the whispers and they make him want to run. So he does, every night. Runs from the blame and the guilt, runs from his own lousy, wrecked life. Runs and leaps the whole of Pomperoy, looting as he goes, and only calls it a night when the flocks of Great Skua fill the dawn skies over the city, and call him home by name,
tuktuk, tuk-tuk
.

The Great Skua's cry makes him itch for their wings. He'd like to fly free of Pomperoy, soar all across the oceans and see what the world is. Tuck would rather risk a salt-knife at his throat than settle for a life of patching boats or mending bridges. It was bridging that killed Da in the end. If Tuck's going to gamble his life, it'll be for something more than a coil of bridgewire.

Or a pocketful of salt, come to that …

When the idea hits, Tuck stops breathing. It's either the best loot he's ever thought of, or the worst.

A fearful excitement zips through him, right down to his fingers and toes. Does he dare?

Great Skua, he dares!

Tuck's doubts about The Man's power have been growing for many a moon. For eleven moons, to be exact. Ever since Tuck stood on this same bridge and promised The Man he'd change his name, never glug another beer ever again, he'd do anything, anything at all, whatever The Man wanted, if only he'd save little Beth and Grumpa from the deadly fever that was burning them up. But The Man did nothing at all.

In nightmares, Tuck still sees their burial boat, blazing on the black sea like a dying sun. The sound of Ma screaming is seared into a corner of his mind.

And secretly, in the depths of his heart, Tuck hates The Man.

Last night, in his panic, he broke his own sullen promise never to ask The Man for another thing as long as he lived. He begged to be saved from the Salters. And he was. Did The Man do that? Or was it just a scrap of ordinary luck? Well, the idea that's ripped through him might reveal once and for all whether The Man is just a bit of old junk like Grumpa said—or not.

Tuck avoids looking at the inscrutable, beaming face as he unfolds the astounding idea in his head.

He'll steal The Man. In the dead of night when Pomperoy is sound asleep.

He'll hide The Man's face in his secret loot store, a murky cabin below deck in
The Grimby Gray
.

Pomperoy will wake up to find The Man gone. The city will grow frantic with fear. At last, The Man will reappear
in the sea. Who will find him? Tuck, of course! He'll be an instant hero and
The Grimby Gray
will be known as the lucky place where The Man in the Middle rose once again—right outside Tuck Culpy's barge.

No more will folk mutter my name like a curse
, Tuck vows.
I'll rescue the Culpy name. I'll make Ma happy again and do Da proud
.

Dawn bleeds across the sky and into the lagoon. The wind throws a punch at the market gondolas and they
knock-knock
against each other like a boxful of bones.

Tuck counts the knocks to keep himself calm. He knows he is gambling with his life because if he's caught … Tuck has seen people hang right here on this bridge, for less.

It's a gamble. But if he wins, it'll be the loot of his life.

Tuck lets out a long breath, counts twenty racing heartbeats.

He'll do it.

He will.

At sundown the wind turns evil. The refugees hide below deck as the wind tries to hurl the ship against the sky.

Crushed between her friends, Mara snatches shreds of sleep but the lights below deck keep flickering. Every time her eyes drop with exhaustion, the lights beat against her eyelids. Time and time again, she jolts awake and stares at the cavernous interior of the ship, wondering where on Earth she is. Each time it takes her long, giddy moments to remember, and immediately she wishes she could forget.

All around, refugees cry and bicker and curse at having landed up in such a foul place as this.

What have I done
? Mara wonders.
What if we don't find land
?

The ship's hold is like a warehouse, piled with crates of food supplies meant for the New World. At least they managed to steal a stocked cargo ship, thinks Mara. They might have been unlucky and taken one that had already unloaded its supplies in the city's dock tower.

What about the other ships that escaped the city? Mara
has searched the ocean through all the hours of daylight but there has been no sign of them.

Mara looks at all the refugees crammed in between the crates in the hold. The urchins have made one corner their own and have filled it with the hoard of objects they stole from the museum in the netherworld. Scarwell is snuggled up asleep with her prize loot, the life-size model of an apeman.

A small girl sits alone, hugging her knees. Every so often her face twitches. Mara goes over and tries to talk to the child but there's no response. The girl stares at the floor, lost in her own world. Better there than in this nightmare, thinks Mara.

She buries her face in her arms and tries to find her own escape. Sleep comes at last, ragged with dreams of her family and her old island home. Dad, clattering milk buckets in the barn. Her little brother, Corey, chasing the chickens and running through billows of bed sheets that Mom is hanging out to dry. Rowan is a lone, distant figure among the crazy whirl of the field of windmills. And there's Tain, bolting the storm shutters of his stone cottage against a rising storm. His white hair is wild in the wind; he's bellowing about the rising sea but the weather drowns his words.

And she dreams of Fox, just for an instant. Fox, alone in the drowned ruins below the towers of New Mungo. Fox, with nightmares in his beautiful eyes.

When a surge of the ship slams her head against a crate, Mara tries to hold on to him but he crashes out of her dream. She's awake and he's gone, just as he crashed out of her life.

Mara sits up with a jolt. What time is it? She rushes up
on deck into darkness, blasted by wind. There's no moon, not one lone star to help track the passage of the night. Has she missed midnight, when she promised to meet Fox in the Weave?

Mara slips into the control cabin to escape the wind. She unzips her backpack, opens the waterproof seal within, and takes out the cyberwizz globe, feels the electric tingle as she nestles it in her hands and it powers up. She shoves the halo over her eyes and clicks open the globe. With the tiny wand, she scribbles a series of symbols on the small screenpad.

And in the flash of a thought, she's there …

…
magicked out of realworld and dropped into the vast, glittering cyberscape of the Weave
.

Mara zooms along the familiar wrecked boulevards lined with buzzing, sparking towerstacks that store the lost data of the old, drowned world. The boulevards end in a crumble of tumbledown stacks, rotting mountains of cyberjunk. There's a strange, flickering beauty, danger too sometimes, in these heaps of decay
.

Deep in the ruins looms the arm of a broken bridge. Mara slows up, steps onto the bridge, and stares at what lies beyond—an electric blue ocean of cyberhaze
.

Fox? Her voice crackles with static. Are you here
?

This is where he promised to be, on the Bridge to Nowhere. But he's not here. There are a hundred reasons why he might not have made it
.

Maybe she's too late. Maybe he came earlier and she wasn't here. Maybe he gave up on her. Maybe he fell asleep
.

But what if he never made it out of New Mungo? What if he was caught by the sea police? Or drowned in the filthy
waters of the netherworld as he tried to swim across to the old university tower
?

Fox? Are you safe? Please be safe. Please come
.

Panic-stricken, she waits and waits
.

But Fox doesn't come
.

The fluttery light of the old woman's lantern illuminates her dark eyes and canyons of wrinkles in a moon-pale face.