Zenith Read online

  Rowan is frowning into the wind. ‘This Fox . . .’

  Mara’s heart skips a beat, but she is rescued from questions she is not ready to answer by a sudden cry. She turns to see her friend, Broomielaw, struggling across the heaving deck with her baby in his papoose on her back.

  ‘What if the world is all ocean?’ says Broomielaw, crashing into Mara. They grip on to each other as the ship rolls up over a wave. The other girl’s large eyes are shadowed and scared. ‘What if there’s no land? What if this is all there is? Ocean and ocean and ocean. I don’t like it, Mara. I hate this wild world. I wish we were all back inside the wall on the Hill of Doves, safe and sound in our trees.’

  Mara keeps a steadying arm across the sleep-slumped baby on Broomielaw’s back.

  ‘You weren’t safe,’ she reminds her friend. ‘The sea was rising. Sooner or later, it’ll swallow up the Hill of Doves just like it swallowed my island, and then what would you have done? There’s land, Broomielaw, I’m sure there is, at the top of the world. It’s in my book.’

  ‘What if it’s a drowned land too?’

  It chills Mara’s heart, that thought.

  ‘And it’s only the word of an old b—’ Broomielaw grimaces as if she’s swallowed an insect and spits out the word ‘–book. What’s that worth? You shouldn’t trust those things.’

  ‘You lot 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 off 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 further and further upland towards 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 towards 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 adrenalin 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 grey 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 on to 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 air ships. 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 stairs 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 high lands and found out it was a New World colony.’

  That spell of slave labour 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 on to 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 on to the radar screen like tear
s.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING

  ‘The sea is killing me.’

  Gorbals the Treenester hangs over the side of the ship, making a noise like a clogged drain. His face is as grey as the day. A spell of slave labour in New Mungo has left him a shaven-headed ragbag of bones, just like Rowan. But Rowan is a sea-hardy boy, used to the ocean. Gorbals has only ever known the dank waters of the netherworld within New Mungo’s walls.

  Mara rubs his shoulder. ‘You’re alive. Remember how much you wanted to be free in the world.’

  Gorbals groans and grips the ship’s rail as they ride an ocean surge. ‘I never thought the free world would feel so bad.’

  A band of urchins barges past, almost toppling him over the rail.

  ‘Time we boiled them up and had them for supper.’ Gorbals eyes the urchins grimly. ‘Though the little rats would be tough even if you boiled them till sundown.’

  ‘They’re just kids gone wild,’ says Mara, though she is as exasperated as everyone else. Abandoned by the world, the urchins survived like human water rats under the bridges and in the drowned ruins around New Mungo. They seem almost as much animal as human with their thick, feral skin and wordless grunts. Yet they touch Mara’s heart. Despite their wild nature the little ones, especially Wing, remind her of Corey, the young brother she lost.

  Ibrox, the Treenester’s firekeeper, taps Mara on the shoulder. ‘They’ve got your bag.’

  Mara glances down at her feet. Her backpack is gone.

  ‘Oh, the little . . . hey! Come back here.’

  But the urchins have vanished, along with her bag.

  ‘My backpack – it’s got everything . . .’

  Her cyberwizz, the precious books, all her treasured things.

  ‘Pollock and Possil,’ says Ibrox. ‘They’re your men. They could hunt out a black beetle in the dead of night.’

  Pollock and Possil are found down in the hold, fighting through scuffling refugees to grab a share of food for the Treenesters from the ship’s cargo of crates. Crammed with packs of dried foodstuffs, tins and water, the crates are being emptied as fast as they are broken open. Glad to escape the mayhem, they set on the trail of Mara’s bag.

  Just as Mara is growing frantic, Possil brings it back to her. Pollock has the squirming culprit by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘Want me to wring his skinny neck?’ he asks, looking hopeful.

  ‘Let him go,’ says Mara, though right now she wouldn’t mind doing it herself. ‘They don’t know right from wrong. They’ve had no one to look after them.’

  Pollock narrows his eyes. ‘I’ll look after them – I’ll truss them up like a puck of rabbits and teach them what’s what.’

  The urchin growls like a wild dog.

  ‘You’ll look after them?’ Gorbals gives a hard laugh that ends in a sickly gurgle as the ship heaves over a wave. ‘You don’t even look after your own child.’

  Pollock releases the urchin and strides over to Broomielaw and Clayslaps. He pulls a packet from a pocket of his tattered clothes, rips it open and gives a bar of food to his baby son. Clayslaps grabs the sticky bar and puts it to his mouth with a delighted squawk.

  ‘Just as well Clayslaps doesn’t have you for a father.’ Pollock throws a sneer at Gorbals, who gives another nauseous groan over the side of the ship. ‘What use would you be, you wet rag?’

  ‘Will you two never stop?’ mutters Broomielaw.

  Mara exchanges a glance with Molendinar.

  ‘Once we’re settled, that lot will have to sort themselves out.’ Mol shakes her head. ‘Clay can’t grow up with Pollock and Gorbals squabbling over his mother all the time.’

  Despair crumples Broomielaw’s soft face yet Mara feels a pang of envy. Broomielaw has a chance to heal the rift between her and Gorbals. Unlike herself and Fox, they have a whole future to sort themselves out.

  But those kinds of thoughts engulf Mara in a misery she cannot bear. She must focus on here and now.

  ‘Stroma?’ She frowns down at the mucky urchin that Pollock set free. The child’s face is layered in so much grime it’s hard to tell who it is. Back in the netherworld, Mara named each urchin after the islands now lost to the sea. Isn’t this Stroma? Or is it Hoy?

