Pathfinder (9 page)

Mara swallows. She can't seem to find her voice. Her throat feels full of stones.

Vast towers unwrap from the dawn mist. Towers so thick and high it's hard to believe they are real. As the boat draws closer the thinning mist reveals a stunning geometry of sky tunnels that connect the towers—branches and branches of gleaming connections. A molten sunrise spreads fire across the sky. When it hits the city like a silent explosion the brilliance is heart stopping. The morning sun seems pale beside such radiance.

“That's it!” Mara croaks. “That's New Mungo.”

People murmur in fear; some cry. But Mara feels blank as she looks at the stupendous vision. She doesn't know what she feels about that immense city in the sky. All she can think of is stepping out onto solid ground, stretching her cramped limbs—and finding her family.

As they draw closer and the last of the mist clears, Mara sees with a sinking heart what she always suspected would be there—an immense wall. It rises up out of the sea, encircling the city.

There is no land or harbor, only a blurred mass that heaves and bobs around the city. A huge, dull-colored live thing. The vile, rotting stench of an open drain hits as the clustering thing sharpens into focus. Mara gasps as she sees it's a heaving mass of humanity. A chaos of refugee boats crams the sea around the city and clings like a fungus to the huge wall that seems to bar all entry to refugees.

Frantically, Mara begins to scan the still-distant mass of boats for her family.
Why
was she so stubborn? Why didn't she go with them?

“Where are they, Gail?” she panics. “They'll have made it, won't they?”

She sees the look that passes between Gail and Rowan. She pictures her mother with Corey clutched close, her
keen eyes searching, searching, searching for Mara; her father cursing her stubbornness, refusing to believe he has lost her.

Alex steers them toward the chaos of boats around the city. People huddle closer on the fishing boat that is now their home. The sense of loss is overwhelming.

“Heads down!” Alex suddenly yells.

A bulky, thuggish-looking, black speedboat roars out from behind the legs of an impossibly high sea bridge that stretches out into the ocean, then suddenly breaks off, unfinished. The speedboat, emblazoned with the words SEA POLICE and crammed with an armed, orange-uniformed police crew, cuts in front, its sirens blaring. A huge gun barrel glints above the bow windshield. Now a fleet of orange waterbikes zips across the waves to encircle them. The speedboat fixes its large gun on Mara's boat, while the police waterbikers swivel their handlebar guns into position.

They are surrounded.

“Turn back! Turn back at once!” a harsh megaphone voice commands.

Alex looks petrified but stays on course—there's nowhere to turn back to. He even keeps his nerve as the waterbikers send thundercracking volleys of machine-gun fire overhead, in warning.

Then he cries out in horror and begins frantically wheeling the boat around.

“
Get down!
” he roars.

Mara can't see what's happening. But she hears something howl through the air, feels it hit the water close by, then is rocked by a terrifying force as a missile explodes in the sea.

The boat fills with screams. Mara struggles to prise herself from the crush, tries to jump overboard, desperate to
escape. But there is no escape. She grips the rim of the boat and squeezes her eyes tight shut. “
Mom! Dad! Help me!
” she screams, but her voice is lost in the wave of panic.

There is the strangest lull. The boat lurches on a wave and Mara waits for the hit. The moment stretches—enormous, empty, dark, and still.
I'm dead
, thinks Mara.
It's happened. It's over
. She opens her eyes. She is still in the boat. There's no screaming missile, no explosion, nothing. Then—

“They're going!” shouts Alex, his voice cracking with relief.

And it's true. The sea police have about-turned and are speeding off in another direction. Then Mara sees what has deflected them—a bigger target. A fleet of boats has appeared on the southern horizon and it's this that the police battalion is headed for. Alex takes his chance to steer hastily toward a mooring place on the edge of the boat camp that stretches far into the waters around the city.

“What were they going to do—kill us all?” Rowan whispers, his face gray, his eyes wide and unfocused with shock.

The shock deepens as they begin to enter the vast boat camp.

“I don't like this, don't like it,” Gail is muttering feverishly, like a small child. “I want to go home, Mom. Oh, please, let's turn back and go home.”

Fishing boats, ferries, rusted military craft, once-luxurious cruisers, old and battered pleasure crafts, and bashed yachts, all kinds of vessels, even ramshackle handmade rafts with patchwork sails; rich and poor, all ages, all kinds of people, are crushed here into a common pulp of human misery. The sea runs red with sunrise, the water steams, the noise and stench are terrible.

This is unreal, thinks Mara. It's hell on Earth.

“Where are they all from?” she whispers.

“Who knows?” says Rowan.

Alex nudges their boat into the crush.

“You'll have to move on—this is our space and it's too crowded already!” shouts a raucous voice. “There's no room for anyone else.”

The owner of the voice is a furious woman who stands at the helm of what once must have been a sleek, luxurious yacht. Now it's dirty and battered, its deck overhung with a patchwork canopy of plastic bags and tatty tarpaulin. Grime has settled into the harsh, ungenerous lines of the woman's face.

“Where else can we go?” demands Brenna, one of Mara's mother's friends, staring back just as furiously. “There's no room anywhere.”

“Should have got here earlier then, shouldn't you?” the woman snaps. “It's your own fault.”

An ugly, unwelcoming grumble grows as the inhabitants of the surrounding boats stare resentfully from their ramshackle floating homes. Some shout abuse, some even fling filthy waste at the new arrivals. Steely eyed, Alex continues to steer into the edges of the boat camp. There's nothing else he can do; there's nowhere else to go but the open ocean.

Mara puts her head upon her knees. She screws her eyes tight shut and puts her fists over her ears to block out the horror of the refugee camp. But she can't. The putrid, stomach-turning stench of sewage, sweat, and sickness is overwhelming.

