Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  She owes Tuck something, she tells herself, because of his mother. And sometimes . . .

  Mara clasps the globe in her hands, a snippet of temper heating her blood.

  Sometimes a cyberfox is just not enough. It’s his living, breathing self she wants, the one she can touch, and he’s not here. The real Fox is as unreachable as the sun. He could have come with her. But he didn’t. He chose to save his world instead. And she chose to save her friends instead of staying with him.

  There’s a disconnection between them that has nothing to do with missing midnight or fading solar rods.

  Mara knows his reality, she can picture exactly where he is in his world; she knows the book rooms of the university tower, she’s been there. But Fox has no idea, and she can’t find the words to tell him, what it’s like to be here, entombed in a freezing mountain at the bitter end of the Earth. Now they’re no more than spirits in the ether and it’s never enough.

  Tuck’s right here though. Mara can hear the fear on his breath as he sits beside her; the fear of a lone gypsea deep inside the Earth. The World Wind might, for a few moments at least, blow away that fear.

  It’ll only take a few minutes, only a tiny bit of power, to show Tuck . . .

  And how long has it been since she had any fun?

  Earth!

  Not deadly and dark like the inside of the mountain but a blue-green pearl hanging in black space among the stars. All alive and aglow. Tuck blinks away tears as he watches clouds swirl across the tattered shapes of Land. And the oceans, what oceans of blue!

  He could look at it forever but already Mara is digging him in the ribs. She warned him he could only have a glimpse.

  Tuck takes an extra moment to fix the image in his mind. He shouldn’t be scared of the dark innards of Earth, not now that he’s seen this.

  He crashes back into the dimness of the moon cave. The silver halo is taken from his eyes. He leans against the cave wall, dazed, and tucks the Earth-pearl into a keep-pocket of his mind wondering, as he watches Mara’s soft mouth break into a smile as she slips on the halo, what other wonders exist in her magic machine.

  The glow of the halo illuminates a patch of the story-carving on the cave wall behind Mara’s head. It’s the arm of a bridge exploding under a furious fist of ocean. A shock of grief hits Tuck, just when he doesn’t expect it, as he remembers the Arkiel smashing the bridgeways of Pomperoy. He hurls the memory to the outermost corner of his mind. He can’t think about that – not least because Mara, the one who made it happen, is right here beside him, so close that he can breathe in the warm, musky scent of her hair. Instead, he takes a peek into his mind’s keep-pocket, where he has stashed the memory of the blue-green gem of the Earth. This Earth, the one that he cowers inside. Does it still hang so peacefully in space? Did all the drowning and destruction dim its glow? Those tattered shapes that were Land, full of cities like the one carved on the wall: are there any left? Or are they all sunk, like Ma and The Grimby Gray?

  For the first time in his life Tuck wants to know. And there’s something else. He wants to know why. Why did the seas rise up and drown the Earth?

  Grumpa could have told him, but Tuck never asked.

  Mara pulls off the cyberwizz with a sigh and stuffs it in her bag. She gives Tuck a wan smile and goes over to her sleeping mats where she makes her backpack her pillow, as she always does, lies down and closes her eyes.

  But she’s forgotten to seal up her bag. Tuck can see the gleam of the cyberwizz globe through a gap.

  Mol said the cyberwizz holds the secrets of the past and she was right. He’s just seen that with his own eyes. Great Skua, it holds a whole secret Earth inside! Who knows what else? Tuck waits until he’s sure Mara is fast asleep then slips his hand into the gap in the backpack. He feels the curve of the globe, smooth as glass. If he could just ease it out without wakening her . . .

  ‘Hands off, pirate,’ says a voice at his back.

  EARTH’S GREAT WHITE WHALE

  Mara is wakened by a spur of rock in her ribs and an idea spiking her dreams. Blurry with sleep, she rummages in her backpack, finds the cyberwizz halo and wand, but can’t feel the globe. She takes her backpack over to the fire and peers inside, but it’s not there. In cold-sweat panic she searches the craggy floor of the cave.

