“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.
But she has Rowan. He is the last link with her island people and the life she lost. She has the Treenesters too and the urchins. She must keep reminding herself of what she still has in the world because what is lost is more than she can bear.
“We missed it in the dark,” said Rowan. “We reached New Mungo at sunrise, remember? It was only when I was working on the sea bridge that I saw there were highlands and found out it was a New World colony.”
That spell of slave labor has wrecked him. Mara wishes she could magic back the old Rowan: quick-witted, never-say-die Rowan, who explored worlds through his hoard of books. Not this broken boy, who, like her, has lost his world.
He’s watching her as she looks at the endless sea, trying to catch the tails of her thoughts. He always could, just as she could always sense the weather of his moods. Now, Rowan’s misery engulfs her like an icy wind.
“We’d never find it, Mara.”
He means Wing, their island, where Tain and the other old ones were abandoned to the rising sea.
“We could try.” Her voice cracks. It’s an empty hope.
A wave thunders onto the deck, crashing over Rowan’s head and knocking Mara off her feet. Another sends her shooting across the deck until she smashes into the wall of the control cabin. Weak as he is, Rowan scutters across the slippery deck and grabs her. Together, they scramble into the shelter of the cabin.
Mara rubs a bashed shoulder, shakes soaking hair out of her eyes.
“You want to play hide-and-seek with an island and a great big ship?” Rowan wipes his streaming face on his arm. “In a sea like this?”
They are sailing across the very ocean their island lies in yet it’s impossible to find it and rescue anyone who might have survived. Like so much of the Earth’s land, Wing might already have slipped into oblivion under the waves.
Mara looks at the switches and buttons of the control deck, at the flashing numbers and symbols on the radar screen. Fox programmed the navigation disk to take them due north; beyond that, they are on their own.
The reek of the ocean fills the cabin. Rowan thumps a fist on the control deck. Seawater splashes from his hair into bitter blue eyes and drips onto the radar screen like tears.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Very special thanks to Tony Bradman for a phenomenal wait for the Future Story that became this one; Graham Sim for a forest of reading and inspired lanterns in the margins, so far beyond the great wizard hat; Elspeth King’s The Thenew Factor; Keith Gray and his phone bill; my editor, Sarah Davies, for her act of faith; Caroline Walsh, and to Riccardo and Natalie for their love.
Copyright © 2002 by Julie Bertagna
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Young Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Limited
Published in the United States of America in 2008 as Exodus
by Walker Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Revised e-book edition published in February 2013
www.bloomsbury.com
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Corrina for permission to reproduce material from
External Moment by Sandy Weores, Anvil Press Poetry, 1987, Ed.
Miklos Vajda, Transl. Edwin Morgan, William Jay Smith
Illustrations © David Newton
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Walker BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Bertagna, Julie.
Exodus / Julie Bertagna.
p. cm.
Summary: In the year 2100, as the island of Wing is about to be covered by water, fifteen-year-old Mara discovers the existence of New World sky cities that are safe from the storms and rising waters, and convinces her people to travel to one of these cities in order to save themselves.
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 3. Altruism—Fiction. 4. Global warming—Fiction. 5. Floods—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B4627Exo 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007023116
ISBN: 978-0-8027-3404-4 (e-book)
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