Read Online Exodus by Julie Bertagna - Free Book Online Page B

pleading with Mara to jump on board with her family. Her mother is raging at Mara, raging at the crush of people around her who block her way.
    â€œTain is the last person who should be left!” cries Mara. “He warned us all about this. He told us to prepare. We never listened and now he’s been proved right, we’re leaving him here to drown? It’s not right! The ones who wouldn’t listen, who said we didn’t need to do anything, that this would never happen—they should be left behind before Tain!”
    Mara hears a scream. Her mother’s. She spins around and is drenched by sea spray. A large wave has hit the boats and they rock wildly, crashing against each other. Some have already pulled away, a small exodus scattering the ocean. Mara can still hear her mother’s cries and frantically she scans the few boats still at the edge of the waves.
    No!
    Her family’s boat has pulled out on the wave surge. There is suddenly an expanse of sea between them—too far to jump. Already the boat is fogged in clouds of peat-smoke from the boat funnels.
    â€œNo, wait!” Mara cries. “Please wait!”
    She didn’t mean this to happen. Mara tries to focus on her mother’s face. She can’t see her father or Corey at all, but she can hear her little brother’s agonized wail.
    â€œI’ll see you in the city!” she sobs but the chug of the boats muffles her cry. In moments they are out of earshot, beyond reach.
    The boat fades amid sea spray and smoke. Sobbing with shock, Mara turns to Tain, who looks stricken, blaming himself. Frail though he is, he lifts her bodily onto the last boat where Gail and her mother grab her and pull her on board beside them. Mara can’t seem to let go of Tain’s hand. In the moment before the boat pulls away she pushes her face into the sleeve of his oilskin jacket and breathes in the scents of the sea, the cheeses, and the peat that are so much a part of him, of her, of the island.
    â€œI was born here and I’ll die here,” says Tain gently, firmly. “This is where I want to be.”
    He juts out his craggy chin. And now Mara sees that Tain is speaking the truth. He doesn’t want to come to the New World. The fear and hope that shine in his dark eyes are for Mara and all the others in the boats, not for himself.
    The journey south will be treacherous. Maybe no one will survive it. Maybe they won’t find the New World—the island’s fishermen have tried to map out navigation charts using compasses and the pattern of the sun and the stars and Mara’s screen map of New Mungo, but they can only hope that their calculations are accurate. And even if they do get there, who really knows what kind of life lies out there beyond the horizon? What kind of life could an eighty-year-old man make in a strange New World?
    Tain will stay on the island he’s never left, not once, since the day he was born. All his memories and storiesand knowledge, all that he is, will disappear with the island when it is swallowed by the ocean.
    The old ones begin to climb the hillside to the church that will now be their home, as the refugee boats struggle against an incoming tide, abandoning their island and the last of its people to the sea.

CITY IN THE SKY

    Many times, in the long days and nights of the journey south, Mara is sure they will never make it. The ocean is a ferocious, swallowing beast. Somehow, Alex steers them up over huge, rolling walls of waves, across moving mountains of sea. Mara dreads each new wave; dreads the horrendous death-ride into a deep, dark valley, then the huge surge upward into a white cliff face of ocean. The wooden boat cracks and groans loudly, its timbers strained to their limit under the massive force of the waves. Mara grips the cold ship’s rail until her fingers grow numb, her stomach churning with fear and seasickness. She keeps her face turned to the seething black