Infernal Devices

Chapter 20 A Life on the Ocean Wave

Pennyroyal, my dear?”

“Mmmmm?”

Morning in the Pavilion, and the mayor and mayoress sitting at opposite ends of the long table in the breakfast room, screened from the hot sun by muslin blinds. Behind the mayoress’s chair, her African slave waved an ostrich-feather fan, wafting cool air over her and rustling the pages of the newspaper that her husband was trying to read. “Pennyroyal, I am talking to you.”

Nimrod Pennyroyal sighed and put down the paper. “Yes, Boo-Boo, my treasure?”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself saddled with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke. Fifteen years earlier, when Predator’s Gold was topping the bestseller lists aboard every city of the Hunting Ground, she had seemed like a good idea. Her family were old Brighton aristocracy, but poor. Pennyroyal was a mere adventurer, but rich. The marriage allowed the Heckmondwykes to restore their fortunes, and gave Pennyroyal the social clout he needed to get himself elected mayor. Boo-Boo made an excellent wife for a man of ambition: She was good at small talk and flower arrangements, she planned dinner parties with military precision, and she was expert at opening fetes, galas, and small hospitals.

Yet Pennyroyal had come to regret his marriage. Boo-Boo was such a large, forceful, florid woman that she tired him out just by being in the same room. A keen amateur singer, she had a passion for the operas of the Blue Metal culture, which went on for days with never a trace of a tune, and usually ended with all the characters dead in a heap. When Pennyroyal annoyed her by questioning the cost of her latest frock or flirting too openly with a councillor’s wife over dinner, she would practice her scales until the windows rattled, or crank up her gramophone and treat the household to all six hundred verses of the Harpoon Aria from Diana, Princess of Whales.

“I expect you to listen when I talk to you, Pennyroyal,” she said now, setting down her croissant in an ominous manner.

“Of course, dear. I was just studying the latest war reports in the Palimpsest. Excellent news from the front. Makes one proud to be a Tractionist, eh?”

“Pennyroyal!”

“Yes, dearest?”

“I have been looking over the arrangements for our Moon Festival ball,” said Boo-Boo, “and I could not help noticing that you have invited the Flying Ferrets.”

Pennyroyal made a sort of shrugging motion with his entire body.

“I’m not sure we should be entertaining mercenaries, Nimrod.”

“I just happened to invite their leader, Orla Twombley,” Pennyroyal protested. “I may have said she could bring a few of her friends if she wanted. Wouldn’t want her to feel left out, you know… She’s a famous aviatrix. Her flying machine, the Combat Wombat, downed three air dreadnoughts at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal.”

As he spoke, a vision of the female air ace filled Pennyroyal’s mind, sleek and gorgeous in her pink leather flying suit. He had always prided himself on how popular he was with the ladies. Why, in his younger days he had enjoyed passionate romances with exotic and beautiful women (Minty Bapsnack, Peaches Zanzibar, and the Traktiongrad Smolensk Ladies’ Croquet Team all sprang to mind). He’d been rather hoping that the dashing Orla Twombley might soon be added to that list.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” said Boo-Boo frostily.

Pennyroyal shifted awkwardly in his chair. “Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed…” he mumbled. He hated scenes like this. That nasty, suspicious look in Boo-Boo’s eyes was just the sort of thing, he thought, to put a chap right off his breakfast. Luckily he was saved from any further interrogation by one of his house slaves, who opened the breakfast-room door and said, “Mr. Plovery to see you, Your Worship.”

“Excellent!” cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his visitor. “Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!”

Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the Laines, was the mayor’s advisor on Old Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal to make himself a tidy little nest egg by secretly selling off items from the Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face that looked as if somebody had molded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He seemed startled by Pennyroyal’s exuberant greeting—people weren’t usually so glad to see him, but then, people weren’t usually being quizzed about lovely aviatrices by Mrs. Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.

“I have been doing some research into that item Your Worship showed me,” he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly toward Boo-Boo. “You remember, Your Worship? The item?”

