Pathfinder

  Above the scrolling text, the on-screen simulation shows a cluster of towers, colossal trunks of towers, rising out of the flooded ruins of an old city. Now a vast geometric construction—tiers and branching networks—begins to grow out of the central trunk, cresting higher and higher into the sky, mapping the airspace between the towers with amazingly complex patterns, while massive roots bore down through the seabed, deep into the Earth.

  Mara’s parents gaze in astonishment at the vast structure that rises out of the ocean—a giant city in the sky.

  “Impossible,” says Coll. “It would blow down. How could it withstand a storm?”

  Mara drags her eyes from the terrible message on the scrolling text and stares blankly at her father.

  “The SOS,” she whispers. “Did you see it?”

  “That was all long ago, Mara,” murmurs her mother, uncomfortably. “Never mind that now.”

  “But—”

  Her parents fix their attention firmly upon the image on the screen. Rosemary keys in Coll’s question and the screen flashes up data about the sky city.

  “Modeled on nature’s genius to produce the toughest, most flexible of structures,” Rosemary reads. “New World sky cities are designed to withstand the most brutal forces of nature. They are a feat of engineering, stabilized by immensely deep seabed anchor roots and ultrapowerful geomagnets that bond each city securely to the Earth’s magnetic core. Constructed from intensely strong yet supple titanmera, a new noncorrosive material found deep within the ocean bed… Rosemary trails off in wonderment. “People really live in that? I don’t believe it.”

  “Thousands live in it,” Mara answers. She turns her head to the window, distracted for a moment by what sounds like the distant peal of bells, though it’s impossible to be sure with the noise of the storm. “What’s that?”

  But her parents are still too enthralled by the vision of the sky city to answer.

  “Where are these New World cities, Mara?” Coll asks at last. “Are we near one?”

  Mara calls up the world atlas that maps the sky cities as a glittering constellation scattered across the planet.

  “I’m not exactly sure where we are in the world,” she confesses, ashamed at her own ignorance.

  “The North Atlantic,” says Coll. “That should be here.” He frowns. “But this map seems to call it …” he peers closer then sits back, looking fazed, “Eurosea.”

  Eurosea! That was what the cyberfox said. New Mungo. In Eurosea. Mara watches as her father zooms in to a patch of Eurosea.

  “We’re about here, wouldn’t you say?” He circles his forefinger on the screen map.

  Rosemary nods. “I think so.”

  Wing and its surrounding network of islands are not even a speck on the map but directly south of where they should be, a single star glows.

  Rosemary reads the flashing label on the star. “New Mungo.”

  Mara lets out a cry. Her parents look up at her in surprise.

  “That’s it!” she bursts out. “New Mungo. I—I’ve heard the name before.”

  Somehow, she doesn’t want to tell them about the fox. She will keep him to herself.

  Rosemary slumps back in her chair. “This is madness. What am I thinking of—falling for this New World myth. We’ll see out these storms and then we’ll move uphill.”

  “Where to?” Coll demands. “There’s nowhere to go, no houses up there. And this doesn’t look like a myth to me. It’s too detailed, too scientific.”

  Rosemary shakes her head stubbornly. “This is our home. We’ll move this house stone by stone if we have to. We’ll go as high as we can in the summer. The sea can’t rise much further now.”

  Outside, the ocean gives a defiant roar. The roar grows and they wait for the noise to ebb, for the rhythm of the waves to resettle. But the roar only rises, becomes a pounding blast that vibrates the thick stone walls of the cottage.

  “Oh,” gasps Rosemary. She stands up and clasps her hands tight together till the knuckles turn white.

  Mara gets up and links arms with her mother, while Coll stares at the storm-bolted door, daring a single wave to touch it. But there’s nothing any of them can do except hope that the terrifying roar will subside.

  After a long while, the roar dies. But a thunderous banging erupts on the cottage door. Storm-torn voices battle to be heard above the wind.

  Coll rushes to unlatch the heavy planks of wood that secure the door. It bursts open and a clutch of terrified people spills through, sodden and shivering. It takes Mara a moment to recognize them as her neighbors from a cottage directly downhill. The children’s eyes stare at her, wide with fear, through drenched locks of hair. The peal of bells is unmistakable now.

