Infernal Devices

Chapter 1 The Sleeper Wakes

At first there was nothing. Then came a spark, a sizzling sound that stirred frayed webs of dream and memory. And then—with a crackle, a roar—a blue-white rush of electricity was surging through him, bursting into the dry passages of his brain like the tide pouring back into a sea cave. His body jerked so taut that for a moment he was balanced only on his heels and the back of his armored skull. He screamed, and awoke to a sleet of static, and a falling feeling.

He remembered dying. He remembered a girl’s scarred face gazing down at him as he lay in wet grass. She was someone important, someone he cared about more than any Stalker should care about anything, and there had been something he had wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. Now there was only the afterimage of her ruined face. What was her name? His mouth remembered.

“H…”

“It’s alive!” said a voice.

“HES…”

“Again, please. Quickly.”

“Charging…”

“HESTER…”

“Stand clear!”

And then another lash of electricity scoured away even those last strands of memory and he knew only that he was the Stalker Grike. One of his eyes started to work again. He saw vague shapes moving through an ice storm of interference, and watched while they slowly congealed into human figures, lit by flashlights against a sky full of scurrying moonlit clouds. It was raining steadily. Once-Borns, wearing goggles and uniforms and plastic capes, were gathering around his open grave. Some carried quartz-iodine lanterns; others tended machines with rows of glowing valves and gleaming dials. Cables from the machines trailed down into his body. He sensed that his steel skullpiece had been removed and that the top of his head was open, exposing the Stalker brain nested inside.

“Mr. Grike? Can you hear me?”

A very young woman was looking down at him. He had a faint, tantalizing memory of a girl, and wondered if this might be her. But no: there had been something broken about the face in his dreams, and this face was perfect: an Eastern face with high cheekbones and pale skin, the black eyes framed by heavy black spectacles. Her short hair had been dyed green. Beneath her transparent cape she wore a black uniform with winged skulls embroidered in silver thread on the high black collar.

She set a hand on the corroded metal of his chest and said, “Don’t be afraid, Mr. Grike. I know this must be confusing for you. You’ve been dead for more than eighteen years.”

“DEAD,” he said.

The young woman smiled. Her teeth were white and crooked, slightly too big for her small mouth. “Maybe ‘dormant’ is a better word. Old Stalkers never really die, Mr. Grike…”

There was a rumbling sound, too rhythmic to be thunder. Pulses of orange light flickered on the clouds, throwing the crags that towered above Grike’s resting-place into silhouette. Some of the soldiers looked up nervously. One said, “Snout guns. They have broken through the marsh forts. Their amphibious suburbs will be here within the hour.”

The woman glanced over her shoulder and said, “Thank you, Captain,” then turned her attention to Grike again, her hands working quickly inside his skull. “You were badly damaged and you shut down, but we are going to repair you. I am Dr. Oenone Zero of the Resurrection Corps.”

“I DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING,” Grike told her.

“Your memory was damaged,” she replied. “I cannot restore it. I’m sorry.”

Anger and a sort of panic rose in him. He felt that this woman had stolen something from him, although he no longer knew what it had been. He tried to bare his claws, but he could not move. He might as well have been just an eye, lying there on the wet earth.

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Zero said. “Your past is not important.

You will be working for the Green Storm now. You will soon have new memories.”

In the sky behind her smiling face, something began to explode in silent smears of red and yellow light. One of the soldiers shouted, “They’re coming! General Naga’s division is counterattacking with Tumblers, but that won’t hold them for long…”

Dr. Zero nodded and scrambled up out of the grave, brushing mud from her hands. “We must move Mr. Grike out of here at once.” She looked down at Grike again, smiled. “Don’t worry, Mr. Grike. An airship is waiting for us. We are taking you to the central Stalker Works at Batmunkh Tsaka. We shall soon have you up and about again…”

She stepped aside to let two bulky figures through. They were Stalkers, their armor stenciled with a green lightning-bolt symbol that Grike didn’t recognize. They had blank steel faces like the blades of shovels, featureless except for narrow eye slits, which shone green as they heaved Grike out of the earth and laid him on a stretcher. The men with the machines hurried alongside as the silent Stalkers carried him down a track toward a fortified air caravanserai where ship after ship was lifting into the wet sky. Dr. Zero ran ahead, shouting, “Quickly! Quickly! Be careful! He’s an antique.”

The path grew steeper, and Grike understood the reason for her haste and her men’s uneasiness. Through gaps in the crags he glimpsed a great body of water glittering under the steady flashes of gunfire. Upon the water, and far off across it on the flat, dark land, giant shapes were moving. By the light of the blazing airships that speckled the sky above them and the pale, slow-falling glare of parachute flares, he could see their armored tracks, their vast jaws, and tier upon tier of ironclad forts and gun emplacements.

Traction Cities. An army of them, grinding their way across the marshes. The sight of them stirred faint memories in Grike. He remembered cities like that. At least he remembered the idea of them. Whether he had ever been aboard one, and what he had done there, he did not recall.

As his rescuers hurried him toward the waiting airship, he saw for just an instant a girl’s broken face look up trustingly at him, awaiting something he had promised her.

But who she was, and what her face was doing in his mind, he no longer knew.

Chapter 2 At Anchorage in-Vineland

Several months later, and half a world away, Wren Natsworthy lay in bed and watched a sliver of moonlight move slowly across the ceiling of her room. It was past midnight, and she could hear nothing but the sounds of her own body and the soft, occasional creaks as the old house settled. She doubted that there was anywhere in the world as quiet as the place she lived in—Anchorage-in-Vineland, a derelict ice city dug into the rocky southern shore of an unknown island, on a lost lake, in a forgotten corner of the Dead Continent.

But quiet as it was, she could not sleep. She turned on her side and tried to get comfortable, the hot sheets tangling round her. She had had another row with Mum at supper-time. It had been one of those rows that started with a tiny seed of disagreement (about Wren wanting to go out with Tildy Smew and the Sastrugi boys instead of washing up) and grew quickly into a terrible battle, with tears and accusations, and age-old grudges being dredged up and lobbed about the house like hand grenades, while poor Dad stood on the sidelines, saying helplessly, “Wren, calm down,” and “Hester, please!”

Wren had lost in the end, of course. She had done the washing up, and stomped up to bed as loudly as she could. Ever since, her brain had been hard at work, coming up with hurtful comments that she wished she had made earlier. Mum didn’t have any idea what it was like being fifteen. Mum was so ugly that she probably never had any friends when she was a girl, and certainly not friends like Nate Sastrugi, whom all the girls in Anchorage fancied, and who had told Tildy that he really liked Wren. Probably no boy had ever liked Mum, except for Dad, of course—and what Dad saw in her was one of The Great Unsolved Mysteries of Vineland, in Wren’s opinion.

She rolled over again and tried to stop thinking about it, then gave up and scrambled out of bed. Maybe a walk would clear her head. And if her parents woke and found her gone, and worried that she had drowned herself or run away, well, that would teach Mum not to treat her like a child, wouldn’t it? She pulled on her clothes, her socks and boots, and crept downstairs through the breathing silence of the house.

Mum and Dad had chosen this house for themselves sixteen years before, when Anchorage had only just crawled ashore and Wren was nothing but a little curl of flesh adrift in Mum’s womb. It was family history, a bedtime story Wren remembered from when she was small. Freya Rasmussen had told Mum and Dad that they might take their pick of the empty houses in the upper city They had chosen this one, a merchant’s villa on a street called Dog Star Court, overlooking the air harbor. A good house, snug and well built, with tiled floors and fat ceramic heating ducts, walls paneled in wood and bronze. Over the years, Mum and Dad had filled it with furniture they found among the other empty houses round about, and decorated it with pictures and hangings, with driftwood dragged up from the shore, and with some of the antiques Dad unearthed on his expeditions into the Dead Hills.

Wren padded across the hall to take down her coat from the rack by the front door, and did not spare a glance or a thought for the prints on the walls or the precious bits of ancient food processors and telephones in the glass-fronted display case. She had grown up with all this stuff, and it bored her. This past year, the whole house had begun to feel too small, as if she had outgrown it. The familiar smells of dust and wood polish and Dad’s books were comforting, but somehow stifling too. She was fifteen years old, and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.

She closed the door behind her as quietly as she could and hurried along Dog Star Court. Mist hung like smoke over the Dead Hills, and Wren’s breath came out as mist too. It was only early September, but she could already smell winter in the night air.

The moon was low but the stars were bright, and overhead the Aurora was shimmering. At the heart of the city, the rusty spires of the Winter Palace towered black against the glowing sky, shaggy with ivy. The Winter Palace had been home to Anchorage’s rulers once, but the only person who lived there now was Miss Freya, who had been the city’s last margravine and was now its schoolteacher. On every winter weekday since her fifth birthday, Wren had gone to the schoolroom on the ground floor of the palace to listen to Miss Freya explaining about geography and logarithms and Municipal Darwinism and a lot of other things that would probably never be any use to her at all. It had bored her at the time, but now that she was fifteen and too old for school, she missed it horribly. She would never sit in the dear old schoolroom again, unless she did as Miss Freya had asked and went back to help teach the younger children.

Miss Freya had made that offer weeks ago, and she would need an answer soon, for once the harvests were in, the children of Anchorage would be going back to their lessons. But Wren didn’t know if she wanted to be Miss Freya’s assistant or not. She didn’t even want to think about it. Not tonight.

At the end of Dog Star Court, a stairway led down through the deck plates into the engine district. As Wren went clanging down the stairs, a summery smell came up at her, and she heard flakes of rust dislodged by her boots falling amid the heaped hay below. Once this part of the city would have been full of life and noise, as Anchorage’s engines sent it skating over the ice at the top of the world in search of trade. But the city’s travels had ended before Wren was born, and the engine district had been turned into a storeroom for hay and root vegetables, and winter quarters for the cattle. Faint shafts of moonlight, slanting through skylights and holes in the deck plates overhead, showed her the bales stacked up between the empty fuel tanks.

When Wren was younger, these abandoned levels had been her playground, and she still liked to walk here when she was feeling sad or bored, imagining what fun it must have been to live aboard a city that moved. The grown-ups were always talking about the bad old days, and how frightening it had been to live in constant danger of being swallowed up by some larger, faster city, but Wren would have loved to see the towering Traction Cities, or to fly from one to another aboard an airship, as Mum and Dad had done before she was born. Dad kept a photograph on his desk that showed them standing on a docking pan aboard a city called San Juan de Los Motores, in front of their pretty little red airship the Jenny Haniver, but they never talked about the adventures they must have had. All she knew was that they had ended up landing on Anchorage, where the villainous Professor Pennyroyal had stolen the ship from them, and after that they had settled down, content to play their roles in the cozy, dozy life of Vineland.

Just my luck, thought Wren, breathing in the warm, flowery scent of the baled hay. She would have liked to be an air trader’s daughter. It sounded a glamorous sort of life, and much more interesting than the one she had, stuck on this lonely island among people whose idea of excitement was a rowboat race or a good apple harvest.

A door closed somewhere in the darkness ahead, making her jump. She’d grown so used to the quiet and her own company that the idea of someone else moving around down here was almost frightening. Then she remembered where she was. Busy with her thoughts, she’d walked all the way to the heart of the district, where Caul, Anchorage’s engineer, lived alone in an old shed between two tier supports. He was the only inhabitant of Anchorage’s lower levels, since nobody else would choose to live down here amid the rust and shadows when there were pretty mansions standing empty in the sunlight up above. But Caul was an eccentric. He didn’t like sunlight, having been brought up in the undersea thieves’ hole of Grimsby, and he didn’t like company either. He’d been friendly once with old Mr. Scabious, the city’s former engineer, but since the old man had died, he had kept himself to himself down here in the depths.

So why would he be wandering about in the engine district at this hour? Intrigued, Wren crept up a ladder onto one of the overhead walkways, from where she had a good view across the old engine pits to Caul’s shack. Caul was standing outside the door. He had an electric lantern, and he had raised it up so that he could study a scrap of paper that he held in his other hand. After a moment, he pocketed the paper and set off toward the city’s edge.

Wren scrambled back down the ladder and started following the light. She felt quite excited. When she was younger, working her way steadily through the small stock of children’s books in the margravine’s library, her favorite stories had been the ones about plucky schoolgirl detectives who were forever foiling smugglers and unmasking Anti Tractionist spy rings. She had always regretted that there were no criminals to detect in Vineland. But hadn’t Caul been a burglar once? Maybe he was reverting to his old ways!

Except, of course, that there was no point stealing anything in Anchorage, where everyone took what they liked from the hundreds of abandoned shops and houses. As she picked her way through the heaps of half-dismantled machinery behind Caul’s shack, she tried to think of a more likely explanation for his nighttime wanderings. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, like her. Maybe he was worried about something. Wren’s friend Tildy had told her that years and years ago, way back when Anchorage first came to Vineland, Caul had been in love with Miss Freya and Miss Freya had been in love with Caul too, but nothing had come of it because Caul had been so strange, even in those days. Maybe he wandered the streets of the engine district every night, yearning for his lost love? Or maybe he was in love with someone else and was going to meet her for a moonlit tryst out on the city’s edge?

Pleased by the idea that she would have something really juicy to tell Tildy in the morning, Wren quickened her pace.

But when he reached the city’s edge, Caul did not stop, just hurried down a stairway that led onto the bare earth and started up the hill, sweeping the lantern beam ahead of him. Wren waited a moment, then followed, jumping down into the springy heather and creeping after him up the track that led to the humming drystone turbine house of old Mr. Scabious’s hydroelectricity plant. Caul did not stop there either, but kept going, climbing between the apple orchards and across the high pasture, into the woods.

At the top of the island, where the pines filled the air with the smell of resin and crags poked up through the thin turf like the spines on a dragon’s back, Caul stopped and turned his lantern off and looked around. Fifty feet behind him, Wren crouched among the crisscross shadows. A faint wind stirred her hair, and overhead the trees moved their small hands against the sky.

Caul looked down at the sleeping city nestled in the curve of the island’s southern shore. Then he turned his back on it, raised his lantern, and switched it on and off three times. He’s gone mad, thought Wren, and then, No—he’s signaling to someone, just like the wicked headmaster in Milly Crisp and the Twelfth Tier Mystery.

And sure enough, down among the empty, rocky bays of the north shore, another light flashed back an answer.

Caul moved on, and Wren began to follow him again, dropping down the steep northern flank of the island, out of sight of the city. Maybe he and Miss Freya had got back together and were too afraid of gossip to let anyone know? It was a romantic thought, and it made Wren smile to herself as she tracked Caul down the last precipitous stretch of sheep track, through a stand of birch trees, and out onto a beach between two headlands.

Miss Freya was not waiting for him. But someone was. A man was standing at the water’s edge, watching as Caul went crunching toward him down the shingle. Even from a distance, in the faint light of the Aurora, Wren could tell that he was someone she had never seen before.

At first she could not believe it. There were no strangers in Vineland. The only people here were those who had come here aboard Anchorage or been born here since, and Wren knew all of them. But the man on the shore was a stranger to her, and his voice, when he spoke, was a voice she had never heard.

“Caul, my old shipmate! Good to see you again.”

“Gargle,” said Caul, sounding uneasy, and not taking the hand that the stranger held out for him to shake.

They said more, but Wren was too busy wondering about the newcomer to listen. Who could he be? How had he come here? What did he want?

When the answer hit her, it was one she didn’t like. Lost Boys. That’s what they’d been called, the gang Caul had been part of, which had burgled Anchorage back in its ice-faring days with their strange, spidery machines. Caul had left them to come with Miss Freya and Mr. Scabious. Or had he? Had he been secretly in contact with the Lost Boys all these years, waiting until the city was settled and prosperous before he called them in to rob it again?

But the stranger on the beach wasn’t a boy. He was a grown man, with long, dark hair. He wore high boots, like a pirate in a storybook, and a coat that came down to his knees. He flicked the skirts of the coat back and stuck his thumbs through his belt, and Wren saw a gun in a holster at his side.

She knew that she was out of her depth. She wanted to run home and tell Mum and Dad of the danger. But the two men had wandered closer to her, and if she ran, she would be seen. She wriggled deeper into the low gorse bushes behind the beach, timing each movement to coincide with the rasp of the little waves breaking on the shingle.

The man called Gargle was speaking, sounding as if he were making some kind of joke, but Caul suddenly cut him off. “What have you come here for, Gargle? I thought I’d seen the last of Lost Boys. It was a bit of a shock to find your message under my door. How long have you been creeping around Anchorage?”

“Since yesterday,” said Gargle. “We just dropped by to say hello and see how you were doing, friendly-like.”

“Then why not show yourselves? Why not come and talk to me in daylight? Why leave messages and drag me out here in the middle of the night?”

“Honest, Caul, I wanted to. I’d planned to land my limpet on the mooring beach, all open and aboveboard, but I sent a few crab-cams in first, of course, just to be sure. Good thing I did, ain’t it? What’s happened, Caul? I thought you were going to be a big man in this place! Look at you: oily overalls and raggedy hair and a week’s worth of beard. Is the mad tramp look big in Anchorage this season? I thought you were going to marry their margravine, that Freya What’s-her-name.”

“Rasmussen,” said Caul unhappily. He turned away from the other man. “I thought so too. It didn’t work out, Gargle. It’s complicated. It’s not like you think it’s going to be when you just watch it through the crab-cameras. I never really fitted in here.”

“I should have thought the Drys would welcome you with open arms,” said Gargle, sounding shocked. “After you brung them that map and everything.”

Caul shrugged. “They were all kind enough. I just don’t fit. I don’t know how to talk to them, and talking’s important to the Drys. When Mr. Scabious was alive, it was all right. We worked together and we didn’t need to talk, we had the work instead of words. But now that he’s gone… What about you, anyway? And what about Uncle? How is Uncle?”

“Like you care!”

“I do. I think of him often. Is he—?”

“The old man’s still there, Caul,” said Gargle.

“Last time I spoke to you, you had plans to get rid of him, take over…”

“And I have taken over,” said Gargle, with a grin that Wren saw as a white blur in the dark. “Uncle’s not as sharp as he was. He never really got over that business at Rogues’ Roost. So many of his best boys lost, and all his fault. It nearly did him in, that. He relies on me for nearly everything nowadays. The boys look up to me.”

“I bet they do,” said Caul, and there was some meaning in his words that Wren couldn’t understand, as if they were picking up a conversation that they’d started long ago, before she was even born.

“You said you need my help,” said Caul.

“Just thought I’d ask,” said Gargle. “For old time’s sake.”

“What’s the plan?”

“There’s no plan, exactly.” Gargle sounded hurt. “Caul, I didn’t come here on a burgling mission. I don’t want to rob your nice Dry friends. I’m just after one thing, one little thing, a particular small thing that no one will miss. I’ve looked with the crab-cams, I’ve sent my best burglar in, but we can’t see it. So I thought, ‘What we need is a man on the inside.’ And here you are. I told my crew, ‘We can rely on Caul.’ ”

“Well, you were wrong,” said Caul. His voice was trembly. “I may not fit in here, but I’m not a Lost Boy either. Not anymore. I’m not going to help you rob Freya. I want you gone. I won’t tell anyone you were here, but I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears open. If I hear a crab-cam nosing about, or see that something’s gone missing, I’ll let the Drys know all about you. I’ll make sure they’re waiting for you next time you come sneaking into Anchorage.”

He turned and strode up the beach, crashing through the gorse barely a foot from the place where Wren was hiding. She heard him fall and curse as he started up the hill, and then the sounds of his going growing fainter and fainter as he climbed. ” Caul !” called Gargle, but not too loud, a sort of whispering cry, with hurt in it, and disappointment. “Caul!” Then he gave up and stood still and pensive, running a hand through his hair.

Wren began to move, very carefully and quietly, getting ready for the moment when he would turn his back on her and she could creep away between the trees. But Gargle did not turn. Instead, he raised his head and looked straight at her hiding place and said, “My eyes and ears are sharper than old Caul’s, my friend. You can come out now.”

Chapter 3 The Limpet Autolycus

Wren stood up and turned and started running, all in the same lurching, panicked movement, but before she had taken three steps a second stranger came out of the dark to her left and seized hold of her, swinging her around, dumping her on the ground. “Caul!” she started to shout, but a cold hand went across her mouth. Her captor looked down at her—another pale face, half hidden by black swags of hair— and the man from the beach came running up. A flashlight came on, a thin blue wash of light that made Wren blink.

“Gently,” said the man called Gargle. “Gently now. It’s a woman. A young woman. I thought as much.” He held the flashlight away so that Wren could see him. She had expected someone Caul’s age, but Gargle was younger. He was smiling. “What’s your name, young woman?”

“Wr-Wren,” Wren managed to stammer out. “Wr-Wren N-N-N-N-Natsworthy.” And when Gargle had managed to filter out all those extra N’s, his smile grew broader and warmer.

“Natsworthy? Not Tom Natsworthy’s child?”

“You know Dad?” asked Wren. In her confusion, she wondered if her father had also been coming down for secret meetings with the Lost Boys in the coves of the north shore, but of course Gargle was talking about the old days, before she was born.

“I remember him well,” said Gargle. “He was our guest for a bit aboard the Screw Worm. He’s a good man. Your mother would be his girl, the scar-faced one? What was she called…? Yes, Hester Shaw. I always thought that spoke well of Tom Natsworthy, that he could love someone like her. Appearances don’t matter to him. He looks deeper. That’s rare among the Drys.”

“What are we going to do with her, Gar?” asked the stranger who had caught Wren, in an odd, soft voice. “Is she fish food?”

“Let’s bring her aboard,” said Gargle. “I’d like to get to know Tom Natsworthy’s daughter.”

Wren, who had been calming down, grew panicky again. “I have to go home!” she squeaked, trying to edge away, but Gargle slipped his arm through hers.

“Just come aboard a moment,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “I’d like to talk. Explain why I’m lurking in your lake like a thief. Well, I am a thief, of course, but I think you should hear my side of the story before you make your decision.”

“What decision?” asked Wren.

“The decision about whether or not you tell your parents and your friends what you’ve seen here tonight.”

Wren thought she trusted him, but she wasn’t sure. She had never had to think about trusting people before. Confused by Gargle’s smile, she looked past him down the beach. The water between the headlands was shining blue. She thought at first that it was just the afterimage of the flashlight on her eyes, but then the blue grew brighter, and brighter still, and she saw that it was a light shining up through the water from below. Something huge broke the surface about thirty feet offshore.

Behind Caul’s shack in the engine district, the limpet that had brought him to Anchorage lay rusting. It was called the Screw Worm, and Wren and her friends had often played hide-and-seek between its crook-kneed legs when they were children. She had always thought it a comical sort of thing, with its big flat feet and its windows at the front like boggly eyes. She had never imagined how smoothly a limpet would move, how sleek its curved hull would look, moonlight sliding off it with the water as it waded to the beach.

This limpet was smaller than the Screw Worm, and its body was flatter, more like a tick’s than a spider’s. Wren thought it was painted with jagged camouflage patterns, but it was hard to be sure in the moonlight. Through the bulging windows she could see a small boy working the controls, his face distorted by the water draining down the glass. He brought the machine to a stop at the water’s edge, and a ramp came down out of its belly with a shush of hydraulics and grated against the shingle there.

“The limpet Autolycus,” said Gargle, gesturing for Wren to go aboard. “Pride of the Lost Boy fleet. Come aboard, please. Please. I promise we won’t submerge until we’ve put you ashore.”

“What if more Drys come?” asked the other Lost Boy, who wasn’t a boy, Wren noticed, but a girl, pretty and sullen-looking. “What if Caul raises the alarm?”

“Caul gave us his promise,” said Gargle. “That’s good enough for me.”

The girl glared at Wren, not convinced. The short black jerkin that she wore hung open, and there was a gun stuffed through her belt. don’t have a choice, thought Wren. I’ll have to trust Gargle. And once she had decided that, it was an easy thing to walk up the ramp into the cold blue belly of the limpet. After all, if Gargle had wanted to murder her, he could have done it just as easily on the beach.

She was taken aft into what she guessed was Gargle’s private cabin, where hangings hid the dull steel walls and there were books and trinkets laid about. A joss stick smoldered, masking the mildew-and-metal smell of the limpet with another smell that made Wren think of sophisticated people and far-off places. She sat down in a chair while Gargle settled himself on the bunk. The girl waited at the bulkhead door, still glaring. The little boy Wren had seen through the window stood behind her, watching Wren with wide, astonished eyes until Gargle said, “Back to your post, Fishcake.”

“But…”

“Now!”

The boy scampered off. Gargle gave Wren a wry smile. “I’m sorry about that. Fishcake’s a newbie, ten years old and fresh from the Burglarium. He’s never seen a Dry before, except on the crab-cam screens. And you such a pretty one too.”

Wren blushed and looked down at the floor, where her boots were leaking muddy water over Gargle’s rich Stamboul rugs. The Burglarium was where the Lost Boys were trained, she remembered. They were kidnapped from the underdecks of raft towns when they were too young to even know it, taken down to the sunken city of Grimsby, and trained in all the arts of thieving. And crab-cams were the robot cameras they used to spy on their victims. Miss Freya had made her pupils do a whole project on the Lost Boys. At the time, Wren had thought it a pointless thing to have to learn about.

Gargle turned to the girl at the door. “Remora, our guest looks chilly. Fetch her some hot chocolate, won’t you?”

“I didn’t know there were any Lost Girls,” said Wren when the girl had gone.

“A lot’s changed in Grimsby since Caul was last there,” Gargle replied. “Just between the two of us, Wren, I pretty much run the old place now. I managed to get rid of a lot of the rough, bullying boys who surrounded Uncle, and I sort of persuaded him to start bringing girls down as well as boys. It was doing us no good living without girls. They’re a civilizing influence.”