“Oh, there’s no need for secrecy, Plovery,” Pennyroyal told him. “Boo-Boo knows all it about it. Don’t you, my little upside-down cake? That metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a look at it, just to see what he thought…”

Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the gossip page. “Do excuse me, Mr. Plovery. I find talk about Old Tech so dull…”

Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction, and turned back to Pennyroyal. “You still have the item?”

“It’s in the safe in my office,” said Pennyroyal. “Why? Reckon it might be worth something?”

“Po-o-ossibly,” said Plovery cautiously.

“The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do with submarines.”

Mr. Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. “Oh no, Your Worship. She clearly knows nothing about the machine languages of the Ancients.”

“A machine language, eh?”

“A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain surviving fragments of American military code.”

“American, eh?” said Pennyroyal, and then, “Military? That should be worth a bob or two. This war’s been dragging on for fourteen years. People are desperate. The R D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon.”

Plovery’s face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage of a fortune. “Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I have contacts in the Mobile Free States…”

Pennyroyal shook his head. “No, Plovery, I’ll handle this. There’s no point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I’ll keep the book in my safe until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my contacts. There’s an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn time, and she always seems to be on the lookout for unusual bits of Old Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery.”

He shooed the disgruntled Old Tech dealer away and sat down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the Palimpsest, which his wife was holding up for him to see. There, on the front page of the gossip section, was a full-length photograph of himself entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was looking even more goddesslike than Pennyroyal remembered.

“Well,” he blustered, “she’s not really what I’d call pretty…”

“Poor Boo-Boo!” said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above the breakfast room beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal’s chat with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. “I don’t know how she puts up with it…”

“Puts up with what?” asked Cynthia innocently.

“Didn’t you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he’s been having a liaison with Orla Twombley!”

“What’s a ‘liaison’?” asked Cynthia, frowning. “Is it a sort of cake?”

Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty, and very dim. She had been a house slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived, Mrs. Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren’s friend and explain the workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than Cynthia had ever known.

“Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms. Twombley are having a fling,” she explained patiently.

“Oh!” Cynthia looked scandalized. “Oh, poor Mistress! To think, a man of his age throwing himself at slinky aviatrices!”

“I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than that,” Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he’d written in his silly books.

“What?” asked Cynthia, intrigued. “What things?”

“I’ll tell you another time,” Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would forget.

To change the subject, she said, “Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo’s chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always looks so sad.”

“Oh, he’s another new arrival, like you,” said Cynthia excitedly. “He’s been here for only a few weeks. His name’s Theo Ngoni, and he used to be a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It’s meant to be ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it’s scary. I mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn’t we! Look at him! Don’t he look vicious?”

Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it must have been for him to be defeated and dragged away from his home and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel sorry for herself too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way to escape from this place.

For a few days Pennyroyal had taken a special interest in Wren, calling her “my fan from beneath the sea” and lending her his latest book, a history of the war with the Green Storm. But he quickly forgot her, and she became just another of his wife’s many slaves.

Her new life was simple. She rose each day at seven, breakfasted, and went with the other girls of Mrs. Pennyroyal’s household to Mrs. Pennyroyal’s bedchamber, where they woke Mrs. Pennyroyal and helped her dress and spent an hour working on her hairdo, which was elaborate, expensive, and several feet tall. In the mornings, when the mayor went down to the Town Hall, his wife liked to take a long, relaxing wallow in the swimming pool. Sometimes in the afternoons, when Pennyroyal came home tipsy from something he called a “working lunch,” Boo-Boo took the cable car down to Brighton and went visiting, or opened things, but she never took any of her pretty young handmaidens with her, just a couple of slave boys to carry her shopping.

At eight in the evening, dinner was served, usually a big affair with many guests, and Wren and the other girls running in and out with roast swan, shark steaks, sea-pie, and great wobbling desserts. After that, Mrs. Pennyroyal had to be helped to bathe and dress for bed before the girls were finally allowed to go to their own beds, in a dormitory on the ground floor.

It was hard work sometimes, but when she was not busy attending to the mayoress, Wren was allowed to do pretty much what she liked, and what she liked, in those first few weeks, was to wander about the Pavilion and its grounds with Cynthia Twite.

