Zenith (28 page)
Authors: Julie Bertagna
‘Fox
. . .
power’s dying
. . .
you there
. . .
?’
Fox zips along the Bridge to Nowhere. Mara is here again, at last. He’s been worried sick. Every night he waits on the broken bridge and the one time he almost sleeps through midnight, she’s here, waiting for him. Her eyes and her voice are scared. Her electronic image flickers. Her lips are moving but now he can’t hear her speak. Fox moves closer and tries to lip-read.
What is it? I don’t know what you’re saying.
She reaches out an arm to him. Fades. And then she’s gone.
Fox waits, heart thumping, but she doesn’t come back. There’s nothing to do except wait. A moment seems to stretch for hours. He can’t bear it. She’s gone.
Fox commands his godgem to save and re-run Mara’s image, but his lip-reading skills are no better this time around. Yet there’s a way to decode anything. Fox digs up a program that will make an electronic cipher translate her silent words. He runs the program and now Mara speaks to him in an alien voice.
‘Someving I need to tell you bevore my bower diezzz,’
the bland voice of the cipher says through Mara’s lips.
It’s not perfect. Some of the sounds are wonky, but he can make sense of it, just about.
‘A – a bavey,’
Mara stutters,
‘in the zpring. I’m zorry – zzzzz – power’z going. Can’t recharge till the zun comez dack in the zpring and by ven
. . .
well, by ven
. . .
zzzzzzZZZ
. . .
the bavey
. . .
sssssssss.’
The cipher voice breaks up, buzzing and hissing. Mara’s face flickers. He holds the look in her eyes until she fades out.
‘Above you.’
The cipher voice cuts through the ether. Fox looks up above him, but there’s nothing except empty static there. There’s no voice, no Mara. He is alone again on the broken bridge.
She’s lost him. Her power’s all gone. Mara unplugs from the cyberwizz and shakes the globe, in case there’s a trickle of power left. She tries again but it’s dead. Did she get through? Did he hear her at all?
Mara puts her head in her hands. Her heart thumps a painful, hard beat.
Darkest winter grips the top of the world. How will she ever make it through to spring?
Fox replays Mara’s message on the bridge. She was trying to tell him something important; he could see by the look on her face. Something about a
bavey
. Didn’t she say the word twice? Fox tries out endless permutations of the word but there’s only one that makes any sense.
Baby.
A baby in the spring?
She will come back. She must. He needs to speak to her and be sure that’s what she said. He can’t believe he might not see her until the spring. That seems a lifetime away. And in the spring . . .
. . .
she’ll have a
baby
?
His heart pounds. It’s the last thing he expected. They were so caught up in each other and their desperate, dangerous plans – but they never planned for this. They were together so briefly, everything happened so fast. Fox’s emotions are in turmoil. He is hit by sudden doubt. Is the baby his? Who else is she close to? There’s Rowan, her old friend from her island. Gorbals and the Treenesters. And Tuck, the gypsea. His voice sounds like the sea, she once said, and something in the way she said it made the back of his neck prickle. It could be Rowan’s baby or the gypsea’s. Couldn’t it?
But she told
him.
Fox pulls himself together. Of course it’s his. He remembers how it was with him and Mara and he feels sure.
All of a sudden he doesn’t want it to be true because he will never see their baby, never know the child they’ve made. The thought chills his soul. Mara is so far away she may as well be on another planet. She may as well be dead.
Fox replays her message again on his godgem. It ends with those strange, stark words.
Above you.
Bewildered, Fox wonders.
What did she mean by that?
The baby makes a sudden wild leap that makes Mara gasp.
Mol catches her eye.
‘It’s leaping like a dolphin,’ Mara whispers. ‘Head over heels. Like it’s having fun.’
The moon glow of the cave can’t soften the envy on Mol’s face. She looks away. ‘I lost a baby once,’ she murmurs. ‘Bad blood, that’s what everyone said.’ She glances back at Mara’s shocked face. ‘One of the New Mungo sea police.’
Mara can’t quite meet her friend’s eye. The sea police are ruthless agents of the New World.
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, nothing bad.’ Mol gives a weak smile. ‘I met him in the ruined cathedral.’ She gives a tiny sigh. ‘He wasn’t like you’d expect. Not like the others, not a brute. He was . . . nice. Just a person, same age as me. He had sunlight hair, just like Tuck.’
Is that why she is so drawn to him?
Mara wonders. She remembers the young policewoman she found dead in the cathedral in the netherworld.
She looked such an ordinary girl, not much different from me.
‘Did he know about the baby?’ Mara asks gently.
‘I was going to tell him, but then I lost her. She wasn’t even as big as my hand but she was perfect. A baby girl.’ Mol tugs at a knot in her long braid of hair, a quiet but frantic gesture, as if trying to tug the memory out her head. ‘Once the others found out what had happened, they wouldn’t let me see him again. I was putting all our lives at risk. But he would never have told. Never. I – I don’t think so. Well, we never had a sea-police raid so he couldn’t have. I never told him we lived in the trees, though. He was from the sky city. I would have seemed like an animal. Anyway, I never saw him again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Mara. She knows that kind of pain, can’t think what else to say.
Mol swallows a sob. ‘But
you
have your baby. Think of that.’
Think of that, and don’t think of Tuck, she means. You have your baby, you don’t need him. Tuck, who spends most days hunting seaweed and driftwood and fishing at the mouth of the cave, not bothering much about Mol.
The baby gives another dolphin leap. Mara lies on her back and tunes into the feeling. For the first time she imagines a baby, a real live baby inside her, jumping head over heels. It must be sending out waves of joy because she feels them vibrate through her, feels something close to pure happiness for the first time since she was in the sky city with Fox.