Wren looked toward the door. She could see the girl called Remora clattering pans about in some sort of kitchen. She didn’t look to Wren like a civilizing influence. “So is she your wife?” she asked, and then, not wanting to seem too prim, “Or your girlfriend or something?”

In the kitchen, Remora looked up sharply. Gargle said,

“Mora? No! The fact is, some of the girls have turned out to be better thieves than the boys. Remora’s one of the best burglars we’ve got. Just as young Fishcake is the best mechanic, for all his tender years. I wanted only the best with me on this mission, see, Wren. There’s something in Anchorage that I need very badly. I saw it all those years ago, when I was here with Caul aboard the Screw Worm, but I didn’t steal it then because I didn’t think it was of any use.”

“What is it?” asked Wren.

Gargle did not answer her at once but waited, studying her face, as if he wanted to be quite sure that she could be trusted with what he was about to tell her. Wren liked that. He was not treating her like a child, the way most people still did. “A young woman,” he’d called her, and that was how he was speaking to her.

“I hate this,” he said at last, leaning toward her, looking intently into her eyes. “You have to believe me. I hate coming in secret like this. I would rather be open, steer the Autolycus into your harbor and say, Here we are, your friends from Grimsby, come to ask your help.’ If Caul had prospered here, the way I hoped he would, that might have been possible. But as it is, who’d trust us? We’re Lost Boys. Burglars. They’d never believe that all we want from you is one book, one single book from your margravine’s library.”

Remora came back into the cabin and handed Wren a tin mug, full of hot, delicious chocolate. “Thank you,” said Wren, glad of the distraction, because she didn’t want Gargle to see how shocked she was by what he had just said. Miss Freya’s library was one of Wren’s favorite places; a treasure cave filled with thousands and thousands of wonderful old books.

It had been on the upper floors of the Winter Palace once, but nobody lived on those floors now and Miss Freya had said it was a waste heating them just for the books’ sake, so the library had been moved downstairs…

“That’s why you can’t find what you want!” she said suddenly. “The books have all been rearranged since you were last here!”

Gargle nodded, smiling at her admiringly. “Quite right,” he said. “It could take our crab-cams weeks to find the right one, and we don’t have weeks to waste. So I was wondering, Miss Natsworthy, if you’d help us.”

Wren had just taken a slurp of chocolate. Anchorage’s supplies of chocolate had run out years ago, and she had forgotten how good it tasted, but when Gargle asked for her help she almost choked on it. “Me?” she spluttered. “I’m not a burglar…”

“I wouldn’t ask you to become one,” said Gargle. “But your father’s a clever man. Friendly with the margravine, from what I remember. I bet you could find out from him where the book we want might be. Just find it and tell me, and I’ll send Remora in to do the rest. It’s called the Tin Book.”

Wren had been about to refuse, but the fact that she had never heard of the book he named made her hesitate. She’d been expecting him to ask about one of Anchorage’s treasures: the great illuminated Acts of the Ice Gods, or Wormwold’s Historia Anchoragia. She said, “Who on earth would want a whole book about tin?”

Gargle laughed, as if she’d made a joke that he liked. “It’s not about tin,” he said. “That’s what it’s made of. Sheets of metal.”

Wren shook her head. She’d never seen anything like that. “Why do you want it?” she asked.

“Because we’re burglars, and I’ve learned that it’s valuable,” said Gargle.

“It must be! To come all this way…”

“There are people who collect such things: old books and things. We can trade it for stuff we need.” Gargle hesitated, still watching her, and then said earnestly, “Please, Wren, just ask your father. Always nosing about in museums and libraries, he was, when I knew him. He might know where the Tin Book is.”

Wren thought about it as she drank the rest of the chocolate. If he had been asking her for the illuminated Acts, or for some treasured classic, she would have said no at once. But a book made of metal, one that she’d never even heard of… it couldn’t be very important, could it? It would probably never be missed. And Gargle seemed to want it very badly.

“I’ll ask,” she said doubtfully.

“Thank you!” Gargle took her hands in his. His hands were warm, and his eyes were rather lovely. Wren thought how nice it would be to tell Tildy that she’d spent the small hours of the night drinking cocoa in the cabin of a dashing underwater pirate, and then remembered that she would never be able to tell Tildy or anybody else about Gargle and the Autolycus. That made it even nicer somehow. She had never had a proper secret before.

“I’ll meet you up in the trees on the hilltop around six tomorrow,” Gargle said. “Is that all right? You can get away?”

“That’s suppertime. I’d be missed. My mum…”

“Noon, then. Noon, or just after.”

“All right…”

“And for now—would you like Remora to walk you home?”

“I’ll find my way,” said Wren. “I often walk about in the dark.”

“We’ll make a Lost Girl of you yet,” said Gargle, and laughed to show her he was only joking. He stood up, and she stood up too, and they moved through the limpet’s passageways toward the exit ramp, the newbie Fishcake peeking out at them from the control cabin. Outside, the night was cold and the moon shone and the water was lapping against the shore as if nothing had happened. Wren waved and said good-bye and waved again, and then walked quickly up the beach and through the trees.

Gargle watched until she was out of sight. The girl Remora came and stood beside him, and slipped her hand into his. “You trust her?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Maybe. It’s worth a try. We haven’t time to hang about here searching for the thing ourselves, and we can’t do much with the crab-cams in this dump. These Drys remember us. They’ll soon put two and two together if they start hearing the patter of tiny magnetic feet inside their air ducts. But don’t worry—I’ll tell Fishcake to set a couple on watch around Wren’s house, so we’ll know if she squeals to her people about us.”

“And what if she does?”

“Then we’ll kill them all,” said Gargle. “And I’ll let you do Wren yourself, with your pretty little knife.” And he kissed her, and they turned and went back aboard.

But Wren, knowing none of this, walked home with a giddy tumble of thoughts inside her head, half guilt, half pleasure, feeling as if she’d grown up more in the past few hours than in all the fifteen years that had gone before.

Chapter 4 The Legend of the Tin Book

The next day dawned fair, the sky above the lake harebell blue, the water clear as glass, each of the islands of Vineland sitting neat and still upon its own reflection. Wren, exhausted by her adventures in the night, slept late, but outside her window, Anchorage was waking up. Woodsmoke rose from the chimneys of the city’s thirty inhabited houses, and fishermen called out good morning to each other as they made their way down the stairways to the mooring beach.

On the north side of the lake rose a brindled mountain, far higher than the Dead Hills to the south. Its lower slopes were green with scrub and stands of pine and steep meadows where wildflowers grew, and in one of these meadows a group of deer was grazing. There were many deer in the woods on the green shore, and a few had even swum across to set up home upon the wilder islands. People had spent a lot of time debating how they had come here: whether they had survived since the fall of the old American Empire, or come down from the frozen country to the north, or made their way here from some larger pocket of green much farther west. But all Hester Natsworthy cared about, as she drew back her bowstring in the shelter of the trees downwind, was how much meat was on them.

The bow made a quick, soft sound. The deer leaped into the air and came down running, bounding uphill into the shelter of the scrub—all except the largest doe, who fell dead with Hester’s arrow in her heart and her thin legs kicking and kicking. Hester walked up the hill and pulled the arrow free, cleaning the point on a handful of dry grass before she replaced it in the quiver on her back. The blood was very bright in the sunlight. She dipped her finger in the wound and smeared some on her forehead, muttering her prayer to the Goddess of the Hunt so that the doe’s ghost would not come bothering her. Then she heaved the carcass onto her shoulder and started back down the hill to her boat.

Her fellow Vinelanders seldom hunted deer. They said it was because the fish and birds of the lake were meat enough, but Hester suspected it was because the deer’s pretty fur coats and big, dark eyes touched their soft hearts and spoiled their aim. Hester’s heart was not soft, and hunting was what she was best at. She enjoyed the stillness and solitude that she found in the morning woods, and sometimes she enjoyed being away from Wren.

Wistfully, Hester remembered the little laughing girl that Wren had once been, playing splish-splash on the lakeshore or snuggling on Hester’s lap while Hester sang to her. As Wren had looked lovingly up at her and run her chubby fingers over the old scar that split Hester’s face in half, Hester had thought that here at last was someone who could love her for what she was, and not care what she looked like. Because although Tom always said he didn’t care, Hester had never shaken off the faint fear that he must, deep down, want someone prettier than her.

But Wren had grown up, and there had come a day, when she was eight or nine, when she started to see Hester the same way everyone else did. She didn’t have to say anything; Hester knew that pitying, embarrassed look well enough, and she could sense Wren’s awkwardness when they were out together and met her friends. Her daughter was ashamed of her.

“It’s just a phase,” said Tom, when she complained of it to him. Tom adored Wren, and it seemed to Hester that he always took Wren’s side. “She’ll soon be over it. You know what children are like.”

But Hester didn’t know what children are like. Her own childhood had ended when she was very young, when her mother and the man she thought was her father had both been murdered by her real father, Thaddeus Valentine. She had no idea what it was like to be a normal girl. As Wren grew and became more willful, and her grandfather’s long, curved nose stuck out of her face like a knife pushed through a portrait, Hester found it harder and harder to be patient with her. Once or twice, guiltily, she had caught herself wishing that Wren had never been born and that it was just her and Tom again, the way it had been in the old days, on the bird roads.

When Wren awoke at last, the sun was high. Through her open window came the calls of the fishermen down at the mooring beach, the laughter of children, the steady thud of an axe as Dad chopped wood in the yard outside. There was still a faint taste of chocolate in her mouth. She lay for a moment, enjoying the thought that none of the people she could hear, nobody else in all of Vineland, knew the things she knew. Then she scrambled out of bed and ran to the bathroom to wash. Her reflection peered out at her from the speckled mirror above the sink: a long, narrow, clever face. She hated her beaky nose and the scattering of spots around her too-small mouth, but she liked her eyes: large, wide-set eyes, the irises deep gray. “Mariner’s eyes,” Dad had called them once, and even though Wren wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, she liked the sound of it. She tied back her coppery hair and remembered Gargle calling her pretty. She’d never thought herself pretty before, but she saw now that he was right.

Running downstairs, she found the kitchen empty, Mum’s shirts hanging white on the line outside the window. Mum was oddly vain about her clothes. She dressed like a man, in outfits she had taken from the abandoned shops on the Boreal Arcade, and she was fussy about keeping things washed and ironed and safe from moths, as if wearing good clothes would make people forget her horrible scarred ruin of a face. It was just another example of how sad she was, thought Wren, pouring herself a glass of milk from the jug in the cold store, smearing honey on one of yesterday’s oatcakes. It was all very well, but it made life difficult for Wren, having a mum who looked so weird. Tildy’s dad, old Mr. Smew, was only about three feet tall, but he was an Anchorage man through and through, so nobody really noticed his height anymore. Mum was different. She was unfriendly, so nobody ever forgot that she was hideous, and an outsider, and that sometimes made Wren feel like an outsider too.

Maybe that was why she felt so drawn to the Lost Boys. Maybe Gargle had seen the outsider in her, and that was what had made him confide in her.

She went out into the yard, eating the oatcake, careful not to get honey on Mum’s shirts. Dad was setting small logs one by one on the chopping block and cutting them in half with the wood axe. He had his old straw hat on, because his brown hair didn’t quite cover the top of his head anymore and his bald patch sometimes caught the sun. He stopped work when he saw Wren, putting one hand to his chest. Wren thought he looked as if he was glad of an excuse for a rest and wondered if his old wound was hurting him again, but all he said was, “So you’re up at last?”

“No, I’m just sleepwalking,” she said, kicking a few sticks of wood out of her way and sitting down beside him. She kissed his cheek and rested her head on his shoulder. Bees buzzed around the hives at the end of the yard, and Wren sat and listened to them and wondered how to broach the subject of the Tin Book of Anchorage. Then she decided to ask him something else instead.

“Dad,” she said, “you remember the Lost Boys?”

Dad looked uneasy, as he always did when she asked him about the old days. He fiddled with the bracelet on his wrist, the broad red-gold wedding bracelet on which his initials were entwined with Mum’s. “Lost Boys,” he said. “Yes, I’m not likely to forget them…”

“I was wondering about them,” she said. “Were they very wicked?”

“Well, you know Caul,” said Dad. “He’s not wicked, is he?”

“He’s a bit weird.”

“Well, maybe, but he’s a good man. If you were in trouble, you could turn to Caul. It’s thanks to him we found this place, you know. If he hadn’t escaped from Grimsby and brought us Snori Ulvaeusson’s map…”

“Oh, I know that story,” said Wren. “Anyway, it’s not Caul I was wondering about. I was thinking of the others, back in Grimsby. They were pretty bad, weren’t they?”

Tom shook his head. “Their leader, Uncle, was a nasty bit of work. He made them do bad things. But I think the Lost Boys themselves were a mix of good and bad, just like you’d find anywhere. There was a little chap called Gargle, I remember. He’s the one who saved Caul when Uncle tried to kill him, and gave Caul the map to bring to us.”

“So he was as brave as Caul?”

“In a way, yes.”

“And you met him? How old was he?”

“Oh, only a youngster, as I say,” said her father, thinking back to his brief, frightening time with the Lost Boys. “Nine or ten. Maybe younger.”

Wren felt pleased. If Gargle had been nine when Dad met him, he couldn’t be more than twenty-five now, which wasn’t so very much older than herself. And he was a good person who had helped save Anchorage.

“Why this sudden interest?” her father asked.

“Oh, no reason,” said Wren casually. It felt strange, lying to Dad. He was the person she loved the most in the whole world. He had always treated Wren like a friend, not a child, and she had always told him everything before. She suddenly wanted very much to tell him what had happened on the north shore and ask him what to do. But she couldn’t, could she? It would not be fair to Gargle.

Dad was still looking at her in a puzzled way, so she said, “I just got thinking about them, that’s all.”

“Because they’re Lost?” asked Dad. “Or because they’re Boys?”

“Guess,” said Wren. She finished her oatcake and planted a sticky kiss on his cheek. “I’m going to see Tildy. ‘Bye’ ”

She went out through the gate at the side of the yard and off down Dog Star Court with the sunlight shining on her hair, and Tom stood watching her until she turned the corner, feeling proud of his tall, beautiful daughter and still amazed, even after all these years, that he and Hester had made this new person.

In the shadows beneath the woodpile, a wireless crab-cam trained its lens on him. In an underwater cave on one of the smaller islets, his image fluttered on a round blue screen.

“She nearly gave us away’ ” said the boy called Fishcake. “He’ll guess!”

Gargle patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. Natsworthy’s as dim as the others. He doesn’t suspect a thing.”

Wren walked briskly toward the Smew house but did not turn in through the gate. She knew full well that Tildy and her family would all be up in their orchard this morning, picking apples. She had even promised to go and help. How could she have imagined that she would find something so much more important to do?

She cut through the Boreal Arcade, glancing at her reflection in the dusty windows of the old shops, then ran along Rasmussen Prospekt and up the ramp that led to the Winter Palace. The big front doors were always open in summer. Wren ran in and shouted, “Miss Freya?” but the only answers were the echoes of her own voice bouncing back at her from the high ceilings. She went back outside and followed the graveled path around the foot of the palace, and there was Miss Freya in her garden, picking beans and putting them in a basket.

“Wren!” she said happily.

“Hello, Miss Freya!”

“Oh, just Freya, please,” said Miss Freya, stooping to set her basket down. It seemed to be the main purpose of Miss Freya’s life to persuade everybody to call her simply “Freya,” but she had never had much success with it. The older people all remembered that she was the last of the House of Rasmussen and still liked to call her “Margravine” or “Your Radiance” or “Light of the Ice Fields.” The younger ones knew her as their teacher, so to them she was always “Miss Freya.”

“After all,” she said, smiling at Wren as she dabbed the perspiration from her round face with a handkerchief, “you’re not a schoolgirl anymore. We might soon be colleagues. Have you thought any more about coming to help me with the little ones once apple harvest’s over?”

Wren tried to look as if she liked the idea without actually promising she’d do it. She was afraid that if she agreed to come and help run the school, she might end up like Miss Freya, large and kindly and unmarried. Changing the subject as swiftly as she could, she asked, “Can I have a look in the library?”

“Of course!” said Miss Freya, as Wren had known she would. “You don’t need to ask! Was there a particular book…?”

“Just something Daddy mentioned once. The Tin Book.”

Wren blushed as she said it, for she wasn’t used to telling lies, but Miss Freya didn’t notice. “That old thing?” she said. “Oh, it’s hardly a book, Wren. More of a curio. Another of the House of Rasmussen’s many hand-me-downs.”

They went together to the library. It was small wonder, Wren thought, that the Lost Boys needed her help. This huge room was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, arranged according to some private system of Miss Freya’s. Tatty old paperbacks by Chung-Mai Spofforth and Rifka Boogie sat side by side with the wooden caskets containing precious old scrolls and grimoires. The caskets had the names of the books they held written on the backs in small gold letters, but many were too worn or faded to read, and Lost Boys probably weren’t very good readers anyway. How would a poor burglar know where to start?

Miss Freya used a set of steps to reach one of the upper shelves. She was really much too plump to go clambering about on spindly ladders, and Wren felt guilty and afraid that she might fall, but Miss Freya knew exactly what she was looking for, and she was soon down again, flushed from her exertions and holding a casket with the arms of the House of Rasmussen inlaid in narwhal ivory.

“Have a look,” she said, unlocking it with a key that she took from a hook on a nearby wall.

Inside, on a lining of silicone silk, lay the thing that Gargle had described. It was a book about eight inches high by six across, made from twenty sheets of tin bound with a rusty twirl of wire. The sheets were thick and dull and patched with rust, folded over at the edges to stop readers from cutting their fingers on the jagged metal. On the topmost sheet someone had scratched a circle with a crudely drawn eagle inside it; there was lettering around the edge of the circle and more below, but all too worn for Wren to make out any words. The other sheets had aged better, and the long rows of letters, numbers, and symbols that had been laboriously scratched into their surfaces were still faintly legible. What they meant Wren could not say. The faded paper label on the back cover, stamped with the arms of Anchorage and the words Ex Libris Rasmussen, was the only thing that made any sense at all.

“It’s not very impressive, is it?” asked Miss Freya. “It’s supposed to be very old, though. There’s a legend about it, which the historian Wormwold quotes in his Historia Anchoragia. Long ago, in the terrible aftermath of the Sixty Minute War, the people of Anchorage were refugees, sailing a fleet of leaky boats across the northern seas in search of an island where they could rebuild their city. Along the way they encountered a wrecked submarine. The plagues and radiation storms had killed off all her crew except for one man, who was dying. He gave a document to my ancestor Dolly Rasmussen and told her to preserve it at all costs. So she kept it, and it was handed down from mother to daughter through the House of Rasmussen, until the paper crumbled. Then a copy was made, but because paper was scarce in those years, it was written on old food tins hammered flat. Of course, the people who did the copying probably had no more idea what it all meant than you or I. The mere fact that it came from the lost world before the war was enough to make it sacred.”

Wren turned the metal pages, and the wire that bound them scratched and squeaked. She tried to imagine the long-ago scribe who had so painstakingly engraved these symbols, working by the light of a seal-fat lamp in the dark of that centuries-long winter, copying out each wavering column in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the world the war had destroyed. “What was it for?” she wondered. “Why did the submarine man think it was so important?”

“Nobody knows, Wren. Maybe he died before he could say, or maybe it’s just been forgotten. The Tin Book is just another of the many mysteries the Ancients left us. All we know is that the name of an old god crops up several times among all those numbers: Odin. So maybe it was a religious text. Oh, and the picture on the front is the presidential seal of the American Empire.”

Wren looked critically at the eagle. “It looks more like some sort of bird to me.”

Miss Freya laughed. She looked beautiful, standing there in the wash of sunlight from the library windows, as big and golden as the Earth Goddess herself, and Wren loved her, and felt ashamed for planning to rob her. She asked a few more questions about the Tin Book, but she wasn’t really interested in the answers. She gave the thing back as soon as she could and left Miss Freya to her gardening, promising to come back soon and talk about becoming a teacher.

The day was passing quickly, the shadow of the Winter Palace sweeping across the city’s rusty deck plates as the sun climbed the sky. Soon it would be time for Wren to keep her rendezvous with Gargle. She was starting to feel more and more nervous about it. However dashing and brave and handsome he was, however much she liked the idea of helping the Lost Boys, she could not steal from people she had known all her life. Sooner or later the Tin Book was sure to be missed, and when it was, Miss Freya would remember the interest Wren had shown in it and know who was responsible.

And what was the Tin Book, anyway? What made Gargle want it so? Wren was not stupid. She knew that documents from the Ancient Era sometimes held clues to things that were very dangerous indeed: Dad had told her once that London, the city he grew up in, had been blown entirely to pieces by a machine called MEDUSA. What if the Tin Book contained instructions for building something like that and Gargle had found a way of reading it?

She wandered to the south side of Anchorage and down the well-worn fishermen’s stairs to the mooring beach, where she sat in the shade of an old, rusted-up caterpillar unit and tried to work out what to do. Her huge secret, which had seemed so exciting, was beginning to feel like a bit of a burden. She wished there was someone she could share it with. But who? Certainly not Mum or Dad or Miss Freya; they would be horrified at the thought of Lost Boys in Vineland. Tildy would probably panic too. She imagined telling Nate Sastrugi and asking him to help her, but somehow, now that she knew Gargle, Nate Sastrugi seemed not nearly so handsome: just a boy, rather dull and slow, who didn’t know much about anything except fishing.

She didn’t notice the rowboat nosing in toward the beach until her mother got out of it and shouted, “Wren? What are you doing? Come and help me with this.”

“This” was a poor little deer, stone dead with a hole in its chest, and Mum was dragging it out of the boat and getting ready to take it up to Dog Star Court, where she would butcher it and salt the meat for winter. Wren stood up and went toward her, then noticed how high the sun was. “I can’t!” she said.

“What?”

“I’ve got to meet someone.”

Hester put the deer down and stared at her. “Who? That Sastrugi boy, I suppose?”

Wren had been trying not to start another argument, but the tone of Mum’s voice was enough to make her temper flare. “Well, why not?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t have to be as miserable as you all the time. I’m not a child anymore. Just because no boys ever liked you when you were my age—”

“When I was your age’ Mum said, low and dangerous, “I saw things you wouldn’t believe. I know what people are capable of. That’s why we’ve always tried to protect you and keep you close and safe, your dad and me.”

“Oh, I’m safe, all right,” said Wren bitterly. “What do you think is going to happen to me in Vineland? Nothing ever happens to anybody here. You’re always hinting about what a terrible time you had and saying how lucky I am compared with you, but I bet your old life was more exciting than this! I bet Dad thinks so! I’ve seen the way he looks at that picture of your old ship. He loved being out in the world, flying about, and I bet he would still be if he hadn’t got himself stuck here with you.”

Mum hit her. It was a hard, sudden slap, with the flat of Mum’s open hand, and as Wren jerked her head backward, away from the blow, Mum’s wedding bracelet grazed her cheek. Wren had not been slapped since she was small. She felt her face burning, and when she touched it, little bright specks of blood came away on her fingers from where the bracelet had caught her. She tried to speak, but she could only gasp.

“There,” said Mum gruffly. She seemed almost as shocked as Wren. She reached out to touch Wren’s face, gently this time, but Wren whirled away from her and ran along the beach and into the cool shadows under Anchorage, running beneath the old city and out into the pastures behind, with her mother’s voice somewhere behind her shouting furiously, “Wren! Come back! Get back here!” She kept to the woods so the pickers in the orchards wouldn’t see her, and ran and ran, barely thinking about where she was running to, until she arrived tearful and out of breath among the crags at the top of the island, and there was Gargle, waiting for her.

Chapter 5 Тews from the Sea

He was all kindness and concern, sitting her down on a mossy stone, taking off his neckerchief to wipe her face, holding her hand until she was calm enough to speak. “What is it, Wren? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing really. My mum. That’s all. I hate her.”

“Now, I’m certain that isn’t true.” Gargle knelt down beside her. She didn’t think that he had looked anywhere but at her face since she’d found him, and his eyes, behind the smoked blue glasses that he wore, were a friend’s eyes, kind and worried. “You’re lucky to have a mum,” he said. “We Lost Boys, we’re just kidnapped when we’re little. We none of us know who our mums or our dads are, though we dream about them sometimes, and think how sweet it would be if we could meet them. If your mum’s hard on you, I think it’s just a sign that she’s worried about you.”

“You don’t know her’ said Wren, and held her breath to stop hiccuping. When she had finished, she said, “I saw the book.”

“The Tin Book?” Gargle sounded surprised, as if he’d been so worried about Wren that he’d forgotten the thing that had brought him to Vineland in the first place. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve done in a morning what might have taken a limpet crew a week or more. Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Wren. “I mean, I don’t know if I should tell you. Not unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but… why would anybody want it? What’s it for?”

Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the pines. Wren thought he looked angry and was afraid that she’d offended him, but when he turned to her again, he just seemed sad.

“We’re in trouble, Wren,” he said. “You’ve heard of Professor Pennyroyal?”

“Of course,” said Wren. “He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to ruin. He stole Mum and Dad’s airship and flew off in her…”

“Well, he wrote a book about it,” Gargle said. “It’s called Predator’s Gold, and in it he talks about what he calls ‘parasite-pirates’ who come up from under the ice to burgle cities. It’s mostly rubbish, but it sold like hotcakes among the cities we used to live off of: the North Atlantic raft towns and the ice runners. They all started installing Old Tech burglar alarms and checking their undersides for parasites once a day, which makes it kind of hard to attach a limpet to them.”

Wren thought about Professor Pennyroyal. All her life she’d been hearing stories of that wicked man. She’d seen the long, L-shaped scar on Dad’s chest where Mrs. Scabious had opened him up to fetch the bullet out. And now it turned out that the Lost Boys were Pennyroyal’s victims too!