Pennyroyal’s palace was a treasure trove of wonders, and Wren loved the gardens, with their shaded walks and summerhouses, the elaborate topiary maze, the groves of blue-green cypresses and shrines to antique gods. Sometimes, as Brighton steamed south into warmer waters and golden autumn sunshine, she would stand at the handrail at the gardens’ edge and look down at the whit e city below her, at the shining sea, at the circling gulls and the airships and the pennants streaming in the wind, and wonder if it hadn’t been worth getting kidnapped and enslaved just to see so much beauty.

But more and more, as the weeks wore by, she missed her mum and dad. She knew she had to get away from Cloud 9. But how? No airships were allowed to land on the airborne deck plate, so the only way off was by cable car, and the cable car was closely guarded by Brighton’s red-coated militia. And even if she made it down to Brighton, what good would that do her? She wore the brand of the Shkin Corporation, and if she tried to board an outbound ship, she would be taken up as a runaway slave and handed straight back to Shkin.

And all the time, she was being carried farther and farther from her home. Brighton was nosing south down the long coast of the Hunting Ground while dusty two-tiered Traction Towns kept pace with it onshore. Everybody was talking about Moon Festival, Boo-Boo endlessly writing and rewriting the guest list for the mayor’s ball, the cooks in the Pavilion kitchens working overtime to turn out moon-shaped cakes and silver moon-sweets. The rising of the first full moon of autumn was an event sacred to all the most popular religions. There would be parties and processions aboard Brighton, and all over the world the Moon Festival fires would burn in city and static alike. There would even be one lonely bonfire on the Dead Continent, for at Anchorage-in-Vineland, Moon Festival was the biggest social event of the year.

Wren imagined her friends piling up driftwood and broken furniture in the meadow behind the city, and maybe wondering where she was and whether she was safe. How she wished she could be there with them! She couldn’t imagine how she had ever thought their lives dull, or why she had argued so with Mummy. Each night, lying in her bed in the slave quarters, she would hug herself and whisper the songs she used to sing when she was little, and pretend that the creaking of the hawsers that attached Cloud 9 to its gasbags was the murmur of waves against the shores of Vineland.

Wren had almost forgotten Nabisco Shkin, and, to be fair, Nabisco Shkin had almost forgotten her. Sometimes, as he went about his busy round of meetings, he glanced up at Cloud 9 and allowed himself to feel a momentary pleasure at the revenge he would take on the girl who had tricked him, but his plans for a slaving expedition to Vineland were at a very early stage, and he had more pressing business to attend to.

Today, for instance, he had received a very interesting note from a man named Plovery.

Descending to the Pepperpot’s midlevel, he exited through a side door and strode quickly into the maze of the Laines. These narrow streets, lit only by sputtering argon globes and by shafts of sunlight that poked down through vents and skylights in the deck plates overhead, were the haunt of beggars, thieves, and ne’er-do-wells, but Shkin was well enough known to walk them without a bodyguard. Even the most witless of Brighton’s lowlifes had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who dared lay a finger on Nabisco Shkin. People stepped out of his way, and turned to watch him when he had gone past. Roistering aviators were tugged out of his path by their friends. Unwary drug touts and gutter girls started back as if his glance had burned them. Only one miserable dreadlocked beggar, leading a dog on a length of string, dared to whine, “A few spare dolphins, sir? Just to buy some food?”

“Eat the dog,” suggested Shkin, and made a mental note to send a snatch squad to this district once Moon Festival was over. He would be doing his city a favor by sweeping these scum off the streets, and they would all fetch a profit at the autumn markets.

He entered a narrow alleyway behind a fried-fish stall, holding a handkerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of pee and batter. In the windows of a scruffy shop at the alley’s end, mounds of junk and Old Tech glimmered. PLOVERY said the faded sign above them, and the jangle of the bell as Shkin opened the door brought the antiques dealer scurrying from a back room.

“You wished to see me?”

“Why, yes, sir, yes…” Plovery bowed and beamed, and twined his thin white fingers into knots. Annoyed at Pennyroyal’s decision to find a buyer for the Tin Book without his help, the antiques dealer had decided to take what he knew about it to another wealthy man. His note had dropped into Shkin’s in-box just an hour ago, and he was impressed and a little startled to find Shkin standing here in person quite so soon. Nervously, he told the slave dealer all that he had learned.

