Pathfinder (5 page)

“I've been watching you for a while,” is the only reply
.

Shivers run down Mara's spine as she senses the stealthy presence that must be the sly stalker, the one who's been tracking her, shadowing her movements on the Weave. But how on Earth did he—it sounds like a he—follow her here? Mara's heart thumps as something begins to form in the cyberhaze. A pair of disembodied, untamed eyes stare at her through the blue. Mara stares back in fright. Two sharp points appear above them. Ears? Now, below the eyes, a long white streak tipped in black forms into a doglike muzzle. There's the sudden flash of a tawny tail…

A fox! Mara has a fleeting memory of the realworld fox that ravaged Wing's lambs and chickens before it was
finally trapped and killed… but what on Earth is a fox doing way out here?

The cyberfox is as still as a statue. Mara feels the fiercest concentration emanate from that intense stillness as the creature strains to sense all that it can of her
.

“What do you know about once upon a time?” The cyberfox bares its teeth as Mara says nothing. She has no idea how to answer
.

“Look, I've tumbled out of the Weave and I haven't a clue where I—”

She falters as the fox pads closer, its teeth still bared, a faint snarl on its breath
.

“Where are you from?” it demands in a tone that prickles Mara's skin. “I mean in realworld—where are you from?”

“Wing,” Mara answers automatically as the fox closes in
.

“Wing?” The fox stops dead, turns still as stone, all senses on full alert. “A new city?” the fox says at last, uncertainly. “I've never heard of that one.”

Mara's eyes widen at this and she lifts her gaze from the fox up to the colossal towers
.

“It's an—an island,” Mara stutters. “But what do you know about new cities? Are there really such things?”

“An island?” the fox murmurs huskily, ignoring her questions. Its fur bristles. A glistening tongue trembles between its teeth. It licks its lips. “There are still islands? Where? Where's this island?”

Mara drags her eyes from the gleaming towers and notes the fox-hunger, a desperate curiosity as intense as her own. She frowns. “You asked where I'm from in real-world. How does a cyberfox know about realworld? Are you real?” The frown lifts and her eyes widen. “Do you exist in realworld too?”

The fox looks at her warily, hesitates, then slowly nods
.

Mara gasps. Never in all her cybertravels has she met another realworld being—only lumens and ghosts and all the other weird electronic creatures of the Weave
.

“Who are you? Where are you in realworld?” breathes Mara. She looks up again at the crystal towers behind the fox and hopes with all her might that her hunch is right
.

“I asked you first,” says the fox
.

“I told you, I'm from an island. It's in the North Atlantic.”

“An island,” whispers the fox. Its eyes shine with wonder. “You live on a real island? In the North Atlantic? Where's that?”

“It's the ocean,” says Mara, unsurprised by his ignorance because she knows so little of the world herself. Tain has told her that the lands once separated the oceans and they had different names, but the Atlantic is all she knows. “But please tell me—I need to know—what are those great towers behind you?”

“The fox barely glances over its shoulder. “It's the New World.”

“The New World!” cries Mara. She hugs herself with joy. “Then it really does exist!”

And yet—she stops and her brow furrows in concentration. Those gigantic towers are only a cybervision. She needs to know if the real thing exists. She turns to the fox who is staring at her more fiercely than ever
.

“Does the New World exist in realworld too?” Mara demands. “Are there really giant cities that rise up above the oceans?”

“Of course,” shrugs the fox. “It's all there is—at least I thought so. That's what we've been told. But you say you live on an island. So there are islands in the world!” The fox turns urgent. “Tell me about your island. Tell me about once upon a time. Tell me now!”

But Mara is filled with her own sense of urgency. Beyond the fox, beyond the great towers, she seems to see another crest rising faintly out of the cyberhaze. She looks harder, deeper, farther, and sees another, she is sure. Then more and still more, only just visible. Endless crests, each one more and more distant, stretching far deep into the ocean of blue static like a forest of crystal trees…

“You've got to help me!” Mara cries. “My island's drowning. The sea is rising fast and we need to find a new home or we'll drown. We need to get to the New World. Please—tell me how to find it. Where are the cities? How can I find them in
realworld
?”

The fox becomes stonelike again. The pupils of its eyes become hard black points of intensity. “Are you real?” it demands suspiciously. “Or just a Weave ghost?”

“Of course I'm real!” exclaims Mara. “Help me, please! I'll tell you all about my island. I'll tell you everything I know about once upon a time. I'll tell you whatever you want if you'll help me find the New World.”

Fox eyes stare deep into her own and for a moment Mara is sure she can see the real, human presence shining through. She feels a tug inside—a deep, raw instinct that urges her toward the fox. She is almost close enough to reach out and touch that sleek, tawny fur—but in an electronic universe there's no such thing as touch
.

“Please,” Mara whispers
.

“Mara!” calls a familiar little voice, from very far away.

Something wrenches her arm and she plunges, sprawling, into the ocean of cyberhaze. Mara makes a desperate, useless lunge at the fox's tail as an overpowering electric surge swoops her backward. A gulf of blue cyberhaze now separates her from the fox
.

“Mara, Mara!” says the little voice, closer now.

“Help me!” she begs the fox, struggling with all her might against the grip of a huge reverse force. “Tell me where you are!”

“New Mungo …” cries the fox, running after her, “in Eurosea. Come back!”