“But I still don’t see why you need the Tin Book,” she said.

“We’ve had to send our limpets farther and farther south,” Gargle explained. “Right down into the Middle Sea and the Southern Ocean, where the raft cities don’t bother to keep watch for us. At least they never used to. This past summer, we’ve started losing limpets. Three went south and never returned. No word, no distress signal, nothing. I think maybe one of those cities has got hold of some kind of device that lets them see us coming, and they’ve been sinking our limpets, or capturing them. And if some of our people are captured, and tortured, and talk…”

“They might come looking for Grimsby?”

“Exactly.” Gargle looked thoughtfully at her, as if he was glad he had chosen to tell all this to such an intelligent, perceptive girl. He took her hands again. “We need something that will get us ahead of the Drys again, Wren. That’s why I need the Tin Book.”

“But it’s just a load of old numbers,” said Wren. “It came off some old American submarine…”

“Exactly,” said Gargle. “Those Ancients had subs way ahead of anything we’ve got. Ships the size of cities that could cruise right around the world without once having to come up for air. If we had that kind of technology, we’d never have to fear the Drys again. We could set the whole of Grimsby moving and they’d never find us.”

“So you think the Tin Book is a plan for a submarine?”

“Maybe not exactly. But there might be enough clues in there to help us learn how they worked. Please, Wren. Tell us where it is.”

Wren shook her head. “Miss Freya and the rest aren’t as scary as you think,” she promised him. “Come down to the city with me. Introduce yourself. I asked my dad about you. He says you helped save Vineland. And you’ve been hurt by Pennyroyal, just like us. I expect Miss Freya will be happy to give you the Tin Book as a gift.”

Gargle sighed. “I’d like that, Wren. I’d love it. But it would all take time. There’d be so much explaining to do, so much mistrust to overcome. And all the time we stay here, more limpets might be disappearing, and whoever’s taking them may already be zeroing in on Grimsby. I’m sorry, Wren. We have to do it the Lost Boy way. Tell me where the book is, and we’ll take it tonight and be off. And maybe, when we have it and Grimsby’s safe again, maybe then I’ll return and introduce myself, and there’ll be peace and friendship between our two cities.”

Wren pulled free of him and hurried away between the trees, almost running, to a place where she could look down upon the rooftops of Anchorage. He didn’t mean what he had said about coming back, she was sure of that. He had just said it to make her feel better. Once he left this place, he would never return. Why should he, when he had a whole world to roam in? A world of cities that floated and flew and rolled beneath skies filled with airships. That’s what Gargle would be going back to, while she, all she had to look forward to was being Miss Freya’s assistant and growing old and bored in Anchorage and one day—if Mum would let her—becoming Mrs. Nate Sastrugi and having a lot of bored little children of her own.

“Wren,” he said behind her.

“No,” she said. She turned to face him, trying not to let her voice shake too much. “No, I won’t tell you where to find the book. I’ll take it myself, and bring it to you tonight. And then I’ll come with you.” She laughed and made a big gesture with both arms, trying to take in Anchorage, the lake, the hills beyond, the whole Dead Continent. “I hate this place. It’s too small for me. I want to go with you when you leave. I want to see Grimsby, and the Hunting Ground and the Traction Cities and the bird roads. That’s my price. I’ll bring you the Tin Book if you’ll take me with you when you leave.”

Chapter 6 We Are Making a Тew Цorld

Late into the night, long after the Stalker Works were quiet and empty, her busy fingers tinkering inside Grike’s chest cavity or in his open brain. And as she worked, she talked to him, filling the old Stalker in on things he’d missed during his years in the grave. She told him of how the hard-line faction called the Green Storm had seized power in the Anti-Tractionist nations of Old Asia and the North, and of their long war against the Traction Cities. She told him of their immortal leader, the Stalker Fang.

“A STALKER?” he asked, surprised. He was growing used to the Green Storm’s Stalkers: mindless, faceless things who couldn’t even recharge themselves but had to have their batteries laboriously extracted and replaced after a few days of action. They were the sort of creatures who gave the living dead such a bad name. He could not imagine one of them leading armies.

“Oh, the Stalker Fang is nothing like the rest,” Dr. Zero assured him. “She is beautiful, and brilliant. She has an Old Tech brain, like yours, and all sorts of special adaptations. And she was built using the body of a famous League agent, Anna Fang. The Storm like people to think that Anna Fang has come back from the dead to lead our glorious war against the barbarians.”

The thought of war stirred instincts deep in Grike’s Stalker brain. He flexed his hands, but the blades that he knew should be housed inside them did not spring out.

Dr. Zero said, “I have removed your finger-glaives.”

“HOW AM I TO FIGHT IF I AM UNARMED?” he asked.

“Mr. Grike,” Dr. Zero told him, “if we just wanted another lumbering battle-Stalker, I could have built one myself. There is no shortage of dead bodies to Resurrect. But you are an antique, more complex than anything we can build. You’re not just a thing, you’re a person.” She touched his harmless hands. “It made a nice change, to work on a Stalker who was not just another soldier.”

An airship named The Sadness of Things arrived to carry Grike to a place they called Forward Command. He stood at Dr. Zero’s side in the observation gondola as they flew west over high snow-clad mountains, then the plains of the Eastern Hunting Ground, which were Green Storm territory now, with here and there the wreck of a destroyed Traction City rusting in the grass.

“This land was all captured in the first weeks of the war, nearly fourteen years ago’’ said Dr. Zero, still keen to educate her patient. “At first the barbarians were taken completely by surprise when our air fleets came sweeping down on them out of the mountains. We drove west, herding terrified cities ahead of us, smashing any that dared turn and fight. But slowly the cities started to group together and defend themselves. A union of German-speaking industrials called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft stopped our advance westward and pushed us back to the Rustwater Marshes, and a rabble of Slavic Traction Towns attacked our settlements in Khamchatka and the Altai Shan.

“There has been stalemate ever since. Sometimes we push west and destroy a few more cities; sometimes they push east and devour a few of our forts or farms.”

The landscape below was changing, pitted and scarred by recent fighting. Enormous shell craters shone like mirrors stitched into a blanket of mud. From this height, the vast track marks of the enemy’s fighting suburbs and the complicated entrenchments and fortifications of the Storm looked almost identical.

“They say we are making the world green again,” sighed Dr. Zero, “but all we are doing is turning it into mud…”

Forward Command turned out to be a captured city, a small four-tiered place standing motionless on the slopes of a hill at the northern end of the Rustwater Marshes. Its tracks lay curled on the mud around it. The wheels and lower tiers were scorched and ruined, but on the upper levels lights showed dimly in the deepening twilight. Warships came and went from makeshift air harbors, and flocks of birds wheeled above the wrecked rooftops. Grike was surprised at the intelligent way the flocks veered to avoid the airships, until The Sadness of Things passed close to one and he saw that they were not living birds but Stalkers, their eyes glowing with the same eerie green light as his, their beaks and talons replaced with blades. Below, on roadways bulldozed through the mud, more Stalkers marched, some man-shaped, others bulky, crablike, multilegged.

“THE GREEN STORM HAS MANY STALKERS,” he said.

“The Green Storm has need of many, with so many battles to fight,” replied Dr. Zero.

The Sadness of Things settled on a landing field under the walls of the city’s town hall. A man was waiting for them there, a small bald-headed old man in fur-lined robes, flinching at the sporadic rumbles of gunfire rolling from the marshes to the west. He grinned when he saw Grike come down the Sadness’s gangplank. “Grikey! Good to see you up and stalking again! Remember me? I was one of old Twixie’s assistants. Helped examine you, back in poor old London.”

Grike’s brain, which used to hold images often thousand Once-Born faces, now remembered only Dr. Zero and a few technicians from the Stalker Works. He studied the old man’s yellowing teeth, the tattoo of a red wheel sunk in the wrinkles between his bushy eyebrows, then turned to Dr. Zero like a child looking to its mother for reassurance.

“This is Dr. Popjoy,” she told him softly. “Founder of the Resurrection Corps, and our leader’s personal surgeon-mechanic.” Then, to the old man, she said, “I am afraid that Mr. Grike has few memories of his former career, Dr. Popjoy. That section of his brain was severely damaged; I was unable to unlock it.”

“Pity,” said Popjoy absentmindedly. “Might have been nice to have a chin-wag about the old times. Still, maybe it’s for the best.” He walked all round the Stalker twice, reaching out to pat Grike’s shiny new bodywork and tweak the electric cords that trailed from his steel skull. “Excellent’” he chuckled. “A right proper job, Treacle! Couldn’t have done it better myself!”

“I seek only to please the Stalker Fang,” said Dr. Zero meekly.

“As do we all, Treacle. Come on now, we’d best go up; she’s expecting us.”

Hurricane lanterns burned in the long corridors of the building. Uniformed Once-Borns hurried about, shouting commands, waving sheets of paper, talking loudly into field telephones. Many of them had dyed their hair green as a symbol of their loyalty to the Storm. They spoke in clipped battle codes that Grike found he could understand perfectly; Dr. Zero’s doing, no doubt. As he followed her and Popjoy up the broad stairways, he wondered what other adjustments she had made.

At the top of the stairs was a pair of bullet-pecked bronze doors. “Resurrection Corps,” said Popjoy as the sentries slammed to attention. “Delivery for Her Excellency.”

The doors swung wide. The room beyond was big and dark. Grike’s new eyes switched automatically to night vision, and he saw that the far wall had been reinforced with armor plate. One long slot of a window, like the slit in a visor, remained open, glassless, gazing toward the west. The figure who stood at it was not entirely human. “Your Excellency…” Popjoy said.

“Wait.” A voice from the darkness, a commanding whisper.

Popjoy waited. In the silence, Grike detected the faint sound of Dr. Zero’s teeth chattering and the nervous drumming of her heart.

Suddenly a huge pulse of light arose from the western marshes, filling the room with an orange glow that fluttered and stabbed as the first great burst of fire separated into the muzzle flash of countless individual guns and the drifting white pinpoints of phosphorus flares. Forward Command shifted slightly, dead metal creaking under Grike’s feet. After a few more seconds the sound reached him, a far-off rumbling and banging, like somebody moving furniture about in a distant room.

Bathed in the light of her war, the Stalker Fang turned from the viewing slit to greet her visitors. She wore long gray robes, and her face was a woman’s death mask cast in bronze. She said, “Our artillery has just launched a bombardment on the forward cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. I shall be flying out shortly to lead the ground attack.”

“Another glorious victory, I’m sure, Fang,” said Popjoy’s voice from somewhere near Grike’s ankles, and Grike noticed that both Popjoy and Dr. Zero had fallen to their knees, pressing their faces to the smooth wood of the floor.

“But not a final victory.” The Stalker’s voice was a winter wind rustling among frozen reeds. “We need more-powerful weapons, Popjoy.”

“And you shall have them, Your Excellency,” Popjoy promised. “I’m always on the lookout for odd bits of Old Tech that might serve. In the meantime, we’ve brought you a small token of the Stalker Corps’s esteem.”

The Stalker Fang’s almond-shaped eyes flared green as they focused on Grike. “You are the Stalker Grike,” she said, gliding closer. “I have seen images of you. I was told that you had ceased to function.”

“He is fully repaired, Excellency,” said Popjoy.

The Stalker stopped a few paces from Grike, studying him. “What is the meaning of this, Popjoy?” she asked.

“A birthday present, Excellency!” Popjoy raised himself, grunting with the effort. “A little surprise that Dr. Zero here dreamed up. I’m sure you remember Oenone Zero, daughter of old Hiraku Zero, the airship ace. She’s a prodigy, already the finest surgeon-mechanic in the Corps. (Apart from yours truly, of course.) Well, Oenone had the notion of digging old Grikey up and repairing him to mark the anniversary of your glorious Resurrection!”

The Stalker Fang stared at Grike, saying nothing. Dr. Zero was shaking so badly that Grike could feel the vibrations through the floor.

“Don’t tell me you’d forgotten?” chirped Popjoy. “It’s seventeen years to the day since I restored you to life in the facility at Rogues’ Roost! You’re sweet seventeen, Fang. Many happy returns!”

The Stalker Fang watched Grike with her impassive green eyes. “What am I to do with him?”

Dr. Zero looked up for the first time. “I thought— thought—you could k-keep him by you, Excellency,” she said. “He will serve you well. While you work to cleanse the world of the cancer of mobile cities, Mr. Grike will keep w-w-watch over you.”

“Th-th-there,” said Popjoy, mocking her frightened stammer. “He’ll keep w-w-watch. A bodyguard as strong as yourself, and with the same heightened senses…”

“I doubt he is as strong as me,” said the Stalker Fang.

“Of course not!” Popjoy said hastily. “Her Excellency doesn’t need bodyguards, Treacle! What are you wittering about?” He simpered toward the waiting Stalker. “I just thought he might amuse you, Fang.”

The Stalker Fang tilted her head on one side, still considering Grike. “Very well. The unit is impressive. Appoint him to my staff.”

A tall door opened at the far end of the gallery. A uniformed aide bowed low and announced, “Excellency, your ship is ready to depart for the front.”

Without another word to Popjoy, the Stalker turned and walked away.

“Excellent!” said Popjoy when she had gone. He rose and switched on an argon lamp, then patted Dr. Zero’s bottom as she stood up, making her blush. “Good work, Treacle. The Fire Flower was pleased. People say you can’t tell what she’s thinking, but I put her together, remember; I’ve a pretty good idea what goes on behind that mask.” Dabbing sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief, he glanced at Grike. “So what does the Grikester think of our glorious leader?”

“SHE IS STRONG’ said Grike.

Popjoy nodded. “She’s that, all right. My greatest work. There’s some amazing machinery inside her. Bits of a Stalker brain even older than yours. Old Tech stuff so weird that even I can’t be sure how it works. I never managed to build another like her. But maybe one’s enough, eh, Grikey?”

Grike turned back to the window and the distant battle. Sheets of light sprang into the sky as if coming from some deep fissure in the earth. The night was full of airships. He thought that it would be good to serve this Stalker Fang; good to obey someone as strong as himself and not take orders from soft, squashable Once-Borns. He would be loyal to her, and perhaps, in time, that loyalty might fill up the empty spaces in his mind and rid him of the nagging sense that he had lost something precious.

That face, that scarred face.

It fluttered in his brain like a moth, and was gone.

Chapter 7 She’s Leaving Home

Night, and a fingernail moon lifting from the mist above the Dead Hills. Wren lay fully dressed on her bed in the house in Dog Star Court, listening to her parents’ muffled voices drifting through the wall from their bedroom. It did not take long for them to fade into silence. Asleep. She waited, just to be sure. The dullness of their lives made her want to shriek sometimes. Asleep at this hour, on such a lovely, moony night! But it suited her plans. She put on her boots and went softly out of her room and down the stairs, with the Tin Book of Anchorage heavy in the bag on her shoulder.

It had been so easy to steal that it hadn’t felt like stealing at all. It wasn’t stealing, Wren kept assuring herself: Miss Freya didn’t need the Tin Book, and no one else in Anchorage would care that it had gone. It wasn’t stealing at all.

But even so, as she propped the note she had spent all evening writing against the bread bin and crept out into the star-silvered streets, she could not help feeling sad that her life in Vineland was ending like this.

When she’d left Gargle, she had run straight back down the hill to the Winter Palace. Miss Freya had still been in the garden, chattering away to Mrs. Scabious about the play the younger children would be performing at Moon Festival. Wren went to the library and took down the old wooden casket that Miss Freya had shown her earlier. She took out the Tin Book and locked the box again, setting it safely back in its place on the shelf. Through the open window she could hear Miss Freya saying, “Please, Windolene, just call me Freya; we’ve known each other long enough…”

Wren slipped out of the library and out of the palace, and hurried home with the Tin Book nestled safely inside her jacket, trying not to feel like a thief.

The moon was a windblown feather, caught on the spires of the Winter Palace. A lamp burned in Freya Rasmussen’s window, and as Wren hurried past, she thought, Good-bye, Miss Freya, and felt as if she would cry.

At home it had been worse. All evening she had been close to tears at the thought of leaving Dad, and she had even started to think she would miss Mum. But it was only for a while. She would come back one day, a princess of the Lost Boys, and everything would be all right. She had given Dad a special hug before she went to bed, which had surprised him.

He probably thought she was just upset about her latest fight with Mum.

She went down into the engine district and walked quickly toward the city’s edge. She had just left the shadow of the upper tier and was walking along a broad street between two derelict warehouses when Caul stepped into her path.

Wren hugged her bag against herself and tried to dodge past him, but he moved to block her way again. His eyes gleamed faintly in the cage of his hair.

“What do you want?” asked Wren, trying to sound cross instead of just scared.

“You mustn’t go,” said Caul.

“Why not? I can go if I want. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Gargle. I watched last night. I looked back when I reached the hilltop, and I saw you come out of that limpet. Did he ask you to help him? Did you agree?”

Wren didn’t answer.

“Wren, you can’t trust Gargle,” Caul told her. “He was just a boy when I worked with him, but he was cunning even then. He knows how to use people. How to hide what he really wants. Whatever he’s asked you to do for him, don’t.”

“And how are you going to stop me?” asked Wren.

“I’ll tell Tom and Hester.”

“Why not tell Miss Freya too, while you’re about it?” Wren teased. “I’m sure she’d love to know. But you won’t do it, will you? If you were going to tell Mum and Dad, you’d have done it as soon as you saw me come off the Autolycus. You wouldn’t betray your own people.”

“You have no idea —” Caul started to say, but while he was still busy hunting for the right words, she darted past him and away, her running footsteps ringing down the metal stairs at the end of the street and then falling quiet as she jumped off the last stair and onto the earth. The bag banged against her side, and her heart was thumping. She looked back to see if Caul was chasing her, but he was just standing where she had left him, not moving. She waved, then turned away and started running up the hill.

Hester had fallen asleep quickly that night, but something disturbed Tom just as he was drifting off. Only later would he realize that it had been the sound of the street door closing.

He lay in the dark and listened to his heart beat. Sometimes it seemed to him to falter, and sometimes there was a pain, or not quite a pain but a sense that something was wrong inside him, where Pennyroyal’s bullet had torn into his body all those years ago. Exercise always made it worse. He should not have cut those logs this morning. But the logs had needed cutting, and if he had not cut them, he would have had to explain to Hester about the pains around his heart, and she would worry and make him go and consult Windolene Scabious, who was Anchorage’s doctor, and Windolene would want to examine him, and he was afraid of what she might discover. It was better not to think about it. Better just to thank the gods for these good years he’d had with Hester and with Wren, and worry about the future when it happened.

But his future was already running toward him, down Rasmussen Prospekt, through the Boreal Arcade, up Dog Star Court; it was through the front gate and sprinting up the steps; it was pounding hard at his front door.

“Great Quirke!” said Tom, startled, sitting up. Beside him, Hester groaned and rolled over, surfacing slowly. Tom threw the covers off and ran downstairs in his nightshirt. Through the glass panels of the front door a blurred figure loomed like a ghost, fists hammering the woodwork. A voice called Tom’s name.

“Caul?” he said. “It’s open.”

This was not the first time Caul had awoken Tom with bad news. Once before, when Anchorage was iceborne and Hester had taken off alone aboard the Jenny, he had appeared out of the night to warn Tom what was happening. He had been just a boy then. Now, with his long hair and his beard and his wide, wild eyes, he looked like some maniac prophet. He burst into the hall, knocking over the hatstand and sweeping Tom’s collection of Ancient mobile telephone casings to the floor.

“Caul, calm down!” said Tom. “What’s the matter?”

“Wren,” said the former Lost Boy. “It’s Wren…”

“Wren’s in her room,” said Tom, but he felt suddenly uneasy, recalling the strange way Wren had hugged him when she said good night, and that scratch on her cheek which she’d said she got walking into a thornbush. He’d sensed that something was wrong. “Wren?” he called up the stairs.

“She’s gone!” shouted Caul. “Gone? Gone where?”

Hester was halfway down the stairs, pulling on her shirt.

She ran back up ; and Tom heard her kick the door of Wren’s bedroom open. “Gods and goddesses!” she shouted, and reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Tom, he’s right. She’s taken her bag and her coat…”

Tom said, “I expect she’s out with Tildy Smew on some midnight jaunt. This is Vineland. What harm can come to her?”

“Lost Boys,” said Caul. He was pacing to and fro, his hands deep in the pockets of his filthy old coat. The wild-animal smell of him filled the hall. “You remember Gargle? He left a note. Wanted me to help him. Stealing something. Don’t know what. Wren must have followed me and got caught. He’s using her. She’s gone to him.”

Hester went into the kitchen and came back with a square of paper.

“Tom, look…”

It was a note from their daughter.

Hester dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the hall rug. Beneath it, set into the floor, was the safe where the merchant whose house this had been once stored his valuables. All it held now were a few cardboard boxes of ammunition and a gun. Hester pulled the gun out, unwrapping it from its oilcloth bindings.

“Where are they, Caul?” she asked.

“Het—” said Tom.

“I should have told you sooner,” Caul muttered, “but it’s Gargle. Gargle. He saved my life once…”

“Where?”

“A cove on the north shore. Where the trees come down nearly to the water. Please, I don’t want anyone hurt.”

“Should have thought of that before,” said Hester, checking the gun’s action. Most of the guns she had taken from the Huntsmen of Arkangel she had thrown off the city’s stern while it was still at sea, but this one she had kept, just in case. It wasn’t as pretty as the others; no snarling wolf’s head on the butt or silver chasing on the barrel. It was just a heavy, black .38 Schadenfreude, an ugly, reliable tool for killing people. She slipped bullets into its six chambers and snapped it shut, then stuffed it through her belt and pushed past Tom to the door, snatching her coat from the rack. “Wake the others,” she told him, and went out into the night.

From the top of the island Wren could see the Autolycus squatting like a beached crab in the cove where she had first seen Gargle. The blue light from the limpet’s open hatch gleamed on the water. She started down the sheep track toward it, slithering on loose earth, tripping on roots, the breath cold at the back of her throat as she ran through the trees and the gorse toward the spider-crab silhouette.

Gargle was standing in the shallows, at the foot of the ramp that led up through the open hatch. Remora was with him, and as Wren drew near, she saw Fishcake come down the ramp to join them. “Ready to go?” she heard Gargle ask.

“Touch of a button,” the boy replied.

The limpet’s engines were idling, a thin plume of exhaust smoke rising from sealable vents on its back. A crab-cam glinted as it scurried up one of the legs and home to its port on the hull. Other cameras were creeping quickly down the beach, looking so spiderlike that Wren almost wanted to run away, but she told herself that if she was to travel with the Lost Boys, she would have to get used to them, so she made herself walk calmly between them down the shingle.

“It’s me,” she called softly as Gargle spun toward the sound of her footsteps. “I’ve got the Tin Book.”

Anchorage-in-Vineland was waking up, indignant and alarmed. As Hester climbed the path to the woods, she could hear doors slamming in the city behind her, and people shouting as they prepared to go and do their bit against the Lost Boys. Some of the younger men almost caught up with her as she drew near the top of the island, but she left them behind on the descent; they stuck to the zigzag path while she just went straight down, crashing through the brush and surfing down screes in a rattle of bouncing stones. She felt excited, and happy that Wren needed her at last. Her father couldn’t save her from the Lost Boys. Nobody else in Vineland could. Only Hester had the strength to deal with them, and when she had killed them all, Wren would come to her senses and realize what danger she had been in and be grateful, and she and Hester would be friends again.

Hester slithered into a briar patch at the hill’s foot and looked back. There was no sign of the others. She pulled the gun out of her belt and started toward the cove.

“Here,” said Wren, sliding the heavy bag off her shoulder and holding it out to Gargle. “It’s in there. My stuff too.”

Remora said, “Better tell her, Gar. It’s time to go.”

Gargle had pulled the Tin Book out and was leafing through it, ignoring both of them.

“I’m coming with you, remember?” said Wren, starting to grow uneasy because this wasn’t the welcome she’d expected. “I’m coming with you. That was the deal.”

She could hear a childish, whining note creeping into her voice, and knew that she wasn’t coming across as brave and grown-up and adventurous, which was how she wanted Gargle to see her. It suddenly occurred to her that she was nothing to him, nothing but a way to get hold of the Tin Book.

“That’s it,” said Gargle to himself. He threw Wren’s bag back at her, then handed the Tin Book to Fishcake, who stuffed it into a leather satchel that hung at his side.

“I’m coming with you,” Wren reminded Gargle. “I am coming with you, aren’t I?”

Gargle moved closer to her. There was a mocking tone in his voice when he spoke. “Thing is, Wren, I’ve been having a think about that, and we haven’t got the space after all.”

Wren blinked quickly, trying to stop the tears from coming. Flinging her bag down on the shingle, she shouted, “You promised you’d take me with you!” She could see Remora watching her, whispering something to little Fishcake that made him smirk too. How stupid they must think her!

“I want to see things!” she shouted. “I want to do things! I don’t want to stay here and marry Nate Sastrugi and be a schoolteacher and get old and die!”

Gargle seemed to be angered by all the noise she was making. “Wren,” he hissed, and instantly, like a furious echo, another voice out of the darkness shouted, “Wren!”

“Mum!” gasped Wren.

“Damn!” muttered Remora.

Gargle didn’t say anything at all, just dragged the gas pistol from his belt and fired toward the beach. In the blue flash of the gun, Wren saw her mother striding across the shingle, barely flinching as the shot whipped past her. She held her own gun out stiffly in front of her. Whack, it went, whack, whack, whack: dull, flat sounds like books being snapped shut. The first bullet rebounded from the Autolycus with a clang; the next two hissed away over the lake; the fourth hit Gargle between the eyes. Something thick and wet spattered Wren’s face and clothes.

“Gargle!” shrieked Fishcake.