Although she's frail and shattered from the journey, and despite the surrounding hostility, Gail manages to strike up a conversation with a boy on the rickety boat next door.
Gail could charm words out of a stone, if she wanted to. After a while, the familiar sound of her friend's chatter calms Mara just enough to let her lift her head from her knees and survey the noisy, frightening chaos she now belongs to. And she must look, she tells herself, she must look hard and keep looking till she finds her family.

“Ask about food and fresh water, Gail,” cries Brenna, struggling to cope with her brood of hungry and restless young children. “Find out where we get them.”

After a few moments Gail turns around from the neighboring boat, her face pale and scared.

“It's hopeless.” Gail slumps down on the deck. Everyone stares across the boats to the impenetrable wall of New Mungo.

“There must be some kind of aid from the city,” says Rowan. “They can't keep us out here with no food and water.”

“Of course they can,” cries Brenna, nursing a limp and pale toddler. “Why should they care? We should have stayed with the old folk on the island, all together, where we belonged. We'll die anyway in these rotten seas.”

I wish we had stayed on the island too
, Mara silently cries, as an outburst of panic and anger explodes around her.
Anything but this
.

In the midsummer night that never quite grows dark, New Mungo cloaks itself in mist. Its shadows lengthen across the water and the people of the boats grow quiet as the city's brilliance turns sinister, menacing. While the other refugees huddle under mothy tarpaulins, plastic coverings and blankets, Mara jumps from boat to boat, calling desperately for her parents, peering through the dim twilight for the arrival of any new boats.

The city glints under the midsummer blue of a star-sprinkled sky. It's awesome, beautiful, an impossible thing. Mara gazes up, puzzling over the many strange, coiling mechanisms attached to the edges of the towers and the sky tunnels. They whirl in the wind, filling the air with ghostly moans and whispers. As she studies the vast geometry of the city, she feels a spark of her old curiosity. What kind of people could dream up such a thing?

Whoever they are, the cyberfox is one of them.

Where are you, Fox?
she wonders.
Are you really up there? How can I get up there too? And if I did, would I ever be able to find you?

In the middle of the night there's a clamor that sounds like the end of the world. Mara wakens with a start from her cocoon of blanket. A great swarm of police speedboats and waterbikes buzz around the city wall. Lights flash, sirens scream. Everyone is looking out to sea and as Mara looks too she sees the lights of a great white ship. As it draws close to the city the police send volleys of gunfire into the sky as a warning. Everyone keeps their heads down but as Mara peers upward from the floor of the boat she sees a crack open in the city wall. The crack widens and Mara cannot help it—she stands up to look.

“Get down!” Rowan yells but Mara stays standing. She wants to see what's happening.

Great waves of sea crash them into the boat next door, and Mara has to hang on tight to the edge of hers. Chaos has broken out at the widening crack in the wall. In the few moments that the gate is open a number of refugee boats make a frantic surge forward as the ship, surrounded by swarms of machine-gunning sea police, enters the city. The refugee boats are either gunned into the great wall or
into nearby craft. Some smash to pieces against the side of the ship.

“Why don't they just let us in?” Gail whimpers. “I'm so hungry. Doesn't anyone care about us?”

“Maybe they don't even know we're here,” says Rowan grimly.

“How could they not know?” Mara despairs. “All they have to do is look down and see. Why don't they do something?”

But she wonders if Rowan is right. Are the people of the sky city so bedazzled by their glittering New World that they can't see beyond it to the human catastrophe right outside their wall? Do they not know what is happening? But somebody knows, because somebody built that city wall.

“Look!” Mara cries as she sees something—the tiniest vessel, so tiny she almost missed it—slip through at the very last moment in the churning foam of the ship's wake.

Is it possible then? At the risk of being shot to pieces or smashed up by a supply ship, maybe there
is
a way into the city.

Slow hours roll into stunned daylight, every second hot and breathless, drenched in steaming mist.

Gail groans weakly. “Mom, I'm going to be sick again.”

It was the fish. Everyone is blaming themselves for not stopping her from eating the small, sun-roasted fish the boy on the neighboring boat caught in the filthy water that's full of toxic algae. The smell of the fish turned Mara's stomach, but her insides groaned and ached so much for food that she wanted to do what Gail did: hold her nose and tear into the stinking fish, eating head, bones, eyes, and all.

All through the night Gail was wracked with stomach pains, and violently sick. On the neighboring boat, everyone who ate the catch of toxic fish was just as ill.

Around dawn, Gail began to chatter and they were all relieved, thinking she was beginning to recover. But her chatter has grown into an unstoppable, hot-fevered raving. Now, though she still mutters feverishly, her voice has become thin and shrill like a child's and her body has grown chilled and rigid. More than anything, Mara is scared by the distant look in her friend's eyes.

“Should have cut my hair before we left, shouldn't I?” Gail whimpers, pulling restlessly at a strand of her fringe.
Kate strokes her daughter's hand, helplessly. “And look at my nails, all dirty,” Gail frets. “I'm such a mess.”

Mara turns away, unnerved by Gail's delirious state, to look back at the scatter of new arrivals in the boat camp. Since first light, her eyes have been fixed on the horizon or scanning the crush of boats, straining for a glimpse of her family's boat.

“I'm going to look for Mom and Dad and Corey,” Mara whispers to Rowan. “And I'll try to find some safe food.”

“I'll come too,” says Rowan heavily. He can't bear seeing Gail so ill. All through the long night Mara could hear him telling Gail stories from the books he read on Wing. He wouldn't stop even when Gail fell asleep and, as she listened to his hoarse, parched voice from under her blanket, Mara knew Rowan was trying to believe that his storytelling would keep his twin alive.