Firespark (34 page)

Great Skua, he's through!

Bashed and smashed and scraped and bruised, yet he's wormed out of the Earth just like he used to wriggle out of a Salter's grip. He was lucky too. His little nook was near the edge of the landslide and after an age of tunneling he made his escape.

Now he's stuck in the blind dark. Tuck tries not to panic and feels in the pockets of his windwrap for the little silver firebox he looted from Ibrox. His trembling fingers fumble uselessly on the switch, again and again, until finally the miracle of a tiny flame burns a bright hole in the dark.

Tuck whimpers with relief. He limps around the cave, hurting his crushed foot, but it doesn't matter, he's free! Well, nearly. He scrambles across rubble, kicking up dust, searching for an exit tunnel, and begging The Man, though he's an ocean away by now, to help him find a way out. And he does! Tuck's tiny flame shivers on the upside-down grin of a skull. Tuck grabs it and lights the small chunk of driftwood inside.

Now he can see the way through the dust and rubble
into the tunnel. All he has to do is follow the trail of bone crosses back to the hot spring. Beyond that, the way is marked with amber firestones.

Tuck can hardly believe it. Soon he'll be outside under the sky with the ocean wind in his face, not trapped here deep inside the Earth.

He'll be out in the world again, free at last!

Fox awakens in a slice of sun as it breaks over the city wall. He feels the fuzz on his chin and the fur on his tongue and wonders if he's been asleep for a day or a week. Slowly, he remembers the burning fever, the terrible sickness, and the pain gouging his stomach, but it all feels distant as if it happened in a bad dream. What was it? A bad egg or some disease from the filthy netherworld sea?

Or the urchin child. She is real. She isn't a fevered dream. She eats rats and birds. Has she given him some disease?

Where is she? Where's Candleriggs? Fox looks around him. Where is
he
?

This is not the usual tower room. He's lying in a sick-crusted bed of paper below a wrecked bookstack labeled
History
.

Gingerly, Fox sits up. He peels off a layer of loose pages that are stuck to his back. He is so fuzzy-headed it takes him some time to find his way through the mess and maze of wrecked bookstacks to the tower room he's made his home with Candleriggs. So weak is his voice that when he tries to shout only a crackle comes out.

“Candleriggs?”

She's not here, only the urchin child, hiding inside a small cave she's built out of books.

Fox kneels down by the child.
Pandora
. The name crawls out of his memory, as if he's been gone a hundred years.

“Where's Candleriggs?”

Blood and a crust of sickness are spattered all down the creases of the knotted tunic Candleriggs made for the child out of the litter of plastic bags. Pandora must have been ill too, but what's the blood? She looks pale and her gem-green eyes are shadowed and scared. Fox sees the dead mouse on the ground that she's been eating. He swallows a surge of nausea.

“Candleriggs!”

He's panicking now. Something's wrong. Candleriggs wouldn't leave Pandora alone eating dead mice.

Pandora points at a mound of books she has made under the tower window at the other side of the room. Fox stares at the gnarled foot that pokes out.

He digs away books, hurling them all over the room until Candleriggs's face is clear.

The only other time Fox has seen death was the shot urchin in the water. That was brutal; this is not. The deep lines on Candleriggs's face have softened as if she is deeply at rest, but death is not something that can be mistaken for sleep. There's no life, no breath, just stillness in a golden lozenge of sun.

She's not there.

Candleriggs is gone.

She left him a note, scribbled in the margins of a book with a bit of charred wood from the dead fire.

Go back to your people. This is all wrong. Maybe it was
enough that Mara found you and I lived long enough to know you, and you could know the truth of the abandoned world. There's nothing you can do from here, I see that now. You've lost too much and there is so much more to lose. Take the child and go back home. Change your world from the inside. Tell Caledon

And there it stops. What she wanted to tell his grandfather has been lost to death or the impossibility of finding the right words.

There's a charred circle around some words in the book.

We shall be as a city on a hill
, Fox reads.
The eyes of all people are upon us
.

They are the long-ago words of an Englishman, John Winthrop. He wrote them, the book says, on board a ship called the
Arbella
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He was one of the Founding Fathers of a new world in another age.

Fox stares at the words. Walks over to the window. He looks up at the gleaming towers that dwarf the old-world tower he stands in and hears the misery that carries on the wind from the boat camp all around the city walls.

He doesn't really know what the words mean or why Candleriggs wanted him to have them. Maybe, though, they weren't for him. Maybe they're for his grandfather in his city high above. And Candleriggs is right. Though he hardly knows his own parents, Fox knows they'll be brokenhearted, as his grandfather will.

