Pathfinder

by Julie Bertagna

  Later that evening, Mara downloads a movie she once found in the Weave—an adventure story of heroes and strange lands, with a comfortingly safe and happy ending.

  She puts the glowing halo on her little brother and lets him enjoy the story as he lies snug in his bed.

  At sundown, despite the heat, the islanders light their fires. No one is sure why, but they do, and so, on the last evening, the people of Wing fill the air with the earthy peat smoke that has filled its winter nights, time before memories, time out of mind.

  Mara knows she will remember this day, every detail of it, as long as she lives.

  “Go now, Mara,” says Tain. “Go. Find a new future.”

  He pushes her toward the boats: every fishing boat and ferry, every seaworthy vessel the island owns. They knock together, rocking on strong wave surges.

  Mara’s family begins to board a boat that looks too full to take anyone else.

  “Come on, Mara!” her father shouts urgently, but she stands stubbornly beside Tain. The rest of the old folk stand on the hill beside the sea, dead-eyed but dignified.

  “I won’t go until Tain does!” she shouts back. “There must be room for everyone. We’ll have to make room.” All around her and in the boats people lower their gaze from her furious, accusing look. All except for her mother. Precariously, she stands up in her place in the boat and tries to push back through the crush of people on deck to get to Mara.

  There are to be no old ones on the boats. It has all been decided, but Mara can’t believe it. She won’t believe it. They cannot leave the old ones on the drowning island.

  “We’ve had all the time in the world to prepare for this and we never made sure we had enough boats? We might at least have done that.” Mara clutches at Tain’s sleeve as she did when she was his little helper. But she can’t help Tain now. She feels useless.

  Gail’s father, Alex, the skipper of the last boat, is shamefaced and desperate. “There’s no room, Mara. Look for yourself. You tell me who to leave—the old ones or the children? The brown-eyed or the blue?” Alex lowers his voice. “Listen to me. This is going to be a long and perilous journey. Those old ones won’t make it. And what about once we get there? How would somebody like Tain manage in one of those cities? But they say they don’t want to come anyway—they want to stay here.”

  Mara glares at Alex with blazing eyes. Tain is furiously ordering her to go, right this second. Gail is pleading with Mara to jump on board with her family. Her mother is raging at Mara, raging at the crush of people around her who block her way.

  “Tain is the last person who should be left!” cries Mara. “He warned us all about this. He told us to prepare. We never listened and now he’s been proved right, we’re leaving him here to drown? It’s not right! The ones who wouldn’t listen, who said we didn’t need to do anything, that this would never happen—they should be left behind before Tain!”

  Mara hears a scream. Her mother’s. She spins around and is drenched by sea spray. A large wave has hit the boats and they rock wildly, crashing against each other. Some have already pulled away, a small exodus scattering the ocean. Mara can still hear her mother’s cries and frantically she scans the few boats still at the edge of the waves.

  No!

  Her family’s boat has pulled out on the wave surge. There is suddenly an expanse of sea between them—too far to jump. Already the boat is fogged in clouds of peat-smoke from the boat funnels.

  “No, wait!” Mara cries. “Please wait!”

  She didn’t mean this to happen. Mara tries to focus on her mother’s face. She can’t see her father or Corey at all, but she can hear her little brother’s agonized wail.

  “I’ll see you in the city!” she sobs but the chug of the boats muffles her cry. In moments they are out of earshot, beyond reach.

  The boat fades amid sea spray and smoke. Sobbing with shock, Mara turns to Tain, who looks stricken, blaming himself. Frail though he is, he lifts her bodily onto the last boat where Gail and her mother grab her and pull her on board beside them. Mara can’t seem to let go of Tain’s hand. In the moment before the boat pulls away she pushes her face into the sleeve of his oilskin jacket and breathes in the scents of the sea, the cheeses, and the peat that are so much a part of him, of her, of the island.

  “I was born here and I’ll die here,” says Tain gently, firmly. “This is where I want to be.”

