Mortal Fire - Hardcover

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CANNY AND HER TEAMMATES stood on platform nine of Castlereagh Station and watched everything they’d seen the night before in Founderston play again in reverse. Passengers from the overnight express were met, kissed, and led away into the concourse—or set off by themselves heads down into the hot wind. Bundles of pillows, sheets, and blankets were removed from the sleeper car, piled into handcarts, and wheeled away by the porters. The only difference was that here, in their hometown, the team’s school uniforms were recognized, and several people stepped up to shake their hands. One man even opened his newspaper to their photo and had them sign it, first the three boys, then Canny. The man said that the Castlereagh Clarion had finally stopped calling their win an unlikely one.
It was the second year that Castlereagh Tech had carried off the supreme award at the National Mathematics Competition; a contest traditionally won by either Founderston Collegiate or St. Thomas’s—a decades-long rivalry in which the prize simply changed hands between the capital’s two best boys’ schools. Castlereagh Tech was a coeducational, state-run high school full of “kids of every stripe”—to quote its own principal—and famous for nothing much but disturbances on city buses and the occasional talented rugby player. When, two years before, Castlereagh Tech’s junior math team took the prize in their section of the competition, even the Clarion reported their win as a surprising result. Last year the same “whiz kids” made the front page in their hometown. This year the Clarion was taking their feats a little more for granted.
“Only page two,” said one of Canny’s teammates, disappointed.
Canny took off her blazer. Mr. Grove, the head of the mathematics department, said, “Agnes Mochrie, you can remove that blazer once you’re back in bounds. Until then you must remember you are representing your school.”
Canny put her blazer back on. She stared at Mr. Grove, whose favorite pupil she was, and wondered how she could get him to just let her go. Then, because she wanted what she wanted, and was already imagining herself setting off with her suitcase banging on the backs of her legs, Canny just said the first thing that came into her head, without articulating any of the steps that led up to it. “I don’t have to wait till visiting time,” she said. “I could go now and they’d let me in.”
“Please endeavor to make better sense when you speak, Agnes,” said Miss Venn—the history teacher who’d had to travel north with the team because Canny couldn’t be expected to go on a trip with just three male classmates and the male head of the math department. (This was what the newspapers, and everyone else, failed to remark upon—that the coeducational college that won the National Mathematics Competition was the only coeducational college with a girl on its team.)
Mr. Grove was pretty good at following Canny’s thinking, even when it wasn’t mathematical. He said to Miss Venn, “Agnes visits Marli Vaiu after school every day.”
There was a pause of a soft sort that Canny knew was sympathy.
“There’s a rehearsal for the end-of-year prize-giving this morning that you’re all required to attend,” said Miss Venn. “But I’m sure they’ll let you go after that.”
One of the boys said, “Have our reports gone out?”
“They were put into the mail on Monday.”
Canny had nothing to fear from the last report of her school career. She was a good student, and her teachers had always encouraged her. And since it was her last report, there’d be no little improvements she’d be expected to make.
Canny forgot about her report and stared off into space. She was wondering how many of her postcards she might find taped to the mirror above Marli’s face, a mirror in which Marli could see the window of the ward and the tops of the trees that the hospital board were planning to cut down to make room for another parking lot. Canny thought about the trees, and their fate, till her mind was full of a green haze as if she were a tree among trees and had just given them the bad news.
Canny was musing, but Mr. Grove thought she was studying the beams of the new roof over the platforms. He asked a question about the roof’s construction, one of the casual, fishing questions he liked to ask her. “What makes those beams so strong? Can you guess, Agnes?” he said, and Canny’s three teammates abruptly turned away, as if she and Mr. Grove had started taking off their clothes. Canny noticed this disapproval and immediately put it aside without thinking about it. She gave the beams a proper look and, after a moment, told Mr. Grove why exactly they were strong, once meeting his gaze to get him to give her the word she needed, a descriptive word she didn’t know but knew must exist.
