Firespark (28 page)

“Nice of the pirate to give us a hand.”

Rowan jerks his head toward Tuck, who is dozing in a nook of rock. He plunges into the hot spring with a groan, ice-bitten after a day spent hacking the frozen waterfall.

Tuck has fallen asleep after a long trek to the cave mouth with Scarwell and Wing. Everyone is sick of seaweed and fish, but there were no eggs or birds on the shore, only face-sniping wind and a darkness that never lightened, not a pinch, said Tuck, though they hunted as long as they could bear the cold. Still, they didn't return empty-handed. As they gathered seaweed for soup and driftwood for the fire, they came across a lone seal on the shore. Tuck killed it with his cutlass and somehow the three of them managed to haul the dead seal all the way back through the tunnels to the moon cave.

“He's been busy enough!” Mara retorts. “This will feed us for weeks.” Sweat drips from her forehead as she works on the large carcass she and Scarwell are struggling to cut up with sharp stones.

Rowan climbs out of the pool and comes over. “A seal!” he exclaims.

“The
pirate
found it,” says Mara snarkily.

“Use every bit of it” is all Rowan says, though his eyes gleam with hunger as he watches Mara cut through tough skin and thick blubber to reach the meat. “Keep the fat for soup and lamp fuel. We can use the skin for all kinds of things and the liver is full of iron—”

“I know, I know,” Mara interrupts. Has he forgotten she lived on the same island as he? She knows what to do with a seal—though she has only ever watched before.

But why is Rowan so moody? Now he's growling at Scarwell for licking lumps of seal fat from her fingers. And he's always ready to give Tuck a tongue-lashing when, right now, he should be praising him to the skies.

“What's your problem with Tuck?” Mara demands.

“Don't trust him.”

“You've said. But you don't like him either. Why?”

“I caught him trying to steal your cyberwizz,
remember
?”

“Caught him
looking
at it. He thinks it's a toy.”

“Mara, I know you feel guilty about his mother and everything but—”

“But what? He needs us. He's lost his own people,
remember
.”

“We all have,” snaps Rowan. “Anyway, he hasn't lost his people, he abandoned them. You can't trust someone who does that.”

“He abandoned a lot of murdering pirates because he doesn't want to be one.”

“Still think he's dangerous,” Rowan growls.

“
Dangerous
? Don't be stupid, Tuck's the least of my worries.” This is her chance, thinks Mara, to tell Rowan
about the baby, though she suspects Mol already has. He is her oldest friend in the world but somehow she hasn't been able to find the right moment or the words. And somehow she knows that her not telling him might be at the root of his filthy moods.

“What about your Fox?”

Mara starts at the unexpected question.

“I—I can't reach him anymore. My power's dead.”

Her voice breaks and she bites her lip.

“Is he so important?” asks Rowan, in a strange, curt voice.

But he reaches down and draws a strand of hair back from her hot face with a gentle hand that is at odds with his tone.

“He's important.” Mara's face crumples and she lowers her head to hide her tears and digs at the seal with her cutting stone. “I tried to tell myself he wasn't. He's so far away that he didn't seem real anymore. But I need him now.” She swallows and scrubs tears from her face with a greasy hand. “It's not just that. Rowan, the cyberwizz took me into the past. I went to Wing and I saw—”

“Mara! Forget those silly games. We're beyond all that.” He hesitates then blurts out. “Just when are you planning to tell me?”

Mara tries to speak but no words come.

“All that sickness and fainting.” Rowan crouches beside her. “We're all starving yet you're getting big. And weepy and strange. Anyway, Mol doesn't keep a secret well.”

The look in his blue eyes makes her hot inside.

“I—I
was
going to tell you.”

“Yeah?” The word feels like a slap. He stands up and turns his back on her. “So who's the father?” he mutters. “The pirate or the Fox?”

Mara could hit him. She glares at the back of his head, hardly able to breathe. But she knows how to rouse Rowan's temper, just as he knows how to rile her.

“Urth!”

She spits Tuck's favorite gypsea curse at him and flings her cutting stone at his back, splattering him with blubber and blood.

That does it. Rowan turns on her.

“How many chances does one person get? How many stupid mistakes …”

He trails off.

Mara gulps. “You mean me?”

He begins to speak, sighs, stops.

Mara stands up. “I get it. This is about Gail. She's dead because of me. How do you think I feel about that? She's not just
your
sister. She was my best friend. My own little brother, my parents—they're dead too because of me and I've got to live with that. Now I'm pregnant and we're stuck in a hole at the end of the Earth and we're probably all going to die. That's my fault too because coming to Greenland was another one of my brilliant ideas. Except,” anger blazes through her, “you all do what I say, don't you? You don't have any brilliant ideas of your own but you'll follow me and blame me when it all goes wrong. I'll tell you something else though—you haven't a clue just how bad I am.”

She takes a seething breath. She should swallow back the next words but she's surfing a wave of temper and can't stop. “I killed a man. I mean it, I did. In the sky city. I thought he was going to kill me, so I—I killed him first. If I hadn't killed him we wouldn't be here now. You would still be a slave, building bridges for the New World till you dropped dead. You might even be dead already …”

“Mara—”

Rowan is on his feet, trying to hold her, to calm her down, but she pushes him off.

“So just
how
many people have I killed? How many have I saved? Let's count them up …”

“
Mara
.”

Rowan grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. Raging, she shoves him in the chest.

They look at each other and stop.

They were like this as little kids, when their bad moods clashed. They'd end up blazing at each other and someone would have to drag them apart before fists flew—usually Mara's, first.

