Zenith (32 page)

Authors: Julie Bertagna

BOOK: Zenith

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Already, the short day wanes. A fat full moon is rising above the city wall. Soon night lights will glow in the sky-city tunnels high above him – the very tunnels he used to skate through in his old life.

Above you.

Those strange, last words Mara spoke to him on the bridge. He still can’t fathom what she meant. Was she trying to tell him to go back up there? Or telling him to remember why he’s down here? Fox stares up at the sky city, feeling desperate. It’s not Mara who may as well be dead; she’s growing a whole new life.
He
may as well not be here.

Above him is his destiny. Could that be what she
meant? He has lost his way these last few months, grieving for the life he left and for the one he could have had if he’d gone with Mara on the ship. Well, he’s done enough grieving. He can’t bear to live this ghost life any longer, yearning for Mara and the baby he will never know.

The moon slides out from behind a tower. Its light falls on the faces of the statues in the archways. The oars
sloop
through the murky water as Fox moves around the building, studying each stone face. At last he stops. Draws in a breath.

There
.

It’s her. Mara. The statue is cracked and furred with moss but the likeness of the stone face is astonishing and true.

Fox wants to reach out and touch her face but he can’t see a way to secure the raft. All of a sudden he knows what it is he must do now he is here. He must say a goodbye of sorts. He won’t give up on her, he couldn’t; he will leave a cyberfox to wait for her on the bridge in the Weave. But he must stop dwelling on the path he did not take. He needs to move on, grow his own new life.

What he must do, he sees, is turn all his pain into energy. He needs energy to do what Mara must have been urging him to do – not to dwell on her and the baby but push on hard to change the world right above his head.

Dreams can slip through your fingers like water. Crafting dreams into something solid and real, Fox now knows, is one of the hardest tasks in the world
.

He studies Mara’s statue; the dream that some long-ago craftsman, who never knew her, carved into stone. And he looks up at his grandfather’s dream in the sky – a wonder of the world that is rotten at the core.

Something slithers and hisses at the mud-caked base of
the statue. Fox draws back. He raises his oar, ready to strike. Some slimy netherworld creature is coiled in a heap at Mara’s stone feet.

In the dim light, Fox thinks it’s a snake. The creature begins to uncoil, hissing louder. Fox stares at it through the gloom. It’s huge. Better just row off, fast as he can.

The snake unfurls arms and legs from within the heap of itself.

Fox peers at what he thinks is a round, entirely human head with two large, bright eyes. The thing hisses, stands up, and chucks a handful of clay that hits him
splat!
on the head.

‘
Hey
. Stop that!’

A child’s giggle bursts out. The giggle is so full of sheer naughtiness it makes Fox smile, despite his dripping hairful of muck. He takes a clump of dirt out of his hair and flings it back. The child giggles again.

A child so caked in mud and dirt she looks as if she’s made of clay.

THE CLAY CHILD

‘I found her by Mara’s statue.’

Candleriggs raises her head from her book. Her eyes moisten when she sees the urchin beside Fox.

‘Were you left behind, little one?’

The child hisses back.

‘She doesn’t talk, just does that hissy snake noise.’

Fox flops down on a lumpy heap of books in the corner of the tower room that he has made his bed. The journey across the netherworld and back has made him dizzy and weak. His neck and arms ache from rowing.

‘I didn’t know what to do with her. She crawled out of the water and sat at Mara’s – I mean, the statue’s – feet. I think she’s all on her own.’

He finds he can’t speak about the other child, the dead one.

‘You found her at the Face in the Stone?’ Candleriggs looks startled then rummages on the floor among a scatter of books. ‘Now, where is it? I was reading a Greek legend . . . it’s such an old story it surely can’t do me much harm.’ Candleriggs mutters, fumbling in a book.

Fox has to smile. She’s surrounded by hillocks of
books, sleeps upon them, the floor is carpeted with pages and they burn them to keep warm, yet Candleriggs can’t shake off her belief that books are dangerous things.

‘Ah, here it is.’ Candleriggs smoothes the page, so intent on the words of the story that she momentarily forgets her fears. ‘The legend of Pandora, a child made of water and earth. Made of clay, really . . . and you found this clay child at
that
statue. That’s important. Must be.’

Fox yawns. The old woman is fixated with signs in stones, with coincidence and what’s meant to be – as if the future is all laid out, already set. Fox is clinging to the hope that the future is still up for grabs. He has to believe that, or why else would he be cooped up here in a cold stone tower in a netherworld with an ancient, owl-eyed Treenester and a child made of clay?

The urchin is staring at the fire, hissing. Before either of them can stop her she reaches out and picks up a glowing ember. And drops it, screaming, her hand singed.

‘Hey, hey, come here.’ Fox grabs a can full of rainwater and plunges the burned hand into it. The child wails at the top of her voice, a sound that mimics the sea-police sirens. Fox points to the fire and copies the siren noise. ‘Don’t touch.’

‘You’re a Pandora all right.’ Candleriggs dips a corner of her mossy cloak in the rainwater and begins to clean the urchin’s mucky face. ‘Too curious for your own good.’

Candleriggs scrubs the urchin’s clay-caked face and body. A green-eyed, wild-ringleted cherub emerges from layers of netherworld muck. In the firelight, when Candleriggs shows how to warm hands and feet by the fire without getting burned, Fox stares at the urchin’s leathery, thick-downed skin and the faintest of webbing between her fingers and toes.