  He juts out his craggy chin. And now Mara sees that Tain is speaking the truth. He doesn’t want to come to the New World. The fear and hope that shine in his dark eyes are for Mara and all the others in the boats, not for himself.

  The journey south will be treacherous. Maybe no one will survive it. Maybe they won’t find the New World—the island’s fishermen have tried to map out navigation charts using compasses and the pattern of the sun and the stars and Mara’s screen map of New Mungo, but they can only hope that their calculations are accurate. And even if they do get there, who really knows what kind of life lies out there beyond the horizon? What kind of life could an eighty-year-old man make in a strange New World?

  Tain will stay on the island he’s never left, not once, since the day he was born. All his memories and stories and knowledge, all that he is, will disappear with the island when it is swallowed by the ocean.

  The old ones begin to climb the hillside to the church that will now be their home, as the refugee boats struggle against an incoming tide, abandoning their island and the last of its people to the sea.

  CITY IN THE SKY

  Many times, in the long days and nights of the journey south, Mara is sure they will never make it. The ocean is a ferocious, swallowing beast. Somehow, Alex steers them up over huge, rolling walls of waves, across moving mountains of sea. Mara dreads each new wave; dreads the horrendous death-ride into a deep, dark valley, then the huge surge upward into a white cliff face of ocean. The wooden boat cracks and groans loudly, its timbers strained to their limit under the massive force of the waves. Mara grips the cold ship’s rail until her fingers grow numb, her stomach churning with fear and seasickness. She keeps her face turned to the seething black well of the ocean. Spray stings her face, crusts her eyes with salt, but she keeps looking out and cannot turn away. There’s been no sign of the other boats in days. Mara’s terror is so great she can hardly contain it. She knows that Jamie, the skipper of her family’s boat, is much less experienced than Alex. The lives of her family lie in the hands of a novice skipper.

  She longs to put her head down and sleep and not wake up until they find the New World—but that’s impossible in a heaving boat, amid the crush of so many bodies. It becomes hard to believe that the journey will ever end, that the wails of the children will ever quiet, that the awful seasickness will ever stop, that she will feel solid ground beneath her feet ever again.

  The crush on board means that there wasn’t room enough for sufficient provisions of food and water. They finished the last scraps of food yesterday and there are hardly any water rations left—just enough for the babies and the very youngest children. Everyone is praying that they reach the city today. They must. Months of meager food rations during the storm months on the island have weakened them all more than they realized. No one has much strength left. And no one has ever experienced terrifying seas like these.

  Trembling and muddleheaded Mara begins to drift in a hazy trance. Gail is crammed beside her, their bodies so close and intertwined that the other girl’s spasms of sickness, her listless fear, even her aching, restless limbs, feel like an extension of Mara’s own. Rowan, who began the journey full of tales and stories to pass the time, is crushed up next to his twin, his blue eyes glazed, his mouth too dry and sore to let him talk anymore.

  At dawn next morning Mara is suddenly shaken out of her daze.

  “Look up ahead!” Alex shouts. He stares shock-eyed across the ocean.

  All around her people are waking up and crying out in fright. Weakly, Mara struggles upright and looks out, but all she can see is
ocean.

  “There!” Gail cries in a parched voice. Trembling, she clutches Mara’s arm and points.

  The most colossal structure rises out of the ocean, swathed in mist.

  Mara swallows. She can’t seem to find her voice. Her throat feels full of stones.

  Vast towers unwrap from the dawn mist. Towers so thick and high it’s hard to believe they are real. As the boat draws closer the thinning mist reveals a stunning geometry of sky tunnels that connect the towers—branches and branches of gleaming connections. A molten sunrise spreads fire across the sky. When it hits the city like a silent explosion the brilliance is heart stopping. The morning sun seems pale beside such radiance.

  “That’s it!” Mara croaks. “That’s New Mungo.”

