Exodus (4 page)

“Maybe lots of people wonder,” says Rowan. “We just don't talk about it. But Tain's right, we need to know what's out there.”

“I don't know what to think,” Mara confesses.

A great boom of sea hits the island.

“I must go!” Mara panics, gives Gail a frantic good-bye hug, and runs upstairs where she bumps into Kate, Gail and Rowan's mother, who is bolting up the front door.

“Mara Bell! What on earth are you doing here? Get on home right now! Your mother will be frantic!” Kate talks at the same helter-skelter speed as Gail, only with considerably more volume. “Rowan! Rowan! Come up here and see Mara halfway home! Hurry! Get a waterproof on! And watch how you go! Keep well away from that sea! I don't want either of you drowned, do you hear me?”

“The whole island hears you, Mother!” Rowan mutters as he and Mara escape Kate's onslaught and race out into the storm. As they run across the hillside an immense bolt of lightning turns the moment white and the skies explode with hailstones.

Side by side they battle through, shielding their faces with hands that are soon stinging from the pelt of the hail. The field of windmills is a maelstrom of ferociously whirling blades. Mara sees her father out on the hillside, watching anxiously for her. Guiltily, she turns to say good-bye to Rowan but he clutches her arm. The backs of his hands, like hers, are now raw.

“You think those cities really are out there?” he asks. His face is scrunched up against the storm; he has to shout to be heard.

“
Mara!
”

Mara peers up the hillside. Even at this distance and through billows of hail she can tell that Coll, her father, is furious with her for staying out in the storm.

She turns to go but Rowan still grips her arm.

“Do you believe in them?” he persists.

“I want to,” she shouts up at him, answering honestly. “But I need more than Tain has told me. I need—I need evidence. All this talk of miracles and giant cities…” Mara tries to shield her face from a horizontal blast of hail. “It sounds like something out of one of your books of fairy tales.”

There's a wet streak of blood on Rowan's brow where a hailstone has struck; it trickles down into his blue eyes. He puts his mouth close to her ear. “Maybe—maybe people make up something to believe in when they
need
something to believe in,” he says.

Mara nods bleakly, then grabs him in a hard hug before she turns to run home.

“Take care!” she shouts over the roar of the wind.

In the second before she is hauled into the house, Mara sees Rowan—like a ghost in a crack of white lightning—running against a wall of black sea.

The storm roars day after day and night after night, as if the island is at the mercy of a battering giant.

“Fe fi fo fum! Huff and puff and blow your house down!” Mara's little brother, Corey, chants from downstairs, muddling up his fairy tales. “But the storm won't get us, will it, Mom? Our house is made of stone.”

Mara leans her head against her bedroom window and feels the storm hurl itself against the thick wooden shutter, vibrating the glass pane. This trapped existence is torture. She feels like a wild bird in a cage. I
need
to be outside, she frets, pacing the room. She imagines herself smashing the window with her bare fist and tearing off the storm shutter to leap out into the immense fury of the wind.

She stops and stares at the imprisoning walls of her room. Restlessly, she toys with the apple-sized globe that lies on her windowsill alongside its tiny wand and crescent-shaped halo. The cyberwizz—her globe, wand, and halo—the only things that stop her dying of boredom, she's quite sure. The cyberwizz is freedom, escape, release.

Mara scoops up the globe. Palm-snug yet weighty, it has the feel of glass but a look of burnished metal. At her touch the globe begins to tingle, activated by the electric
charge of her body. Colors start to swirl across its surface like clouds or shadows and a glow emanates from the core of the globe as its tiny solar rods power up.

With a thumb and forefinger, Mara presses on the hinges that are placed on opposite poles of the globe and in one smooth motion it breaks open to form two half spheres. The flat surface of one half is a compact keyboard, the other a blank screenpad.

Mara slips the crescent-shaped halo over her eyes to make a sleek visor. She picks up the little silver cyber-wand, taps a swift command upon the tiny keyboard, then scribbles a series of cryptic symbols upon the screenpad—the beautiful, complex language the cyberwizz has taught her, that merges alphabet, hieroglyph, and number. The symbols gleam and fade, each one superseded almost instantly by another. Over the years, Mara has picked up cyberwizzdom with the greed and instinct of an animal on the scent of a hunt.

The cyberwizz powers into action. The halo glows and the swirling colors of the globe quicken and intensify. Mara stares into the halo, consumed by the vision she has called up. Excitement surges through her limbs as she exits realworld and plunges into cyberspace.

And the magic begins…

Mara zips and zooms
.

Wizzing far beyond realworld
.

Fast and free in the glittering strands of the Weave
.

Joy-rush is amazing. Mara verves down a shimmering vertical strand to land on a wide electronic boulevard that's lined with buzzing, sparking towerstacks—colossal Weavesites that reach ever upward and onward
.

Up ahead on the boulevard, a gang of hazard spiders scuttle out, flashing red for danger. Alert for oncoming hazards, Mara sees none and spurns the red spiders with ease. Her path ahead seems clear. But in the Weave things are rarely as they seem. Every one of its glittering electronic strands splits into infinite possibility, an endless unfolding of choices
.