  ‘This what you’re missing?’ There’s a rustle close behind her. Rowan sits up. He unearths the globe from his sea-grass pillow and hands it to her. ‘I caught pirate boy stealing it.’

  ‘Tuck?’ Mara frowns then laughs, relieved. ‘Oh, it’s OK. I took him on a trip into the Weave. He was probably trying to sneak another look at, um—’

  She stops. Rowan doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She has always kept the secrets of the cyberwizz close to her chest. She is trying to work out how to explain when he shrugs and flops back down on his mat.

  ‘Just keep your stuff safe,’ he grunts.

  And turns away. Mara stares at his back, stung. Why has he become so cold and strange? Maybe it’s only now that they’re stuck here in this dark hole in the Earth that he has been hit by the full misery of his twin’s death and the loss of his parents. Mara remembers how she felt in the netherworld when the terrible loss of her family sank in. Now that Rowan has had time to think, is he blaming her?

  Well, she blames herself. It was her idea to travel to the New World.

  But if they hadn’t, a voice inside pipes up, what would they have done? Stayed on Wing and let the ocean swallow them up? Everyone thought the North was in meltdown, that any land would be sunk; there was no way to survive there.

  Whether they were right or wrong about survival, time will tell.

  Mara picks up the cyberwizz, opens the globe and puts the halo over her eyes. She can’t wait for Fox. She’ll do this alone. With the wand, she scribbles a series of hieroglyphs on the tiny screenpad inside the globe and . . .

  . . . dives into the ruined boulevards of the Weave. She whizzes through the crumbling network until she finds the site she needs and tumbles into the World Wind, zipping through crackling blue ether into black space where the vast, glowing gem of the planet looms up. A glinting, winged craft flies towards her. Mara boards the wind-shuttle and begins to zoom towards an immense blueness of ocean.

  A name glows beneath its surface.

  The Pacific.

  The names of lost lands and cities begin to flash at the faraway rim of the planet but the ocean is so large it covers this whole face of the Earth’s sphere. Mara keeps a high altitude so that the images and echoes of the horrible history flags, planted all over the planet by old world windshuttlers, are weakened by distance.

  There’s a wide scatter of islands like pebbles upon the serene ocean. Solomon, Phoenix, Starbuck, whole shoals of names flash and fade as she zips past. A green and brown terrain looms up beyond a firework flash for Hong Kong. She follows the wriggling line of the River Ganges, skirts the purple peaks of Himalayan mountains, India and Sumatra behind her, the highlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan ahead, the River Volga shimmering far in the distance and cluttered plains of low-lying cities as far as she can see.

  One name, flashing in the distance, catches her eye and a memory flares of sitting by the fireside with her mother in her lost home on Wing. Mara stares at the faraway nameflash. Ararat. Why does she know that? Mara dredges through her memories and she swallows hard when she remembers. Ararat was the mountain in the story of Noah and the Ark, an ancient legend of a flood. So that is where those long-ago people saved themselves from a drowned world.

  There is high land above the oceans, scattered across the Earth. How much is barren mountain rock? And how hot has the Earth grown? It’s hard to believe the rest of the world is warm while they are stuck in cold caves. But Fox has trawled Weavesite ruins and what he found there has made him sure, he said, that the sunless winter at the top of the world is at odds with the searing heat further South, where no one can live, not even in a sky city. One thing has given Mara heart: Fox’s c
ertainty that once the long Arctic winter night is over and the sun returns, the mellow spring and summer of a warmed world awaits them.

  If only he’s right.

  If only they can survive until then.

  For the first time in a while, as she scans the oceans and lost lands, Mara wonders about the other ships that escaped the sky city with the Arkiel. Did they survive and find land?

  Mara stalls the wind-shuttle, lost amid her thoughts and the names that flash all around her. Where in the world is she? She could zip back into realworld and ask Rowan, who spent entire winters engrossed in old atlases and books, but she can’t face another of his rebuffs. No, she’ll do this herself. She can’t make up for the deaths that have already happened but she will do everything in her power to save the people she’s brought to the top of the world.