Gargle went down on his knees, then flopped forward with his bottom in the air and his face in the chuckling waves.

Fishcake scrambled through the shallows toward him, getting in Remora’s way as she pulled out her own gun. “Fishcake, get aboard!” she screamed. “Get back to Grimsby!”

Hester put two bullets through her, kicking her backward and down into the lake.

“Gargle!” Fishcake was wailing.

Hester was reloading her gun, empty shells jinking on the shingle around her feet. She shouted, “Wren, come here!” Shaking with fright, Wren stumbled gladly toward her, but suddenly Fishcake’s arm was around her waist, tugging her back. The snout of Gargle’s pistol ground against her chin.

“Drop the gun!” Fishcake shouted. “Or I’ll… I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!”

“Mummy!” squeaked Wren. She couldn’t breathe properly. She knew suddenly that she had had all the adventures she would ever want. She longed to be safe at home. “Mummy! Help!”

Hester edged forward. Her gun was raised, but she dared not pull the trigger, they all knew that; there was too much danger of hitting Wren.

“Let her go!” she ordered.

“What, so you can shoot me?” sobbed Fishcake. Twisting Wren about so that her body was always between him and her mother, he started to drag her with him up the boarding ramp. The gun was still pressed under her chin, pushing her head up. She could feel him shaking, and although she could easily have overpowered him, she dared not try, in case the gun went off. He pulled her through the hatch into the limpet, and slammed his elbow against the button that raised the ramp. A ricochet howled off across the lake as Hester shot at the hydraulics and missed. “Mummy!” shouted Wren again, and had a brief glimpse of her mother shouting something back as the hatch closed. Then Fishcake shoved her through a doorway into the complicated electrical clutter of the control cabin. She felt the limpet shiver as he began working the controls with one hand, the other still pointing the gun at her head. “Please,” she said. The cabin lurched. Wren saw lights on the hillside behind the beach. “Help!” she shouted. Waves were slapping at the cabin windows, and she glimpsed the moon for a moment, shivery and unreal through the rising water. Then it was gone, and the note of the engines changed, and she thought, We’ve submerged— never get home now! and her stomach turned over and she fainted.

Hester ran down the beach, firing her gun at the limpet until its black hull was lost in a boiling of white water. Then there was nothing to do but shout Wren’s name over and over, hoarse, useless, her lonely voice the only sound remaining as the lap and wash of the Autolycus’s wake faded into silence.

No, not quite silence. Slowly Hester became aware of other sounds: dogs barking, shouts. Lanterns and flashlights bobbed on the hillside. Mr. Smew came charging through the gorse, waving an antique wolf rifle twice as tall as him and shouting, “Where are they, the subaquatic fiends? Let me at them!”

More people followed him. Hester went to meet them, shrugging aside the hands that reached for her, the questions. “Are you all right, Mrs. Natsworthy?”

“We heard shooting!”

“Was it the Lost Boys?”

The bodies in the shallows stirred gently as the waves broke round them, dragging long smears of red away into the lake. Caul knelt beside one of them and said in a soft, puzzled voice, “Gargle.” The air stank of gun smoke and exhaust fumes.

Tom ran up, looking stupidly about and seeing only his daughter’s going-away bag lying forlorn upon the shingle. “Where’s Wren?” he asked. “Hester, what happened?”

Hester turned away and would not answer. It was Freya Rasmussen, in the end, who came to him and took his hands in hers and said, “Oh, Tom, they’ve gone, and I think Wren is with them; I think they’ve taken Wren.”

Chapter 8 Kidnapped

“Daddy, Mummy’s face is all funny.”

“I know.”

“But why is it all funny?”

“Because a bad man cut her when she was just a little girl.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I think so. I think it hurt a lot, and for a long time. But it’s all right now.”

“Will the bad man come back?”

“No, Wren, he’s dead. He’s been dead a long time. There are* no bad men in Anchorage-in-Vineland. That’s why we live here. We’re safe here; nobody knows about us, and nobody will try to hurt us, and no hungry cities will come to gobble us up. It’s just us, quite safe: Mummy, and Daddy, and Wren.”

The voices of her childhood whispered in Wren’s memory as she slowly returned to her senses. She was lying on the floor of a tiny cabin that held a metal washbasin and a metal toilet. The toilet smelled of chemicals. A dim blue bulb glowed in a cage on the roof. The walls vibrated slightly. She could hear the threshing, churning sound of the Autolycus motors, and another sound, a creaking and whispering, which she guessed was water pressing against the hull.

Well, bad men have come to Anchorage-in-Vineland now, she thought, and they’ve escaped with what they wanted, and I’ve helped them. Only question left is, What are they going to do with me?

Dad had been taken by the Lost Boys once, yet he’d survived all right, and returned to Anchorage to marry Mum. So that must mean that there was hope for Wren, mustn’t it? But thinking of Dad made her think of Mum, and that made her remember what Mum had done, and the memory filled her with a sick horror. Inside her head, like an echo that would not fade, she could hear the crack and spatter of the bullet hitting Gargle.

She was not sure how long she lay there, shivering, whimpering, too shocked and miserable to move. At last the hard floor grew so uncomfortable that she forced herself to stand up. Get a grip, Wren, she told herself crossly.

The stuff on her clothes had dried brown and crusty, like spilled goulash. She ran some water into the metal handbasin and tried to sponge it off, then washed her face and hair as well as she could.

After a long time, a key grated in the lock and the door opened. Fishcake came and looked in at her. The gun was still in his hand. His face looked hard and white in the blue light, as if he’d been carved out of ivory. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Shut up,” said Fishcake. His voice sounded hard too. “I ought to kill you.”

“Me?” Wren wriggled, trying to burrow into the deck. “But I haven’t done anything! I got you the Tin Book like Gargle asked…”

“And your witch of a mother killed him!” Fishcake shouted. The gun in his hand wobbled as big sobs shook his body. Wren wondered if he was going to shoot her, but he didn’t. She felt scared of him and angry at him and somehow responsible for him, all at the same time.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “About Remora too.”

Fishcake sniffed loudly. “Mora was Gargle’s girl,” he said. “Everybody said he was in love with her. He was never really going to take you with him. I heard him and Mora talking about you, saying how stupid you were…” He started to cry again. “What are the Lost Boys going to do without Gargle?” he asked. “It’s all right for him; him and Mora are down in the Sunless Country together. What about the rest of us? What about me?”

He looked at Wren again. In this underworld light his eyes looked black: two holes opening onto empty space. “I ought to kill you, just so your Mum would know how it feels to have someone you love took away. But that would make me as bad as her, wouldn’t it?”

He stepped back, the door slammed shut, and the key grated in the lock.

“I’m going after her,” said Tom.

Everyone politely ignored him. They thought that going after Wren would be impossible, but they were all too kind to say so. They thought that the shock of what had happened was making him talk wildly. And he had been shocked, quite numb with it when they first told him she was gone. He had run up and down the beach, shouting her name at the waves as if the Lost Boys who had taken her might hear him and relent, until his heart had twisted and kicked so painfully inside him that he thought he was going to die right then and there upon the shingle, without ever seeing Wren again.

But he hadn’t died. Kind hands had led him to a boat and rowed him back to Anchorage, where now he sat with Hester and Freya and a dozen other Vinelanders in one of the smaller rooms of the Winter Palace.

“It’s my fault, you see,” he explained. “She was asking about the Lost Boys only this morning. I should have guessed something was going on.”

“No fault of yours, Tom,” said Smew, glaring at Hester, who sat silent and scowling beside her husband. “If certain people hadn’t gone racing off ahead of the rest of us and started shooting…”

Several other Vinelanders muttered in agreement. They had always respected Hester for saving them from the Huntsmen of Arkangel, but they had never liked her. They all remembered the way she had killed Piotr Masgard, killed him when there had been no more need for killing, and hacked and hacked at his body long after he was dead. Small wonder that the gods would send bad luck to a woman who could do such things. It was just a shame they’d waited sixteen years to send it, and that it had fallen on her nice husband and her lovely daughter too.

Hester knew what they were thinking. “I was only defending myself,” she said. “I was defending all of us. I promised Freya once I’d look after this dump and guard it from harm, and that’s what I was doing. You want somebody to blame, blame him.”

She pointed at Caul, who sat awkwardly in a far corner. But nobody seemed to think badly of what Caul had done. His former friends had come asking for his help, and he had refused. You couldn’t expect him to betray them. They were his people.

“What were the Lost Boys here for, anyway?” asked Mr. Aakiuq.

“Lost Girls too,” said Smew, still glowering at Hester. “One of those kids she shot was just a girl.”

“But what brought them back to Anchorage after all these years?”

Everyone turned to look at Caul. He shrugged. “Don’t know. Didn’t ask. Thought the less I knew, the better.”

“Oh, gods and goddesses!” said Freya suddenly, and went running from the room. When she returned, she was carrying the empty casket that had once held the Tin Book of Anchorage. “Wren came asking about it,” she said. “This was what the Lost Boys came here for.”

“Why?” asked Tom. “It’s not worth anything, is it?”

Freya shrugged. “I didn’t think so. But here it is, gone. They must have asked Wren to get it for them and…”

“The stupid little—” Hester started to say.

“Be quiet, Het!” snapped Tom. He was thinking of Wren as a child, and of how, when she was frightened by thunder or a bad dream, he would hold her tight till she was calm again. He could not bear the thought of her trapped aboard that limpet, alone and afraid, with nobody to make it better. “I’m going after her,” he said again.

“Then I’m coming too,” Hester agreed, taking his hand. They had been parted once before, when Hester was a prisoner at Rogues’ Roost, and they had vowed then that they would never be apart again. She said, “We’ll go together.”

“But how?” asked Freya.

“I’ll help.”

Caul had risen to his feet. He circled the room with his back to the wall, lamplight gleaming in his eyes. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I thought maybe if I didn’t help them, they’d leave us alone. I didn’t think they’d turn to Wren. I’d forgotten how clever Gargle can… could be.” He put a hand to his throat, to the shiny red scars that the ropes had left where Uncle had tried to hang him. He said, “I remember Wren being born. I played with her when she was little. I’ll help. The Screw Worm’ll take you all the way to Grimsby if need be.”

“That old limpet of yours?” Hester sounded angry, as if she thought Caul was mocking them.

“I thought the Screw Worm broke down years ago,” said Tom. “That summer that you and Mr. Scabious dug out the harbor-mouth…”

“I’ve repaired her,” said Caul. “What do you think I’ve been doing with my time, down in the district? Picking fluff out of my belly button? I’ve been repairing the Worm. All right, repairing the Worm and picking fluff out of my belly button. She’s not perfect, but she’s seaworthy. No fuel, of course…”

“I reckon there might be a drop left in the old air harbor tanks,” said Mr. Aakiuq. “And we can recharge her accumulators from the hydro plant.”

“Then she could be ready in a few days,” Caul said. “Maybe a week.”

“Wren will be miles away by then!” Hester said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Tom firmly. Usually it was Hester who was the firm one and Tom who did as she said, but he was utterly certain about this. He had to get Wren back. If Wren were lost, what would be the point of going on living? He took Hester’s hand, sure that she felt the same. “We’ll find her,” he promised. “We’ve faced worse things than Lost Boys in our time. Even if we have to go all the way to Grimsby, we’ll find her.”

Chapter 9 The message

Winding river systems of the Dead Continent. Fishcake knew his way back to the sea, for he had helped Gargle map these channels on the journey from Grimsby. It was simple enough to retrace the route that had brought the Autolycus through the Dead Hills to Vineland, except that all the way, Fishcake kept thinking, The last time we passed through this lake, Gargle was here, or, Last time we crossed this sandbar, Mora made that joke…

He had to do something. But what could he do? He had loved Gar, and he loved Gar still, but Gar was gone, and crying would not bring him back. What could he do? He had to do something…

Always before, there had been someone to tell him what to do. He had never acted on his own or made his own plans, except for that one panic-driven moment back in Vineland when he’d grabbed that gun and pointed it at Wren to stop her mum from shooting him, and even that had not worked out as he had meant it to, for he had ended up with Wren as a captive, and he didn’t know what he should do with her either.

On the third night after the fight at Vineland, he cut the limpet’s engines and climbed out onto the roof. The Dead Hills of America rose stark against the shining sky. Certain that Lady Death and all the gods of war and vengeance watched over this land, Fishcake raised his voice so that they would all hear him. “I’ll avenge you, Gargle! I’ll avenge you, Mora! I’ll find Hester Natsworthy again one day, and when I do, I promise you I’ll kill her.”

The next day the limpet reached the coast, crept across a stretch of dismal saltings, and slid gratefully into the gray sea. Safe in the deep, Fishcake set a course for home, then went aft to see his prisoner. Wren was curled up on the floor of the toilet cubicle. Staring at her fragile, sleeping face, Fishcake wished he had not had to capture her, for she was pretty, and none of this had been her fault. But it was too late now to let her go.

He prodded her with his foot. “We’re at sea now,” he told her as she woke. “You don’t have to stay in there anymore. There’s fifty fathoms of cold water above us, so don’t even think about trying to escape.”

“At sea?” Wren knew that the open sea was a long way from Anchorage-in-Vineland. She bit her lip to stop herself from crying.

“I’m going to take you to Grimsby,” said Fishcake. “Uncle or one of the older boys will know what to do with you. You can clean yourself up if you want. You can take some of Remora’s old clothes from her locker.”

“Thank you,” whispered Wren.

“I’m not doing it for your sake,” Fishcake said sharply, to show her he wasn’t soft. “It’s the stink, see? I can’t be breathing your reek all the way to Grimsby.”

Wren went aft. For four days she had seen nothing but the inside of the toilet cubicle, and after that, even the narrow passageways of the Autolycus seemed roomy. Remora’s locker was decorated with pictures snipped out of stolen magazines: hairstyles and clothes. There were photographs of Remora and Gargle laughing, their arms around each other. There was a bag of makeup, and a teddy bear, and a book on interpreting your dreams. Wren took some clothes and changed, then went and stared at her reflection in the mirror above the sink, which wasn’t really a mirror but just a sheet of polished metal bolted to the wall. Already she looked older and thinner, swamped by Remora’s shapeless dark clothes. Wren the Lost Girl. When she had stuffed her own filthy clothes into one of the bags the limpet crews used for loot and tied it shut, there was nothing of Vineland left about her but her boots.

She sat in the hold, listening to Fishcake clattering about on the bridge. Her stomach rumbled, but the Lost Boy had offered her no food, and she was afraid to ask for any. It was a bit embarrassing, being held prisoner by someone so much younger than her, but Fishcake’s feelings were balanced on such a knife-edge that Wren was still afraid he might kill her if she annoyed him. Better stay quiet. She drank foul-tasting water from the sink faucet and thought about escape. Daring plans formed in her mind, only to burst like bubbles after a few seconds. Even if she somehow overpowered her little captor, she would never be able to steer the limpet back to Vineland. She was stuck here, and it was all her own fault. She had been incredibly, dangerously stupid, she could see that now, and it made her ashamed because she had always thought herself clever. Hadn’t Miss Freya always said that Wren had more brains than any of the other young people in Vineland?

“Well, Wren,” she said, hugging herself for comfort, “if you’re going to stay alive and find your way back to Mum and Dad, you’ll have to start using them.”

The Autolycus was a hundred miles from shore when the signal came in. Fishcake thought at first that it must be a message from another limpet, although he didn’t know that any others were operating on this side of the ocean. Then he noticed something strange: The signal was being broadcast simultaneously on the limpet-to-limpet frequency and on the wavelength that the limpets used to receive pictures from their wireless crab-cams.

He flicked some switches, and the bank of circular screens above his station slowly flooded with light.

Huddled on the floor of the hold, Wren heard voices. She crept to the door of the control cabin and peeked through. Fishcake was staring up at the screens. All six showed the same strange image: a city, seen from above, cruising on a calm sea. It was hard to tell on this grainy, ghosting picture what size of city it was, but it looked pleasant, with many ornate white cupolas and domes, and lots of long pennants streaming in the wind.

“What’s that?” asked Wren.

Fishcake glanced round, but if he was surprised to find her standing there, he didn’t show it. He turned his face to the screens again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It keeps repeating. Watch.”

The picture changed. A kindly-looking man and woman sat side by side upon a sofa. They seemed to be looking straight at Wren and Fishcake, and although they were strangers, and dressed in the robes and turbans of rich townspeople, something in their sad and gentle smiles made Wren think of her own mum and dad and how they must be missing her.

“Greetings, children of the deep!” said the man. “We are speaking to you on behalf of WOPCART, the World Organization for Parents of Children Abducted from Raft Towns. For half a century, boys—and lately girls too—have been vanishing from cities that cross the Atlantic and the Ice Wastes. Only in recent years, thanks to the explorer Nimrod Pennyroyal, have we become aware of the parasite-pirates who secretly burgle and infest such cities, and who steal children away to train as thieves and burglars like themselves.”

“Pennyroyal again!” said Wren crossly.

“Shush!” said Fishcake. “Listen!”

The woman was speaking now, still smiling, but weeping too, as she leaned toward the viewers. “Now the good people of the raft resort of Brighton have brought us north into your home waters. If you tune your radio equipment to 680 kilocycles, you will pick up the signal of Brighton’s homing beacon. We know that you probably have no memories of the mummies and daddies from whom you were stolen when you were so very little, and who have been missing you so very much. But if you come to us, come in your submarines to meet us here in Brighton, we are sure that many of you will recognize your own families, and they you. We do not want to harm you, or take you from your new friends or your exciting new life beneath the waves. We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again…”

Here the woman’s voice grew high and wobbly; she hid her face in her handkerchief while her husband patted her arm and took over.

“WOPCART has many members,” he explained, and the picture changed again to show a crowd of people gathered on one of the city’s observation platforms. “Every one of us has lost a child, and longs to see him again and learn what has happened to him. Or, indeed, her. Oh, children of the deep, if you can hear this message, we beg you, come to us!”

The image lingered for a moment while sad music swelled and the members of WOPCART all smiled and waved at the camera and the sea breeze plucked at their coats and robes and hats. Then it was replaced by a printed sign that read:

The music faded, there was a moment of blackness, and the transmission began again. “Greetings, children of the deep!…”

“See?” asked Fishcake, turning to Wren. He had forgotten that she was his hostage, so eager was he to share the astonishing message with somebody. His eyes were shining— his whole face was radiant—and Wren realized for the first time how young he really was: just a small boy, far from home and longing for love and comfort.

“What do you think I should do?” he asked. “I checked for Brighton’s homing beacon. They’re close. About fifty, sixty miles southwest of us. I never heard of a city coming that near to the Dead Continent…”

Wren could feel the sense of yearning building in the cramped cabin as Fishcake imagined that city full of mums and dads floating fifty miles away. What if she could persuade him to rendezvous with Brighton? She was sure that she would be far better off there than down in Grimsby. So would Fishcake, probably, so she need not feel guilty about it.

She went into the cabin and sat down in the swivel chair beside his. “Maybe they’ve come here because they’re searching for Lost Boys,” she said. “They could have been zigzagging their way north for weeks, transmitting that message over and over. Gargle told me that limpets had gone missing. He thought something bad had happened to them, but what if they just heard that message and went to find their families… ?”

“Why haven’t they contacted Grimsby, then?” asked Fishcake.

“Maybe they’re having too much fun,” suggested Wren. “Maybe they were scared that Gargle would punish them for going to Brighton without his orders.”

Fishcake gazed up at the screens. “Those people look so rich. The Lost Boys take only kids nobody’s going to miss: orphans and urchins from the underdecks who nobody wants…”

“That’s what Gargle and Uncle told you,” said Wren. “What if it isn’t true? What if they take children from rich families sometimes too? Anyway, probably even an orphan would be missed by somebody. Probably even an urchin’s mummy and daddy would want to find him if he got himself stolen away…”

Two big tears ran down Fishcake’s face, pearly in the light from the screens.

“I’ll send a message-fish to Grimsby and ask Uncle what to do,” he decided.

“But Fishcake,” said Wren, “he might tell you not to go!”

“Uncle Knows Best,” said Fishcake, but he didn’t sound very certain.

“Anyway, by the time you get a reply, Brighton might have sailed away. Autumn’s coming. Storms and high seas. Miss Freya always taught us that raft cities head for sheltered waters in the autumn. So this might be your only chance…”

“But it’s one of the rules. What they teach us in the Burglarium. Never show yourself. Never give the Drys a chance to find out about the Lost Boys—that’s what Gargle says…”

“These Drys seem to know all about you already,” Wren reminded him.

Fishcake shook his head and smudged the tears away with the heel of his hand. His Burglarium training was fighting against the rising hope that his own mother and father might have been among that crowd of smiling faces on the screens. He did not remember them, but he felt sure that if he met his parents in the flesh, he would know them at once.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll go closer. We’ll have a good look at this Brighton place, get crab-cams aboard if we can. Check these WOPCART people are on the level…” He looked at Wren and pitied her; after all, she had no hope of finding her parents aboard the waiting city.

“You must be starved,” he said.

“Pretty hungry,” admitted Wren.

Fishcake smiled shyly at her. “Me too. Mora used to do all the cooking. Do you know how to cook?”

Chapter 10 The Parent Trap

Usually at this time of year the raft resort of Brighton would have been cruising the Middle Sea, anchoring now and then so that visitors from the mobile towns and cities that prowled the shores could come out by balloon and motor launch to explore its amusement arcades and aquarium, its beaches and boutiques. But business had been poor these past few seasons, and so the Council had agreed to venture into the North Atlantic in search of parasite-pirates.

Now they were beginning to regret it. There had been much excitement when the first three limpets had made contact, east of the Azores. Crowds of visitors had come swarming out by airship from the cities of the Hunting Ground to see the strange new arrivals. But that had been weeks ago. There had been no sign of Lost Boys since, and the long banners that were stretched along the city’s bows, declaring WOPCART summer expedition and Brighton welcomes parasite-pirates, were starting to look tattered, and a little bit sad.

Fishcake brought the Autolycus up to periscope depth about a mile from Brighton. A night had passed since he’d first picked up the transmission from WOPCART. The morning sky was the color of the inside of a cowrie shell, and big gray waves heaved up and down. When Wren took a turn at the periscope, she could not see Brighton at all, just the waves, which now and then allowed her a glimpse of a big island away to windward, ringed by dirty white cliffs, with clouds hugging its summit.

And then she realized that it was not an island at all: What she had taken for cliffs were rows of white buildings, and the clouds were steam and exhaust fumes rising from a dense thicket of smokestacks. It was a city, a three-tiered raft city with two outrigger districts linked to its central hull by spidery gantries and a bank of huge paddle wheels beating the sea to foam astern. “Oh!” cried Wren, amazed. She’d seen pictures of cities in books, but she had never grasped how big they really were: far bigger than Anchorage-in-Vineland. Airships moved to and fro above a jagged skyline of spires and domes and rooftops, and a circular deck plate held up by immense gasbags hung a few hundred feet above the upper tier, anchored to it by thick hawsers. Wren could see green trees on the edge of the deck plate, and a building with unlikely onion domes.

“What’s that?” she gasped.

“That’s called Cloud 9,” said Fishcake, who had managed to get a picture of the city from a crab-cam that he had sent up to perch upon the periscope. He had fetched out the Autolycus’s tattered old copy of Cade’s Almanac of Traction Towns (Maritime Edition), and was comparing Ms. Cade’s diagram of Brighton with the image on the screen. “It’s a sort of airborne park. The big building in the middle is where the mayor of Brighton lives.”

“Gosh” breathed Wren. “I mean— Gosh!”

“No jaws,” said Fishcake, checking the screens to make sure Brighton had not added anything nasty since Cade’s Almanac went to press. There were a few air defense cannon mounted on revolving platforms on the promenades, but no more weapons than any town carried in these troubled times. “It’s just a pleasure resort.”

He lowered the periscope. As he switched off the crab-cam signal, the screens filled again with the transmission from Brighton, clearer and stronger now that the limpet was so close. “We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again,” the woman from WOPCART was saying. Fishcake felt a silly, happy hopefulness rising up inside him. What if she was his mummy? Mums and dads are a chain that binds, a pain, a strain; they stop boys being boys. That’s what he’d been taught to chant down in the Burglarium. Now that he was faced with the prospect of meeting his own mum and dad, he found that he’d never really believed it. He’d been missing his parents his whole life long, and he’d not even known it until he heard the message from WOPCART.

He took the Autolycus deeper, nearer, down into the shadows beneath Brighton’s hull. Trailing cables and a huge, complicated steering array loomed out of the murk; green forests of weed swirled through the cone of light from the limpet’s nose lamp. Near the city’s bow, a metallic sphere dangled on cables; Fishcake guessed it was the machine that WOPCART used to transmit its message through the sea.

A metallic ping rang through the cabin. Wren thought that something must have fallen over in the hold, but the sound came again and then again, chiming out a rhythm, as if someone were carefully tapping the outside of the hull with a hammer.

“Oh, gods’” said Fishcake suddenly.

“What?” asked Wren. “What is that noise?”

Fishcake was frantically working the limpet’s controls, steering for brighter water beyond the edge of the city. “Gargle told us he ran into something like this once, under a big predator raft. It’s a type of Old Tech listening device… The mummies and daddies know we’re here now!” He wasn’t sure if he was scared or happy.

With a grinding clang the limpet lurched awkwardly sideways, throwing Wren off her feet. At first she thought it was because of something Fishcake had done. “You might have warned me,” she complained, rubbing the elbow she’d banged on a bulkhead. Then she saw that the boy looked just as startled as her.

“What’s happening?” she whispered.

