Firespark

by Julie Bertagna

  “Don’t you remember this place?”

  Mara looks around her, at the flickering towerstacks, at the cracked and buzzing street name. After the cold, dark tunnels and the unearthliness of the moon cave, it’s a relief to plunge back into the familiar world of the Weave with Fox.

  BOULEVARD OF something, says the flickering ice-blue sign. Mara peers hard and sees that the unlit last word is DREAMS. A crack runs right through the word and the blue light has died in that part of the sign, as though the dream is dead.

  “This is the boulevard where I first saw you,” says Fox.

  “It was?”

  Mara remembers the creeping Fox presence that haunted her Weave visits when she would zoom down the boulevards for fun, her realworld self safe in her bedroom in Wing. Now, that not-so-distant past seems like someone else’s life.

  Fox has stopped outside one of the Weavesites.

  “In here.”

  “WORLD WIND.” Mara reads the faded name that flickers on the the towerstack.

  “It’s a wind that blows you all around the world.” Fox pauses. “I found it the other night when you didn’t come. Spent half the night just wandering the Weave. Most of this boulevard’s rotted or dead, but this site’s ace. You ready? Here we go …”

  The Weavesite crackles and Mara gasps as she’s sucked into the whirl of a cyberstream. In the second it takes to yell Fox’s name, she has whooshed right through the cyberstream and shoots out into calm black space. She draws a breath, swallows, blinks.

  Looming up before her is a vast glowing gem.

  “Planet Earth,” says a voice in her ear.

  They are floating in black space. Mara wants to grab Fox’s hand, then remembers she can’t. She stares up at the amazing vision.

  “This is Earth?”

  She can hardly breathe as she takes in the beauty of the glowing, gemlike planet: the stunning blue of the oceans, the brown and green of its lands and ice-crusted mountains and white ice caps, all wrapped in swirls of cloud. It’s hard to believe that in realworld she is sitting in a cave deep in the mountains in the dark of winter at the tip of such a vivid world.

  Fox is watching her, not the planet. The glow of the Earth reflects in his cybereyes. But she can feel his real self looking at her. Can he feel her too?

  “But—but how is this possible?” she whispers. “To see the Earth …?”

  “Satellite images,” says Fox. “Remember, the old satellites all around the Earth that hold the Weave? This is an image of the Earth taken from the moon, long ago. Look, there’s the date.” Above them, a label hangs in the ether. “THE EARTH PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE MOON, JULY 20, 1969.”

  Mara laughs. “People went to the moon? And I suppose it was made of cheese?”

  “Cheese?” Fox looks at her askance.

  “When I was small,” Mara explains, “my mom used to tell me the moon was made of cheese. People thought it was, once.”

  “Once upon a time,” says Fox. “In a time out of mind.”

  They float in space, the bright Earthgem in front of them, the words tingling between them.

  Mara breaks the spell.

  “People really did go to the moon?”

  “Once upon a time, they did.” Fox’s voice drifts. He’s staring at Mara, and she knows he’s thinking of their once upon a time. He looks away and when he speaks it’s with a forced matter-of-factness. “Okay, there’s a wind-shuttle here somewhere that we can navigate with and if I can just instruct my godgem—”

  The slow-spinning planet and the disorienting whirl of black space have begun to make Mara feel queasy.

  “Fox.”

  “—we can go for a whirl around the Earth.”

  Mara swallows her queasiness as a craft that looks like a shiny beetle with wings zooms toward them. They board the wind-shuttle and begin to orbit the Earth, crossing blue expanses of ocean, surfing the undulating plains and mountains of its lands, speckled with the cluttered mosaics of cities.

  Fox zooms in closer and now the occasional shock of noise, an image or a disembodied voice flashes up from the planet below.

  “What was that?” gasps Mara, as a rumbling line of tanks appear and vanish.

  “TI-ANAN-MEN SQUARE.” Fox reads the sign that flashes up with the tanks. “It’s old message flags. Historical stuff.” He shrugs. “Don’t really know. Wind-shuttlers—people of the old world who used this site—left all sorts of blogs and flags and messages. Wow, did you see that?”

  A mushroom cloud billows up. In the distance, a tidal wave crashes on a raft of islands, obliterating the land. Ahead, cracks appear in the mountains and the Earth shudders.

  “Nuclear bomb, tsunami, earthquake.” Fox reads the flags at each event. They pass over the bombed ruins of several countries. Mara can’t read the messages on the tattered flags but a great wail of despair rises from the smoking remains.