In cyberspace there are no rules, no limits. Anything might happen
.

Mara zooms onward, ready and alert. She keeps a wary eye on the dark alleys between the towerstacks, on the lookout for the sleek, sly stalker that she sometimes senses. She never manages to catch more than a glimpse of whoever or whatever it is—just the glint of watchful eyes and a stealthy presence in the shadows that sends shivers down her spine
.

Now the great boulevard breaks into sudden rubble. Here, mighty towerstacks have crumbled into giant junk heaps. Mara scoots up one to see what she can find among the ruins. At the peak of the flickering junk mountain she sits down and sighs with pleasure
.

It's beautiful, so beautiful
.

The Weave glitters all around, as far as she can see. A vast datascape. The electronic knit of a billion computers. From here, on the top of the junk mountain, it looks stunning, but Mara knows that up close those glittering strands are bleak ruins and wasted boulevards. Their brilliance comes from the great spill of electronic litter that leaks from all the Weavesites. In the lonely back alleys behind the main strands and in the giant shadows of the tumbledown towerstacks, these rotting heaps of electronic rubbish have somehow sparked their own lifeforces to mutate
into the strangest forms—weird Weave-creatures born of decay and chaos
.

The Weave is wild and savage. Thrilling and scary. Here Mara owns a freedom that's impossible in real-world
.

It's the best place ever
.

Mara snaps to sudden attention. Something's happening. Something big. A raid? An attack? By whom, what? She feels the electric surge race across the network of communication strands. Whatever it is, it's coming straight for her. She scrambles from her exposed position on the data mountain but is only halfway down when it hits
.

A pack of flying cyberdogs
.

Fast and furious, short wings crackling, electronic jaws agape, and jagged teeth glinting, they spit their venomous froth of data-decay. They'll rip her to shreds. Mara grips her cyberwand, furiously dodging, desperately trying to keep her hands and head steady as the cyberdogs snarl and snap around her. She keys a frantic command into the cyberwizz…

… and zaps them all to bits. Shards of electronic dog scatter satisfyingly all across the Weave
.

Venomous stuff! A truly elegant kill
.

Her moment of glory lasts just long enough for her to zip onto a bridge that rises up out of the ruins. One instant she is zooming along the bridge path, zinging with joy, the next the bridge crumbles into nothing and she is hurtling off its broken end—down, down, down into a meltdown of electronic blue
.

Backtrack—now!

But she can't. She's out of control and there's nothing she can do to stop. She crashes head over heels through
the strands of the Weave. On and on she tumbles, falling helplessly, until at last the glittering strands end
.

Amazed, Mara hurtles into dark, unknown regions of cyberspace. She has fallen right out of the Weave
.

A giant, glistening coil looms up, surrounded by darkness. She must slow down—she's going to crash. But some vast magnetic force is pulling her onward and with a great
whoosh
the coil sucks her in and now she's zooming helter-skelter down a spiraling silver vortex—or is it up?

Just when it seems the crazy helter-skelter will never end, Mara shoots out into a crackling haze of ice blue static, so blinding it must have fire at its heart
.

Wow
.

Amazing
.

She slows to a soft tumble. Something vast glints, then is lost again in the blaze of icefire. Mara stares as the vision glints and fades, glints and fades. She concentrates harder and the hazy vision forms into a thick trunk of unimaginably colossal towers, topped by a ferocious geometry of networks and connections. It looks like a gigantic crystal tree
.

Mara stares wide-eyed, stunned by the vast, unearthly beauty of it. She tries to move forward but doesn't know how. How do you move through an ocean of static? The haze around the crystal tree-towers shimmers intensely, seems to rise up like a wall. Then Mara sees—it is a wall, a massive guard shield. Still, there must be a way
through. There's always some tiny glitch that an ace wizzer like Mara can trick a way through
.

But this is not the Weave. This is the unknown. The majestic towers look like something out of a fairy tale
.

“Once upon a time,” Mara whispers, thrilling at the words that always began a story. “Once upon a time, in a time out of mind…”

Her whisper radiates ripples in the ice blue static. The most incredible thought strikes
.

“Who are you?” a voice demands out of the blue, sending jagged shock waves through the cyberhaze
.

Mara jumps in fright and looks all around. There's no one to be seen
.

“Who are you?” the voice demands again; a husky, hungry voice. “And what do you know about once upon a time?”

“I'm Mara,” she whispers nervously, searching frantically for the source of the voice. “Who are you? Where are you?”

“I've been watching you for a while,” is the only reply
.

Shivers run down Mara's spine as she senses the stealthy presence that must be the sly stalker, the one who's been tracking her, shadowing her movements on the Weave. But how on Earth did he—it sounds like a he—follow her here? Mara's heart thumps as something begins to form in the cyberhaze. A pair of disembodied, untamed eyes stare at her through the blue. Mara stares back in fright. Two sharp points appear above them. Ears? Now, below the eyes, a long white streak tipped in black forms into a doglike muzzle. There's the sudden flash of a tawny tail…

A fox! Mara has a fleeting memory of the realworld fox that ravaged Wing's lambs and chickens before it was
finally trapped and killed… but what on Earth is a fox doing way out here?