Once she’s eaten some scrambled egg and spat it out in disgust, Pandora prowls the tower room, curious and wary. Fox eats her leftover egg and watches her grab an uncooked one and munch it, shell and all. When Fox laughs she snatches his green headgem from the bookshelf behind him, hissing like a snake. Fox smacks her fingers but Pandora won’t let go of the gem. He has to force her fingers open. She bites his hand.

‘No!’

Pandora just looks at him with beautiful green eyes and laughs. She points to the headgem that’s the same colour as her eyes, with another hiss.

‘What’s the hissing for?’

‘I don’t know. She’s copying something, as children do. The waste air that’s pumped out of New Mungo, maybe? There’s a waste pipe near the Face in the Stone. No, listen – she’s speaking,’ says Candleriggs.

Fox can only hear a serpent hiss.

‘Whississss,’ Pandora hisses, still pointing at the green gem.

‘What’s this?’ Candleriggs’s face creases into a thousand wrinkles as she smiles at the child.

‘Thisss,’ says Fox, imitating the hiss, ‘iss mine. Iss not a toy.’

‘Ah, but I’ve got a toy,’ declares Candleriggs.

She digs into a pocket in her mossy cloak and brings out a little wooden snake, hardly bigger than her hand. The snake is made of a train of short stubs of wood, linked on a string, so that it wriggles whenever it’s moved. The greenish tinge the wood has been stained with has almost all rubbed off.

‘Whississss.’

‘It’s a toy snake. See? Sssss.’ Candleriggs runs the
wooden snake up Pandora’s arm. The little girl squeals with delight and grabs it. ‘It was my son’s,’ says Candleriggs, laughing. ‘I made it for him when he was a baby. You can play with it now,’ she tells the child.

Candleriggs has a son? One of the Treenesters who have gone with Mara?

Candleriggs reads the surprise on Fox’s face.

‘He died when he was a baby.’

Fox takes this in. ‘You had a baby with my grandfather? Is that what you mean? And he still threw you out of the city? With his own baby? What kind of a man could do that?’

Anger flashes through him. The thought of Mara with his baby, an ocean away, haunts Fox night and day.

‘Caledon never knew,’ says Candleriggs. ‘It was my revenge. But revenge didn’t do me any good when my baby died,’ she pauses, her eyes bitter and dry, ‘of an infected mosquito bite.’ Candleriggs gives Fox a look that makes him shiver. ‘Maybe he’d have looked something like you, if he’d lived.’

Everything might have been so different. What if Candleriggs hadn’t rebelled against the New World, where people are safe in their sky-city havens and everyone else, like Mara, is abandoned in the drowned world? If Candleriggs had stayed with Caledon and her baby had lived, his grandfather would never have married his grandma. He, Fox, wouldn’t have been born at all.

Fox has a glimmering of all the great and small flukes of fate, all the twists and turns in the lives of his ancestors, that must have happened to cause him to be born, to be alive, here, at this point in the world.

He’s hungry, miserable, his life is a wreck, and the idea that he could change things seems like a mad fantasy. The
temptation to go back home is huge, to plead for forgiveness from his family and claim his disappearance was just a teenage prank that got out of hand. Night after night, too cold to sleep on his lumpy mattress of books, he’s on the verge of giving in. But he always comes back to Mara. Mara and a ship of refugees at the top of the world. Wasn’t it a mad fantasy to think she could do that? Wasn’t it a mad fantasy of his grandfather’s to imagine up a whole New World of skyscraping cities studded across the globe of a flooding world? Yet he made it real and became the Grand Father of All the New World. His grandfather and Mara both chased their dreams and made them real.

‘Your parents,’ Candleriggs interrupts his thoughts. ‘They must be missing you, worried sick.’

It’s not the first time she’s said it. She keeps urging him to post them a note in the Noos, at least.

‘I hardly knew them,’ says Fox, aware as he says it that he’s put his parents behind him, in the past. ‘They were never there. Their work came first.’

The idea he’s been crafting all this time feels like mad fantasy too. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll work. The Noos is more ruthlessly guarded than ever before, but Fox knows that trying to police cyberspace is like trying to police the universe. You can’t. And now he has created a new wonder for the stunning cyber-universe of the Noos.

A galaxy of peekaboo moons.

He found the idea in old Weavesites: pesky adverts that pop-up in your face. Yet the occasional one would catch his eye and he’d be curious to see what it was about. So Fox has created another kind of pop-up: a peekaboo at a buried past and an unknown world of the present that exists just beyond the city walls. It’s a pesky pop-up of brutal truth the people of the New World need.

Someone, surely, will take a look to see what his peekaboo moons are about. The bored and the too-curious, the brilliant and the lonely. Some daredevil Noosrunner like he once was, who still has a glimmer of wonder and might stop for an instant amid the frenzy of invention and cyber-trading that engrosses the New World.

That’s who Fox is seeking. People of a mind like him. In the unguarded moment they stop to take a look, their godgem is open to him. That’s his chance to sneak a secret connection with the godgems of all the curious minds. All he can do is hope there are such people left in the cosseted cities of the New World.

If there are, he’ll pop them a shock of truth.