Aurora (26 page)

Leaves shred and scatter as Pan slithers past him. Horrified, he sees she’s let go of the creeper.

‘No!’

Fox lunges for her. Clinging to the creeper with one arm, he grabs her round the waist. The pangolin scales cut into his hands but he grips her tight.

‘You don’t love me,’ she whispers. ‘You lied. You want Mara and the Lily girl.’

‘We’ve come this far together, Pan,’ he says gently, feeling all her hurt and fear as she trembles against him. Whatever she did, what does it matter now? ‘Don’t give up when we’re so close.’

She buries her head in his neck. ‘I want to stay close.’

He meant
so close to our goal
, but never mind.

‘Come on then,’ Fox urges. ‘Let’s go.’

The world below explodes into war as they climb inside the dark jungle that tunnels up to the city in the sky.

DISTURBING THE ETHER

Just hours before, escaping the seething panic of the Noos, Fox had surfed across the empty blue static of the Nowhere to the forlorn edges of the electronic universe where the virtual ruins of the Weave lie.

It was to be his last-ever visit to the place he’d bequeathed to Pandora. Since she’d taken over Surgent meetings in the Weave, freeing him to fire up revolution in the Noos and the world’s soundwaves, he’d had no reason or desire to go there. A final gathering of the avatars of Surgent leaders from all across the Earth had brought him back, at last.

No one knew if they’d survive what lay ahead. As they gathered in the wasteland behind the Boulevard of Dreams, a scream tore through the ether like an omen of the battle to come. Fox saw what looked like a flame of his own fox tail streaking through the Weave-sky. No sooner had he glimpsed it than it was gone. The boulevards were checked but no threat or snooping presences were found. Fox urged his Surgents to keep strong and true in their hearts and the meeting broke up in a sombre, determined mood.

His life might end in a matter of days or hours. So Fox reckoned it was time to say goodbye to the past, once and for all. In the guise of the very same fox avatar of his youth, he roamed old haunts in the electronic boulevards, his wanderings ending where they always did, once upon a time.

But when he padded on to the broken Bridge to Nowhere his cybersenses tingled. Someone else had been here, recently. The disturbance left in the ether was like fresh footprints in dust.

Pan liked to snoop, he knew that, but her snaky presence left barely a trace. These were not Pan’s slithering Weave-tracks nor the furtive stalkings of a rogue presence. Neither was there the litter of rotting data the creatures of the junk heaps always left in their wake. These cybertracks were frantic, circling and back-tracking, treading this way and that across the broken bridge. Yet the guard he’d left here years ago, a fox twin on a neverending bridge-watch waiting for Mara if she ever came back, had not sounded its alarm.

He found the fox guard muzzled and useless, hidden under ether dust so thick he knew the creature hadn’t stirred in years. Who had muzzled it and put it to sleep? Pan? A rogue Surgent? How long had it been silenced? How many years . . . ? If Mara had ever come here looking for him, he realized with a sick jolt, he’d never know now.

Fox unmuzzled his fox twin and awakened it from its enforced slumber. Back in realworld, suddenly exhausted in body and mind, Fox flopped down on his pulpy bed in the tower room and fell into a blank sleep of his own.

Jolted awake into throbbing darkness he couldn’t tell if he’d slept minutes or months. He’d fallen asleep with his godgem on and woke up still on the Bridge to Nowhere at the edges of the Weave. The fox guard was on its feet yipping and yapping at the avatar of a girl scrambling across the rubble to clamber up on to the broken bridge arm. As she spied the two foxes on the bridge she stumbled to a halt.

Fox silenced his yapping bridge-guard. In realworld, he could barely breathe. The skin of his human body prickled with shock. The name formed on his lips but it couldn’t be . . .

‘Mara?’

The girl was trembling so hard the ether rippled around her.

‘I – I’m not Mara.’

Her voice was as incredulous as his own.

It was not Mara. He saw that after the first shock passed. Yet, there was something about the girl’s intense gaze and burning presence, that
was . . .

‘Who are you?’ Fox demanded, all his Weave-senses super-charged.

‘I’m Lily,’ she replied with a gasping cry. ‘I thought I’d never find you.’

Fox stared harder and padded towards her until they were a footstep apart. She watched his every move with wide, fiery eyes.

‘Once upon a time there was a fox,’ she said, quick and breathless, ‘who liked to sneak through the ruins of a beautiful, broken world on to the Bridge to Nowhere. My mother used to tell this tale when I was small.’

‘Who,’ Fox whispered, ‘is your mother?’

‘Mara,’ said the girl.

Reality seemed to bend and crumple. The eyes that stared back at him were, he now saw, a mirror of his own.

‘You
are
Fox?’ It was a desperate plea. ‘My mother’s Fox?’

‘I am Fox,’ he replied.