“I don’t know, I don’t know]”

No mistaking the next sensation. The Autolycus was rising quickly upward. Water foamed white as it broke the surface, and sunlight burst into the cabin, blindingly bright after so many days in the dark. When Wren could see again, the limpet was hanging high above the waves and being swung sideways over a broad metal deck that jutted out from Brighton’s bow. People were running across the deck—not the smiley, well-dressed mums and dads she’d seen on the screens, but rough-looking, tough-looking men in rubberized overalls. Wren felt a jolt of fear at the sight of them. Then, looking past them, she relaxed, for overlooking the deck was a pleasant promenade, and the people lining the railings there looked much more like Parents of Children Abducted from Raft Towns: beaming, happy, pointing down excitedly at the limpet as it was dumped on the deck.

Fishcake was already halfway up the ladder that led to the hatch on the roof. As he popped it open, the sound of cheering burst into the limpet and a big amplified voice began shouting something, the words confused and echoey.

Wren followed him up the ladder. Out on the hull, Fishcake was crouched against the periscope mounting, looking nervously around, confused by the sunlight and the thundering cheers. The magnetic grapple that had dragged the limpet from the sea had been released and dangled dripping overhead, attached to the jib of a crane. The people on the promenade were shouting and cheering and waving their arms in the air. Wren touched Fishcake’s shoulder to reassure him. The rubber-suited men had formed a loose ring around the limpet and were closing in cautiously. Wren supposed they must be longshoremen or fishermen hired to pull limpets aboard. She smiled at them, but they did not smile back. Straining her ears, she began to make out what the booming voice was saying.

“… and for those of you who have just joined us,” it bellowed through squalls of feedback, “Brighton has captured a fourth pirate submarine! There are the crew, creeping out onto the hull—as desperate-looking a pair of young cutthroats as you could hope to meet! But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen; the world will soon be rid of these parasites forever!”

“It’s a trap!” said Wren. Fishcake, who hadn’t understood what the announcer was saying, turned a shocked white face toward her. “It’s not real!” she cried, standing up, shouting. “Fishcake! It’s a—”

And two men came up the limpet’s side, unfurling something between them that turned out to be a net. They dropped it over Fishcake, who kicked and struggled and shouted and reached for Wren’s hand. “Does this mean they aren’t our mummies and daddies?” he asked her, his voice going squeaky and ready to cry. “You lied! You lied to me!”

Then strong hands grabbed him from behind and tore him away from Wren, and more hands grabbed her, rough hands in rubber gauntlets that stank of fish and oil. A net went over her, and though she wriggled and lashed out with fists and feet, she could not stop her captor from throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her down the limpet’s flank, and dumping her heavily on the deck. She heard Fishcake’s sobs turn suddenly to a sharp squeal, and a moment later she understood why. A man grabbed her arm and burned the back of her hand with a hot iron stamp, branding her with a sort of logo:

“Mummy! Mummy!” Fishcake was howling as they dragged him away, still not wanting to believe that WOPCART and all the smiley parents had been nothing but bait.

“Leave him alone!” screamed Wren, weeping with the pain of her seared hand. “He’s only ten! How can you be so beastly? He thought you were his parents!”

“That’s the idea, boy.” A big, burly man in a waterproof cape stooped over her, belching out a hot fug of whiskey fumes as he peered into her face. “Hang on,” Wren heard him say. “Look, Miss Weems—this one’s a girl.”

A brittle, beautiful woman in black shoved him aside. She had a brand on her hand just like Wren’s, but hers was old and had faded to a raised scar not much darker than the surrounding skin. “Interesting,” she said, looking at Wren. “We’ve heard rumors of female parasites, but she’s the first we’ve seen.”

“I’m not a Lost Girl!” Wren shouted through the tight wet mesh of the net. “I was a prisoner aboard the Autolycus, Fishcake took me from my home…”

The woman sneered at her. “I don’t care who you are, girl. We are slave dealers You are just merchandise, as far as we’re concerned.”

“But I’m— You can’t make me a slave!”

“Au contraire, child, our contract with Mayor Pennyroyal is perfectly clear: Anyone we dredge up in one of those parasite machines becomes the property of the Shkin Corporation.”

“Mayor Pennyroyal?” cried Wren. “You don’t mean… Not Nimrod Pennyroyal?”

The woman seemed surprised that a Lost Girl should recognize that name. “Yes. Nimrod Pennyroyal has been mayor of Brighton these past twelve years or more.”

“But he can’t be! Who’d want Pennyroyal for mayor? He’s a fraud! A traitor! An airship thief!”

Miss Weems made some notes upon a clipboard. “Take her to the slave pens,” she told one of her men. “Inform Mr. Shkin of the catch. I believe it’s a good sign. We may be drawing close to the pirate nest.”

Chapter 11 Four Against Crimbsy

On the morning of their departure, when the Screw Worm was ready at last and Hester and Tom were waiting for Caul to run a few final tests on the engines, Freya Rasmussen came down to the mooring beach and announced that she was coming too. Nothing that Tom or Hester could say seemed to change her mind.

“It’ll be dangerous.”

“Well, you’re both going.”

“You’re needed here.”

“Oh, Anchorage-in-Vineland runs itself perfectly well without me. Anyway, I told Mrs. Aakiuq that she can be Acting Margravine while I’m away, and you don’t want to disappoint her, do you? She’s made herself a special hat and everything…” Beaming, Freya clambered up the Screw Worm’s boarding ladder and dumped her bulky going-away bag through the hatch.

“Don’t you understand, Snow Queen?” Hester said. “We’re not off to Grimsby to pay a social call. We’re going to get Wren back, and if I have to kill every Lost Boy who stands in my way…”

“You’ll only make things worse,” said Freya tartly. “There’s been too much killing already. That’s why you need me along. I can talk to Uncle and make him see reason.”

Hester let out an exasperated howl and looked to Caul, sure that he would not want Freya along for the ride, but Caul was saying nothing, staring away across the shining water.

So it was settled, and the voyage began like a picnic trip, with Tom and Freya waving from the Screw Worm’s open hatchways as the limpet nosed out into the lake and all of Anchorage-in-Vineland lined the beach to cheer them on their way.

As the city passed out of sight behind the headland and the Screw Worm folded in its legs and prepared to submerge, Freya went down into the cabin, where Caul was hunched over the rusty controls. But Tom stayed out on the hull until the last moment, watching the passing shoreline, the green slopes reflecting in the rippled water. Birds were calling in the reed beds, their songs echoing the car alarms and mobile-phone trills that their distant ancestors must have heard: sound-fossils of a vanished world. They made Tom think of the Ancient settlements he had begun to excavate in the Dead Hills and the relics of forgotten lives he had unearthed there. Would he ever return with Wren to finish his work?

“We’ll come back,” promised Tom as he climbed inside to join Hester. But Hester said nothing. She did not think that she would ever see Anchorage-in-Vineland again.

In the cramped control cabin of the Screw Worm there was no way for Caul to avoid talking to Freya Rasmussen. He wondered if that was half the reason for her deciding to come. As the waters closed over the nose windows, she sat down beside him and spread Snori Ulvaeusson’s ancient map upon the pilot’s console and said, “So do you remember the way back to Grimsby?” He nodded.

“I was sure you would,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t made the trip before.”

“To Grimsby?” He turned to look at her, but the kind, careful way she was watching him made him uneasy, so he stared at the controls instead. “Why would I want to go back to Grimsby? Have you forgotten what happened the last time I was there? If Gargle hadn’t cut me down…”

“But you still want to go back,” said Freya gently. “Why else did you repair the Worm?”

Caul squinted into the silty darkness ahead of the limpet, pretending to be keeping a lookout for sunken rocks. “I thought about it,” he admitted. “That’s the trouble. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even in the first weeks at Vineland, when there was so much to do and everybody was so kind and welcoming and you—”

He glanced sideways at her and away. She was still watching him. Why was she always so kind to him? Sixteen years ago she had offered him her love, and he’d turned her down for reasons he still couldn’t quite understand. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d banished him back to the sea.

“That’s why I live down in the underdeck,” he admitted. “Because it’s the bit of Anchorage that’s the most like Grimsby. And every night, when I’m dreaming, I hear Uncle’s voice. ‘Come back to Grimsby, Caul,’ it says.” He looked at Freya nervously. He’d never told anyone this, and he was afraid she might think he was mad. He thought it himself, sometimes. “Uncle whispers to me, the way he used to whisper out of the speakers on the Burglarium ceiling when I was small. Even the waves on the beach talk with his voice. ‘Grimsby’s your home, Caul, my boy. You don’t belong with the Drys. Come home to Grimsby.’ ”

Freya reached out to touch him, then thought better of it. She said, “But when Gargle showed up, asking for you to help him, you turned him down. You could have given him the Tin Book and gone back with him on the Autolycus.”

“I wanted to,” said Caul. “You don’t know how much I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t. You chose Anchorage over Grimsby.”

“Only ’cos I was afraid,” said Caul. “Only ’cos I was afraid that when I got there, I’d find I don’t fit in any better with the Lost Boys than I do with you Drys. Maybe I’m not either anymore. Maybe I’m nothing at all.”

Freya did touch him then. She laid her hand on his shoulder and felt him flinch away from her, quick and shy, like a frightened animal. Sometimes she thought that Caul was as much of a mystery to her now as he had been all those years ago when he’d first come to her out of the sea. He would have been so much happier if he had just let her love him. And so would she. It hadn’t exactly ruined her life, for so many other good things had happened to her, but sometimes she did feel sad that she had no husband and no children of her own. It seemed to her that there were some people-Caul was one, and Hester Natsworthy another—who just didn’t have the knack of being happy.

Or was there more to it than that? She thought of the waves on the beach whispering to Caul with Uncle’s voice, and felt spooked and uneasy. If Uncle could speak to him in Vineland, what would it be like for him when they reached Grimsby? And if things went badly there, and it came to a fight, would Caul be on her side, or on Uncle’s?

Chapter 12 Business in Great Waters

That’s right your worship! Hold it Smile!” tray of flash powder exploded with a soft chuff, and a ball of smoke rose into the sunlit air of Cloud 9 like a party balloon. Nimrod Pennyroyal, explorer, author, and mayor, was having his photograph taken for the Brighton Morninig Palimpsest again, posing this time with Digby Slingback and Sardona Flysch, the actor and actress who played the grieving spokespeople of WOPCART in the messages Brighton was beaming into the Atlantic.

“So, Your Worship,” the Palimpsest’s reporter asked while the photographer loaded a fresh plate into his camera, “can you remind our readers what gave you the idea of this expedition against the parasite-pirates?”

“I considered it my duty,” said Pennyroyal, beaming and adjusting his chain of office, which twinkled prettily in the sun. “After all, it was I who first alerted the world to the existence of these maritime miscreants; you can read of my encounters with them in my interpolitan bestseller Predator’s Gold (Just twenty-five Brightonian dolphins at all good bookshops). In recent years we have had more and more reports of their raids and burglaries and have started to deduce how their organization operates. I considered it my duty to take our city north and capture as many of them as I could.”

“Of course, Your Worship, some of your critics have suggested that it is all a publicity stunt designed to attract more visitors to Brighton and sell more copies of your books…”

Pennyroyal made scoffing noises. “My books sell well enough without publicity stunts. And if news of our quest to rid the oceans of these parasites brings more tourists to Brighton, what is wrong with that? Brighton is a tourist city, and it’s the mayor’s job to help boost it. And may I remind you that our little fishing expedition is not costing Brighton’s ratepayers a penny. Thanks to the partnership deal I worked out, all the underwater sensing equipment and limpet traps are paid for by one of our most eminent businessmen, Mr. Nabisco Shkin. This fake organization for pirates’ parents was all Shkin’s idea. I know some people think it’s rather cruel, but you must admit it’s worked like a charm. Shkin understands the psychology of these parentless louts perfectly, you see. He was an orphan himself, you know, an urchin from the underdeck who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, so he knew just how to appeal to them.”

“And does Your Worship think we shall catch more pirates soon?”

“Wait and see!” chuckled Pennyroyal, presenting his best profile to the camera as the photographer lined up another shot. “The boys we took from the first three limpets were hard nuts who refused to divulge the location of their base. This latest catch includes a younger boy and a girl too: much easier to crack. I believe the next few days will bring big results!”

In fact, what the next few days brought was a change in the weather. A storm sweeping off the Dead Continent chopped the ocean into steep white waves and threw Brighton up and down so violently that even the residents felt queasy, and a lot of the visitors who had flown in from the Hunting Ground to watch Pennyroyal’s people fishing for pirates took to their airships and sky yachts and went hurrying home. The Brightonians (those who were not feeling too ill to walk about) glared up through the blustering rain at the underbelly of Cloud 9 hanging in the wet sky and wondered why they had agreed to let Pennyroyal bring them out onto this wild, unfriendly ocean.

Down below the pitching decks, on Brighton’s lowest level, Wren lay on the floor of her narrow cage in the Shkin Corporation’s holding pens and wished she were dead. Above her head, an argon lamp swung to and fro, splashing light across the metal walls and the rows of cages that sat waiting for more Lost Boys to be lured aboard. Fishcake lay in one; the others held the crews of the limpets that had been captured earlier. The burn on Wren’s hand hurt terribly. She supposed she would bear that raised weal for the rest of her life—although that might not be very long.

“Are we sinking?” she asked when the Shkin Corporation’s guard came round and aimed his flashlight at her to check that she was still alive.

The guard chuckled. “Feels like it, don’t it? But Brighton’s ridden out worse than this. Don’t worry; we’ll soon be hoovering up the rest of your chums.”

“They’re not my chums,” said Wren bitterly. “I’m not a Lost Boy…”

“Change the record, love,” the man said wearily. “I heard you telling Monica Weems that same story down on Fishmarket Hard when we first dredged you up. The answer’s still the same. Don’t matter who you are. You’re merchandise now. You’ll fetch a good price in Nuevo-Maya.”

Memories of old geography lessons stirred in Wren’s brain: the big globe in the schoolroom at the Winter Palace and Miss Freya saying, “Here is Nuevo-Maya, which used to be called South America before the isthmus that linked it to North America was severed by Slow Bombs in the Sixty Minute War.”

Nuevo-Maya was thousands of miles away! If they took her there, how could she ever find her way home?

The guard leaned on her cage and leered at her through the bars. “You don’t think Mr. Shkin’d try and sell a bunch of lairy pirates off as house slaves and nursemaids, do you? You’ll end up as fighters aboard one of them big Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities. Lovely shows they have in them arenas. Gangs of slaves pitched against each other, or fighting souped-up dismantling machines and captured Green Storm Stalkers. Blood and guts all over the shop. But it’s all done in honor of their funny Nuevo-Mayan gods, so it’s quite spiritual, really.”

Spiritual or not, Wren didn’t think she fancied it. She had to find a way out of this horrible mess. But her brain, about which Miss Freya had said such nice things, was too addled by the pitching of the city to think of anything.

“I hope we do sink!” she shouted weakly after the guard as he went on his way. “That’d serve you right! I hope we sink before you trap any more poor Lost Boys!”

But next day the storm slackened and the waves subsided, and that evening the crews of three more limpets were dragged, sheepish and weeping, into the slave pens. There were four more limpets that night, and another three the following day; one of them sensed a trap and fled before the magnetic grapples caught it, but Brighton gave chase and dropped depth charges until a white plume of water burst from the ocean to drench the cheering spectators on the starboard observation decks and bits of limpet and Lost Boy came bobbing to the surface.

“Word must have reached Grimsby by now,” said Krill, one of the boys who’d been taken earlier, watching white-faced from his cage as the pens around him filled with captives. “Old Uncle will do something. He’ll rescue us.”

“Word has reached Grimsby,” said the new arrivals.

“That’s where we came from…”

“We picked up that message a couple of days ago.”

“Uncle said it was a trap and we shouldn’t listen, but we sneaked out anyway.”

“We thought our mums and dads would be here…”

Krill hung his head and started to cry. He had led raiding parties against static cities in the Western Archipelago, slaughtering any Dry who stood against him, but here in the Shkin Corporation’s warehouse he was just another lost teenager.

Wren reached through the bars and tugged at Fishcake’s sleeve. He had not spoken to Wren since they were brought in, and she guessed he blamed her for what had happened to him. Maybe he was right. If only she hadn’t been so keen to persuade him to come to Brighton!

“Fishcake,” she asked gently, “how many Lost Boys are there? All together, I mean.”

Fishcake would not look at her, but after a moment he muttered, “About sixty, I s’pose. That’s not counting Uncle and the newbies too young to ride limpets.”

“But there are at least forty of you here!” Wren said. “Grimsby must be nearly empty…”

The warehouse door rattled open, letting in another bunch of people. More prisoners, Wren thought, and didn’t even bother to look at them; it was too depressing. But the sound of tramping feet stopped beside her cage, and she glanced up to see that the newcomers were not Lost Boys, just two Shkin Corporation guards and the odious Miss Weems.

“Fetch her out,” Miss Weems commanded. Wren was alarmed. Had Miss Weems finally accepted that she was not a Lost Girl? Perhaps the Shkin Corporation had realized that she would never cut the mustard in those Nuevo-Mayan arenas and were planning to throw her overboard rather than waste any more food and water keeping her alive?

“The master wishes to see you,” said Miss Weems. The captive Lost Boys watched from their cages as Wren was led away.

A door behind the slave pens opened onto a room no bigger than a cupboard. The guards shoved Wren inside, then crowded in behind her. It was only when Miss Weems pulled a lever on the wall and Wren felt the floor jerk under her that she realized this was an elevator. The elevators of Anchorage had all been out of order for years, but this one was working perfectly: It rose so fast that Wren felt as if her stomach had been left behind.

Having been dragged to the slave pens in a net, Wren did not really understand the layout of the Shkin Corporation building. It was a tower whose lower stories, down in Brighton’s depths, held the captive slaves. The middle floors, on the city’s second tier, housed a few special cells for luxury goods and the offices of administrators. The higher levels, which poked up through the resort’s top tier in a fashionable district called Queen’s Park, were the offices of the Corporation’s founder, Mr. Nabisco Shkin. This topmost part was as white and beautiful as any iceberg, and gave no hint of the dangerous nine tenths that lurked below. Local people called the tower the Pepperpot.

The elevator stopped on the top floor, and Wren stepped out into a large, circular room. It was beautifully furnished, with plush black draperies, black carpets, and black pictures in golden frames hanging on the black walls. But what made Wren catch her breath was the view from the windows. She was looking out over the rooftops of Brighton: The sun was shining, bright flags were flying, sky yachts and air pedalos were rising from the harbor, and legions of gulls were wheeling and soaring around the chimney pots and far out over the sparkling sea. Spray from the paddle wheels blew across the city on a gentle breeze, and the sunlight shining through it filled the streets with drifting rainbows.

For a moment Wren almost forgot her misery, her hunger, the pain of her branded hand. Joy bubbled up in her. She was on a raft city, on one of the wonderful cities she had always dreamed about, and it was even more beautiful than she could have hoped.

“The girl, Mr. Shkin,” announced Miss Weems with an ingratiating whine in her voice that Wren had not heard before. One of the guards turned Wren around to face a man who sat quietly watching her from a black swivel chair.

Nabisco Shkin sat very still, one leg crossed over the other, one patent leather shoe blinking with reflected light as his foot tapped ever so slightly up and down, his only movement. A dove-gray suit; gray gloves; gray hair; gray eyes; gray face; gray voice. He said, “I am delighted to meet you, my dear,” but he didn’t sound delighted. Didn’t look it either. Didn’t look as if he’d know what delight was. He said, “Monica tells me that you claim to come from Anchorage.”

“I do!” cried Wren, grateful that someone was prepared to listen to her at last. “My name is Wren Natsworthy, and I was kidnapped—”

“Nobody comes from Anchorage.” Shkin stood up and circled her. His eyes were on her all the time. “Anchorage sank years ago, west of Greenland.”

“No, it didn’t!” blurted Wren. “It—”

Shkin raised one finger and turned to his desk. Turned back with something in his hands. It was the book that Wren had stolen from Miss Freya. She had forgotten all about it until now.

“What is this?” he asked.

“That’s the Tin Book,” she said. “Just an old curio from the Black Centuries. It’s why the Autolycus came to Anchorage. I think it’s got something to do with submarines. I helped the Lost Boys steal it, but it all went wrong and Fishcake ended up taking me hostage, and if you could take me back there, sir, I’m sure my mum and dad and Miss Freya would reward you…”

“Anchorage again.” Shkin put the book down and studied her. “Why do you persist in this ridiculous story? Anchorage is home to no one but fish. Everyone in Brighton knows that. Our beloved Mayor Pennyroyal made rather a lot of money with his book about its final days. Predator’s Gold ends with Anchorage sinking to what our ever-original mayor describes as ‘a watery grave.’ ”

“Well, Pennyroyal’s a liar!” Wren said angrily, thinking how unfair it was that Pennyroyal should have survived at all, let alone grown rich from his fibs. “He’s a coward and a liar, and he shot my dad and stole Mum and Dad’s airship so he could run away from Anchorage when he thought Arkangel was going to eat it. He can’t possibly know what happened after that. Whatever he wrote, he must have made it up.”

Nabisco Shkin raised one gray eyebrow about an eighth of an inch, which was his way of showing surprise. At the same instant, Wren had an idea. She was the only person in the whole of the outside world who knew the truth about Anchorage. Surely that must make her valuable? Far too valuable to be auctioned off with the rest of the Lost Boys as an arena slave!

She felt as if a tiny door had opened very far away from her, on the other side of an enormous, darkened room; she could see a way out.

She said, “Anchorage found its way to a green bit on the Dead Continent. It has thrived there, and I’m proof of it. Don’t you think Pennyroyal would like to know that?”

Nabisco Shkin had been about to silence her again, but when she said that, he hesitated, and his eyebrow shot up a full quarter inch. He settled into his chair again, his eyes still fixed on Wren. “Explain,” he said.

“Well, he’ll want to know about Anchorage, won’t he?” Wren stammered. “I mean, if he’s made all that money telling people about us, think how interested he’ll be to learn what really happened. He could write a sequel! He could have an expedition to take me home, and write a book about it!” And even if he couldn’t, she thought, at least life as a slave in this floaty palace thing would be better than the arenas of Nuevo-Maya. She said eagerly, “He’ll be dying to talk to me.”

Shkin nodded slowly. A smile flickered for a moment around his thin mouth, then gave up the effort. He had been irritated by the crack that Pennyroyal had made about the underdeck in his interview in the Palimpsest, reminding everyone of Shkin’s beginnings as a child thief in the dank alleys of Mole’s Combe. Maybe this girl was a gift from his gods, a way to get back his own from Brighton’s absurd mayor.

“If your story is true,” he said, “you might indeed be of interest to Mayor Pennyroyal. But how can you prove it?”

Wren pointed to the Tin Book, which lay on his desk. “That’s the proof. It’s a famous artifact from the margravine’s library…”

“I do not recall Pennyroyal mentioning it in his tediously detailed account of Anchorage’s treasures,” said Shkin. “What if he does not recognize it? That leaves only your word, and who would believe the word of a slave and a Lost Girl?”

“He can ask me stuff,” said Wren desperately. “He can ask me things about my mum and dad and Mr. Scabious and Miss Freya, stuff that’s not in his book, stuff that only somebody who’d lived in Anchorage could know about.”

“Interesting.” Shkin gave another of his slow-motion nods. “Monica,” he said, “this girl is to be transferred to the Second Tier. Make sure she is treated as a luxury item from now on.”

“Don’t forget Fishcake,” said Wren. “He’s been to Anchorage too.”

“Indeed,” said Shkin, and with a glance at Miss Weems, he added, “arrange for that boy to be brought to the questioning room. It’s time I had a word with him.”

Chapter 13 Dr Zero

As the airship that had carried her from Batmunkh Tsaka swung into the shoals of other ships above Tienjing, Oenone Zero looked down from the gondola windows, delighted by the gaily painted houses balanced on their impossible ledges, the gardens like window boxes, the sunlight silvering high-level canals, and the bright robes of the citizens thronging on the spidery bridges and the steep, ladderlike streets. This city, high in the central mountains of Shan Guo, had been the birthplace of Anti-Tractionism. Here Lama Batmunkh had founded the Anti-Traction League, and here the League had had its capital for a thousand years.

But the League was gone now, the old High Council overthrown, and the signs of the Green Storm’s war were everywhere. As the airship descended toward the military docking pans at the Jade Pagoda, Oenone found it harder and harder to ignore the hideous concrete rocket emplacements that disfigured Tienjing’s parks and the armies of ugly windmills flailing and rattling on the mountainsides, generating clean energy for the war effort. For fourteen years no one had been allowed to do anything that was not part of the war effort, and the civilian quarters of the city showed signs of long neglect. Wherever Oenone looked, buildings were falling into disrepair and the shadows of patrolling dreadnoughts slithered across decaying roofs.

The Jade Pagoda was not made of jade, nor was it a pagoda. The name was just a relic that Tienjing’s founders had brought with them when they had first fled into these mountains; it had probably belonged once to some pleasant summer palace in the lowlands, long since devoured by hungry cities. It didn’t suit the grim stone fortress that loomed over Oenone as she disembarked on the snow-scoured pan. On spikes above the outer gates, the heads of antiwar protesters and people who failed to recycle their household waste were turning dry and papery as wasps’ nests in the mountain air. Huge slogans had been painted on the walls: THE WORLD MADE GREEN AGAIN! and ONE LAST PUSH WILL SMASH THE PAN-GERMAN TRACTION WEDGE!

Soldiers of the Stalker Fang’s elite air legion manned the inner gate, and stepped out to bar the way as Oenone heaved her pack onto her shoulder and started up the steps from the docking pan.