  “Ruth!” cries Rosemary, grabbing the woman by the arms.

  “It’s gone,” the woman, Ruth, bursts out sobbing. “Our home. The sea—”

  “We were lucky to get out in time. There must be others who didn’t,” Quinn, her husband interrupts in a flat, dazed voice. “A giant wave. Never seen such a wave, never.”

  “Gail!” gasps Mara. “Oh, and Rowan and Tain and—and everyone—” She clasps her hand over her mouth as if to stop the awful thoughts that might burst out.

  “No, Coll!” Ruth catches Coll’s arm to stop him rushing out into the storm to help. “It’s no use. They’re either safe or gone. You’ll risk yourself for nothing and your family needs you alive. Tain’s high enough up. And a lot of the villagers have moved up into the church. Maybe Kate and Alex took the family there, Mara. I said we should do the same.”

  The church sits on the hillside just above the village. It should be safe, thinks Mara, willing her friends to be there.

  Ruth leans weakly against a chair, presses a hand to her mouth, and suppresses a sob. Quinn stares in a daze at his drenched, terrified children and his heavily pregnant wife.

  “Sit down, Ruth,” says Rosemary anxiously, helping her into a seat. “I’ll see to the children. It’ll be all right.”

  Brisk and grim-faced, Rosemary takes charge, sending Mara to the kitchen to heat up soup while she finds dry clothes for them all. Mara hears her mother settling the two shocked children with the calm, soothing tones she uses with Corey but it’s the even quieter conversation that is taking place between her father and the other two adults that she is tuned in to.

  Once they are all dry and warmed with soup, the children settled in a makeshift bed on Corey’s bedroom floor, the four adults gather around the computer where the star of New Mungo still glows on the screen map. Coll tells his neighbors of Mara’s discovery and a glimmer of hope lights their stricken, desperate faces. They all sit by the old computer, staring at the star for a long time.

  Rosemary shakes her head, biting her lip. “I just can’t believe in it,” she says, “but I know it might be our only hope.”

  Coll reaches out and squeezes Mara’s hand.

  “If it is, if this New World really is an option, then we need to figure out how to get to it—before we run out of time.”

  Much later, when everyone else has fallen into exhausted sleep, Mara lies wide awake, bonded to her cyberwizz, racing at the speed of light through its electronic universe. She rips across the strands of the Weave, rampaging through its rotting ruins, its junk mountains, and tumbledown towerstacks, frantically scrolling through the last messages on any news site she can find. It’s almost dawn when she tears the halo from her eyes and flings the wand and globe on the floor, distraught.

  She cannot believe it. How could she spend half her life in the Weave and never see the truth? How did she not see those awful cries for help that lie among the ruins and junk mountains of the Weave? She thought it was an adventure playground, that’s all, and she’s been so engrossed in her thrills and spills that she hasn’t seen what should have stopped her in her tracks long, long ago.

  The Weave is not a game or a picturesque ruin for her to play in. It’s a lost world. A world of the dead. It hangs in cyberspace like an ancient c
obweb, derelict, defunct—a ghost weave suspended between the old communication satellites that orbit a drowned Earth.

  It’s an electronic gravesite.

  The news sites have been dead for more than half a century. They all end in a horrifying SOS—the last, frantic cry for help of a drowning world—trapped forever in the strands of the Weave.

  How could I be so blind? Mara is appalled. It’s the same blindness Tain accuses the islanders of when, surrounded by a swallowing sea, they still refuse to see the evidence that’s right in front of their eyes.

  And now she remembers Granny Mary trying to explain something to her, years ago, when Mara first found the cyberwizz, a forgotten relic tucked away at the back of a cupboard. But Mara hadn’t listened, too excited by her find, too eager to learn the secret language that would bring the cyberwizz to life. Now she knows what Granny must have been trying to tell her—the Weave was dead.

  But now she knows. Now she is looking at the world with eyes wide open. And she is almost sure that there is something out there. A New World, a haven above the seas. A future.