“Military, eh?” said Shkin, just as Pennyroyal had a few hours earlier. “An ancient weapon?”

“Just a code, sir,” Plovery cautioned. “But perhaps a clever man who understood such things might work backward from the code and reconstruct the machine that it was written for. That could be valuable, sir. And as Pennyroyal told me that he had got the book from you—’I tricked that creep Shkin into handing it over for free’ were his exact words, sir, if you’ll forgive me—well, I thought you might be interested, sir.”

“I have already made arrangements that will repay His Worship for that little episode,” said Shkin, annoyed that this wretch knew how Pennyroyal had outwitted him. He was intrigued by Plovery’s story all the same. “You made a copy of the book, of course?”

“No, sir. Pennyroyal will not let it out of his sight. It is in his safe at the Pavilion. But if I had a buyer, sir, I might be able to get my hands on it. I am a frequent visitor to the Pavilion, sir.”

Shkin twitched an eyebrow. He was interested, but not interested enough yet to lay down the sort of money that he knew Plovery would want. “I deal in slaves, not Old Tech,” he said.

“Of course, sir. But what if it does turn out to be some ancient weapon? It might tip the balance. End the war. And the war has been so good for business, sir, has it not?”

Shkin pondered for a moment, then nodded.

“Very well. The thing is mine by rights anyway. ‘Finders keepers,’ you know. I do not like to think of Pennyroyal profiting from it. I take it you know the combination of his safe?”

Plovery said, “Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven. Twenty-second of September, nine hundred and fifty-seven T. E. It’s His Worship’s birthday.”

Shkin smiled. “Very well, Plovery. Fetch me the Tin Book.”

Chapter 21 The Flight of a Seagull

That afternoon, when luncheon was over and the preparations for dinner not yet begun, Wren wandered through the kitchen garden and out into the grounds behind the Pavilion to watch a wing of the Flying Ferrets take off on patrol. The Ferrets had set up a temporary airfield in a little-used part of the gardens behind the Pavilion. Wren knew most of the strange machines by sight now, and recognized them as they taxied out of their hangars: the Visible Parity Line and the Tumbler Pigeon, the Austerity Biscuit and the J. M. W. Turner Overdrive. The ground crews fitted them into spring-loaded canvas catapults and sent them hurtling over the edge of the deck plate while the aviators gunned their engines and prayed that their wings would find a purchase on the air before they plunged into the dirty sea off Brighton’s stern.

Wren watched from the handrail at the gardens’ brink while Ferret after Ferret pulled out of its dive and went zooming off across the rooftops, doing ill-advised aerobatics and letting off canisters of green and purple smoke. It was a spectacle that she had always enjoyed before, but today it only made her feel more homesick than ever. She would have liked to tell Dad about the Ferrets’ machines.

Behind the aerodrome stood a whale-backed hillock of copper, screened by cypress trees. Wren had noticed it from a distance before, but she had never bothered to take a closer look, assuming that it was just another of the abstract sculptures that littered the lawns of Cloud 9, bought by Pennyroyal to keep his supporters in the Artists’ Quarter happy. Today, having nothing better to do, she wandered toward it. As she drew nearer, she started to realize that it was a building, with huge curved doors at one end and a fan-shaped metal pavement outside. The copper curves of its walls and roof were studded with decorative spines, so it looked like a giant puffer fish surfacing through the grass. A spindly exterior staircase led up one side, and Wren climbed up it and peeked in through a high window.

In the shady interior sat a sky yacht so delicate and sleek that even Wren, who knew nothing about airships, could tell that it was ferociously expensive.

“That’s the Peewit,” said a helpful voice behind her. Cynthia was standing at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Wren,” she added. “I’m going to the household shrine; I simply must make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Beauty; I really want to lose weight before Moon Festival. You should come with me. You could ask her to do something about your spots.”

Wren was more interested in yachts than spots. She turned back to the window. “The Peewit… Is she Pennyroyal’s?”