“Papers, young man,” barked the subofficer in charge. It was a mistake that Oenone was used to. In the Storm’s lands, all surplus food was earmarked for the fighters at the front, and the yearly famines of her childhood had left her as slight and flat-chested as a boy of fourteen. She waited patiently while the subofficer checked her pass, and saw his face change when he realized who she was. “Let her through! Let her through!” he shouted, lashing at his men with the flat of his sword, punishing them in the hope that Dr. Zero would not punish him. “Let her through at once! This is Dr. Zero, the leader’s new surgeon-mechanic!”

Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues’ Roost, was just a face in a photograph on the family shrine.

Oenone grew up shy and clever on an air base in remote Aleutia, where her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs like “The East Is Green” and “We Thank the Stalker Fang for Our Happy Childhoods.” At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother, Eno, told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken Stalkers shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them better, not understanding then that they were dead already and would best be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armor, the braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations for her mother and herself that way until she was sixteen, when the Green Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility, then to a front-line Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.

In that underground world of trenches and dugouts she toiled through the long, murderous winter of ’22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them marching back into the line.

She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity. She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way they weren’t people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the Resurrection room that Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked and teased one another as they worked, but because Oenone was so young, they called her “little sister” and took care of her. They were impressed by how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her, using words like “genius.”

Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.

At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming snout-gun rounds and the whistle of snipers’ bullets slicing the cold air above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months, and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in the Resurrection room: You learned to stop feeling things. She didn’t even feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother’s air base had been eaten by amphibious suburbs.

And then, during the spring offensive of ’23, she recognized one of the bodies that the salvage teams dumped in front of her. There was a pattern of moles on his chest that she knew as well as the constellations he had taught her when she was little. Even before she peeled aside the bloody rag that someone had draped over his face, she knew that he was her brother, Eno. Because their letters to each other had been censored, she hadn’t even known that he was in her sector.

She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets. She did not want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps taking the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced them as Crypto-Tractionists, and they were shot and Resurrected with their friends. Oenone did not want to be shot. At the sight of Eno, all her feelings had returned, and her fear of death came back so suddenly and so powerfully that she could barely breathe. She did not ever want to be like Eno, cold and helpless on a slab.

“Surgeon-Mechanic?” asked one of her assistants. “Are you unwell?”

Oenone wanted to be sick. She waved him away and tried to control herself. It was wrong to even think of not Resurrecting Eno. She told herself that she should be happy for her brother, because thanks to her, his body would be able to go on fighting the barbarians even after death. But she was not happy.

Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, “Scalpel. Bone saw. Rib spreaders,” and set to work. She opened Eno’s body and took out his internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery housings, and preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She took off his skin and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibers of his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and to the other machines she had installed.

“This isn’t really you,” she told him, whispering to him constantly as she worked. “You are in the Sunless Country, and this is just a thing you’ve left behind that we can use, like recycling a bottle or a crate. Doesn’t the Green Storm tell us to recycle everything for the sake of the Good Earth?”

When she had finished, she handed him over to a junior surgeon-mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives. Then she went outside and smoked a cigarette, and watched airships on fire above no-man’s-land.

It was after that that the dead started talking to her. It seemed strange that they should be so chatty when her own brother had said nothing at all, but when she looked into their faces, which she always made a point of doing after Eno, she could hear them whispering in her mind.

They all asked her same thing: Who will end this? Who will put an end to this endless war?

“I’ll do it,” Oenone Zero promised, her small voice drowning in the thunder of the guns. “At least I’ll try.”

“Treacle!” cried Popjoy cheerfully, when she finally arrived at his offices, high in the pagoda. He was packing. In the big trunk that sat open on his desk, Oenone could see books, files, papers, a framed portrait of the Stalker Fang, and an enamel mug with the logo of the Resurrection Corps and the slogan YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A MAD SCIENTIST TO WORK HERE—BUT IT HELPS! Popjoy was standing on a chair to unhook a picture of the Rogues’ Roost air base, which he dusted with his cuff before stowing in the trunk. Then he blew Dr. Zero a kiss.

“Congratulations! I’ve just been to see Fang, and it’s official! She’s so impressed with your work on old Grikey that she’s decided to let me retire at last! I’m off to my weekend place at Batmunkh Gompa for a well-earned rest. A spot of fishing; tinkering with a few pet projects; I might even write my memoirs. And you, Treacle—you’re to be my replacement.”

How strange, thought Oenone. This was what she had been working for ever since her epiphany in the trenches: to be the Stalker Fang’s personal surgeon-mechanic. For this she had overcome her natural shyness and fought for a transfer to the central Stalker Works. For this she had put up with Dr. Popjoy’s unpleasant sense of humor and wandering hands. For this she had spent years tracking down the grave of the notorious Stalker Grike, and months repairing him, proving to everyone that she was at least Popjoy’s equal. Yet now that the moment had arrived, she could not even find a smile. Her knees felt weak. She gripped the doorframe to stop herself from falling.

“Cheer up, Treacle!” Popjoy leered. “It’s good news! Power! Money! And all you have to do in return is check Her Excellency’s oil levels from time to time, buff up her bodywork, keep a weather eye open for rust. She’s basically indestructible, so you shouldn’t have too many problems. If you have any worries, send word to me. Otherwise…”

Otherwise I’m on my own, thought Oenone Zero, climbing the stairs to the highest level of the pagoda, the Stalker Fang’s own quarters. It was all wrong, of course; if there were justice in the world, a man like Popjoy, who had unleashed so much suffering and evil, would suffer himself. Instead, he was going to end his days in luxury, doing a spot of fishing, tinkering with a few pet projects. But at least by retiring he would allow Oenone Zero a chance to fulfill her promise to the dead.

Sentries clattered to attention as she passed. Flunkies bowed low before her and swung open the doors that led into the Stalker Fang’s conference chamber. Clerks and staff officers looked up from a big map of the Rustwater and did not bother to return Oenone’s low bow. Fang looked up too, her green eyes flaring. She had returned from the front line only a few hours before, and her armor was crusted with dried mud and the blood of townie soldiers. “My new surgeon-mechanic,” she whispered.

“At your service, Excellency,” murmured Oenone Zero, and dropped to her knees before the Stalker. When she found the courage to lift her head, everyone had gone back to their war maps, and the only eyes that lingered on her were those of Mr. Grike.

So everything was in place. She was on the inside, a member of the central staff. Soon she would put in motion the plan she’d thought of in her louse-infested bunk on the Altai front. She would assassinate the Stalker Fang.

Chapter 14 Sold

Later, Wren would sometimes tell people that she knew what it was like to be a slave, but she didn’t, not really. The old trade was thriving in those years. Prisoners taken by both sides in the long war were sold wholesale to men like Shkin, who packed them into leaky, underheated airfreighters and shipped them off along the bird roads to work on giant industrial platforms or the endless entrenchments and city-traps of the Storm. Slavery for them meant grinding labor, the ripping apart of families, random cruelty, and an early death. The worst Wren had to put up with was Nimrod Pennyroyal’s writing.

They had moved her, after that first interview with Shkin, into a comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Pepperpot. She had a soft bed, a basin to wash in, three meals a day, and a new linen dress that rather suited her. And she had a copy of Predator’s Gold, delivered by Miss Weems “with Mr. Shkin’s compliments.”

For a few hours each day, a reflector outside the barred window caught a beam of sunshine falling through a skylight in the deck plates above and filled Wren’s cell with light. As she curled up on her bunk and opened the lurid covers of Pennyroyal’s book, she could almost imagine herself back in her own bedroom in Dog Star Court, where she had often sat beside the window, reading. But she had never read anything like Predator’s Gold. How strange it was to find the places and people and stories she had known all her life so changed and twisted!

She had been afraid that reading about Mum and Dad would make her homesickness worse, but she need not have worried. Dad did not feature at all in Pennyroyal’s book. As for Hester Shaw, “a titian-haired Amazon of the air whose divine face was marred only by a livid scar where some brigand had drawn his stiletto across the damask flesh of her cheek,” she was barely recognizable as Mum.

And one night, as Wren lay sleepless, thinking indignantly about all that she had read, it struck her that she had made another terrible mistake. She’d thought herself so clever for persuading Shkin to take her to the mayor, but she’d been assuming that Predator’s Gold would be mostly true. She had not imagined just how much Pennyroyal had lied about his time in Anchorage. By telling the real story, Wren could destroy his reputation and his career. Pennyroyal might well want to buy her, but not so that he could write books about her. He would want to silence her, quickly and permanently.

Alone in her cell, Wren hid her face in the pillow and whined with fear. What had she done? And how could she undo it? She jumped from her bunk and started toward the door, meaning to shout for a guard. She would tell Shkin that she had lied about Anchorage; she was just a Lost Girl after all, and of no interest to Professor Pennyroyal. But then she would be back where she had started, or worse—Shkin would say she had been wasting his time. She imagined that a man like Shkin would have unpleasant ways of getting even with people who wasted his time.

“Think, Wren, think!” she whispered.

And all the while, beneath her feet, Brighton’s powerful Mitchell Nixon engines boomed and pounded, pushing the city steadily northward.

After his interview with Wren, Shkin had questioned Fishcake. The newbie had proved highly cooperative. He was tired out and terrified, and eager for some new master who would look after him and tell him what to do. After a few kind-sounding words from Nabisco Shkin, he confirmed Wren’s story about Anchorage. After a few more, he told the slave dealer where Grimsby lay.

Shkin’s people relayed the information to the mayor and the Council. Brighton adjusted its course, and soon the Old Tech instruments on the bridge detected the spires of a sunken city in the depths below. Brighton circled for a while, broadcasting its treacherous message, and succeeded in winkling out a last few limpets. When no more appeared, Pennyroyal decided that the expedition was at an end.

The original plan had been to send men down in captured limpets to explore the pirate lair. But the voyage north had taken longer than expected; it was late in the season, more storms were forecast, and the people of Brighton, who had the attention span of midges, were growing bored. Depth charges were dropped, resulting in a few spectacular underwater explosions and a lot of floating debris, which the city’s shopkeepers scooped up in nets and put on sale as souvenirs of Grimsby. Pennyroyal made a speech declaring that the North Atlantic was now safe for decent raft cities again, and Brighton turned south, setting a course back to the warmer waters of the Middle Sea, where it had promised to rendezvous with a cluster of Traction Cities to celebrate Moon Festival.

The following afternoon, Wren’s door was unlocked and a lot of black-clad guards came packing into her cell, followed by Nabisco Shkin himself.

“Well, my dear,” he said, glancing at the copy of Predator’s Gold that lay on her bunk. “Were you gripped by our mayor’s adventures? Did you notice any errors in his account?”

Wren barely knew where to start. “It’s all rubbish!” she said indignantly. “The people of Anchorage didn’t force Pennyroyal to guide them across the High Ice; they made him their Chief Navigator, which was a great honor, and he made a proper hash of it. And it wasn’t him who fought off the Huntsmen, it was my mum, and she didn’t get killed by Masgard, like she does in the book; she’s still alive. And she’d never have sold Anchorage’s course to Arkangel. And when she’s dying and says to Pennyroyal, ‘Take my airship, save yourself,’ that’s just poo; Pennyroyal stole the ship, and shot Dad so he could take off in her—he doesn’t mention Dad, of course, and as for that thing that Miss Freya does on page eighty-one…”

She stopped, remembering her predicament. Shkin was watching her, as careful and calculating as ever. Maybe giving her the book had just been a way of testing her, seeing if she would stick to her story about Anchorage in the face of all Pennyroyal’s lies.

“Interesting,” Shkin said, and snapped his fingers at one of the guards, who stepped smartly forward to clamp a pair of pretty silver manacles on Wren’s wrists. “I always suspected that His Worship’s tales of adventure were somewhat embroidered. I think it is time we took you up to meet him.”

Wren was led down the stairways of the Pepperpot to a garage, where a sleek black bug stood waiting. “What about Fishcake?” she asked as Shkin’s men pushed her inside. “What have you done with poor little Fishcake?”

“He will be remaining at the Pepperpot.” Shkin settled himself beside her on the bug’s backseat and checked his pocket watch. “Cloud 9,” he told the driver, and the bug set off, out into the dingy streets of the Laines, a district of antique shops and cheap hotels that filled most of Brighton’s middle tier.

In other circumstances Wren would have been fascinated by the passing shop fronts packed with junk and Old Tech, the strangely dressed people, the tier supports plastered with the handbills of hopeless fringe theater companies. Now, however, she was too busy wondering how she was going to keep herself alive. It would all be a matter of timing, she decided. If she were clever enough and kept her nerve, she might still be able to get herself out of Shkin’s hands without Pennyroyal ever realizing who she really was…

The bug climbed a long ramp to the upper tier. Clearing tourists out of the way with blasts of its hooter, it sped along Ocean Boulevard, the oval promenade that ringed Brighton’s upper city. It passed hotels and restaurants, palm trees and crazy-golf courses, fairgrounds, floral clocks, and bingo parlors. It crossed a bridge that spanned the shallow end of the Sea Pool, a lake of cleaned and filtered seawater fringed by artifical beaches. At last it arrived in the Old Steine, the circular plaza where the thick steel hawsers that tied Cloud 9 to Brighton were attached.

The floating deck plate hovered about two hundred feet above Wren’s head. Looking up, she could see a glass-walled control room jutting from its underbelly like an elaborate upside-down greenhouse. Men were moving about inside, operating banks of brass levers that adjusted Cloud 9’s trim and altitude. Small engine pods were mounted all around the deck plate’s edge, and Wren presumed that in rough weather they would be used to keep Cloud 9 on station above the city. On this windless afternoon only a few were switched on, acting as fans to blow Brighton’s exhaust smoke away from the mayor’s palace.

In the middle of the Old Steine, where the Cloud 9 tow-lines were bolted to huge, rusty stanchions, a yellow cable car waited to take visitors up to the Pavilion. As Shkin’s bug squeaked to a stop beside it, red-coated soldiers came hurrying to study the papers of Shkin and his men and run Old Tech metal detectors over their clothes.

“There was a time when just about anyone was allowed to go up and wander in the Pavilion gardens,” said Shkin. “That’s all changed since the war started. There’s no fighting in our part of the world, of course—the African Anti-Tractionists have no stomach for the Green Storm’s crusade—but Pennyroyal is still terrified that saboteurs or terrorists might take a potshot at him.”

That was the first Wren had heard about the war between the cities and the Storm. It explained why there were all those big, ugly gun batteries on the city’s esplanades, and why security was so tight.

“Purpose of your visit to Cloud 9, Mr. Shkin?” asked the commander.

“I have an interesting piece of merchandise to show to the mayor.”

“I’m not sure His Worship is buying slaves at the moment, sir.”

“Oh, he will not want to miss the chance of adding this one to his staff. I suggest you let us up without further delay, unless you wish to spend the rest of your career down on Tier Three, picking pubes out of the Sea Pool filters…”

There were no more objections. Shkin and his party were ushered quickly aboard, the cable car shuddered, and Wren, looking from its big windows, saw Brighton fall away below her. “Oh, look!” she murmured, entranced, but Shkin and his men had seen it all before.

Suddenly the howl of supercharged engine pods filled the cable car and swift shadows came flickering across its windows. Beyond the web of Cloud 9’s hawsers, a flock of fierce, spiky shapes cut through the afternoon sky. Wren shrieked, imagining that there had been an explosion up on Cloud 9 and that this was the debris raining down, but the shapes veered in formation and hurtled away across Brighton’s rooftops, their shadows speeding across the busy streets.

“But they’ve got no envelopes!” Wren cried. “No gasbags! How do they stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!”

Some of Shkin’s men laughed. The slave trader himself looked faintly pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. “Not impossible,” he said. “The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm’s air fleets. There is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological advances…” He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines. “This lot are called the Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air force, hired by our esteemed mayor to protect his palace…”

Wren turned to the window again as the machines sped by. They were fragile-looking contraptions, all string and balsa wood and varnished paper, their cockpits stripped down to a bucket seat and a nest of control sticks. Some had two batlike wings, others three or four or ten; some flapped along beneath black, creaking things like broken umbrellas. On their massive engine pods were painted hawks and sharks and naked ladies and raffish, devil-may-care names: Damn You, Gravity! and Bad Hair Day; Contents Under Pressure and Delayed Gratification NOW. A begoggled aviatrix waved at Wren from the cockpit of something called the Combat Wombat. Wren waved back, but the squadron was already pulling away, dwindling to a cluster of specks far off above the sea.

Wren was trembling as the cable car carried her up through the belly of Cloud 9 to its terminus in the Pavilion gardens. She had always believed that Dad and Miss Freya knew everything there was to know about the world outside Anchorage-in-Vineland, but clearly it had changed a lot in the sixteen years since they had crossed the ice. They had known nothing about this terrible war, which was almost as old as she was, and she doubted they could even imagine the bizarre flying machines she had just seen. It made her feel even farther away from them.

The pang of homesickness faded as her minders led her out of the upper cable-car terminus and along graveled paths toward the hub of Cloud 9, where the sugar-pink minarets and meringue domes of Pennyroyal’s palace rose from gardens filled with palm trees and cypresses, follies and fountains. Flocks of gaudy parakeets wheeled overhead, and above them Cloud 9’s transparent gasbags shone in the sunlight like enormous bubbles.

“Your business?” asked a house slave, stepping out to bar Shkin’s way.

“Nabisco Shkin,” the slave dealer replied, and that was enough; the man bowed and stammered something and waved the visitors on, up an elegant white staircase to a broad sundeck. At the heart of the sundeck was a pool. In the middle of the pool, adrift on his air bed in a gold lame swimming costume, a cocktail in one hand, a book in the other, his round face tilted to the sun, lounged Nimrod Pennyroyal.

Wren had worked out that Pennyroyal must be at least sixty-five, so she was expecting someone quite frail. But Pennyroyal had aged well. He had lost some weight and most of his hair, but otherwise he looked not much different from the photographs Wren had seen of him, taken during his brief, unhappy stint as Anchorage’s Honorary Chief Navigator. A bevy of attractive slave girls trod water around his floating bed, clutching fresh drinks, a bookmark, trays of cakes and sweets, and other items such as a busy mayor might need. A boy of Wren’s age, long and black as an evening shadow, stood on the poolside, waving an ostrich-feather fan.

“I see that Green Storm prisoner I sold you has settled in well,” said Shkin.

’Ah? Oh!” Pennyroyal opened his eyes and sat up. “Ah! Afternoon, Shkin.” He twisted round on his air bed to peer at the youth. “Yes, Mrs. Pennyroyal is delighted with him. Makes a very handy fan bearer. Lovely wafting action. And he goes so well with the dining room wallpaper.” He looked at Shkin again, and Wren had the impression that he wasn’t particularly pleased to see the slave trader. “Anyway, Nabisco, old chap, to what do I owe the um, ah…”

Shkin bowed faintly. “This girl was taken from one of the limpets we fished up last week. I thought you might wish to purchase her for the Pavilion.” He gestured toward Wren, and his assistants moved her closer to the poolside so that the mayor might have a better view of her.

Pennyroyal peered at her. “Lost Girl, eh? She scrubs up well, I must say. But I thought we agreed we don’t want any of her crowd hanging about in Brighton. Weren’t you planning to sell them all to Nuevo-Maya?”

“Afraid one of them might know a few awkward facts about your past, Pennyroyal?” said Shkin.

“Eh? What are you suggesting?”

“This girl,” Shkin announced, “has lately arrived from the Dead Continent. From a city long thought lost, but actually thriving in that blasted land. A city of which I believe Your Worship has fond memories.”

Reaching behind him, Shkin took something from one of his lackeys and lobbed it across the pool so that it landed on Pennyroyal’s air bed. The Tin Book. Pennyroyal picked it up and studied the cover with a puzzled frown, then turned it over and looked at the paper label on the back.

“Great Gods]” he gasped, spilling his drink into the pool. “Anchorage!”

“This girl,” Shkin said, “is none other than the daughter of your old traveling companion Hester Shaw.”

“Oh, cripes!” yelped Pennyroyal, and with a sudden, spasmodic lurch capsized his air bed.

“I was concerned to discover that there are certain discrepancies between the story she tells and the version of events in Your Worship’s interpolitan bestseller Predator’s Gold” explained Nabisco Shkin, looking not the least bit concerned as he stood there on the poolside, leaning on his black steel cane, watching Pennyroyal splash and flounder. “So I decided it might be best if I gave Your Worship the opportunity to purchase her before her account can become publicly known and… confuse Your Worship’s many readers. Naturally she is priced at a premium. Shall we say a thousand gold pieces?”

“Never!” spluttered Pennyroyal, standing up in the shallow end with all the dignity an elderly gentleman in a gold lame swimming costume can muster. “You’re nothing but a gangster, Shkin! I will not be intimidated by your puerile attempt to ah, er… It’s not true, is it? It can’t be true! Hester Shaw had no daughter—and anyway, ah, Anchorage sank, didn’t it; went down with all hands…”

“Ask her,” said Shkin brightly, pointing the tip of his cane at Wren. “Ask Miss Natsworthy here.”

Pennyroyal gawked at Wren, his eyes so full of fear that for a moment Wren felt almost sorry for him. “Well, girl?” he asked. “What do you say? Do you really claim to be from Anchorage?”

Wren took a deep breath and clenched her fists. Now that she was facing this legendary traitor and villain, she felt less certain than ever that her plan would work.

“No,” she said.

Shkin turned to stare at her.

“Of course it’s not true,” said Wren, managing a tight little laugh. “Anchorage went down in Arctic waters years and years ago. Everyone who has read your magnificent book knows that, Professor Pennyroyal. I’m just a poor Lost Girl from Grimsby.”

Wren had turned her story this way and that in her mind on the way from the Pepperpot, and could not see how it could be disproved. Of course, if anyone asked the other Lost Boys, they would all say that Wren was not one of their tribe, and Fishcake knew who she really was—but why would Pennyroyal believe their word over Wren’s? She could say that Shkin had bribed them to back him up.

“I’ve never been to Anchorage,” she said firmly.

Shkin’s nostrils flared. “Very well then; the book, the Tin Book, stamped with the seal of Anchorage’s rulers—how do you explain that?”

Wren had already worked out an answer to that. “I brought it with me from Grimsby,” she said. “It is a present for Your Worship. The Lost Boys stole it years and years ago, like we’ve stolen all sorts of things from all sorts of cities. Anchorage is a wreck, sunk at the bottom of the sea. Nobody lives there.”

“But she told me herself she was Hester Shaw’s daughter!” said Shkin. “Why would she lie?”

“Because of your wonderful books, Your Worship,” explained Wren, and gazed at the mayor as adoringly as she could. “I have read them all. Whenever my limpet attached itself to a new city, I would always burgle the bookshops first in the hope that there would be a new Nimrod Pennyroyal. I told Mr. Shkin I was from Anchorage just so that he would bring me to meet you.”

Pennyroyal looked hopeful. He so wanted to believe her. “But your name,” he said. “Natsworthy…”

“Oh, it’s not my real name,” Wren said brightly. “I looked up Hester Shaw in Uncle’s records, and it said she used to travel with someone called that.”

“Oh, really?” Pennyroyal tried to hide his relief. “Never heard of him.”

Wren smiled, pleased at how easy it was to lie and how good she was turning out to be at it. Her story didn’t make a lot of sense, but when you tell someone something that they want to hear, they tend to believe you; WOPCART had taught her that.

She said, “I was planning to keep up the pretense, Professor, in the hope that you would take me into your household. Even if I were only the lowliest of your slaves, at least I would be close to the author of Predator’s Gold and… and all those other books.” She lowered her eyes demurely. “But as soon as I saw you, sir, I realized that you would never be taken in by my lies, and so I resolved to tell you the truth.”

“Very commendable,” said Pennyroyal. “Quite right, too. I saw through it in an instant, you know. Although oddly enough, you do bear a slight resemblance to poor Hester. That’s why I was startled when you first appeared. That young woman was very, very dear to me, and it is the deepest regret of my life that I didn’t manage to save her.”

Ooh, you rotten liar! thought Wren, but all she said was, “I expect I must go now, sir. I expect Mr. Shkin will wish to make what profit of me he can. But I go happily, for at least I have spoken with the finest author of the age.”

“Absolutely not!” Pennyroyal heaved himself out of the pool and stood dripping, waving away the girls who came hurrying round him with towels, clothes, and a portable changing tent. “I will not hear of it, Shkin! This delightful, intelligent young person has shown pluck, initiative, and sound literary judgment. I forbid you to sell her off as a common slave.”

“I have my overhead to consider, Your Worship.” Shkin was angry now, white with it, and struggling to keep himself under control.

“I’ll buy her myself, then,” said Pennyroyal. He wasn’t a sentimental man, but he didn’t like to think of this discerning girl being punished for her love of his books—besides, house slaves were tax deductible. “My wife can always use a few extra handmaidens about the place,” he explained, “especially now, with the preparations for the Moon Festival ball to attend to. Tell you what—I’ll give you twenty dolphins for her. That’s more than fair.”

“Twenty?” sneered Shkin, as if such a sum were too small to even contemplate.

“Sold!” said Pennyroyal quickly. “My people will pay you. And next time, my dear fellow, try not to be so gullible. Honestly, how could anyone believe that this girl came from America? Quite absurd!”

Shkin bowed slightly. “As you say, Your Worship. Absurd.” He held out his hand. “The Tin Book, if you please.”

Pennyroyal, who had been leafing through the Tin Book, snapped it shut and clutched it to his chest. “I think not, Shkin. The girl said this was a present for me.”

“It is my property!”

“No, it’s not. Your contract with the Council states that any Lost Boys you fished up were yours. This isn’t a Lost Boy, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s some sort of Ancient code, possibly valuable. It is my duty as mayor of Brighton to hang on to it for, ah, further study.”

Shkin stared for a long moment at the mayor, then at Wren. He manufactured a smile. “No doubt we shall all meet again,” he said pleasantly, and turned, snapping his fingers for his men to follow him as he walked briskly away.