  Mara picks up Tain’s carved box, a box he made in the time the island still had trees, for a girl who had a kind of greatness in her; a girl who was Mara’s living image. Mara opens the box and gazes into the mirror she has cracked and ruined. She can’t see any signs of greatness in her own face—just the wide, scared eyes of a young girl who can hardly bear to think about what lies in front of her.

  EARTH WINS

  Summer 2100

  Early next morning Mara is torn from sleep by the dull clang of Wing’s church bell. She rips back her bedclothes and rushes downstairs. Outside, the world is calm at last, the sea and sky a misty blue. But Mara stops in shock and stares around her.

  All that remains of Wing is its central peak. The higher farms and the upper reaches of the village are safe but beyond that, as far as she can see, there is only ocean. Nothing else. A few blades rotate above the waves—all that’s left of the field of windmills.

  Mara grips her father’s hand as they face the impossible truth. All the islands in the north are gone. It’s as if they’d never been there at all. Now it’s too late for miracles. The entire network of islands has been swallowed by the sea. Along with most of Wing.

  “We’re out of time, Mara,” says her father heavily.

  Furious, Mara runs down to the edge of the waves, crashes into the sea, and struggles to reach the old red phone booth that stands on the humpbacked bridge. Up to her waist in water, she reaches an arm through a windowpane long emptied of glass and dials 911, the old emergency number. Why, she doesn’t know. Who she is calling, she doesn’t know either. Who on Earth does she think might answer? The line is dead, of course.

  This can’t happen, Mara sobs down the phone line that’s been dead for decades.

  No one answers. They’re all long gone.

  Mara stands upon the stone altar of Wing’s tiny church, her cheeks burning as she confronts the crowd of fellow-islanders that have gathered there.

  “There is a New World,” she insists. “There are real cities—beautiful cities that are built high above the oceans, just like I’ve told you. The evidence is there, I promise. It’s our only hope. Where else can we go?”

  “Maybe she’s right,” someone calls out from the back of the crowd. “Maybe there are cities out there. But even if there are, they won’t take us all in—awhole island!”

  “It’s what they were built for—to house flood refugees,” Mara counters.

  “The sea might calm down,” says Gail and Rowan’s mother, uncertainly. “It can’t keep rising like this. I think we should stay put. What we know is safer than what we don’t.”

  “It’s too late, Mom,” says Rowan. “We have to face up to this, now.”

  Mara glances over at Gail, who stands beside him. Gail sends her a trembly smile of support. Earlier, Mara had raced up to the church, sobbing breathlessly, terrified that her friends wouldn’t be there. Their whole street was now sea; their home flooded to the top of the windows. Thankfully, they had found sanctuary at the top of the hill.

  The toll of the bell had brought the islanders out of their barricaded homes to gather in the old church. In stunned, broken voices, they told each other of the lives swept away and the homes lost in the great sea surge. Then, urged forward by her father, Mara suddenly found herself on the altar, telling everyone who was crammed into the tiny church of the evidence she had found of the existence of the New World. All the time she felt Gail’s and Rowan’s blue eyes fixed upon her in amazement.

  Now she has told her story, all that she knows of the New World; now it’s up to the others to decide. Everyone is arguing, shouting their views and fears at each other across the church. It’s so loud and chaotic that Mara can’t tell whether the feeling is for or against her. Eventually, Tain strides over to the dust-caked organ that is centuries old—almost as old as the church itself. He lifts the lid and crashes a fist upon the keyboard. The most unearthly noise bursts in a cloud of dust from the organ pipes and stuns the crowd into silence.

  “Remember who this young woman is!” Tain thunders. “Remember who her grandmother was—Mary Bell, a woman whose vision and hard work helped this island survive at a time when we all thought that was impossible.”

  A murmuring fills the church as the older people remember.

  Mara blushes uncomfortably and shoots a glance at her mother. But the look on her face isn’t what Mara expected at all. Suddenly Rosemary begins to push through the crowd and stands beside Mara on the stone altar.

  “You all know that my mother was a woman of unusual courage and vision.” Rosemary sounds breathless, as if she has run up a huge flight of steps, but her quick voice rings clearly through the church. “She worked endlessly for what was best for this island—so that we would all have a future.” Rosemary pauses, steadies herself, then gives Mara a look of deep pride. “My daughter is made of the same stuff as my mother,” she declares. “You should believe in her.”