Maybe he wants them to be.

Just what
is
he doing here? Getting back at his parents for not being around? Kidding himself that one person in a tower can change a whole world?

We shall be as a city on a hill
.

Fox finds the bucket of rainwater. He splashes his face and gulps handfuls of the cold water until his head clears.

He remembers his fever-dream of going back to the sky city, demanding an airship to find Mara at the top of the world. In the throes of deep fever Fox was certain his grandfather, so thankful to have him back safe and sound, would do that for him.

Fox looks over at the dead body of the woman his grandfather once loved yet abandoned in the drowned world. All because she stood against him and challenged the cruelty of his world. Fox knows his fever-dream was fantasy. When the world he created is threatened his grandfather is ruthless, even to those he loves. The evidence is here, right before his eyes.

The only way Caledon would have him back is if Fox denies the truth of the world outside.

How can he? Mara is living the truth he'd have to deny.

We shall be as a city on a hill
.

The long-ago words keep haunting his thoughts, recalling his idea of a cybercity, a place with no state in realworld. A place that only exists in the ether because its citizens will it to be.

And what would it be, this secret city, entered through the portal of a peekaboo moon? A place that would open its doors to the truth of the past and the present—to Candleriggs's and Mara's existence, and the life of his baby to come, and to all the lost people of the drowned world.

But though Fox popped a legion of moons into the Noos, no one has answered his call.

It's no use. He can't create a city on his own. And if he did? He reads Candleriggs's message once again. What more is there to lose? Candleriggs kept trying to make him
think about the consequences of his plans.
Once you've shocked them with the truth about the outside world
, she'd ask,
what then
? Now, with her dead beside him, Fox feels bound to ask himself the questions he always avoided before.

What would revolution really mean? His heart quickens as scenarios tumble through his mind. For the first time Fox sees that it might not be such a grand and glorious task.

He looks at his torn, grubby fingernails and the netherworld grime ingrained in his skin. It might be vicious, dirty work. Wrecking the old order means destruction.

Fox looks at the towers above him. How much wreckage and destruction justifies the creation of a better world? Could he be sure it would be better? What if the new order were just as corrupt and hooked on power as the old? What if it became so?

There is one question he cannot avoid anymore.

What if people died
?

Could he live with that?

Mara has to live with guilt of the deaths of people she loved dearly. But they were a mistake. Wouldn't any deaths caused by his revolution be the same? A horrible but necessary consequence of his attempt to rescue the future?

But would Mara ever have left Wing and sailed to New Mungo if she knew it would mean those deaths?
Never
. And yet he is contemplating something with consequences that are just as unknown, involving countless lives.

What if he begins something he cannot control?

What if he does nothing when he could be the catalyst for a new world?

The eyes of all people are upon us
.

How many deaths, Fox asks himself, would justify the creation of that world? Many or none? Well, Candleriggs, he thinks, I've faced the hard questions but haven't found answers. The final question, Fox knows, is the darkest of all.

What if that's the only way
?

In the depths of his fever he thought he heard Mara calling him.

Where are you
? he tried to shout.

Above you
, came the answer.

Trapped in the fever, he couldn't find her but now he understands what she really said.

Not
above you
.

I love you
.

Fox wants to rush and see if, by some miracle, she's on the bridge right now. She is the one person left in the world who might help him with all the questions that are churning him up inside. But there's something he must do first. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this. In the New World, old age and death are dealt with invisibly and tidily behind the Youthnasium's doors.

His hands shake so much it's hard to begin, but Fox makes up a fire exactly as Candleriggs taught him, with her flint stones and dry pages from the books. Pandora's green eyes watch through her tangled blond locks. She hisses with unease,
whississ
, clasping her toy snake tight while he works on the fire until it's fierce and strong and thick smoke fills the small tower room. He tidies every book and scrap of paper from the stone floor and adds them to the fire. Eyes streaming, he takes Pandora by the hand and shuts the heavy oak door on Candleriggs and her blazing funeral pyre.

And it sometimes happens that the stone breaks into flower in your hand
.

George Mackay Brown

She is born in a sunbeam, in a flame of agony, just before the sun sinks.

From the moment Mara first sets eyes on her daughter's face, on the soft mouth that opens and closes like a little fish, on the waxy eyelids that flicker like moth wings in the weak candle of spring, and on the fox-tawny down of hair, she knows the baby is not the hostile presence she had begun to fear, especially in the tearing hot pain of her birth.

She is the most perfect and beautiful thing Mara has ever seen on this Earth.