Pathfinder (35 page)

“Hey, we never get together these days. You're always with David, aren't you?” Dol grins at Tony and hugs her whining purple puffball pet. “You two must be in a romance situation—don't deny it.”

“David? Oh, you mean Fo—I mean, David, yes, I mean, no, I mean…”

Mara has got herself in knots. She can't seem to function in the realworld tonight; she's too full of what is happening out in the Noos. But Dol takes her confusion as a
yes and grins again at Tony. He beams a wide smile but his eyes still have an unsettling gleam.

“So, are you going to be hanging around with David tonight or will you manage to tear yourselves from each other's arms and come out with the gang?” Dol asks. Mara can't help noticing that her popularity has suddenly shot up now that she's with Fox. “You must come—Tony's organized a Noos War Game. He's promised
sensational
injuries and
real, extreme
fear. It'll be nux.”

Tony is still smiling that fixed, broad grin yet the indefinable edge in his eyes sends vibrations of fear through Mara's already shattered nerves.

“How on Earth do you manage
extreme
fear, Tony?” she blurts out. “Is it
real
pain,
real
death? If not, well, it's just not sensational enough for me.”

She should have kept her mouth shut but she wants so badly to wipe the smile clear off his face for just a second to see what lies underneath. And she does—for an instant. As Tony's smile slips a fraction, Mara sees something as nasty as necrotty beneath his smarmy exterior and wishes she had left well enough alone.

You don't know who they are. They're trained to look just like any one of us
.

That's what Fox said about the rooks, the secret police.

Now Tony leans close toward her till she can feel his breath on her cheek. “My kind of girl,” he murmurs. “You know I've got my eye on you, Mara.”

Dol giggles but Mara gets up unsteadily, mumbles good night, and quickly exits the cybercath. With trembling fingers she snaps on her zapeedos and begins to head for the Leaning Bridge, where she is to meet Fox for the last time. As she zips along the silver tunnel Mara wishes it could all stop and never happen at all. She wants to snuggle
down with Fox amid the softly undulating walls of his room, rest her aching head against him, and try to blank out all thought of Tony Rex and rooks and the cyberflood and everything else that lies before her.

She wants the world to stop.

But that's not going to happen. The virus will already be live and loose. Cyberflood is on its way, and she can't stop it.

Fox is already there, leaning over the humpbacked bridge, more tousle-headed than ever, gazing into the Looking Pond as if he hadn't a care in the world. Mara feels full of thorns. She is full of pain; she can't believe she will never see him again. They have been together less than a week, but this kind of love cuts quick and deep and keen as a blade.

Mara skates up and bumps to a halt beside him. When he turns toward her, she embeds his face, the way he looks at her now, deep in her mind. She will keep it there forever. For the rest of her days.

“It's begun,” he whispers.

His forehead is damp with sweat. He slips a hot hand into hers. Mara lets out a great sigh and squeezes his hand. They stand together in silence, trying to grasp the enormity of what they have taken on.

“Mara,” he says after a while, and his husky voice shakes with more than just nerves. “I'll never forget you. Never, as long as I live. You've changed everything for me.”

“Fox, I—I…”

She can't find the words she needs. Now that the moment is here she cannot endure it, cannot bear to leave him. The future
must
include him or it will always feel empty. But there's too much to say and so little time. And what could she say now that would change anything?

So she doesn't say a word.

Fox leans heavily upon the bridge.

“Stay. Stay with me,” he whispers, just when she thinks he is never going to speak again. “We could get everyone on the ships, then you could stay and fight with me. I don't want you to go. I've never met anyone like you in my world, and I don't believe I ever will.”

He grips her hand so tight it hurts. The powerful tug inside that pulled her toward him from the very first now becomes a tearing, red-hot pain.

Mara tries to say yes. It's what she wants to say. But somehow she can't. The wrong words seem to be drawn from her against her will, like knives from raw wounds.

“I'm scared the Treenesters wouldn't make it without me. They've never seen the outside world, never seen the sky and the ocean—except Candleriggs, and that was long ago. She'll be just as frightened as the others. They might panic and not know what to do. I can't let them down. And the refugees and urchins—this is their only chance for a future. For the rest of my life I'd wonder what happened to them, if they survived. I'd feel so guilty that I abandoned them all—and I just can't live with the guilt of any more deaths. But I can't bear losing you. I don't want to go—I want to be with you.”

They can't look at each other, can't speak, can't do anything except hold on to each other so tightly it's impossible to believe that either will ever let go.

Finally, Fox speaks.

“I'll meet you in the Weave. At night, every night. I'll wait for you by the broken bridge.”

The Bridge to Nowhere. Mara sobs silently.

It won't be the same. It'll never be the same as his true presence. A cyberfox will never be enough now that she
knows the real, live Fox. Yet it will be something. He won't be lost to her completely.

“I wish you all the luck in the world, Mara,” he says. “And happiness.”

I don't know if there's any happiness left in the world
, thinks Mara.
But there's love. Maybe it's strong enough to bridge an ocean
.

To have found this love amid so much pain and horror feels miraculous—even if, just as she finds it, she must lose it.

“I'll be there,” she promises. “Every night, on the bridge. Always.”

His lips crush hers in a last kiss, unlike any other—a burning, bruising, fast, and brutal kiss, full of pain.

And then suddenly, shockingly, he's gone.

Mara leans over the Looking Pond and wants to scream. She feels as if someone just wrenched a limb from her body.

“Is the big romance off?” says a familiar voice. “Well, plenty more fish in the sea.”