‘Then – then you’re my father,’ she said, her tentative young voice reaching out to him across a footstep of cyberspace, an ocean of lost time.

It was the violent tug of her voice on his heart that made him believe beyond doubt.

Back in realworld, Fox whispered a Weave spell into the godgem, while on the broken bridge . . .

A tiny tornado began to whirl around the cyberfox. He was breaking up, vanishing before Lily’s horrified eyes.

‘No!’ A cry tore from her. ‘Please don’t go!’

Unable to breathe, she could only watch as the cyberswirl slowed and the electronic matter rearranged and settled into the shape of . . . a man. A man who was a stranger – yet he belonged to her, she knew that right away. His face was so like the one she has studied in the cracked mirror inside the lid of Granny Mary’s wooden box: her own.

Lily wanted to rip through the virtual skin of the Weave, to reach out and touch her real, human father.

The ether crackled and sparked around them as the man and the girl stood together on the broken bridge.

She was a heart-wrenching mixture of Mara and himself. And there was even, Fox saw, a ghost of his own mother in Lily’s face. But there was something more, something beyond all that, which was her very own self.

This is my daughter,
thought Fox, amazed.

‘But Mara,’ he blurted out, ‘is she . . . ?’

Lily sighed and his heart sank.

Dead, he thought. She’s dead, after all.

‘She’s on the far side of the mountain,’ said Lily.

‘She’s alive?’ The throb of emotion in Fox made a violent ripple in the ether.

Lily nodded. ‘But she doesn’t know where I am. I ran away to find you.’

Fox studied his daughter’s face, lost for words.

‘I never knew you existed,’ she burst out. ‘I thought Rowan was my dad. The wizz globe was stolen before I was born so Mum lost contact with you. I came through the mountains to the ocean to search for you. I found the globe and now I’ve found you, but I’ve lost everything else.’ The girl’s face quivered. ‘My best friend is dead and I’m a prisoner in Tuck’s ship in the city of Ilira. He’s a brutal man, he –’ She gasped, glancing upwards at something Fox couldn’t see, frightened by something in her world. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. There’s shouting and screaming up on deck. Help me.’

Fox stepped as close as he dared. The slightest touch would tear the ether and leave a gash like a wound in the skin of the Weave.

‘Lily, I’m an ocean away. You must help yourself.’

Her eyes were desperate. ‘I had to see you, I had to. I was sure that snake-girl, Pandora, knew who you were. I told her you were my father but she chased me away.’

Pandora found Lily here and never told him?

Fox controlled a surge of rage at such betrayal. He felt he was furiously trying to fit together the lost pieces of a puzzle in the dark. The only parts of the puzzle that mattered were Mara and Lily. Mara was alive. But his daughter’s life was in danger because of him.

And within hours his own life might end.

Emotion whirled inside Fox as he thought of the coming cyclone he had stirred up around the world. Yet here they were, he and Lily. Somehow they’d found each other in the virtual universe. It was as unlikely as two bits of flotsam from a storm-wrecked ship coming together, years later, in the eye of another storm.

His war was about to burst through the walls of the empire. Fox no longer had the power to stop it, even if he wanted to.

‘I don’t want to die here,’ Lily blurted. ‘I want to see you in the real world.’

Fox would have ripped through the ether to get to her if he could. He saw her terror, felt her courage scattering.

Somehow, he had to give her strength – and do so at cyberspeed.

WIZZLOG TO THE WORLD

Fox uttered a cybercode into his godgem – a Weave-spell he treasured years ago, found in the wreckage of a Weavesite and saved in the godgem’s memory banks in case Mara ever came back.

On the Bridge to Nowhere a dark-haired young woman appeared like a genie from the ether.

‘Mum?’ Lily gasped.

‘It’s her grandmother,’ Fox told her. ‘Your great-grandmother, Mary Bell, when she was young.’

‘Granny Mary?’ Lily gaped in amazement.

‘A lumen image of her I found in a newsgram,’ Fox quickly explained. ‘She logged the plight of her islands when the seas first rose. Her wizzlogs once had a worldwide following.’ He started the lumen. ‘Watch.’

‘Wizzlog 47,’ said Mary Bell. ‘Last night the sea took one of our islands – whole families wiped out as they slept.’ Her voice broke. ‘Our land is vanishing around us. This is an SOS to the outside world.’

Mary Bell raked dark hair from her face in a gesture that is now Lily’s and Mara’s. She gazed out across the years. ‘The people of our islands are survivors. Please help us. But if you don’t, we’ll find a way through this somehow.’

Her defiant dark eyes widened and she cried out in sudden joy to someone in her world that they couldn’t see. ‘Tain! You’re safe!’

Mary Bell vanished.

Fox turned to her astonished great-granddaughter on the broken bridge.

‘Don’t give up. Do what Mary Bell and Mara did. Save yourself!’

Lily began to cough.