“Of course.” Cynthia climbed halfway up the stairs. “She’s called a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow—very fancy. But the mayor hardly ever takes her up anymore. He keeps her polished and full of lifting gas, but the only time she gets used is when Boo-Boo goes shopping aboard another city.”

“Won’t the mayor be using her in the MoonFest Regatta?” asked Wren.

“Oh ; no; he’s got a vintage airship moored down in Brighton. He’s going to be flying her, with that Orla Twombley as his copilot. She’s going to lead a Flyby of Historic Ships, and there’s to be an Air Battle with real rockets, just like in Professor Pennyroyal’s books. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s had the most amazing adventures on the bird roads.”

Wren looked again at the yacht, thinking of the airship that Pennyroyal had stolen from her parents all those years before. Might it be possible for her to sneak down here at dead of night, slide open the boathouse doors, and take off aboard the Peewit? That would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it!

A faint drumbeat of hope began to throb deep down inside her. It cheered her up no end as Cynthia took her hand and led her toward the slaves’ and servants’ shrine behind the Pavilion kitchens. She barely heard her friend’s bright chatter about makeup and hairstyles. In her imagination she was already piloting the Peewit westward: She was crossing the Dead Hills, the lakes of Vineland were shining blue below her, and her parents were running to greet her as she touched down in the fields of Anchorage.

The only trouble was, Wren had no idea how to fly a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow. Or anything else, for that matter. But she knew someone who did.

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn’t notice. The rest were always disobeying her rule and trying to sneak into one another’s quarters, which pained Boo-Boo. But at least Theo Ngoni never gave her any cause for concern. Theo Ngoni never spoke to anyone.

Wren, though, was determined to speak to Theo Ngoni, and she found her chance a few days after her discovery of the boathouse. Boo-Boo had gone down to Brighton, and Pennyroyal had collared Wren and Cynthia to act as his towel holders while he took a dip in the pool. By a lucky chance Theo was on duty at the poolside too, carrying the mayor’s spare swimming goggles on a silver platter. While Pennyroyal dozed on his drifting air bed, Wren sidled up to her fellow slave and whispered, “Hello!”

The boy looked at her out of the corner of his eye but said nothing. Wren wondered what to do next. She had never been this close to Theo before. He was very handsome, and although Wren was tall, Theo was taller still, which made her feel young and silly as she stood there at his side.

“I’m Wren,” she said.

He looked away again, out across the gardens and the blue sea, toward a distant haze on the horizon that Wren had been told was Africa. Maybe he was homesick. She said, “Is that where you come from?”

Theo Ngoni shook his head. “My home was in Zagwa. A static city in the mountains, far to the south.”

“Oh?” said Wren encouragingly, and, “Is it nice?” but the boy said no more. Determined to keep the conversation going, she added, “I didn’t know the Green Storm had bases in Africa. That book Professor Pennyroyal lent me said that the African statics didn’t approve of the war.”

“They don’t.” Theo turned his head to look at her, but it was a cold look. “I ran away from my family to travel to Shan Guo and join the Storm’s youth wing. I thought it would be a glorious thing to fight against the barbarian cities and sweep them from the earth.”

“Gosh, yes,” agreed Wren. “I’m an Anti-Tractionist myself, you know.”

Theo stared at her. “I thought you were a Lost Girl. From that place under the sea.”

“Oh, yes, I am,” said Wren quickly, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “But Grimsby didn’t move, it wasn’t a moving city, so that makes me a Mossie through and through. Did you fight in many battles?”

“Only one said Theo, looking away again.

“You got captured on your first go? Oh, bad luck!” Wren tried to sound sympathetic, but she was fast losing patience with this sullen, gloomy boy. Maybe all that she’d heard about the Storm and its soldiers was true: They were brainwashed fanatics. Still, she was sure he must want to leave Cloud 9 as badly as she did, and she thought it unlikely that he would betray her to the hated Tractionists, so she decided to take a chance and tell him about her plan.

She glanced round and saw that Pennyroyal was asleep. The other slaves were dozing too, or whispering together on the far side of the pool, while Cynthia, who was closest, was studying her freshly polished fingernails with a frown of deep concentration. Wren sidled even closer to Theo and whispered, “I know a way we can escape.”

