Pathfinder by Julie Bertagna Read Free Book Online Page B

She picks up the globe of the cyberwizz, and it tingles tolife at her touch. She scribbles a series of commands on its electropad. Grudgingly, the old laptop powers up. Mara finds it awkward to tap on the big, flat keyboard and it is grindingly slow, but it’s a reliable old machine. Frowning in deep concentration, she slips on her halo and enters the Weave. Then zips through site after site, following a complex trail of links that eventually lead her to the hidden basement site in one of the tumbledown towerstacks that, after weeks of trawling and searching through the rot of the Weave ruins, she found at last, late last night.
    It’s the vital evidence she needs that the New World is real.
    Coll and Rosemary watch as she scans newsreels from the beginning of the Century of Storms. Images of floods and tempests and global destruction fill the screen. Mara is shocked to the core, every bit as shaken as she was when she first viewed it last night. It all happened years ago, long before she was born, in faraway places. But now the same thing is happening on her very doorstep. She cannot look away or dismiss it. She must pay attention.
    While her parents murmur to each other, Mara draws a sharp breath as she reads the text that scrolls along the bottom of the screen—the final message on the Weavesite. Somehow, in her euphoric excitement last night, she never saw it. Now Mara is dumbfounded by what she reads.
    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.
    â€œImpossible,” 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.
    â€œThe SOS,” she whispers. “Did you see it?”
    â€œThat was all long ago, Mara,” murmurs her mother, uncomfortably. “Never mind that now.”
    â€œBut—”
    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.
    â€œModeled 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.”
    â€œThousands 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.
    â€œWhere 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.
    â€œI’m not exactly sure where we are in the world,” she confesses, ashamed at her own ignorance.
    â€œThe North Atlantic,” says Coll. “That should be here.” He frowns. “But this map seems to call it …” he peers closer then sits