  ‘Oy!’ shouts the urchin.

  ‘Hoy.’ Mara smiles at the bedraggled child, then remembers he’s the pest who took her bag.

  She rummages in the backpack, checking her precious possessions, one by one. The book on Greenland is safe and so is Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities; she found both in the wrecked book rooms of the old university tower in the netherworld sea. The tiny black meterorite from the ruined museum, older than Earth itself, is safe too. And here are the gifts old Candleriggs gave her when she fled the drowned city – a bottle of fizzy amber drink and a pair of red shoes. There are only crumbly fragments left of the sprig of herbs she took from the kitchen at home on Wing, but the bag is filled with the green, head-clearing scent of rosemary, her mother’s namesake, and every time she opens it the ghost of her mother seems to waft through her.

  Two things are missing: Gorbals’s book of charcoal-scribbled poems; she left them with Fox. And the bone dagger – Mara doesn’t want to remember what she did with that.

  But the most important thing of all is safe.

  Mara takes out an apple-sized globe from her bag and cradles it in her palm. The cyberwizz is a relic of the old technology. When the oceans rose and devastated the Earth, the vast datascape of the lost world was left in cyberspace. The Weave still hangs there like a cobweb in an abandoned house, a ghostly electronic network suspended between old satellites around the Earth. Once upon a time, cyberwizzing through the sparking boulevards of the Weave was a game for Mara. Now, it’s her only connection with Fox.

  The globe tingles to life at her touch. Colours drift across its surface like hazy clouds and the solar rods glow at its core. Mara clicks opens the globe and checks the small screen, keypad and wand inside. She digs into her bag and finds the halo, a sleek crescent that is her visor.

  All fine.

  She lets out a long breath. Tonight, the cyberwizz will be her escape. It will zip her out of the nightmare of realworld, deep into the Weave, where Fox will be waiting for her on the bridge.

  That’s her hope. Her dread is that he never got out of New Mungo or made it down to the netherworld, safe and sound.

  Tonight, she’ll find out.

  A TRUE DUBYA

  It’s the looted salt that saves Tuck at the very last second from the lethal little knife at his throat.

  He grabs a handful from the pocket of his windwrap and flings a crackle of salt. There’s a roar as it hits the man in the eyes. The salt-knife slips from Tuck’s throat. The instant the arm-lock loosens from his neck, Tuck breaks free.

  His long, lean legs outrun the Salter’s short, sturdy ones easy enough, but Tuck’s a stride too far from the short suspension bridge that links to the next barge. Panic is a bad judge. He gambles on a leap. Against the odds he makes it but crash-lands on the bridge and hears his ankle crack. Now he has to hobble through a red blaze of pain. He struggles across the rusted wire bridge that links to his own barge. At last he’s home on The Grimby Gray.

  He’d be safer still if he was where he should be once the curfew bell has rung – inside his ramshackle barge shack, tucked up in his bunk. But Tuck’s never one for doing what he should. So he hauls himself up on to the shack roof, his bad ankle jangling with pain, and scans the dark decks of the barges, just in case the Salter is lurking somewhere. But the decks are quiet and still.

  He’ll stay up here until his heart and his breathing calm. Ma doesn’t want to hear him huffing and puffing. She knows fine well what he does. How else does he get his hands on all those extra rations of lamp oil, the baskets of smoked oysters and crabs, the best catch of the sea every day, not to mention those gluggets of seagrape beer Ma likes so much? Patching bridges and roof shacks? He’d earn grit for that. Great at fooling herself, is Ma. Her
mind shuts snap-hard as an oyster shell if there’s something she doesn’t want to know. It’s not the deaths that made her like that; it’s just the way she is. But she never used to guzzle a glugget of seagrape bitterbeer every night.

  She’s had a good glug tonight, he can tell; she’s snoring like one of the old dogs that snooze around the lagoon. The noise rattles the shack roof. Tuck knots his windwrap tight around him and lies on his back with only the blanket of the night sky above.

  Better off up here.

  He’s still there when a slice of sunrise, thin as a wire, prises open his sleep-locked eyes. Tuck thinks he’s in his bunk, turns away from the light, rolls off the roof and lands with a crash among the two buckets of looted eels he’s forgotten he left outside the shack the other night.

  ‘Urth!’ he curses.

  Landed right on his bad ankle too.

  ‘Tuck?’

  Ah, now Ma’s up. And the buckets are spilt, the eels splattering on to the deck.

  ‘Sodden Urth.’

  ‘Tuck!’

  There’s a weary creak of wood as Ma struggles out of her bunk. She fiddles with the broken window latch, the one she’s been asking him to fix for many a moon, and pushes the shutters open.

  ‘Whassall the racket?’ she croaks, rubbing bleary eyes. She spies Tuck among the spilt eels. ‘In the name of The Man! You’d better catch those eels, Tuck, before I grab you by the neck and . . .’

  Tuck doesn’t wait to hear what she’ll do. He runs a string of curses through his teeth as he limps along the deck of the barge, crashing into neighbouring shacks, tripping over fishing gear, seaweed stacks, pot plants and all kinds of junk, trying to catch the tail end of an eel.

  He’s just about to close his fingers on one when next-door’s cat darts between his feet and trips him up. Now he’s flat on his face, his bad ankle on fire, and it’s too late.

  The eels slick down a drain. Tuck hears the slither and plop as they escape back into the sea.

  No eels, a few crumbs of salt in his pocket, a druxy ankle and there’s no one to blame but himself.