Theo said nothing, but he stiffened slightly, which Wren thought was a good sign.

“I know where we can get an airship,” she went on. “Cynthia Twite told me you used to be an aviator.”

Theo almost smiled at that. “Cynthia Twite is a fool who understands nothing.”

“True. But if you can fly an airship—”

“I did not fly airships. I flew Tumblers.”

“Tumblers?” asked Wren. “What are they? Are they like airships? I mean, if you know the basics…” But Theo had clammed up again, narrowing his eyes and staring past her at the horizon. “Oh, come on!” Wren whispered impatiently. “Do you like being Pennyroyal’s slave? Don’t you want to escape? I should have thought you’d be itching to get back to the Green Storm…”

“I would never go back to the Storm!” Theo said suddenly, angrily, almost dropping the mayoral goggles as he turned to face her. “It is a lie, their great war, The World Made Green Again. My father was right; it is all lies!”

“Oh,” said Wren. “Well, what about your home, then? You must want to go back to Zagwa…”

Theo stared at the horizon again, but it was not the sea and the sky and the distant shore that he was watching. Even here, in the expensive sunlight of Cloud 9, he could see that last, desperate fight above the Rustwater. The light of guns and rockets and burning ships had glittered in all the little winding waterways below him as he fell. A doomed suburb had been bellowing its distress calls across the marshes, and the exultant voices of his comrades had crackled in his headphones, shouting, as they began their own drops, “The World Made Green Again!” and “Death to the Pan-German Traction Wedge!” He had thought that those would be the last sounds he would ever hear. But here he was, months later and half a world away, still alive. The gods of war had spared him so that he could stand beside a swimming pool and be talked at by this stupid, skinny white girl who thought herself so clever.

“I can never go home,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I disobeyed my father. I ran away. I can never go home.”

Wren shrugged. “All right, suit yourself,” she told him, and stomped away before Pennyroyal woke up and saw them talking to each other. She would show Theo Ngoni! She would steal the mayor’s yacht on her own and pilot it back to Vineland herself. It was only a silly airship, after all! How hard could it be?

Dusk settled over Brighton. Along the promenades at the edges of its three tiers, strings of colored bulbs were switched on. Lights blinked and swirled on the fairgrounds and the pleasure piers. Powerful lamps were lit atop each cabin of the revolving Pharos Wheel, which was mounted near the city’s bow and served as both a joyride for the tourists and a lighthouse to guide night-flying airships to Brighton.

The city was swinging eastward. Soon it would thread itself through the narrow strait that separated Africa from the Great Hunting Ground and swim proudly into the Middle Sea. Brighton’s businessmen were hoping for plenty of visitors when they anchored for Moon Festival. Word of the campaign against the Lost Boys would have spread along the bird roads by now, and the captured limpets displayed in the Brighton Aquarium would add a certain educational element to the attractions of the usual MoonFest celebrations. Already sightseers had started arriving from some of the small towns whose lights could be seen on the shore.

Above the coming and going of balloons, the shadows of evening pooled between the cypress groves of Cloud 9, and colored floodlights made the Pavilion blush pink and gold. A few airships circled it, up from Brighton on an evening pleasure trip. The amplified voices of their pilots were faintly audible on Cloud 9, pointing out features of interest, but new security arrangements prohibited them from coming too close. None of the sightseers noticed a small window swing open in one of the Pavilion’s domes, or the bird that flew out of it and up through the web of hawsers to join the cloud of gulls hanging ghostly in the city’s wake.

Although it was white like a gull and had a gull’s soaring flight, this bird was not a gull; not anymore. Its bill had been replaced with a blade, and in the spaces of its skull glowed dim green lights. It rose through the circling flocks and flew away into the deepening twilight.

On and on it flapped, untiring, while days and nights came out of the east to meet it. It crossed the town-torn spine of Italy and skirted the plumes of erupting volcanoes in Asia Minor. At a Green Storm air base in the Ziganastra Mountains, it landed to let the base commander peer at the slip of paper that it carried in a cavity inside its chest. She cursed under her breath when she saw whom the coded message was addressed to, and summoned a sleepy surgeon-mechanic to recharge the gull’s power cells.