Pennyroyal’s girls clustered around him, enclosing him within his changing tent. For a short time Wren was left alone. She grinned, flushed with her own cleverness. She might still be a slave, but she was a posh slave, in the house of the mayor himself! She would get good food and fine clothes, and probably never have to carry anything much heavier than the odd tray of fairy cakes. And she would meet all kinds of interesting people. Handsome aviators, for instance, who might be persuaded to fly her home to Vineland.

Her only regret was that she hadn’t managed to bring Fishcake up here with her. She felt responsible for the boy, and hoped that the slave dealer wouldn’t take out his anger on him. But it would be all right. One way or another, she would escape, and then maybe she’d find a way of helping Fishcake too.

Nabisco Shkin was not a man who let his emotions show, and by the time the cable car set him down again on Brighton’s deck plates, he had mastered his temper. At the Pepperpot he greeted Miss Weems with no more than his customary coldness and told her, “Bring me the little Lost Boy.”

Soon afterward he was sitting calmly in his office, watching Fishcake tuck into a second bowl of chocolate ice cream and listening again to his account of the Autolycus’s voyage to Vineland. This boy was telling the truth, Shkin was sure of it. But there was no point in trying to use him to discredit the mayor. He was young, and easily influenced: If it came to a trial, Pennyroyal’s lawyers would tear him to shreds. Shkin closed his eyes thoughtfully and pictured Vineland. “Are you quite certain you can find the place again, boy?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Shkin,” said Fishcake with his mouth full.

Shkin smiled at him over the tips of his steepled fingers. “Good. Very good,” he said. “You know, boy, every now and then I acquire a slave who proves too useful or too bright to part with; Miss Weems, for example. I hope that you will be another.”

Fishcake nervously returned the smile. “You mean you ain’t going to sell me off to them Nuevo-Mayan devils, sir?”

“No, no, no, no,” Shkin assured him, shaking his head. “I want you to serve me, Fishcake. We’ll have you trained up as an apprentice. And next summer, when the weather improves, I shall outfit an expedition, and you will lead us to Anchorage-in-Vineland. I imagine those Vinelanders or Anchorites or whatever they call themselves will fetch a good price at the slave markets.”

Fishcake listened wide-eyed, then grinned. “Yes, Mr. Shkin! Thank you, Mr. Shkin!”

Shkin leaned back in his chair, his temper quite restored. He would avenge himself on Pennyroyal by showing the whole world that Anchorage had survived. As for that treacherous little vixen Wren, let her see how clever she felt when the Shkin Corporation enslaved all her family and friends.

Chapter 15 Children of the Deep

The limpet Screw Worm had been built long before the Lost Boys started to use wireless crab-cams. Even its radio set had stopped working long ago. It had no way of receiving the broadcasts from Brighton, and so Hester, Tom, and Freya never had to find out whether Caul’s desire to meet his parents would have outweighed his loyalty to his friends. Deaf to WOPCART’s invitations, the Screw Worm swam north into the deep, cold waters of the Greenland Trench. On the same late-summer afternoon that Wren came face-to-face with Pennyroyal, its passengers finally sighted Grimsby.

Tom had visited the underwater city once before, but Hester and Freya knew it only from his descriptions. They jostled for a view as Caul steered the limpet closer.

Grimsby had been a giant industrial raft once. Now it was a drowned wreck, resting on the slopes of an undersea mountain. Weeds and barnacles and rust were all working hard to camouflage it, blurring the outlines of buildings and paddle wheels until it was difficult to tell where Grimsby ended and the mountain began.

“Where are the lights?” asked Tom. His strongest memory of the Lost Boys’ lair was the surreal glow of lamplight in the windows of Grimsby’s sunken Town Hall. Now the whole city lay in darkness.

“Something’s wrong,” said Caul.

Something bumped against the Screw Worm’s hull. Shards of splintered wood and torn plastic revolved in the splay of light from the nose lantern. The limpet was swimming through a zone of drifting wreckage.

“The whole place is dead—” Hester said, and then stopped short, because if that was true, then Wren was probably dead as well.

“Look at the Burglarium!” Caul whispered, shocked. A big building slid by on the starboard side, a building where he had spent much of his childhood, now lightless and open to the sea, litter swirling around huge, jagged rents in its walls. A boy’s body turned slow somersaults as the Worm’s wake reached it. Others tumbled in the flooded glastic tunnel that had once linked the Burglarium to the Town Hall. “Power plant’s gone too,” he added as they passed over a domed building that had been smashed like an eggshell. His voice sounded tight and strained. “The Town Hall looks all right. Nobody about, though. I’ll see if we can get inside.”

It was sixteen years since Caul had fled this place, but he had made the approach to the limpet pens a thousand times in his dreams since then. He swung the Screw Worm toward I40 the water-door at the base of the Town Hall. The door stood open. Silvery fish were darting in and out.

“Still no one,” he said. “It should be closed. There should be sentry subs to check us out.”

“Maybe they’re trying to raise us on the radio and we can’t hear them,” Tom suggested hopefully.

“What do we do?” asked Freya.

“We go in, of course,” said Hester. She checked the gun in her belt, the knife in her boot. If there were any Lost Boys left alive in there, she meant to show them what Valentine’s daughter was made of.

The Screw Worm slid into the tunnels. Automatic doors opened ahead and closed behind. “The emergency power must be on,” said Caul. “That’s something…”

“It could be a trap,” said Hester. “They might be waiting for us.”

But no one was waiting for the Screw Worm. It surfaced in one of the moon-pools in the floor of the limpet pen, and its passengers scrambled out into cold, stale air. The darkness was broken only by a few dim red emergency lights. Air pumps wheezed asthmatically. The big space, which Tom remembered as being filled with Lost Boys and limpets, was deserted. Docking cranes stood mournfully above the empty moon-pools like the skeletons of dinosaurs in an abandoned museum. A fat cargo submarine wallowed in a dock on the far side of the pens, her hatches open. A half-dismantled limpet lay in a repair yard, but there was no sign of the mechanics who should have been working on her.

Tom fetched an electric lantern from the Screw Worm’s hold and went ahead, still trying to hope that he would find Wren here somewhere, alive and safe and running to hug him. He shone the lantern into the inky shadows under the cranes. Once or twice he thought he glimpsed a crab-cam scuttling away from the light. Nothing else moved.

“Where is everybody?” he whispered.

“Well, here’s one of them,” said Hester.

The big door at the back of the pens stood half open, and on the threshold lay a boy of Wren’s age, curled up, staring, dead. Hester pushed past Tom and stepped over the body. In the corridor outside the pens lay a half dozen more, some killed by sword thrusts, others by metal spears from harpoon guns.

“Looks like the Lost Boys have been fighting among themselves,” she said. “Nice of them to save us the trouble.”

Tom stepped gingerly over the dead boy and looked up. Cold drops of water pattered on his upturned face. “This place is leaking like a rusty tin can,” he murmured.

“Uncle will know how to fix it,” said Caul. The others turned to look at him, surprised by the confidence in his voice. He felt surprised by it himself. “Uncle built Grimsby,” he reminded them. “He made the first few rooms airtight and built the first limpet all on his own, without anyone to help him.” He nodded, fingering his neck. The old rope burns were still there, hard under his fingertips, reminders of how much he had feared and hated Uncle at the end. But before that, for a long time, he had loved him. Now that he was here again, and the Burglarium was a ruin and the Lost Boys gone, he found that the fear and the hate had gone as well and that only love was left. He remembered how safe he used to feel, curled up in his bunk while Uncle’s voice whispered from the ceiling speakers through the long night shift. The world had been simple then, and he had been happy.

“Uncle Knows Best,” he murmured.

A sudden movement in the shadows farther down the corridor made Hester swing her gun up. Freya grabbed her arm before she could shoot, and Tom yelled “Het, no!” The echoes of his voice went booming away, up staircases and down side passages, and the face that had been pinned for an instant in his lantern beam vanished as its owner darted backward into the shadows.

“It’s all right,” said Freya, moving past Hester, her hands held out in front of her. “We won’t hurt you.”

The darkness was suddenly full of soft footfalls, rustlings. Eyes glinted in the lantern light. Out from their hiding places the children of Grimsby came creeping, smudged white faces pale as petals. They were newbies, too young to take their places yet among the Lost Boys. A few were as old as nine or ten; most were much younger. They stared at their visitors with wide, scared eyes. One girl, older and bolder than the rest, came close to Freya and said, “Are you our mummies and daddies?”

Freya knelt down so that her face was level with the children’s. “No,” she said. “No, I’m sorry, we’re not.”

“But our mummies and daddies are coming, aren’t they?” whispered another child.

“There was a message…”

“They said they were near,” said a little boy, tugging at Caul’s hand and looking up earnestly into his face. “They said we should go to them, and a lot of the big boys wanted to, even though Uncle said not to…”

“And when the other boys tried stopping them, they fought them and killed them dead!”

“And then they went anyway. They took all the limpets.”

“We wanted to go with them, but they said there wasn’t room and we were only newbies…”

“And there were explosions!” said a girl.

“No, that was later, silly,” said another. “That was the depth charges.”

“Bang!” shouted the smallest boy, waving his arms about to demonstrate. “Bang!”

“And all the lights went out, and I think some water got in…”

All the children were talking at once, crowding into the light from Tom’s lantern. Hester held her hand out to one of them, but he backed away and went to snuggle against Freya instead.

“Is Wren here?” Hester asked. “We’re looking for our daughter, Wren.”

“She’s lost,” Tom explained. “She was aboard the Autolycus.”

Small faces turned toward him, blank as unwritten pages. The older girl said, “Autolycus ain’t come back. None of the limpets that went out these last three weeks has come back.”

“Then where’s Wren?” shouted Tom. He had been terrified that he would find Wren dead. The prospect of not finding her at all was almost as bad. He stared from one bewildered little face to another. “What in Quirke’s name has been happening?”

The children backed away from him, frightened.

“Where’s Uncle?” asked Caul. Freya smiled at him to let the children see that he was a friend and they should answer his question.

“Maybe he left too,” said Hester.

Caul shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. Uncle wouldn’t leave Grimsby.”

“I think he’s upstairs,” said one of the boys.

“He’s very old,” said another doubtfully.

“He doesn’t ever leave his chamber now,” agreed a third.

Caul nodded. “Good. We’ll talk to him. He’ll be able to tell us what’s happened, and he’ll tell us where to find Wren.” He could feel the others staring at him. He turned to them and smiled. “It’ll be all right. You’ll see. Uncle Knows Best.”

Chapter 16 Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes

They made a strange procession, climbing the cluttered stairways of Grimsby, where salt water dripped from hairline fractures in the high roof and ran in rivulets from step to step. More bodies lay on the landings, forming dams that the dirty water pooled behind. Overhead, crab-cameras clung to ducts and banisters. Now and then, one turned to follow the newcomers with its Cyclops eye.

Hester went ahead. Behind her, Tom, Caul, and Freya were surrounded by children, small hands clutching theirs and reaching out to touch their clothes as if to reassure themselves that these visitors from the world above were real. They were especially drawn to Freya. In shocked, whispery voices, they told her all sorts of secrets. “Whitebait picks his nose.”

I do not!

“My name’s Esbjorn, but the big boys at the Burglarium said I had to be called Tuna, only I think Tuna’s a stupid name, so can I change back now that all the big boys have got killed dead and run away?”

“He sticks his finger right up there. And he eats the boogers.”

“I don’t!”

“Children,” asked Freya, “who was it who blew up the Burglarium? How long ago did it happen?”

But the children couldn’t answer that: A few days, said some, a week, reckoned others. Their chatter faded as they neared the upper floors. They looked into an enormous chamber, new since Tom and Caul were last in Grimsby, made by knocking a dozen of the old rooms together. It was stuffed with fine furnishings: plunder from burgled town halls and looted statics. Huge mirrors hung on the walls, and swags of silk and velvet curtained the colossal bed. Clothes and cushions were strewn across the floor, and mobiles made from beach stones and antique seedies hung from the ducts on the ceiling.

“This was Gargle’s quarters,” explained the children. “Gargle ran things from here.”

“Remora made the mobiles,” said a little girl. “She’s pretty and clever, and she’s Gargle’s favorite.”

“I wish Gargle would come back,” a boy said. “Gargle would know what to do.”

“Gargle’s dead,” said Hester.

After that, the only sounds were the pad of their feet on the wet carpets and a faint voice somewhere ahead, tinny and fizzing, as if it were coming through loudspeakers. It said, “We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again…”

Up a final stairway to the chamber of screens, where Grimsby’s founder kept watch over his underwater kingdom. The last time Tom had been here, it had been guarded; this time the guards were gone and the door was not even locked. Hester kicked it open and went through it with her gun out.

The others crowded in behind. The chamber was large and high-ceilinged, lit blue by the ghostly glow of the screens that covered the walls. They were of every shape and size, from giant public Goggle Screens to tiny displays ripped from Old Tech hospital equipment, all linked together by a jungle of wires and ducts. Up above, in the dark dome of the roof, hung a portable surveillance station: a midget cargo balloon dangling a globe of screens and speakers. And every screen was showing the same picture: a crowd of people on the windswept observation platform of a raft city. “Children of the deep,” the voice from the speakers pleaded, “if you can hear this message, we beg you, come to us!”

“Why did they fall for it? Why did they go? Did they prefer a bunch of old Drys to me?”

In the middle of the chamber an old man stood with his back to the door, shouting at the recording on the screens. In his hand was a remote-control device; he raised it and pressed a switch that made all the screens go blank and silent, then turned to face Hester and the others.

“Who are you?” he demanded petulantly. “Where’s Gargle?”

“Gargle’s not coming back,” said Tom as gently as he could. He had bad memories of Uncle, but that did not stop him feeling sorry for the stooped old man who was shuffling I48 toward him in a pair of threadbare bunny slippers. The tortoiselike head, poking out from layer upon layer of moldy clothes, blinked shortsightedly at him. Uncle’s eyes were clouded with age, and Tom noticed that many of the screens that surrounded him had big magnifying lenses bolted in front of them to make their pictures clearer. He suspected that Uncle was almost blind. No wonder he had come to depend on Gargle.

“Gargle has passed on,” he said.

“What, you mean… ?” Uncle came closer, peering at him. “Dead? Gargle? Little Gargle what gave himself such airs and graces?” His face showed grief, then relief, then anger. “I told him! I warned him not to go looking for that rotten book. He wasn’t cut out for burgling, Gargle wasn’t. More of a planner. He had brains, Gargle did.”

“We know,” said Hester. “We saw them.”

Uncle recoiled from the sound of her voice. “A woman? There’s no females allowed in Grimsby. I’ve always been very strict about that. Gargle always backed me up on that. No girls allowed. Bad luck, that’s all they bring. Can’t trust them.”

“But Uncle…” said Freya gently.

“Eugh, there’s another one! The whole place is crawling with females!”

“Uncle?” asked Caul.

The old man twitched around, frowning, as if the sound of Caul’s voice had tripped a rusty switch inside his head. “Caul, my boy!” he said, and then, with a snarl, “This your doing, is it? You got something to do with this? Tell the Drys how to find us, did you? You alone, or are there more?”

He limped away, stabbing at his remote control until the jumbled screens were filled with views of Grimsby, thrusting his parchment face close to the glass to stare at the empty corridors and chambers, the empty limpet pen, the flooded, ruined halls of the Burglarium.

“It’s just the four of us, Uncle,” said Caul. “We barely know what’s happened here. It has nothing to do with us.”

“No?” Uncle stared at him, then let out a high-pitched cackle. “Gods, then you’ve picked a fine time to drop in for a visit!”

“We’ve come for Tom and Hester’s daughter,” Caul said patiently. “Her name’s Wren. She was taken from Vineland by the newbie who was with Gargle aboard the Autolycus.”

“Fishcake? Fishcake, that was his name…” Uncle hung his head. When he spoke, he sounded close to tears. “The Autolycus is missing. They’re all missing, Caul, my boy. The fools got that message about their mums and dads and they went haring straight off to Brighton.”

“To Brighton?” Tom had heard of Brighton. A resort town, a bit bohemian, but not a bad sort of place. If Wren was there, she might be all right.

“Why would Brighton want them?” asked Hester suspiciously.

Uncle shrugged and spread his hands and made various other twitchy gestures to show that he had no idea. “I told my boys it was a trap. I told them. But they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe if Gargle had been here. They listen to Gargle. Don’t listen to their poor old Uncle anymore, what’s slaved and worried for them all these years…” Tears of self-pity went creeping down his crumpled old face, and he blew his nose on his sleeve. His gaze slid listlessly over Tom and Hester, then settled on Freya again. “Gods, Caul, is that great fat whale the girl you ran off to Anchorage for? She’s let herself go! Come to think of it, you don’t look too good yourself. I like my boys to be well turned out, and you… Well, you’re shabby, that’s the truth of it. Gargle told me you’d gone to make something of yourself among the Drys.”

Caul felt as if he were a newbie again, being told off for forgetting part of his burgling kit. “Sorry, Uncle,” he said.

Freya moved to his side and took his hand in hers. “Caul has made something of himself,” she said. “We couldn’t have built Anchorage-in-Vineland without his help. I’d like to tell you all about it, but first I think we all have to leave this place.”

“Leave?” Uncle stared at her as if he’d never heard the word before. “I can’t leave! What makes you think I’d want to leave?”

“Sir, this place is finished. You can’t keep the children here…”

Uncle laughed. “Those lads aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “They’re the future of Grimsby.”

The children edged in closer to Freya. She let go of Caul’s hand to stroke their heads. Everyone could hear the faint groan of stressed metal from the lower floors, the distant splatter of water spilling in.

“But Mr. Kael,” said Freya. She had remembered something Caul had told her once. Before Uncle became Uncle, he had been Stilton Kael, a rich young man from Arkangel. Freya hoped that by using his real name, she might be able to get through to him, but it only made him hiss and glare. She pressed on anyway. “Mr. Kael, this place is leaking. It’s half flooded, and the air smells stale. I don’t know much about secret underwater lairs, but I’d say Grimsby’s future is going to be pretty short.”

Hester snapped off the safety on her Schadenfreude and aimed it in Uncle’s general direction. “If you don’t want to come,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

Uncle peered at her, then up at his hovering globe of screens, where there was an image of her face far clearer than the one his poor old eyes could provide him with. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not leaving, and nor are you. We’re going to rebuild. Make the place watertight again. Stronger than ever. Make more limpets, better ones. We are none of us leaving. Tell them, Caul.”

Caul flinched and wondered what to do. He didn’t want to betray his friends, but he didn’t want to let Uncle down either. The sound of the old man’s voice made him shiver with love and pity.

He looked at Freya. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, with a sudden, quick movement, he jerked Hester’s gun out of her hand and pointed it at her, then at Tom.

“Caul!” Tom shouted.

Uncle cackled some more. “Good work, boy! I knew you’d come right in the end! I’m quite glad I didn’t finish hanging you now. What a shame those others scarpered off before they had a chance to meet you, Caul. You’d be an object lesson. Return of the Prodigal. All these years gone and you’re still loyal to your poor old Uncle.” He pulled a key from one of his pockets and held it out toward Caul. “Now get rid of this lot. Lock ’em in Gargle’s quarters while we have a proper talk.”

Caul kept pointing the gun at Tom, because he knew that Hester was the only one reckless enough to try and overpower him and that Hester cared more about Tom’s safety than her own. He fished the knife out of Hester’s boot, then took the key from Uncle and started shooing everyone else backward, toward the open door.

“But Caul—” Freya said.

“Forget it,” Hester told her. “I knew we were wrong to trust him. I expect this is the only reason he agreed to bring us here—so he could see his precious Uncle again.”

“You won’t be hurt,” Caul promised. “We’ll sort this out. It’ll be all right.” He didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he was glad to be a Lost Boy again. “Uncle Knows Best,” he said as he forced his prisoners down the stairs and into Gargle’s quarters, locking the doors behind them. “It’ll be all right. Uncle always Knows Best.”

Chapter 17 The Chapel

Night fall in Tienjing. above the city, the mountains hung huge and pale, a pennant of powder snow flying from each cold summit. Above the mountains, colder yet, the stars were coming out, and the things that were not stars, the dead satellites and orbital platforms of the Ancients, danced their old, slow dance in heaven.

The Stalker Grike patrolled the silent corridors of the Jade Pagoda, his night-vision eyes probing the shadows, his ears detecting conversations in a distant room, a gust of laughter from the guardhouse, the woodworm busy in the paneled walls. He roamed through galleries decorated with ancient carvings of monsters and mountain demons, none of them as scary as himself. Relishing the grace and power of his retuned body, he checked with all his many senses for the faint chemical signature of hidden explosives, or the body-glow of a lurking assassin. He hoped that soon some foolish Once-Born would try to attack his mistress. He was looking forward to killing again.

A cold breath touched him: a faint change in air pressure that told him of an outside door being opened and closed four floors below. He moved quickly to a window and looked down. A forked blob of body heat was moving through the shadows of the courtyard toward the checkpoint at the gate. Grike measured its height and stride against the data he had gathered during his time as bodyguard, and recognized Dr. Zero.

Where was she going on such a cold night, with curfew due in less than an hour? Grike pondered the motives of the Once-Born. Perhaps Dr. Zero had a lover in the lower city. But Dr. Zero had never seemed interested in love, and anyway, this was not the first time that Grike had caught her acting strangely. He had noticed the way her heartbeat raced when she was near the Stalker Fang, and smelled the sharp scent that came from her sometimes when Fang glanced her way. He was surprised that his mistress had not noticed these things herself—but then, Fang did not share his interest in the Once-Borns and their ways. Perhaps she did not realize, or did not care, that her surgeon-mechanic was afraid of her.

Grike’s eyes, on maximum magnification, watched Dr. Zero show her pass at the checkpoint and followed her until she was lost to him among the barracks and banners of Tienjing. Why was she so frightened? What scared her so? What was she doing? What was she planning to do?

Grike owed her everything, but he still knew that it was his duty to find out.

Down through the steep, stepped streets Oenone Zero went hurrying in her silicone-silk cloak, hood up, head down. The sky above the city was full of the running lights of carriers and air destroyers taking off from the military air harbor, carrying yet more young men and women away to the west, where their deaths were waiting for them on the Rustwater salient.

Guilt welled up inside Oenone, but she was used to it. Every morning she tended the Stalker Fang’s joints and bodywork, and placed her instruments against the Stalker Fang’s steel breast to check on the strange Old Tech power source that nestled where Anna Fang’s heart had once been. Every morning she told herself, I should do it now, today.

She would not be the first to try. All sorts of fanatical peaceniks and die-hard supporters of the old League had attempted to destroy the Stalker Fang, only to have their knives snap on her armor or watch her walk unscathed from the ruins of bombed rooms and the wrecks of airships. But Oenone Zero was a scientist, and she had used her scientist’s skills to devise a weapon that could destroy even the Stalker Fang.

The trouble was, she hadn’t the courage to use it. What if it didn’t work? What if it did work? Oenone was sure that without the Stalker to lead it, the Green Storm regime would fall apart—but she doubted it would fall apart so quickly that the Stalker’s supporters would not find time to kill her, and she had heard rumors about the things they did to traitors.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not notice that she was being followed as she crossed Double Rainbow Bridge and turned onto the Street of Ten Thousand Deities.

Over the centuries, Anti-Tractionists from all over Europe and Asia had fled into these mountains, and they had brought their own gods with them. Packed side by side, the temples seemed to jostle one another in the dying light. Oenone pushed her way past two wedding processions, a funeral, past shrines decked with lucky money and clattering firecrackers. She passed the Temple of the Sky Gods, and the Golden Pagoda of the Gods of the Mountains. She passed the Poskittarium, and the grove of the Apple Goddess. She passed the silent house of Lady Death. At the end of the street, sandwiched between the temples of more popular religions, stood a tiny Christian chapel.

She checked to make sure that no one was watching her before she stepped inside, but she did not think to look up at the rooftops.

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worshipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things? It was small wonder that this place had fallen into disuse, its roof gone, weeds growing through the rotting pews. But on nights like this, when she felt that she must get out of the Jade Pagoda or go mad, this was where Oenone came to calm herself.

Snowflakes sifted down on her through a sagging sieve of rafters, settling on her green hair when she threw back her hood. Running her hands over the walls, she read with her fingertips the texts carved in the old stone. Most were illegible, but there was one that she had grown fond of. It was an old fragment from before the Sixty Minute War, and Oenone was not sure what it meant, but there was something consoling about it.

Oenone knelt before the bare stone altar and bowed her head. She didn’t believe in him, this ancient god, but she had to talk to someone.

“Help me,” she whispered. “If you are there at all, give me strength. Give me courage. I’m so close to her. I could use the weapon now, if only I were brave enough. And it wouldn’t be murder, would it, to kill someone who is already dead? I would only be smashing a machine, a dangerous, destructive machine…”

She spoke softly, barely moving her lips. No human ear could hear her. But her prayer was heard, just the same. Crouched like a gargoyle on the chapel’s ruined steeple, the Stalker Grike listened carefully to every word.

“Have I the right to do it? It all seemed so clear before, but now I have seen her; how clever she is, and how strong… Maybe it would be murder. Or am I just making excuses for myself? Am I just looking for a reason not to do it so that I can live? Send me a sign, God, if you’re up there; show me what I should do…”

She waited, and Grike waited with her, but no sign came. The noisy, popular gods of the neighboring temples seemed to dish out comfort and counsel like advice columnists, but the god of this place was less scrutable; maybe he was asleep, or dead. Maybe he was busy with some better world off at the far end of the universe. Oenone Zero shook her head at her own foolishness and stood up, making ready to leave.