The fox is vanishing in the haze, and the crystal towers fade as—feet first—Mara is sucked back through the spiraling coil and ripped across channels of electronic matter. “Help me!” she screams over and over as she tumbles far away and out of reach of the cyberfox and the beautiful vision of the New World
.

There's nothing she can do. Miserably, she hurtles back through the networks of the Weave
.

“Mara!” gasps the little voice, scared now.

With a sickening wrench Mara crashes back into real-world. She pulls the glowing halo from her eyes and flings it away. She looks around her bedroom in a daze, a sob caught in her throat. Corey stands beside her, his big blue eyes wide with fright, clutching the wand he has pulled from her hand. The globe rolls across the floor.

“Mara! What's wrong?”

Mara stares blankly at her little brother. Her eyes nip with tears, her cheeks burn. She grabs the culprit.

“I could kill you!” she rages at him. “Why did you do that? I lost the fox—I lost the New World, all because of you!”

Corey's face crumples, his eyes shut, his mouth forms a hard O and Mara braces herself for a huge wail. He musters a noise that could shatter rock. Mara tries to shush him before her mother hears.

“I thought something
ba-ad
was happening to you 'cos you were shouting, ‘Help me, help me!'” Corey cries. “And I was
sca-ared
. And I was
trying
to help you. And I
was only wanting to show you my new wobbly
too-oof
!” He lets out a huge heartbroken howl, giving a wide display of his wobbly teeth.

“Mara, what's happening up there?” her mother calls.

Ashamed, Mara softens her furious grip to hug the rigid body of her small brother. She strokes his head until his howls calm and she feels his body soften. “I'm sorry, Corey,” she mutters into his hair. “It was just a game that went wrong and I got a bit upset. But I'm all right, really I am. It wasn't your fault. Scoot now and I'll come downstairs and we'll play, whatever you want.”

“Really?” Corey sniffs, scrubs away his tears, hiccups, and recovers instantly. “When?”

“Five minutes.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Mara lies.

Corey scoots and Mara flops on her bed. Outside, the sea surges around the island, something in the sound reminding her of the waves of electronic matter she was surfing through only minutes before.

It's unbearable. She could search cyberspace for years and never find the fox and the New World again. It was only by sheer accident that she found them at all. Mara springs to her feet and paces her room, thinking furiously. She turns, trips over a cushion on the floor, and impatiently kicks it out of her way. The cushion bounces across the room and something hard that was lying under it clatters against the wall.

Oh no!
Mara rushes over and sinks to her knees beside Tain's hand-carved box that she has unwittingly kicked, full-force, across her room. Earlier, she was lying on the floor, admiring it and scrutinizing her face in the little mirror. A small splinter has broken off the bottom of the
box where it hit the wall but thankfully the wonderful carvings are unharmed.

Gingerly, Mara opens the box to check inside—and her heart sinks. The mirror on the lid has a horrible jagged crack right across one side. When she looks at herself her face is scarred by the crack, all across her left cheek. Mara groans and wants to kick
herself
now.

More than half a century ago Tain made this beautiful box for Granny Mary; it's only been hers for a few weeks and she's wrecked it.

Tain will never know, Mara vows. She'll make sure of that. But she
will
tell him of her amazing discovery—the evidence she has found that the New World really does exist.

And yet—Mara frowns. All her evidence really amounts to is that single stunning vision, a crystal forest of towering cities. And the word of a cyberfox. Mara runs a finger over the crack in the little mirror, something in its jagged shape reminding her of the beautiful, branching crests that stretched far into the ocean of cyberspace.

It's just not enough. It's not real, solid evidence. Not enough to convince anyone to launch out onto the ocean to find sanctuary in a New World. And now she's back in realworld, now she thinks hard about that unearthly vision, Mara is suddenly a lot less sure than she was. Her frown deepens, her eyes darken, and she bites her lip. She sits and thinks with a hard-beating heart.

Could this really be our future? Might there be a safe refuge for us all in the New World?

She stirs herself. Time to work. If the New World really does exist, she needs more than shimmering visions. She needs rock-solid evidence; something she can believe in. Something everyone can believe in.

Mara gathers up her cyberwizz. She scrapes her dark sweep of hair back from her face and slips the halo over her eyes. She picks up the tiny wand and repowers the globe. Then plunges straight back into the Weave.

“Mara!”

Rosemary stands at Mara's bedroom door with a cremated loaf of bread in her hands. Mara stirs from the bed where she is huddled in an exhausted heap, sits up, and rubs her eyes.

“What time's it?”

“Could you not
smell
the bread burning?” exclaims her mother. “I asked you to keep an eye on it while I went out to the barn to feed the animals. This is a waste and you know we can't afford any waste.”

“You asked me to keep an eye on Corey too,” Mara yawns. “Can't do everything, can I?”

“You don't do
anything
but play on that cyberwizz all night then sleep all day.”

“I wasn't playing, I was—” Mara stops, reminding herself that no one, not even her mother, knows what she really does on the cyberwizz. With a jolt of excitement she remembers what she found deep in the ruins of the Weave last night—something that might help save them all. But her mother is not in the mood for life-and-death discussions. Today's bread is a more pressing concern.

“Well, you can switch off now because you'll have to bake another loaf.” Rosemary takes the globe and wand
from Mara's hands and replaces them with the blackened loaf. “You can take that one out to the chickens first.”

Mara knows better than to argue. Her mother's normally good nature is balanced by a stubbornness equal to her own. It's simpler to punch a pillow and do as she's told.