Wonder where she gets her temper from
? Tain's eyes would twinkle and Granny Mary would give him one of her looks.

In time, they learned to keep their tempers in check, but it was easy back then, in their ordinary life. Now, nothing is ordinary. Everything familiar is gone. All they can depend upon is each other, yet here they are, brawling with each other, ready to fight like a couple of farm cats.

Rowan gives her another shake, gentler, a rough kind of hug, almost.

“Mara, I'm sorry. I just needed to blow off steam at someone,” he confesses, “and you're—well, I
know
you, so you got it. What happened in the sky city,” he looks bewildered, upset, shakes his head, “we'll talk about that sometime. But Gail and our families—you're not to blame. You're right, we backed you all the way, all of us. I never should have said what I did, I just—I
miss
Gail so bad. It's like I lost a bit of myself. It's like”—he screws up his face—“like chopping the leg off a stool. I feel … toppled.”

“I know.”

Gail was his twin. Identical in looks though not in nature, they were as necessary to each other as water to a wave.

“I want them all back.” Mara feels a terrible grief rising; her nails are puncturing her palms. “I want our old life back. Everything's gone.”

She thinks of the specks of people on their island, the ones that might have been Granny Mary and Tain. There were other specks near the village that might have been Rowan's ancestors. When the sun returns and she can power up the cyberwizz, she'll show him then.

Rowan looks her in the eye. Like her, his temper is all burned out.

“We're all ripped up by what we've seen, what we've lost—and what we've had to do to get here. We've all got blood on our hands. Me too. There are things I did—” Rowan stops and stares at the carving of the Wreck of the World on the cave wall. “We've survived a catastrophe like nothing else that's ever happened. The seabed's crowded with people who didn't. How are we supposed to live with that?”

He rubs a hand over his eyes and turns away from the carving on the wall.

“Maybe there's still something out there in the world for us,” Mara whispers. “Some kind of future.” She's not sure if she believes that anymore but she can't give up hope.

“You've got your baby now,” says Rowan. “You've got that.”

He says it softly but she knows him so well she can hear an edge in his voice. A strange, snaky feeling is uncurling deep inside.

It's only the baby moving, she tells herself.

Too much has happened, too much has been lost. Too much hard life has junked up the innocent bonds they once had. He is not Rowan from the island any more than she is the same girl she was back then. Everything has changed. They are not the uncomplicated friends they once were. How could they be?

Their eyes meet in a confused glance.

But what are they now?

Possil bursts into the moon cave with a yell, his ax still grasped in his fist. At last, they have broken through to the other side of the waterfall! It was his ax, Possil boasts, that made the final chop.

Excited voices echo in the tunnels and soon the others pour into the cave. Tuck is woken by grateful slaps on the back when the ravenous ice-diggers see the seal carcass and the strips of meat sizzling on hot stones around the fire.

What a day this has been, they say, licking their fingers, although whether it's night or day no one can tell.

Once they have slept, they will pack up and try to make it through the ice tunnel and the mountains into the interior of the land.

“We can't leave without Broomielaw and Clayslaps.” Gorbals is hit by panic now it's almost time to go. “They could be out there somewhere. We don't know. We have to wait until the sun comes back and search the bay again.”

“We
have
searched, Gorbals,” says Ibrox firmly. “Many, many times.”

Gorbals stares at the ground and shakes his head.

“I'll stay and look for them,” Tuck offers.

Everyone stares at him in surprise.

“You? How would you know who they are?” scoffs Pollock. “Even if you found them, you'd never bring them through the mountain. You only want to stay because you're afraid, gypsea,” he taunts.

Tuck clenches his fists and shifts from foot to foot.

Pollock raises his chin. His dark eyes are fierce. “Anyway,
I'm
staying.”

Gorbals's face stiffens. “Why would
you
stay?”

“Clayslaps is my baby. Remember? I searched the bay even when the firebombs were falling.” Pollock turns on Gorbals. “Didn't see
you
out searching at all, wordslug. Too busy digging in your thick head for poems? Too scared you'd get another finger burned? You go. I'll search again for Broomielaw and my baby when the sun returns. Possil can mark a trail through the mountains and I'll track you all down in the spring.”

Mol pushes between Pollock and Gorbals. Her mouth trembles and she twists her hands.

“Broomie and I were like sisters. If I thought she was alive out there with Clay, would I have stayed in these caves all this time? We only survived because we found the hot spring. How long would we have lasted out there in the dark, any of us, alone? I've thought and thought about it, and I know they must have drowned when the ship sank. The wreckers would have rounded them up with the rest of us if they'd survived.” Mol covers her mouth with her hands to catch a sob.

After long moments, Gorbals steps toward Pollock.

“No more fighting,” Mol pleads.

But Gorbals only puts out his hand.

Shocked, Pollock looks as if he'll refuse the outstretched hand.

“She's right, Pollock,” says Gorbals. “They're gone and we're still fighting over them.”

Pollock looks at the hand, gives a tiny shake of his head, as if he doesn't know what to do.

“We'll come back in the spring,” Mara urges, “and we'll make sure. We won't give up on them. But we need to survive. We can't look for them if we're dead. Come with us for now, Pollock.”

She sees the pain in Pollock's eyes. He's so practical and fierce in nature that everyone thought he felt little for the baby and Broomielaw. He's been hurting all this time.

Gorbals has taken back his hand and stuffed it in the pocket of his sealskin coat. Mol grabs his arm before he turns away. She grabs Pollock's arm too and forces them into a handshake.