Grike climbed quickly down the chapel wall and waited in an alcove by the entrance, where perhaps a statue of the Christians’ nailed-up god had once hung. His suspicions had been right. Dr. Zero was a traitor, and although he had grown fond of her in his Stalkerish way, he knew that he must eliminate her before she could harm his mistress. His circuitry hummed and tingled at the prospect of a kill. She had taken his claws from him, but he was still strong, and merciless. One blow from his fist would end her easily.

A footstep on the threshold. The young woman stepped out of the chapel, pulling up her hood against the cold wind. She did not see Grike. She went past him and walked quickly away along the Street of Ten Thousand Deities, hurrying back to her quarters in the pagoda before the curfew bells were rung.

Grike lowered his fist, feeling startled and slightly foolish. What had happened to him? He was a Stalker, a killing machine, and yet, when his quarry’s eggshell skull had been in reach, he could not strike.

I must warn the Green Storm’s secret police, he thought, jumping down from the alcove and following Oenone out into the crowds on the street. He would let the Once-Borns deal with her themselves, down in their white-tiled torture rooms beneath the Jade Pagoda. But after a few strides he halted. He simply didn’t have it in him to betray Oenone Zero.

She has done this to me, he thought, remembering all those lonely night shifts in the Stalker Works. Somehow, the young surgeon-mechanic had built a barrier in his mind that made it impossible for him to harm her, or tell anyone what she was planning. He had been part of her plans all along. She had given the Stalker Fang a bodyguard who was not capable of guarding her.

He should have hated Dr. Zero for using him like that, but he did not have it in him to hate her either.

He barged through a festival procession outside the shrine of Jomo and climbed homeward through the darkness and the snow. He was not the puppet of Oenone Zero. He could not harm her, but he would keep her from harming his mistress. Somehow he would learn the nature of her plan, and put a stop to it.

Chapter 18 The naglfar

As soon as he had locked his friends and the children inside Gargle’s quarters, Caul sprinted back up the stairs to the chamber of screens. He was shuddering slightly, and half inclined to go back down and unlock the doors again. He kept telling himself that he hadn’t chosen Uncle over Freya and the others; he would find a way to stay true to both of them.

“First thing we must do,” said Uncle when Caul rejoined him, “is to get rid of those women. Bad luck, they’ll be. You’ll see.” He had filled his screens with images of the captives in the room below: big, grainy close-ups of Hester and Freya. He said, “They look very pretty, I’m sure, and no doubt you think they’re very sweet, but they’ll twist round and betray you, like my Anna did me all those years ago. That’s why I’ve always made it the rule that there ain’t no girls in Grimsby.”

Caul put down Hester’s gun. He felt stupid, standing there holding it. “But what about the girl who was aboard the Autolycus with Gargle?”

“Young Remora?” Uncle snatched the gun and stuffed it away inside his filthy clothes. “I know what you mean. Odd-looking lad. High-pitched voice. Long hair. Too much makeup. I had my doubts when Gargle first introduced me, but Gargle assured me he was a boy. A fine burglar. Poor Remora. I suppose he’s dead too?”

“Uncle, there are girls among those poor children we found downstairs. Lots of them are girls.”

“Girls? You’re sure?” Uncle started thumbing his remote control, hunting for close-ups of the children. Caul saw his friends on the screens look up nervously as crab-cams spidered around on the ceiling above them, jangling Remora’s mobiles. Uncle saw only grayish, face-shaped blurs. “Maybe Gargle’s kidnapping squads have grabbed a few girls by mistake,” he muttered grudgingly. “We’ll have to get rid of them, too, if we’re to make a new start. And we will make a new start, Caul, my boy. We’ll rebuild Grimsby, stronger and better than it ever was before, and you’ll be my right hand. You can move into Gargle’s pad and look after things for me like Gargle used to do.”

One of the banks of screens behind him suddenly died, leaving the room even more dimly lit than before. There was a smell of burned wiring, and when Caul went to investigate, he saw that water was flooding down the surfaces of the screens and pooling on the floor below. He touched some to his lips and tasted brine. Uncle Knows Best, he told himself, and he wanted to believe it because it would have been good l62 to go back to the old days, when he had been so certain about everything. Everybody had to believe in something better and greater than themselves. Tom and Freya had their gods, and Hester had Tom, and Caul had Uncle. He would not let Uncle down again, even though he was old, and blind, and confused; even though there was probably nothing that could save Grimsby from the sea.

But he would not let his friends drown with him.

“You look tired, Uncle,” he said gently. It was true. How long had the old man been alone in this room, staring at the treacherous message from Brighton on his walls of screens? Caul touched his hand. “You should get some rest, now that I’m here to keep an eye on things.”

Uncle’s head jerked round to stare at him, his eyes glittering with something of their old cunning. “You trying to trick me, Caul? That’s what Gargle did. ‘Have a nap, Uncle dear,’ he’d say. ‘Lie down for forty winks, Uncle.’ And when I woke up, some of my stuff would be missing, or another boy I’d trusted would be dead, and Gargle would be telling me it had been an accident…”

“Why did you let him get away with it?” asked Caul.

The old man shrugged. “ ’Cos I was scared of him. And ’cos I was proud of him. He was a sharp one, that Gargle, and it was me who made him that way. He was like a son to me, I s’pose. I like to think that me and Anna might have had sons, if she hadn’t tricked me and flown off in that homemade airship of hers. I like to think they’d have been as sharp as Gargle. But I’m glad he’s gone, Caul, my boy. I’m glad it’s you here now.”

Mumbling quietly to himself, Uncle let Caul lead him up the steep stair to his bedchamber. The midget engine pods of the old cargo balloon whined and clattered as the ball of screens went with them, hanging a few feet above their heads so that Uncle could keep staring up at it, his half-blind eyes flicking nervously from one screen to another. The entrance to his bedroom had been made higher and wider to let the balloon squeeze through. “Gotta keep watching them, Caul,” he muttered. “Never know what they’ll get up to unwatched. Gotta watch everybody. Everywhere. Always.”

The room had been richly furnished once, for the Lost Boys had brought all the finest things they stole here as tribute to Uncle. But over the years, piece by piece, Gargle must have found excuses to move all the treasures downstairs to his own quarters. All that remained was a bed with a threadbare quilt, some piles of moldy books, and an upturned crate that served as a bedside table; it held an old argon lamp and a faded photograph of a beautiful young woman in the uniform of an Arkangel slave worker.

“I keep that to remind me,” said Uncle, when he saw Caul looking at the picture, and quickly turned it facedown. “My Anna Fang. Pretty, weren’t she? They’ve gone and made a Stalker of her now, and put her in charge of the Green Storm, and she rules over half the world, with airships and armies at her command. I’ve followed her career. Got a book of cuttings, somewhere. Gargle thought he could do a deal with her, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Knew it would only lead to trouble…”

“What sort of deal?” asked Caul. He had heard Uncle talk about his lost love once before, but he had never heard of the Lost Boys trying to do a deal with the world outside. “Is that why Gargle came to Anchorage? Why he wanted the Tin Book?”

Uncle sat down on the bed, and his moon of surveillance screens dipped until it was hanging just above his head. “Gargle said there was trouble coming. As soon as those first three limpets went missing, he said, ‘There’s trouble coming.’ He was right, too, wasn’t he? Only he didn’t know how soon. He thought if he got hold of that Tin Book, he could give it to the Green Storm and ask for their protection in exchange, get them to smash whatever city came hunting for us.”

“But why would they want the Tin Book?” asked Caul.

“Who knows?” replied Uncle with a shrug. “A couple of summers back, they sent an expedition to try and find the wreck of Anchorage. They didn’t, of course. But Gargle got a crab-cam aboard their ship, and he found out what it was they was hoping to dredge up.”

“The Tin Book?”

Uncle nodded. “They weren’t ordinary Green Storm, neither. They were special agents, who reported straight to her. So Gargle thought, if she’s ready to send ships halfway round the world in the middle of a war looking for this thing, she must want it pretty bad. And he remembered seeing something like it when he was burgling Anchorage that time, only he didn’t think nothing of it then.” He shook his head. “I told him it wouldn’t work. I told him to stay put. But he was like that, young Gargle; once he got an idea in his head, there weren’t no stopping him, and off he went, and now he’s dead, and that wicked city’s stolen all my boys away.”

“But what was it?” asked Caul. “The Tin Book, I mean? What makes it so valuable?”

Uncle, who had been sniffling miserably, blew his nose on a polka-dot handkerchief and peered at Caul. “Don’t know,” he said. “We never did find out. Gargle put about the story that it was the plans to some great big Ancient submarine that would save us all, but I think he made that up. What would my poor Anna want with a submarine? No. I reckon it’s a weapon. Something big.”

He stuffed the handkerchief away and yawned. “Now, my boy. Enough about the past. We should think of the future. We should make plans. Time to start rebuilding. We’ll need to nick some stuff. Lucky you brought the Screw Worm home with you—that’ll come in proper handy, that will. And I’ve still got the old Naglfar. Remember the good old Naglfar?”

“Saw her in the pens when we arrived,” said Caul. He could see that Uncle was growing sleepy. He helped him lie down, and pulled the tattered quilt over him, tucking it under his chin. “You have a little sleep,” he said. “You have a sleep, and when you wake, it’ll be time to start.”

Uncle smiled up at him and closed his eyes. The ball of screens hung just above his pillow, and’ in the cathode-ray glow of the crab-cam pictures, his old face looked luminous, a paper mask lit from within by the flickering light of his dreams.

In the chamber below, some of the children had gone to sleep too. The rest sat quietly, watching with large, trusting eyes while Tom told them a story that he used to tell Wren when she was little and woke up scared in the night. They did not seem frightened by the groans and shudders of the dying city, or the dribbles of water creeping down the walls.

It had been scary when they were all alone, but now that these kind grown-ups had arrived, they felt sure that everything would be all right.

Hester prowled the edges of the room, looking for weapons or ways to pick the heavy locks on the doors, and growing more and more angry as she found none of either.

“What will you do if you do find a way out?” Freya asked her softly. “Sit down. You’ll scare the children.”

Hester scowled at her. “What will I do? Get down to the limpet pens, of course, and away aboard the Screw Worm.”

“But we can’t all fit aboard the Screw Worm. Even if we managed to squeeze all the children into the hold, there wouldn’t be air or fuel enough to get us back to Anchorage.”

“Who said we were taking the children?” asked Hester. “I came to rescue Wren, not those little savages. Wren’s not here, so we’ll take the Worm to Brighton and try looking there.”

“But the children—” cried Freya, and quickly stopped, in case they heard her and guessed what Hester was planning. “Hester, how could you even think such a thing! You have a child of your own!”

“That’s right,” said Hester. “And if you had, then you’d know how much trouble they bring. And these aren’t even ordinary children. It’s all very well, you coming over all nurturing, but these are Lost Boys. You can’t take them back to Anchorage. What will you do with them there?

“Love them, of course,” replied Freya simply.

“Oh, like you did Caul? That really worked, didn’t it? They’ll rob you blind, and then probably murder you. You’ve lost your edge, Snow Queen. You asked me once to help you protect Anchorage. Well, I’ll protect it by making sure you don’t take a gang of burglar babies home with you as souvenirs of Grimsby.”

Freya took a step backward, as though she didn’t like to be so close to Hester. “I don’t think Anchorage needs your sort of protection anymore,” she said. “I was glad of you once. I hoped all those years of peace would bring you peace as well. But you’ve not changed.”

Hester was about to reply when the door behind her opened and Caul came in. She turned on him instead. “Come to gloat over your prisoners?”

Caul would not meet her eye. “You’re not prisoners,” he said. “I just didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And I didn’t want you to make Uncle leave. He’s an old man. He’d die if he leaves Grimsby.”

“He’ll die if he stays,” said Hester. “Unless he’s a really good swimmer.”

Caul ignored her and spoke to Freya and Tom. “He’s asleep now. He’ll sleep for hours, with luck. That gives you time to get away.”

“And what about you?” asked Freya.

Caul shook his head. “I have to stay. I’m all he’s got.”

“Well, you’re more than he deserves,” said Tom indignantly. “You do know he’ll never really be able to rebuild this place, don’t you?”

“You don’t understand,” said Caul. “Seeing him like this, so old and mad and miserable… Of course Grimsby’s finished. But Uncle doesn’t realize that. I’m the last of his boys, Tom. I’ve got to stay with him till the end.”

Freya was about to try to reason with him, but Hester butted in. “Fine by me. Now, how do you suggest we leave?”

Caul grinned at her, glad of a practical question at last. “The Naglfar. She’s the cargo submarine we saw in the pens when we first got here. She’s old, but she’s trusty. She’ll take you back to Anchorage all right.”

“Then you’ll have to come too!” said Freya, relieved. “I can’t drive a submarine on my own, or pilot it, or whatever you’re supposed to do to them.”

“Tom and Hester will help you.”

“Tom and Hester are taking the Screw Worm and going after Brighton,” said Hester.

“No,” Caul told her. “You’ve got to go with Freya. I have to stay with Uncle. I’ll help you fuel and provision the Naglfar. You can take her back to Anchorage and then, once Freya and the children are safe, you can carry on to Brighton and find Wren.”

And so, for one last time, the limpet pens of Grimsby were filled with the sounds of a submarine being made ready for sea. The Naglfar was a rusty, ramshackle old tub, but Caul said that she would swim, and there was room enough in her spacious hold for all the children. He did not tell them what else he knew about her: that she was the submarine that Uncle had stolen years before from Snowmad scavengers and used to begin his underwater empire. Nor did he mention where her name came from—in the legends of the Old North, the Naglfar was a ship built from dead men’s fingernails in which the dark gods would sail to battle at the world’s end. He didn’t want to give the children nightmares.

So Tom and Caul concentrated on testing the old sub’s engines while Hester filled her tanks with fuel and Freya made some of the older children show her Grimsby’s food stores, where they collected armfuls of provisions to keep them going on the journey back to Vineland.

Everything had to be done quickly. Metallic moans and grumbles kept rolling down the passageways of the building, as hull plates that had been damaged by Brighton’s depth charges slowly shifted and gave way under the pressure of the sea and the bulkhead doors slammed shut to seal off the flooded sections. No one had forgotten that Uncle was still up there in his chambers with his mad dreams. But Uncle seemed to be sleeping soundly for the moment; at least when Tom opened the Naglfar’s hatches and looked up at the shadowy roof, he could not see any crab-cams on the move.

He leaned against the open hatch cover for a moment, glad of the cold, for it was growing hot and stuffy in the Naglfar’s engine room. He had been overdoing it down there and worrying too much about Wren, and his old wound was hurting him again, sharp, jabbing shards of pain, as if his heart were full of broken glass. He wondered again if he was going to die. He didn’t think he was afraid of dying, but he was afraid of dying before he found Wren.

He decided to worry about Caul instead of himself. He climbed out of the submarine and found Hester coming across the dock.

“What are we going to do about Caul?” Tom asked softly, drawing her aside. “He’s still set on staying here. Has he forgotten that Uncle tried to have him killed?”

Hester shook her head. “He’s not forgotten,” she said. “I don’t think he wants to stay, exactly. It’s just that he loves Uncle.”

“But Uncle nearly killed him]”

“That doesn’t make a difference,” said Hester. “Uncle is the nearest thing Caul’s got to a mother or a father. Everybody loves their parents. They may not always realize that they love them, they may hate them at the same time, but there’s always a little bit of love mixed in with the hate, which makes it really… complicated.”

She stopped, unable to explain herself, thinking of her own complicated feelings for her dead father and her missing child. She wished Wren loved her as much as Caul loved Uncle.

“Freya told me Caul has dreams about this place every night,” said Tom. “He dreams about Uncle’s voice, whispering to him the way it used to when he was a child. Why would Uncle keep talking to them all, over the speakers, even while they were asleep?”

“Maybe he was sort of brainwashing them,” said Hester.

“That’s what I think,” Tom agreed. “Putting a kind of hook in their minds that would always pull them back to Grimsby, no matter how far they tried to run or how much they wanted to get away.”

“We’ll overpower Caul,” said Hester. “Knock him on the head and drag him away. He’ll come to his senses once we’re at sea.”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Maybe, once this place is gone and Uncle’s dead, he’ll be able to forget it.”

From the conning tower of the Naglfar came a piercing, childish scream. “The cams]” shouted a boy called Eel, whom Freya had told to keep watch because he was too small to do anything else. “The cams are moving]”

Tom and Hester looked up. Above them, crab-cams were scuttling along the rusty jibs of the docking cranes, clambering over each other as they trained their lenses on the pool where the Naglfar wallowed.

“The old man’s awake,” said Caul, scrambling out of the submarine’s forward hatch and climbing down onto the dock with Freya close behind.

“So what?” asked Hester. “He can’t stop us leaving now.”

“Who said anyone is leaving?” asked Uncle’s scratchy voice. “Nobody’s leaving.”

He came limping toward them between the empty moon-pools, Hester’s gun looking huge in his papery, quivering hand. Above his head the old balloon hung like a moldy thought-bubble, and the globe of screens beneath it flickered with pictures from the crab-cams. He heaved the gun up and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet clanging into the metal of the Naglfar’s conning tower. The sound echoed away between the shadowy docking cranes, and as if in answer a stressed bulkhead somewhere on the upper levels let out a long groan, like some huge creature dying slowly and painfully of indigestion.

Uncle ignored it. “Uncle Knows Best!” he shouted shrilly. “Stay here and help me rebuild Grimsby, and you will be well rewarded. Try to leave, and you’ll be flushed out the water-door to feed the little fishies.”

The children twittered. Hester stepped protectively in front of Tom. Caul ran toward the old man. “Uncle,” he said, “I think Grimsby is damaged worse than we reckoned.”

“Well?” asked Uncle, looking up at a close-up of Caul on one of his screens. “So? It was worse off than this when I first came down here.”

“Mr. Kael’ Freya called softly. “Stilton?”

She walked across the dock while crab-cameras on the cranes above her frantically zoomed in on her face and hands. Caul tried to stop her, but she shrugged him aside and held out her hand to Uncle. “Caul’s right,” she said. “Grimsby is coming to an end. It was a bold idea, and I’m glad that I have seen it for myself, but it is time to leave. You can come with us, back to Anchorage. Wouldn’t you like to breathe fresh air again, and see the sun?”

“The sun?” asked Uncle, and his eyes suddenly swam with tears. It was a long time since anyone had been kind to him. It was a long time since anyone had called him Stilton. Freya reached out to him, and he stared up at his hovering ball of screens, at her gentle white hands hanging huge above him, like wings.

“Leave Grimsby?” he said, but in a wondering way, softly. The crab-cams zoomed until every screen showed Freya, or a part of Freya: her face, her eyes, her mouth, the soft curve of her cheek, her hands, all larger than life, like parts of a self-assembly kit from which a goddess might be constructed. Uncle wanted to hold those kind hands and go away with her, and see the sun again before he died. He took a half step toward her and then remembered Anna Fang, and how she had betrayed him.

“No!” he shouted. “No! I won’t! It’s all a trick!”

He pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, and the huge noise slammed through the pens and made all the children squeal and cover their ears. The bullet went through Freya’s smiling face, and her face broke, and there was blackness behind it, and sparks, and as the glass rained down on him, Uncle dimly realized that he had shot not Freya but only her image on the largest of his screens. He looked for the real Freya, but Caul pulled her aside and shielded her, and Uncle didn’t want to shoot Caul.

From somewhere above him came a long, distracting sigh. The heavy gun drooped in his hands. He looked up. Everyone looked up, even the scared children. The sigh grew louder, and Uncle saw that his shot had opened a hole in the balloon that held his moon of screens aloft. As he watched, it widened swiftly into a long gash like a yawning mouth.

“Uncle!” shouted Caul.

“Caul!” screamed Freya, pulling him back, holding him tight.

“Anna…” whispered Uncle.

And the ball of screens came down on him like a boot on a spider. The screens burst, sparks swarming blue and white, shattered glass sleeting across the deck. The collapsing balloon settled over the wreckage like a shroud, and as the smoke from the smashed machines reached the roof, a sprinkler system kicked in, filling the limpet pens with cold salt rain.

Tom ran up, and Hester took Freya by her shaking shoulders. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I think so,” Freya said, nodding, soaked to the skin and sneezing at the smoke. “Is Uncle—?”

Caul skirted the heap of sparking, smoldering screens. Only Uncle’s feet, in their grimy bunny slippers, poked out from beneath the debris. They twitched a few times and were still.

“Caul?” asked Freya.

“I’m all right,” said Caul. And he was, even though for some reason he could not stop crying. He pulled a swag of balloon fabric over the bunny slippers and turned to face the others. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the Naglfar swimming before this place finally falls apart. The Worm too. Tom and Hester will need the Worm if they’re going after Wren.”

The work went faster after that. Grimsby was creaking and keening constantly, and sometimes an ominous shudder rippled the water in the moon-pools, as if the unlikely old place somehow knew that its maker was gone, and was dying with him.

The last of the fuel was loaded, and fresh batteries and kegs of water were rolled aboard the Screw Worm and the Naglfar. Hester prowled the seeping treasure hoards of Grimsby, gathering up handfuls of gold coins, for she suspected money might come in useful aboard Brighton. And when nobody was looking, she burrowed into the heap of ruined screens until she found her gun, still clutched in Uncle’s dead hand. She was certain she would find a use for that.

On the quayside, Tom hugged Freya. “Good luck,” he told her.

“Good luck to you,” said Freya, holding his face and smiling at him. She hesitated, blushing. She had been meaning to warn Tom, if she could, about his wife. She still didn’t think he understood how ruthless Hester could be. She knew that Hester loved him, but she didn’t think that Hester cared at all about anybody else, and she was afraid that one day her ruthlessness would bring trouble down on them both.

“Tom,” she said, “watch out for Hester, won’t you?”

“We’ll watch out for each other, like always,” said Tom, misunderstanding.

Freya gave up, and kissed him. “You’ll find Wren,” she said, “I know it.”

Tom nodded. “I know it too. And I’ll find the Tin Book as well, if I can. If what Uncle told Caul was true, if the Green Storm are making war on cities… I saw what they were like at Rogues’ Roost, Freya. If that book is the key to something dangerous, we mustn’t let them get hold of it…”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s the key to anything,” Freya reminded him. “It would be better to get it back if we can, just to be safe. But Wren is all that really matters. Find her, Tom. And come home safe to Vineland.”

Then Tom went with Hester aboard the Screw Worm, and Freya watched and waved as the Worm submerged; she stood with Caul at the edge of the moon-pool till the last ripples faded. The children were waiting for her aboard the Naglfar, their high, nervous voices spilling from its open hatches.

“Are we going now?”

“Is it far to Anchorage?”

“Will we really have our own rooms and everything there?”

“Is Uncle really dead?”

“I feel sick!”

Freya took Caul’s hand in hers. “Well?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

So they went, and Grimsby stood abandoned at last. After a few days even the dim light from its windows faded, and one by one the air pumps died. Through widening cracks and fissures that there was no one left to repair, the patient sea came creeping in, and the fish made their homes in the halls of the Lost Boys.

Tom would miss the company of Freya, and even Caul, but for Hester it was a relief to be alone with him again. She had never been truly comfortable with anyone but Tom, except for Wren, when Wren was little. She watched lovingly as Tom worked the Screw Worm’s strange controls, frowning with concentration as he tried to remember all that Caul had taught him. That night, when the limpet was running smoothly south by southwest toward Brighton’s cruising grounds and the waters were singing against the hull, she slipped into his bunk and wrapped her long limbs around him and kissed him, remembering how, when they were young and first together in the Jenny Haniver, they used to kiss for hours. But Tom was too worried about Wren to kiss her back, not properly, and she lay for a long time awake while he slept, and thought bitterly, He loves her more than ever he loved me.

Chapter 19 The Wedding Wreath

First frost reached Vineland long before the Naglfar. The old submarine, with too many people aboard and her poor old engines grumbling all the way, took several weeks to return to the Dead Continent and nose her way up the winding rivers that the Screw Worm had swum down in days. But Caul coaxed her back to Anchorage at last, and she surfaced through a thin covering of ice just off the mooring beach. Freya climbed out, waving, and was almost shot again, this time by Mr. Smew, who believed the Lost Boys were invading.

And in a way they were. Anchorage would never be the same again, now that all these boisterous, ill-mannered, sometimes troubled children had come to live there. Freya set about opening the abandoned upper floors of the Winter Palace, and the old building filled with life and noise as the children moved into their new quarters. Some of them were not quite used to the idea that they were not supposed to steal, and some had nightmares, calling out Uncle’s name and Gargle’s in their dreams, but Freya was convinced that with patience and love they could be helped to forget their time beneath the sea and grow into happy, healthy Vinelanders.

After all, it had worked with Caul, eventually. Freya wouldn’t say what had passed between them on the voyage home, but the former Lost Boy never went back to his shack in the engine district. At the beginning of that October, when the harvests were in and the animals down from the high pastures and the city was preparing for winter, he and the margravine were married.

Freya awoke early on the morning after her wedding: wide-awake at five o’clock, the way she used to be when she was young. She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Caul, and went to the window of her chamber with the floor cold under her bare feet and the tatters of her bridal wreath still hanging in her hair.

When she drew back the curtains, she saw that the ice was thick upon the lake and that a dusting of snow had fallen in the night. She felt glad that her city was back in the domain of the Ice Gods for another six months. The gods of summer, of the lake and the hunt, had all been good to her people, and the gods of the sea and the Goddess of Love had been very kind to her too, but the Ice Gods were the gods she had grown up with, and she trusted them better than the rest. She breathed on the window and drew their snowflake symbol in the mist and whispered. “Keep Tom safe. And Hester too, though she doesn’t deserve it. Lead them to Wren, wherever she may be. And may they all come home again to us, safe and happy and together.”

But if the Ice Gods heard her prayer, they sent no sign. The only answer Freya had was the sound of the wind in the spires of the Winter Palace, and her husband’s voice, gentle and sleepy, calling her back to her bed.