  Mara wings a prayer of hope across the Earth to wherever the other ships might be and focuses on the task in hand. She casts her mind back to the tattered atlas that used to lie on Tain’s cottage table. If only she’d paid more attention when he’d tried to teach her about the world beyond the island, instead of twitching to be out playing in the wind with Rowan and Gail.

  Wing was in the North Atlantic, a pinprick in the seas beyond the land mass of Europe. That she knows for sure. She closes her eyes to block out an insistent red SOS from Bangladesh, as the wind-shuttle flies over it, and tries to remember more. Europe leaned on the shoulder of Africa. That was the dead continent with the HELP flags she saw on her trip with Fox; she’s almost sure of that. Far West, across the Atlantic Ocean, was the huge mass of North America, trailing its southern lands on a string.

  Mara takes a guess and zooms East, back across the Pacific Ocean until she sees a gigantic golden archway with a banner flashing USA in red, white and blue. It bridges the entire land mass that lies to the north-east. And, yes, there are the southern Americas attached to the North land mass by a thin string of land.

  Peru, Ecuador and Colombia flash past. She zooms over the string of land – and jumps with fright as a crowd of orange ghosts rise like distress flares from a bay on a long island that is the shape of a wrenched arm. The name of the island, Cuba, flashes but there is no message flag or blog from the bay of the orange ghosts.

  Unnnerved, she speeds on to the ridges of the Rocky Mountains where a roll of beautiful names echo the undulations of the land. California, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma. Dizzied by flashing towns and cities, she heads for the calm blue of the ocean that lies beyond the lowlands of Mississippi and Florida, now surely drowned.

  The Atlantic! The name shimmers on the surface of the ocean and Mara’s excitement grows as she veers sharp North, following the eastern seaboard towards the part of the world that is home.

  A rumble vibrates the wind-shuttle. Far below, two towers, as tall as any sky city, implode into dust.

  Mara rushes onward, following the flashes of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec along a trail of waterways that lead her North, tracking the line of the coast. As the wind-shuttle takes her over the huge water bowl of Hudson Bay, she remembers something and glances back West. But there are too many lakes, scattered like shattered glass across the rugged terrain of the North. Somewhere among those lakes and forested highlands lived the Athapaskans whose story first inspired her to find a homeland in the Far North. She hopes the Athapaskans survived.

  Now all her hopes and wishes fly North, like a spur of boreal wind because there it is at last, like a great white whale at the top of the world.

  Greenland, the biggest island on Earth.

  A patch of island, a cuttlefish beside Greenland’s giant whale, comes as a shock because it’s due North, surely, of where Wing, her home island, must lie. Mara peers out of the wind-shuttle window.

  The name flashes up.

  Iceland.

  She remembers tales of an ice land full of molten fire. The oldest island folk swore the tales were true. Mara digs into her memory. Wasn’t there a mention in her Greenland book of a volcanic island in the northern Atlantic? The old people’s stories were of a violent land, so hot it melted the soles of your feet and guarded by a people so fiery they could burn a stranger’s eyes to blackened sockets with a glance. Not a soul on Wing suggested they go there, not even when the sea reached their doorsteps.

  Mara pauses the wind-shuttle. Now that she’s here, she knows it’s been in the back of her mind to do this all along.

  Just to see.

  She descends to a speckle of islands that lie south of Iceland and North of the British Isles. She’s using up too much of her precious power but she doesn’t care. She circles the speckle of islands. It’s the largest, most southerly one.

  Mara stares at the island. Her vision blurs and her throat tightens.

  In realworld she scrubs tears from her eyes. In the cyber-world she swoops low over the old satellite image of Wing, her island, her lost home.

  How long ago did some satellite orbiting the Earth capture this image of what no longer exists? Was it when Mum and Dad were young? Before they were born? A century ago, before the seas rose, when Granny Mary and Tain were young? Mara zooms deeper into the satellite image, as close as the World Wind allows, until she is no higher from the ground than a sky city tower. That grey clutter near the sea must be the rooftops of the old village – before the sea forced the villagers further inshore. There’s a scattering of farms on the hillside that didn’t exist in her lifetime. It was the field of windmills. Mara’s heart beats painfully as she follows the coastline of her island until she finds the horseshoe shape of Longhope Bay.