  “Fox, stop, this is—”

  He veers away. Far beneath the wind-shuttle, a great wall crashes down.

  “—horrible.”

  A vast continent in the middle of the Earth seems dead. There are no noisy messages from the past here, just a mass of silent flags.

  HELP, they say, SEND AID, and a solitary one, TOO LATE.

  “Stop,” Mara pleads. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Fox nods, his mouth set in a grim line. He pulls the wind-shuttle back from the Earth. The planet looks calm and beautiful once more.

  “We’ll go north,” he says, sounding shaken, and revs the craft to full speed.

  The empty blue of the ocean is a relief. Mara’s stomach settles a little as they zoom across it. She draws breath as the white-capped top of the world comes into view.

  “Is that really what the old world was like?”

  “It’s not all like that,” says Fox. “I promise. We must’ve been at the wrong altitude and picked up all the bad stuff. There are loads of amazing things too. Just wait.”

  “… ice caps melting twice as fast as feared …” A disembodied voice crackles in the ether, then fades.

  “What was that?” Mara almost grabs Fox by the arm. “Go back.”

  Fox pulls the wind-shuttle into reverse and tracks the lone voice.

  “… we may be on the edge … not much time left …” The voice seems to be coming from one of the satellites marked NASA. This one hangs above the northern hemisphere.

  “… all countries must stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide … can’t wait, must act … flooded Earth would be an alien planet … armadas of icebergs, rising oceans … the end of civilization … how long have we got?”

  Fox revs the wind-shuttle.

  “They knew,” says Mara.

  Another surge of nausea hits her.

  Fox leans closer. “It was a hundred years ago, Mara. It’s history.”

  “But they knew. They could’ve done something but they didn’t. They knew. They didn’t think about the future, did they? They never thought about us.”

  The nausea turns violent. Mara doesn’t know whether it’s Fox’s zip-zooming navigation or all those terrible message flags from history, but she needs to get back to realworld, fast.

  “Fox. Stop.”

  His electronic eyes flash at her.

  “I need to go back.”

  “Go back? Where?”

  “Home. I mean, realworld. Out of here.”

  “Why?”

  He looks as if he’ll grab her if she tries to leave. Then remembers he can’t.

  “Mara, there’s beautiful stuff too—the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China. The patterns of the old-world cities are stunning. I’ve seen things that are more amazing than anything in the Noos. The sun rising over the Himalayas. A massive river that slides through a jungle like a silver snake. A land full of castles and towers and forests and lakes. A million pink flamingos sweeping across a lake like a flame. And elephants—Mara, elephants and animals you can’t imagine were ever real. A black pool of penguins on an ice shelf at the botto
m of the world. And I was going to show you Greenland. We’re nearly there.”

  “I need to go. I’m sorry.”

  He looks at her blankly as she exits the wind-shuttle and spins away through black space into the crackling cyberstream.

  Just in time, Mara yanks the halo from her eyes and crashes back into realworld. And promptly throws up.

  “Mara?”

  Mol puts a cool hand on Mara’s forehead. “No fever. What’s wrong?”

  “All this seaweed and fish. Doesn’t agree with me,” Mara croaks. She goes over to the hot spring to scrub herself clean. Poor Fox. She remembers the bewilderment in his eyes.

  “But you’re an island girl,” says Mol. “You must have eaten lots of seaweed and fish.”

  Mara lies down on her seaweed mat. Mol is right, but she’s too sick to try to answer. She closes her eyes and tries to quell the queasiness by imagining she has zipped out of realworld and is with Fox again, gazing at the vast, glowing gem that is Earth.

  THE WRECK OF THE WORLD

  Mara yawns and stretches, soothed from a long dip in the hot spring after a sleep so deep it might have lasted a month. As she dries herself on one of the scratchy seaweed mats, she sees Tuck studying a dim nook of the cave by the light of a torch flame. There’s an intensity about the way he is peering at the wall that makes Mara go over. For the first time she sees there are carvings etched in the rock.

  “There were rock carvings on Wing,” she remembers. “Circles and spirals all over the standing stones. Ancient stuff—nobody knew what it meant.”

  “These are old but not ancient.”

  Tuck rubs the words that are carved into the rock and shows her the charcoal stain on his fingertip. Mara hears the trembling in his breath. She looks at the words in the rock.

  THE WRECK OF THE WORLD.

  Mara takes the torch from Tuck.