It's the very last person she wants to deal with right now—Tony Rex.

“I've been looking for you,” he says, grabbing hold of her arm so that Mara can't skate away. “Lost anything?”

Horrified, Mara suddenly realizes that she has.

My backpack!

Tony flips something from over his shoulder and Mara sees that he's got her precious backpack. Has he looked in it and seen her treasures? If he has and he's a rook, she's finished. As well as her treasures from the old world and her cyberwizz, there are all the disks that Fox has made for the ships, each one wrapped in her carefully penciled instructions for the mass escape from the city, sealed inside waterproof wallets.

“Thanks. That was nice of you,” says Mara coldly, but her shaking voice betrays her emotion.

“My pleasure.”

Tony smiles as if in sympathy with Mara's distress, but she is sure he's enjoying every second of her discomfort.

Fingers clumsy with nerves, she takes the backpack from him, wondering what is going to happen now.

“Good night then,” she mutters.

“Good night, Mara. Don't feel too lonely and sad,” he leans close and murmurs in her ear, just as she's about to skate off. “You know I'm never far away.”

His words are not meant as comfort, she is sure. They feel like a threat.

Less than two hours till midnight. Then the virus goes live and it's cyberflood wipeout.

Mara lies in a sleep pod and feels each passing second beat within her. She can't sleep. She's too deeply frightened by Tony Rex and by the enormity of the rescue plan she is about to undertake. She must ready herself for what is to happen. This is what she has come to New Mungo for. But Mara doesn't feel ready, not at all. She will never be ready. She wants to snuggle down in the pink glow of her sleep pod and forget it all. But even here she can't feel at peace, with the lumen eyes of the motherlight watching her.

Maybe I could get out of this. Maybe I could persuade Fox to forget it all. We could let the cyberflood come and do nothing. We could live together and have a nice, snug life here in the New World. Why do I have to be the big heroine? Why me? I don't want it to be me. I'm too scared. I'm just an ordinary girl and all I want is an ordinary life. It's not up to me to save the world. And I want to be with Fox. I can't bear to leave him. I just can't
.

Misery engulfs her. Mara huddles down inside the spongy quilt, closes her eyes, and tries to find oblivion in sleep.

I believe in you
.

The voice jolts her back into wakefulness. Mara stares at the motherlight. But she knows it was no lumen's voice. That was the voice of her own mother, echoing out of the past.

My daughter is made of the same stuff as my mother
.

Mara turns over onto her back and begins to think. She thinks of Granny Mary, who fought so hard in her youth to build a future when it seemed there was none—the future that she, Mara, inherited. She thinks of Candleriggs, then of Thenew, the Face in the Stone; all of them salvaged a future out of the wreckage of their young lives. And each one had some deep inner wound to bear. Thenew was thrown out of her own land and set adrift, pregnant and all alone on the ocean. And Granny Mary—did she have some deeply hidden wound too?

Mara digs into her backpack and takes out the little carved wooden box. She opens the lid and looks in the mirror—looks beyond the scar in the cracked glass, deep into her own eyes, and confronts the thought that she has kept tucked away at the back of her mind for so long. Suddenly she is sure of what she sees: eyes that are as dark and determined as Tain's.

She closes the little box. Deep within her something is settled. She will never know the answer to that puzzle of the past but she no longer questions it.

Now Mara knows why she must act, and it has nothing to do with the stone-telling. Her own eyes tell her why. All the signs she ever needed lie within herself. She must fight to save what she can of the future that her parents, and her
grandparents, Granny Mary and Tain, struggled to give her. The future that Gail and her little brother, Corey, lost.

The only way she can give any meaning to their lost lives is to keep fighting for her own future, and the futures of the urchins, the Treenesters, and the refugees. Then the deaths of the people she loved won't have been for nothing at all.

And Fox must fight for a future he can be proud of in the world his grandfather built.

In just a few hours the fight will begin.

Fox feels them coming, a tidal wave advancing
.

The shock waves rip across the Noos, thrilling all its patterns. His twentieth-century ghost wave, a massed army of history's lost and dead, is about to engulf New Mungo. In they come, using every godgem channel they can find—by the hundreds, thousands, millions
.

An oceanic feeling sweeps Fox as wipeout hits. Pure joy. Too good to be true
.

Chaos and panic erupt all around. Fox waits. He knows how to still it. Using the only virus-free godgem in the whole city he keys in the code that will shake New Mungo to its roots. And sits back to watch
.

Martin Luther King appears as a colossal lumenbeing above ten thousand heads. A giant with a giant's voice
.

“I have a dream!” he booms, and Fox feels that the strength of will in that immense voice could shatter the city into pieces. “I have a dream—to be free at last! Free at last! Free at last!”

The cybercath freezes in shock. Martin Luther King pauses. Fox sees open-mouthed amazement reflected ten thousand times over upon the faces of the New World citizens. He tingles all over, his hair stands on end. The atmosphere turns electric, volatile
.

This is it, his own voice roars in his head; this is what you were born to do
.

But now comes the dangerous bit, the test that Fox has created for his city, a test of its heart and soul. The cybercath is silent, breathlessly still, as Martin Luther King begins to tell the people of New Mungo the story of the old, drowned world. He tells them the truth. And the people of the New World don't turn away. They listen. Now, for the first and only time in his life, Fox feels part of his own city. He feels the past link with the present and begin to knit the fabric of the future as he stands among his fellow citizens and hears the truth from the mouth of a giant lumen ghost
.