Mr. Grove smiled. He was proud of her. Canny liked being his favorite, so she attempted a smile and said, “The new bridge in Founderston—”
In his enthusiasm Mr. Grove took off, talking over her. “Yes, the new bridge is built by the same principle. Well observed, Agnes.”
Mr. Grove had been an engineer in the army during the Second World War and was passionate about the practical applications of mathematics. He had once famously shouted at a year-nine class that mathematics could save their lives. (He had lost his leg to a badly placed round by a British artillery unit, and his opinions about mortality and mathematics had some weight.)
“But the bridge is stronger than the roof,” Canny said.
Founderston’s newest bridge had been the best thing about the tour they’d taken of the capital’s points of interest. It was a beautiful piece of engineering, and Mr. Grove had helped his pupils to see it with his own loving eyes. But to Canny, the bridge wasn’t just beautiful. It had something Extra. It was the first time she’d seen the thing she thought of as her “Extra” attached to an object. She had wondered whether the new bridge’s Extra was a property of the river—the mighty Sva—and had only fetched up against the structure in the same way that flotsam collects around the piles of bridges when a river runs high. She couldn’t imagine how it might actually be part of the bridge, but it had seemed to be there for something.
It was only recently Canny had realized that usually no one else could see this “Extra,” though it had at least once appeared in a form visible to others. That was three years before, on a family trip. Canny and her stepbrother, Sholto, had been trailing behind their parents in Founderston’s old town when she’d spotted a line scrawled on a smoke-stained brick wall. The chalked letters looked so ordinary that she’d asked Sholto if he could see them too, and whether he knew what they meant.
“I don’t know what it says. Perhaps it’s Greek. The people in the old town used to speak a kind of Greek. But what do you mean, can I see it too?”
Canny didn’t answer Sholto. But when they were home again she looked up the Greek alphabet in an encyclopedia. The Greeks’ alpha beta delta was nothing like the chalk writing. And, anyway, why would she see bits of Greek that were invisible to everyone else—letters salted like frost between a certain pair of gate posts, or floating like thistledown above the grandstand when she was at the racetrack with Marli’s family?
Canny was very persistent when puzzled and had taken the problem to Sholto again. She asked, “What would you feel if you could see things no one else could see?”
“I expect I’d feel very proud of my powers of perception,” Sholto replied. “Though I hope not too proud, because, as sure as eggs are eggs, what no one else sees, no one else cares about.”
Canny felt both reassured and put in her place. It was only later that it dawned on her that Sholto had thought she was talking about her flair for math.
Now Mr. Grove was saying, “Of course the worst the station roof has to deal with is a Southerly Buster, whereas a bridge on the Sva—” And he went on to talk about laminar and turbulent flow, and Canny listened because it was interesting, and because she didn’t know how to begin to explain that, when she saw the bridge, she thought that someone had told it to be strong in the same way that her mother would tell her to be brave. Brave about inoculations, or having her wound cleaned that time she and Marli crashed their homemade go-kart and Canny lost a toenail. Canny wouldn’t even be crying, and her mother would say, “Be brave.” And sometimes, because she was not just any old mother, but Sisema Mochrie: “Be braver than you are.” Canny had looked at the new bridge and thought that someone had told it to be stronger than it was, stronger than its materials and its make.
Mr. Grove was still going on enthusiastically when one of the boys said, “Here’s our bus, sir.”
The school bus rocked across the potholed asphalt of the drop-off lane, its suspension squeaking. Behind the bus was a car. Canny recognized her stepfather’s bulbous beige Austin. Her stepbrother, Sholto, was behind the wheel, and her mother was in the backseat, as if Sholto was her chauffeur.
As soon as she spotted the car, Canny hurried toward it. Her only thought was to cast herself bodily into that suddenly sickeningly narrow gap between her home and school life. She did not want her mother to have any opportunity to emerge from the car and say something her teachers and teammates might overhear. Something typically odd and imperious.
Canny saw that her mother had leaned forw...