Firespark Read Online Free Page A

fever wiped out boatfuls of gypseas all over Pomperoy. It killed his little sister, Beth, and Grumpa, Ma’s old da. They’d hardly recovered from Tuck’s own da’s death the year before, from a bone-rotting sickness he caught while raiding one of the toxic ships that ghost the oceans, ships full of scrap metal, oil, and chemicals left over from the old world. Da was on a scavenge scoop for bridge metal and wire, but he ended up scavenging his own death.
    He’d known the risk. That’s why he wouldn’t take Tuck.
    Now Da and the others are gone, there’s only Tuck left to look after Ma. Though they both survived the fever, Ma is a wretched shadow of her old self. Tuck knows he’ll never be able to mend the great big rip in her life where little Beth and Da and Grumpa once were. All he can do is bring her home the fruits of his ill-gotten loot.
    Ma’s still grumbling. “If there’s one thing I want before I—
phut-phut PHUT
—lie down here on my bunk and die, it’s my son anchored and settled in a rock-solid trade.”
    Tuck almost laughs at the show Ma’s putting on for the neighbors. Urth’s sake, how can he settle when the world’s all hurling and wheeling, when the windsnap in the rigging is loud as thunderclaps day and night, when the boats are in a tug of war with the chains that bind the city together against an ocean that’s set on tearing it apart?
    â€œIn the name of The Man, Ma, gimme
peace
.”
    Wheeez
.
    â€œGo back to sleep,” he mutters. “I’ll go find some work.”
    Tuck clambers back onto the shack roof. His ankle’sstill sore, but he tries a leap and lands, light as a cat, on one foot, on the roof next door.
    But Ma’s still going. He’s a disgrace, she’s yelling, always out leaving his poor mother to fend for herself. One day he’ll come back and she’ll have died, she will, in a corner, all alone.
    But the wind’s against her. Soon she’ll be right out of his ears.

THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

    Without a dodgy ankle, it’s easy to leap and scuddy across the boat shacks. They’re crammed close with rubbery roofs, good for foot-grip, made from tarred strips of seascavenged tires. Today, Tuck tries to leap and land on his good foot. Eyes of The Man, who cares about a foot? He’s alive! He might’ve been gutted like a fish by a Salter and ditched in the sea last night.
    Pomperoy is the shape of a flat fish.
The Grimby Gray
is one of the wrecked, rusty barges crammed with shacks at the city’s tail end. The lagoon around the oil rig in the middle, where Tuck is headed, is its pumping heart.
    At the edge of
The Grimby Gray
, Tuck hops across the wire suspension bridge (built by his own da and branded with the Culpy crescent) that connects to the neighboring barge. He clears that, and the next. Now he’s in the huge region of Doycha, a motley maze of small boats. It’s said that Doycha has a thousand bridgeways, but Tuck knows there are exactly eight hundred and forty-one.
    He leaps from boat to boat, laughing whenever he earns a yell. Every so often his ankle throbs too hard and he sits down on a roof or hobbles onto a swaying bridgefor a rest, but cuts back to scuttering across the boats as soon as he can. They give him a straighter route than the bridgeways that link the boats. Though he could map a track across the bridgeways blind.
    Beyond Doycha, he zigzags a route along the bridges that run between the rusted hulks of the ferries and take him into the higgledy squalor of Yewki. At last, he reaches the wooden walkways that surround the central lagoon. In the middle of the lagoon is the huge oil rig, the city’s anchor and fuel source, linked by the five suspension bridges that radiate from it like the spokes of a great wheel.
    All around the lagoon the market gondolas are being loaded. By the time the sky has lightened the lagoon will be thronged with