It went on its way, flying into the haze of smoke above the Rustwater Marshes, where artillery duels were rumbling like autumn storms. A squadron of enormous Traction Cities was crawling eastward, trying to head off a Green Storm counterattack. On their lower tiers, whole buildings had been converted into snout guns. Railways carried huge high-explosive shells out of the cities’ innards, and the guns hurled them into the marshy Out-Country ahead, which was said to be crawling with Stalkers and mobile rocket units. Buffeted by passing airships and the fluffy white thistledown of antiaircraft bursts, the gull let the leading city’s slipstream carry it eastward for a while, then rose above the battle and flapped on toward the white mountains that stood on the rim of the world.

The sky grew cold, and the ground rose. The gull flew through zones of high white silence and over regions where the Storm’s troop movements gave the mountains the busy, scuttling look of anthills. At last, on a night of snow and starlight a week after it left Brighton, it landed on a windowsill of the Jade Pagoda and tapped its bill against the frosty pane.

The window opened. The Stalker Fang took the gull gently in her steel hands and opened its chest. The message she took out had been written by someone called Agent 28. Her green eyes flared slightly brighter. She tore the message into small pieces and sent for General Naga, commander of her elite air legion.

“Make ready an assault unit,” she told him. “And prepare my ship for battle. We leave for Brighton with the dawn.”

Chapter 22 Murder on cloud Nine

Late October. In Vineland, Wren thought, the grass would be white and stiff with frost until midmorning; fog would blanket the lake, and perhaps the first snow was already falling. But here on the Middle Sea it was still as warm as midsummer, and the only clouds in the sky were small white fluffy ones that looked as if they’d been put there for decoration.

Brighton had cruised slowly along the southern shores of the Hunting Ground for several weeks. Then, with Moon Festival drawing near, it headed south to its appointed rendezvous. Boo-Boo went with her handmaidens to watch from an observation balcony at the edge of Cloud 9 as the land came into view. “Look, girls, look!” she cried happily, indicating the coastline with a theatrical sweep of her hand. “Africa!”

Wren, standing at the mayoress’s side with an enormous parasol, tried to be impressed, but it was quite difficult. All she could see was a line of low reddish bluffs rising out of a landscape the color of biscuits, with a couple of big, ragged mountains lost in the haze beyond. Wren knew from things her father and Miss Freya had told her that Africa had been both the birthplace of mankind and its haven in the centuries of darkness that followed the Sixty Minute War, but the civilizations that once thrived upon those shores had left no traces—or, if they had, they had long since been snaffled up by hungry scavenger towns.

One of the towns that might have done the snaffling came into view soon afterward. A small three-tiered place, it was rumbling along on broad, barrel-shaped sand wheels, trailing a swirl of red dust like a wind-blown cape. Wren glanced at it without very much interest. It felt strange to remember how, two weeks before, she had deserted her post in the middle of Mrs. Pennyroyal’s hairstyling routine to run and stare in wonderment at a little townlet trundling down onto the shore. She’d seen so many towns and even small cities since then that they seemed quite ordinary now, and certainly not the fabulous things that she had imagined when she’d lived in Vineland.

And then she looked again, and felt as silly as she had on that long-ago day when she’d first seen Brighton through the Autolycus’s periscope and mistaken it for an island. The things she’d thought were distant mountains were not distant at all. Nor were they mountains. They were Traction Cities so large that, when she’d first looked at them, her brain had simply not understood what her eyes were showing her.

They were lumbering seaward, and through the dust and the drifting exhaust smoke Wren could see that each had nine tiers bristling with chimneys and spires.

“The one on the left is Kom Ombo,” the mayoress told her girls. “The other is Benghazi. Mayor Pennyroyal has contracted to meet them here so that their people may taste the delights of Brighton this Moon Festival. They have been hunting sand towns in the deep desert, poor things, so you can imagine how they will relish good food, fine entertainment, and a refreshing dip in the Sea Pool.”

