Firespark Read Online Free Page B

gondolas, each one piled with a harvest from the ocean or the sky: seafood and scrap metal, plastic and driftwood, birds and eggs. Tuck is overtired and achy. The buzz of the market workers irritates like a swarm of flies around his head. Creeping around the empty city after curfew is what he loves. Especially the lagoon.
    Sometimes, deep in the night, strange winds whirl around the boat masts and upset the lagoon with scents of somewhere else. They fill Tuck with curiosity and send prickles down his spine. The restless ruffles inside him only calm when the wind flies off across the ocean and the lagoon smoothes to black glass.
    Tuck knows about glass. He even owns a bit. It belonged to Grumpa. The fragment of glass is the shape of a raggedy, three-cornered boat sail and just fits into the creases of his closed hand. Once sharp enough to cut him, Tuck has rubbed the jagged edges smooth by scraping the Culpy crescent, his da’s trademark, into the wooden walkways around the lagoon. The power of the glass isthat it can show you your very own self. And, better still, if you catch the sun’s rays inside it, you can train it to make fire.
    It’s a mirror
, Grumpa told him.
My old mum called it a looking glass. Everyone used to have them, some big as your face, even as big as your whole self. First thing you’d do in the morning was take a look in your mirror, brush your hair and your teeth, have a shave
.
    Grumpa would look wistful. The idea makes Tuck laugh. He can’t imagine waking up and staring at your own face instead of rushing out to fish or load up a gondola or seal a leak in a rusted boat. Not that Tuck does any of that, himself.
    He likes to look in the mirror, though it only shows his face in bits. Long, sun-bleached hair that blows across his face. Gypsea eyes, a deeper blue than his faded wind-wrap, narrowed by sharp winds and blades of sun. Weather-tanned cheeks, scoured by salty air. His ma’s mouth. His da’s strong nose.
    Grumpa told strange stories of how people once lived fixed to the Earth. He’d always use the old word, no matter what Ma said.
    Earth
, he’d insist, rounding out the word.
Not Urth. Earth! A good old word. It’s you youngsters who’ve made it a curse
.
    It’s you oldsters who cursed it, Da would mutter, just too low for Grumpa’s crusty old ears. Tuck could hear, but Da would never explain what he meant.
    Tuck never could get his head around the idea of Earth. A world steady underfoot? That didn’t shift to the dance of the ocean? Even the word “Earth” is odd. It always made him snigger when Grumpa said it, all proudand defiant, because Tuck couldn’t think of it as anything other than a curse.
    There were cities, Grumpa would tell him, and he’d rub his watery blue eyes. Great cities with homes and shops and tall buildings fixed to the Land. The cities would stretch on and on, but the Land stretched farther, as far as you could see. You’d have to walk for days until you reached the sea. Before the fuel ran out, he added, you’d just jump in a car or a plane and go anywhere you wanted, anywhere in the world, in no time at all.
    Cars and planes? What are they
? Tuck wanted to know.
    A plane, Grumpa explained, was a boat with wings that flew across the skies like a giant bird. A car was a boat that traveled across Land. People lived in houses fixed to the Earth. Tuck has taken the biggest rock he ever dredged up with a catch of fish, held it in his hand, and tried to imagine Land as a rock bigger than the whole of Pomperoy. He has even tried to imagine it stretching as far as the sea. But he can’t.
    Sometimes he wonders if Grumpa dreamed it all up.
    Yet some people say there is still Land. Once, during a bad outbreak of sickness, one of the boats unchained from the rest and set out to sea. It was so long gone that everyone thought the family was lost. Many moons later the boat returned. Only some had survived