  There it is. She can hardly believe her eyes. Far below is the grey rooftop of a farm cottage. Her own home. And there, further up the hillside, is Tain’s cottage roof.

  Mara can hardly breathe as she gazes down at this lost world, her world, from a time long before she was born, before the Earth drowned.

  Two specks are outside Tain’s cottage. They could be rocks. Or they could be people.

  They might be Granny Mary and Tain.

  She can’t take any more.

  Mara revs the wind-shuttle and zooms away as fast as she can from the ghosts of the past.

  HERE, NOW

  Mara takes the wind-shuttle up the eastern side of Greenland, across endless fjords. In realworld, their mountain could be in any one of the fjords that fritter the edges of the great white island like frosted ferns.

  She zooms over the ridge of the mountains that enclose the mass of ice and snow in the interior. The snow is melted now so the mountains must surely cup a lake so vast it would seem like a sea.

  Mara thinks of the dead tree root in the cave roof and wonders. She remembers the Athapaskans who lived among the boreal high lands and lakes. Anything is possible, she reminds herself. It’s a thought she hasn’t had in a while.

  She is about to pull the wind-shuttle back from the Earth to find its parking bay in electronic space when she pauses. Thinks hard. Then scribbles on her screenpad and hits the message flag button on the control panel. Maybe no one will ever see it but Wing, her island, deserves a flag of its own.

  Now she revs up the wind-shuttle, ready to exit Earth. She’s seen what she needs to know, and far more. Of one thing she is sure.

  They need to go through the mountains. They need to find a way through to the interior sea.

  SNAKE IN THE BOOK

  Tonight, at long last, he found Mara on the Bridge to Nowhere. Fox replays the precious moments in his head. She seemed so lost and upset. When he asked her what was wrong, she hardly made sense. Before she left, she asked him such an odd thing.

  Have you ever seen the sign of a snake coiled around a stick?

  She described a symbol she’d found among the carvings on a cave wall. The same sign, she murmured, was burned on to her arm.

  Burned? By who? Fox demanded, appalled. Not now, she muttered, she’d tell him another time.

  He has only seen her for a few snatched moments since her sudden, strange exit from the World Wind. N
ow he’s too worried to focus on his own task. Who could have done such a thing to her? The gypsea? Yet Fox remembers, all too clearly, how fondly she speaks of him.

  Finding out about the snake sign is the only thing he can think of to do, so Fox searches the tower bookstacks, trying to calm his spiralling fear. The image is niggling at the back of his head. It’s only when he turns over a book on serpents and spots a tiny snake coiled on a stick on the corner of the back cover, that he realizes what it is.

  Of course! It’s all over New Mungo and the Noos.

  It’s a dollar sign. The trading symbol of the New World.

  Fox grips the book. The sign of a dollar is branded on her arm?

  ‘What’s branded on whose arm?’

  Candleriggs is frowning at him.

  Fox could kick himself. He must have spoken the words out loud.

  The gnarled hand on his arm is like a claw.

  ‘What’s happening?’ demands Candleriggs. ‘You told me they’d found land, that they’re safe and settled for the winter in caves by the sea.’

  He said exactly that. Fox has been very careful about what he has and has not said. Mara was adamant about that.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Candleriggs repeats. ‘Is someone sick? Broomielaw and the baby, are they—’

  ‘They’re fine,’ he says, too quickly.

  ‘What’s happened, boy?’

  Fox shakes his head. With Candleriggs’s owl eyes fixed on him so fiercely, he can’t lie any more.

  When he tells all he knows she doesn’t break down. She hunches deeper into her earthen cloak, says nothing at all, just walks away.

  Night has fallen when he hears her wail somewhere deep in the book rooms. Her cry mingles with the moans of misery Fox is sure he hears, carried on the wind, from the boat camp on the other side of the city walls.