  The carving shows a vision of the sun beating down on what must have been a great city. There are towering buildings, streets crammed with cars and people, a sky crisscrossed with winged objects and their smoky trails. Mara remembers the broken bird on the mountain. Planes. Beside the city, tall chimneys in a field belch a dirty cloud. Mara moves the torch flame along the wall. The city seems unaware of what is rolling toward it—a wave, seething with people and animals and the debris of a destroyed city. Mara peers into the wave. Carved into the great swirl of water are what look like bits of paper, each one marked with (Mara peers even closer to be sure) the very same sign that is branded on her arm.

  The snake on a stick.

  Mara tries to think what the sign could mean but she has no idea.

  The torch flame flickers on a bus full of people. The luminous cave wall makes them glow like ghosts. Yet the carving is so detailed that Mara can see the open, screaming mouths of the people as the great wave threatens to swallow the bus. She remembers the wrecked bus the urchins played in on the remains of a sunken bridge in the netherworld.

  It’s as if the world is a wrecked ship and all that is left is the flotsam of the past.

  Mara drops the torch and leans her head against the rock wall, nauseous once again. Her imagination reels with the horror of what it must have been like.

  A hand pulls up her chin. The wet lip of a bottle touches her lips.

  “I’m all right,” she mutters crossly.

  Tuck picks up the torch from the floor and blows gently on it to revive the flame. “Don’t throw up on me again, eh?” he teases.

  Mara shakes her head and manages a smile. She takes a gulp from Tuck’s water bottle, catching his eye as she hands it back.

  “What’s sickening you?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” she retorts. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “You’re sick a lot.”

  “The sea made me sick. Now the food—”

  “You’ve been Landed a while now,” Tuck persists. “Two, three moons?”

  Even the rise and fall of his gypsea voice makes her feel seasick.

  “How do I know? It’s all this fish and seaweed, it’s turning my stomach. And the eggs.”

  Mara steers her thoughts back to the carvings on the cave wall. Even they are preferable to the thought of an egg.

  But, like Mol, Tuck won’t swallow that.

  “An ocean girl from an island can’t stomach fish and eggs?”

  Tears prickle Mara’s eyes. “I don’t know what it is.” She takes back the torch, scrubs her eyes with her sleeve. “Let me see the rest of this.”

  Beyond the great wave is a carving of a child. The hair suggests it’s a girl. Mara peers closer and traces the faint outline of a halo around the child’s head.

  “It’s your magic machine.” There’s a crackle of excitement in Tuck’s voice as he points. “See?”

  Mara stares at the cave wall, unnerved. The child is cradling a globe. Ah, but it’s not her globe. Mara touches the intricate patterns carved into the child’s globe and knows what it is.

  “It’s the Earth.”

  “The Earth?” Tuck’s eyes glitter. The torch flame catches the salt crystals that seem to be ingrained forever in his hair, on his eyelashes, even in the down of his face. “It really is round like Grumpa said.”

  Mara nods. She runs across the cave to dig out her backpack from the heap of mats that are her bed. She has had an idea. “Tuck, listen …”

  She hesitates. What would happen if they bumped into Fox? But would they? It’s hard enough to find him when she wants to. She has been trying endlessly to find him in the Weave to explain about her odd exit from the World Wind. But she can no longer gauge, so deep in the mountain in this season of endless night, whether long days or even weeks have passed since then. It’s long enough for her nails to have grown again though she keeps chewing them down to the quick. Surely they are unlikely to bump into Fox if she avoids the bridge.

  Anyway, Tuck is just a friend, isn’t he?

  “I’ll show you the Earth,” she decides.

  Tuck looks blank, of course, and she tries to explain. “It’s a place I can go with the cyberwizz, a site that shows the Earth the way it used to be. People took pictures of it from the moon over a hundred years ago.”

  Now Tuck looks at her as if she’s crazy. Mara laughs.

  “That’s what I thought but it’s true. People once went to the moon.”

  “They had wings?” Now he’s laughing with her.

  Mara pulls the cyberwizz from her bag and begins to power it up.

  “Oh no.”

  The globe should charge up right away, at a touch, but it takes a long, dead moment to work up a pitiful glow. Mara’s heart sinks. The power is running out. The solar rods inside the globe need a blast of sun, but she is deep inside a mountain and the outside world is in the thick of the longest night of the Far North, a night that spans the whole winter, without a glimpse of sun. Blankets of icy fog make it hard to see the moon or the stars from the cave mouth. It’s impossible to keep track of time. Finding midnight, that single point in the night, when the world around her is all night, has become a blind guess in the dark.

  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 et
her and it’s never enough.

  Tuck’s right here though. Mara can hear the fear in 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 keeppocket, 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?