  People murmur in fear; some cry. But Mara feels blank as she looks at the stupendous vision. She doesn’t know what she feels about that immense city in the sky. All she can think of is stepping out onto solid ground, stretching her cramped limbs—and finding her family.

  As they draw closer and the last of the mist clears, Mara sees with a sinking heart what she always suspected would be there—an immense wall. It rises up out of the sea, encircling the city.

  There is no land or harbor, only a blurred mass that heaves and bobs around the city. A huge, dull-colored live thing. The vile, rotting stench of an open drain hits as the clustering thing sharpens into focus. Mara gasps as she sees it’s a heaving mass of humanity. A chaos of refugee boats crams the sea around the city and clings like a fungus to the huge wall that seems to bar all entry to refugees.

  Frantically, Mara begins to scan the still-distant mass of boats for her family. Why was she so stubborn? Why didn’t she go with them?

  “Where are they, Gail?” she panics. “They’ll have made it, won’t they?”

  She sees the look that passes between Gail and Rowan. She pictures her mother with Corey clutched close, her keen eyes searching, searching, searching for Mara; her father cursing her stubbornness, refusing to believe he has lost her.

  Alex steers them toward the chaos of boats around the city. People huddle closer on the fishing boat that is now their home. The sense of loss is overwhelming.

  “Heads down!” Alex suddenly yells.

  A bulky, thuggish-looking, black speedboat roars out from behind the legs of an impossibly high sea bridge that stretches out into the ocean, then suddenly breaks off, unfinished. The speedboat, emblazoned with the words SEA POLICE and crammed with an armed, orange-uniformed police crew, cuts in front, its sirens blaring. A huge gun barrel glints above the bow windshield. Now a fleet of orange waterbikes zips across the waves to encircle them. The speedboat fixes its large gun on Mara’s boat, while the police waterbikers swivel their handlebar guns into position.

  They are surrounded.

  “Turn back! Turn back at once!” a harsh megaphone voice commands.

  Alex looks petrified but stays on course—there’s nowhere to turn back to. He even keeps his nerve as the waterbikers send thundercracking volleys of machine-gun fire overhead, in warning.

  Then he cries out in horror and begins frantically wheeling the boat around.

  “Get down!” he roars.

  Mara can’t see what’s happening. But she hears something howl through the air, feels it hit the water close by, then is rocked by a terrifying force as a missile explodes in the sea.

  The boat fills with screams. Mara struggles to prise herself from the crush, tries to jump overboard, desperate to escape. But there is no escape. She grips the rim of the boat and squeezes her eyes tight shut. “Mom! Dad! Help me!” she screams, but her voice is lost in the wave of panic.

  There is the strangest lull. The boat lurches on a wave and Mara waits for the hit. The moment stretches—enormous, empty, dark, and still. I’m dead, thinks Mara. It’s happened. It’s over. She opens her eyes. She is still in the boat. There’s no screaming missile, no explosion, nothing. Then—

  “They’re going!” shouts Alex, his voice cracking with relief.

  And it’s true. The sea police have about-turned and are speeding off in another direction. Then Mara sees what has deflected them—a bigger target. A fleet of boats has appeared on the southern horizon and it’s this that the police battalion is headed for. Alex takes his chance to steer hastily toward a mooring place on the edge of the boat camp that stretches far into the waters around the city.

  “What were they going to do—kill us all?” Rowan whispers, his face gray, his eyes wide and unfocused with shock.

  The shock deepens as they begin to enter the vast boat camp.

  “I don’t like this, don’t like it,” Gail is muttering feverishly, like a small child. “I want to go home, Mom. Oh, please, let’s turn back and go home.”

  Fishing boats, ferries, rusted military craft, once-luxurious cruisers, old and battered pleasure crafts, and bashed yachts, all kinds of vessels, even ramshackle handmade rafts with patchwork sails; rich and poor, all ages, all kinds of people, are crushed here into a common pulp of human misery. The sea runs red with sunrise, the water steams, the noise and stench are terrible.

  This is unreal, thinks Mara. It’s hell on Earth.