  Mara turns to her mother in surprise. “You believe in the New World?”

  “I believe in you,” says her mother.

  Tain grasps Rosemary’s hand.

  “I think that swayed it,” he murmurs, keenly scanning the faces in the hushed church. “We’ll take a vote now.”

  It is decided. In two days they will set out for the New World while the summer seas are calm and steady, before another storm or sea surge hits. But there’s no way of forecasting the weather, no way of knowing if a storm will strike on the voyage, and no guarantee that they will find New Mungo or reach it safely.

  People wonder fearfully if the island’s fishermen have the skills to navigate the perils of a great ocean when they have only ever fished the seas close to Wing. The journey might take as long as a week, they reckon, but will there be enough room in the crammed fishing boats for all the water and food and provisions they will need? The talk is all about the sea journey but not about what lies beyond it, because no one can imagine what life in a New World city, high above the ocean, could possibly be like.

  The last day on the island feels like a dream. Tomorrow they will set out on a perilous journey into the future, yet today everyone still tends to the animals and farm holdings as always—they stack the peat and prepare meals just as they always have. They don’t know what else to do, thinks Mara, and neither does she, so she meets up with Gail and Rowan and they climb up to the standing stones to sit upon the ancient rock and look at the endless sea and sky. It’s what they’ve always done on midsummer nights when their northern sky stays light all night long; a strange, forget-me-not sky that is the same intense blue as the scattered wildflowers that once grew in the drowned field of windmills.

  But now, the sight of all that empty ocean is too hard to bear.

  As they walk home, Gail is talking up a huge, ridiculous fairy tale for their future but Mara and Rowan are quiet, looking all around, saying impossible good-byes to every rock, ev
ery stone, every weed and wildflower that remains.

  “What are you taking?” asks Gail. “I’ve lost almost everything—all the beautiful clothes I made over the winter. Mara, can you give me something decent to wear in the New World?”

  Rowan shakes his head, a comical look of disgust on his face. But Mara laughs, glad to have a bit of Gail’s feather-brained chatter to lift the desperate mood. Only Gail could think about clothes at a time like this.

  “Hmm,” Mara frowns. “Something that travels well and won’t crease too much in the crush of thirty people in a fishing boat.”

  “It’s important!” Gail declares. “What if we land up in some great new city looking like gawky peasants?”

  Suddenly Gail is in tears, choking on loud sobs. Mara hugs her friend tight, knowing Gail is not really a feather-brain at all. The frantic chatter is just her way of blocking out a nightmare.

  “Let’s go,” Rowan says heavily and he puts an arm around his twin. “See you tomorrow, Mara.”

  “Yes,” says Mara, but she can’t imagine tomorrow. She watches her two friends head toward their makeshift shelter in the church, then turns for home.

  When she gets home her mother is weeding and watering their small vegetable field, clinging to every last scrap of her life here on the island for as long as she can.

  “Find us some music, Mara!” Rosemary calls out, so Mara runs upstairs and powers up her cyberwizz to zoom into the Weave. Quickly, she locates the flickering tower-stack that’s packed to the brim with all kinds of music, selects a soaring waltz from its electronic catalog, and zips back into realworld where she connects the sound-site up to an ancient speaker in her bedroom. She opens her window and lets the rousing music float out over Wing and the surrounding sea.

  Downstairs, Mara grabs Corey by the hands and leads him around and around the garden in a dance until he is full of giggles. Rosemary sings along in her clear voice, smiling at the two of them—then, all of a sudden, her face crumples and she goes inside. Mara follows her into the kitchen and watches her mother plant herb cuttings in a tiny pot. The room is full of the green, mind-clearing aroma of her namesake, rosemary. She has tied it in bunches to dry over the fire. Mara knows why. Her grandmother seeded that plant on the day Mara’s mother was born. Rosemary won’t leave without taking it with her to their new life. Mara plucks a small bunch of dried rosemary and tucks it in the pocket of her jeans as she looks out of the kitchen window at her father, who is setting the sheep and the goats and their two horses running free on the hillside.