She’s the lucky one, she suddenly sees, because Fox is on his own without her. But she has a part of him now, to keep.
The thought shakes up a surge of energy. She sits up, eager to find a scrap of food. Now there’s a reason to eat, a need to make it through to spring. On the other side of winter is a little piece of Fox.
‘Nice of the pirate to give us a hand.’
Rowan jerks his head towards Tuck who is dozing in a nook of rock. He plunges into the hot spring with a groan, ice-bitten after a day spent hacking the frozen waterfall.
Tuck has fallen asleep after a long trek to the cave mouth with Scarwell and Wing. Everyone is sick of seaweed and fish, but there were no eggs or birds on the shore, only face-sniping wind and a darkness that never lightened, not a pinch, said Tuck, though they hunted as long as they could bear the cold. Still, they didn’t return empty-handed. As they gathered seaweed for soup and driftwood for the fire they came across a lone seal on the shore. Tuck killed it with his cutlass and somehow the three of them managed to haul the dead seal all the way back through the tunnels to the moon cave.
‘He’s been busy enough!’ Mara retorts. ‘This will feed us for weeks.’ Sweat drips from her forehead as she works on the large carcass she and Scarwell are struggling to cut up with sharp stones.
Rowan climbs out of the pool and comes over. ‘A seal!’ he exclaims.
‘The
pirate
found it,’ says Mara sarkily.
‘Use every bit of it,’ is all Rowan says, though his eyes gleam with hunger as he watches Mara cut through tough skin and thick blubber to reach the meat. ‘Keep the fat for soup and lamp fuel. We can use the skin for all kinds of things and the liver is full of iron—’
‘I know, I know,’ Mara interrupts. Has he forgotten she lived on the same island as him? She knows what to do with a seal – though she has only ever watched before.
But why is Rowan so moody? Now he’s growling at Scarwell for licking lumps of seal fat from her fingers. And he’s always ready to give Tuck a tongue-lashing when, right now, he should be praising him to the skies.
‘What’s your problem with Tuck?’ Mara demands.
‘Don’t trust him.’
‘You’ve said. But you don’t like him either. Why?’
‘I caught him trying to steal your cyberwizz,
remem ber?
’
‘Caught him
looking
at it. He thinks it’s a toy.’
‘Mara, I know you feel guilty about his mother and everything but—’
‘But what? He needs us. He’s lost his own people,
remember
.’
‘We all have,’ snaps Rowan. ‘Anyway, he hasn’t lost his people, he abandoned them. You can’t trust someone who does that.’
‘He abandoned a lot of murdering pirates because he doesn’t want to be one.’
‘Still think he’s dangerous,’ Rowan growls.
‘
Dangerous?
Don’t be stupid, Tuck’s the least of my worries.’ This is her chance, thinks Mara, to tell Rowan
about the baby, though she suspects Mol already has. He is her oldest friend in the world but somehow she hasn’t been able to find the right moment or the words. And somehow she knows that her not telling him might be at the root of his filthy moods.
‘What about your Fox?’
Mara starts at the unexpected question.
‘I – I can’t reach him any more. My power’s dead.’
Her voice breaks and she bites her lip.
‘Is he so important?’ asks Rowan, in a strange, curt voice.
But he reaches down and draws a strand of hair back from her hot face with a gentle hand that is at odds with his tone.
‘He’s important.’ Mara’s face crumples and she lowers her head to hide her tears and digs at the seal with her cutting stone. ‘I tried to tell myself he wasn’t. He’s so far away that he didn’t seem real any more. But I need him now.’ She swallows and scrubs tears from her face with a greasy hand. ‘It’s not just that. Rowan, the cyberwizz took me into the past. I went to Wing and I saw—’
‘Mara! Forget those silly games. We’re beyond all that.’ He hesitates then blurts out. ‘Just when are you planning to tell me?’
Mara tries to speak but no words come.
‘All that sickness and fainting.’ Rowan crouches beside her. ‘We’re all starving yet you’re getting big. And weepy and strange. Anyway, Mol doesn’t keep a secret well.’
The look in his blue eyes makes her hot inside.
‘I – I
was
going to tell you.’
‘Yeah?’ The word feels like a slap. He stands up and turns his back on her. ‘So who’s the father?’ he mutters. ‘The pirate or the Fox?’
Mara could hit him. She glares at the back of his head, hardly able to breathe. But she knows how to rouse Rowan’s temper, just as he knows how to rile her.
‘Urth!’
She spits Tuck’s favourite gypsea curse at him and flings her cutting stone at his back, splattering him with blubber and blood.
That does it. Rowan turns on her.
‘How many chances does one person get? How many stupid mistakes . . .’
He tails off.
Mara gulps. ‘You mean me?’
He begins to speak, sighs, stops.
Mara stands up. ‘I get it. This is about Gail. She’s dead because of me. How do you think I feel about that? She’s not just
your
sister. She was my best friend. My own little brother, my parents – they’re dead too because of me and I’ve got to live with that. Now I’m pregnant and we’re stuck in a hole at the ends of the Earth and we’re probably all going to die. That’s my fault too because coming to Greenland was another one of my brilliant ideas. Except,’ anger blazes through her, ‘you all do what I say, don’t you? You don’t have any brilliant ideas of your own but you’ll follow me and blame me when it all goes wrong. I’ll tell you something else though – you haven’t a clue just how bad I am.’
She takes a seething breath. She should swallow back the next words but she’s surfing a wave of temper and can’t stop. ‘I killed a man. I mean it, I did. In the sky city. I thought he was going to kill me, so I – I killed him first. If I hadn’t killed him we wouldn’t be here now. You would still be a slave, building bridges for the New World till you dropped dead. You might even be dead already . . .’