  “Where are they all from?” she whispers.

  “Who knows?” says Rowan.

  Alex nudges their boat into the crush.

  “You’ll have to move on—this is our space and it’s too crowded already!” shouts a raucous voice. “There’s no room for anyone else.”

  The owner of the voice is a furious woman who stands at the helm of what once must have been a sleek, luxurious yacht. Now it’s dirty and battered, its deck overhung with a patchwork canopy of plastic bags and tatty tarpaulin. Grime has settled into the harsh, ungenerous lines of the woman’s face.

  “Where else can we go?” demands Brenna, one of Mara’s mother’s friends, staring back just as furiously. “There’s no room anywhere.”

  “Should have got here earlier then, shouldn’t you?” the woman snaps. “It’s your own fault.”

  An ugly, unwelcoming grumble grows as the inhabitants of the surrounding boats stare resentfully from their ramshackle floating homes. Some shout abuse, some even fling filthy waste at the new arrivals. Steely eyed, Alex continues to steer into the edges of the boat camp. There’s nothing else he can do; there’s nowhere else to go but the open ocean.

  Mara puts her head upon her knees. She screws her eyes tight shut and puts her fists over her ears to block out the horror of the refugee camp. But she can’t. The putrid, stomach-turning stench of sewage, sweat, and sickness is overwhelming.

  Although she’s frail and shattered from the journey, and despite the surrounding hostility, Gail manages to strike up a conversation with a boy on the rickety boat next door. Gail could charm words out of a stone, if she wanted to. After a while, the familiar sound of her friend’s chatter calms Mara just enough to let her lift her head from her knees and survey the noisy, frightening chaos she now belongs to. And she must look, she tells herself, she must look hard and keep looking till she finds her family.

  “Ask about food and fresh water, Gail,” cries Brenna, struggling to cope with her brood of hungry and restless young children. “Find out where we get them.”

  After a few moments Gail turns around from the neighboring boat, her face pale and scared.

  “It’s hopeless.” Gail slumps down on the deck. Everyone stares across the boats to the impenetrable wall of New Mungo.

  “There must be some kind of aid from the city,” says Rowan. “They can’t keep us out here with no food and water.”

  “Of course they can,” cries Brenna, nursing a limp and pale toddler. “Why should they care? We should have stayed with the old folk on the island, all together, where we belonged. We’ll die anyway in these rotten seas.”

  I wish we had stayed on the island too, Mara silently cries, as an outburst of panic and anger explodes around her. Anything but this.

  In the midsummer night that never quite grows dark,
New Mungo cloaks itself in mist. Its shadows lengthen across the water and the people of the boats grow quiet as the city’s brilliance turns sinister, menacing. While the other refugees huddle under mothy tarpaulins, plastic coverings and blankets, Mara jumps from boat to boat, calling desperately for her parents, peering through the dim twilight for the arrival of any new boats.

  The city glints under the midsummer blue of a star-sprinkled sky. It’s awesome, beautiful, an impossible thing. Mara gazes up, puzzling over the many strange, coiling mechanisms attached to the edges of the towers and the sky tunnels. They whirl in the wind, filling the air with ghostly moans and whispers. As she studies the vast geometry of the city, she feels a spark of her old curiosity. What kind of people could dream up such a thing?

  Whoever they are, the cyberfox is one of them.

  Where are you, Fox? she wonders. Are you really up there? How can I get up there too? And if I did, would I ever be able to find you?

  In the middle of the night there’s a clamor that sounds like the end of the world. Mara wakens with a start from her cocoon of blanket. A great swarm of police speedboats and waterbikes buzz around the city wall. Lights flash, sirens scream. Everyone is looking out to sea and as Mara looks too she sees the lights of a great white ship. As it draws close to the city the police send volleys of gunfire into the sky as a warning. Everyone keeps their heads down but as Mara peers upward from the floor of the boat she sees a crack open in the city wall. The crack widens and Mara cannot help it—she stands up to look.