To Wren, the approaching cities looked at first just like the pictures she remembered from her dog-eared copy of A Child’s Guide to Municipal Darwinism back in Anchorage. Then, as they drew closer, she began to make out differences. These cities were armored, the exposed buildings on the edge of each tier screened with steel plates and antirocket netting. And although the land around their massive tracks was dotted with small, scurrying towns and suburbs and Traction Villages, these cities were making no attempt to swallow them.

“Moon Festival is a sacred time,” said the mayoress when Wren pointed this out. “A time when, according to tradition, no city hunts or eats another.”

“Oh,” said Wren, feeling disappointed, for it would have been thrilling to watch a good old-fashioned city chase.

“Of course,” Boo-Boo went on, “with the war on and prey so scarce, not every mayor abides by tradition nowadays, but if any of those cities tries to eat another, Ms. Twombley and her friends will sort them out. It’s high time that aerofloozy made herself useful.”

Right on cue, the Flying Ferrets went tearing through the sky toward the cities, rolling and tumbling and firing off colored rockets to demonstrate how they would deal with any predator that threatened to break the Moon Festival fast. One peeled off, trailing lilac smoke, to write WELCOME TO BRIGHTON across the sky. As the thunder of their engines rolled away across the desert, Wren heard the rattle of heavy chains drifting up from Brighton. The city was dropping anchor.

“I have a feeling that this will be a wonderful MoonFest!” said Mrs. Pennyroyal brightly as the girls around her oohed and aahed and applauded the aviators’ daring. “Now, come on, all of you; I wish you all to be photographed in your costumes for the mayor’s ball.”

She turned back toward the Pavilion, and Wren, with a last glance at the towering cities, hurried after her. All the other girls were busy talking about tomorrow night’s ball, and about the charming costumes the house slaves were to wear. Listening to their excited chatter, Wren found herself feeling almost sorry that she was going to miss the fun. But miss it she must. Tonight, while the household was asleep, Wren meant to creep down to the boathouse and steal the Peewit. By the time the sacred moon rose, she would be a long, long way from Brighton.

The Pavilion echoed and rang to the sound of preparations for the MoonFest ball. In the ballroom under the central dome, painters and curtain fitters were hard at work, and musicians were practicing, and electricians were covering the ceiling with hundreds of tiny lights. Crates of wine and hampers of food came creaking up from Brighton in the cable car, and the militia drilled in the Pavilion gardens.

It was all costing Pennyroyal a fortune, which he thought rather unfair. The people of Brighton surely wanted their mayor to put on a good show for Moon Festival; it seemed a bit rich that they expected him to pay for it all out of his own pocket. So he felt not the tiniest pang of guilt about inviting Walter Plovery to an informal dinner party he was holding that night. Between dessert and coffee, while the other guests were discussing their plans for MoonFest and the latest scandals in the Artists’ Quarter, Pennyroyal led the antiques dealer off to take a look at some of the precious antiques in the Pavilion’s collection. Together the two men wandered from room to room, studying Stalkers’ brains and ground car grilles, fragments of circuit boards that looked like careful embroidery, flattened drink cans, and suits of ancient armor. They made notes of pieces that Plovery thought might fetch a tidy sum from some collectors he knew in Benghazi, and that Pennyroyal reckoned nobody would miss.

Over coffee, Mr. Plovery mentally totted up the commission he stood to make on all these sales and found that he was going to do very nicely. Full of Pennyroyal’s food and charmed by the wit and sophistication of his fellow guests, the antiques dealer regretted that he had ever made that deal with Shkin about the Tin Book. But Mr. Shkin had promised him a very great deal of money, and Plovery, whose aged mother lived in an expensive nursing home at Black Rock, needed all the money he could get. When the evening ended and the other guests made their way noisily back to the cable car, he doubled back and hid himself in one of the Pavilion’s galleries.

The night air made Wren shiver inside her silver lame nightgown as she stepped out through the servants’ entrance into the cold of the garden. She could hear the sea far below, the wind soughing through the rigging, and someone burbling a drunken song down in the streets of Brighton. Clutching the bag of food she had stolen from the kitchens, she hurried across the damp lawn toward the boathouse and the lights of the Flying Ferrets’ aerodrome.

The boathouse doors were never locked, and big as they were, they were easy to move, rolling aside on well-oiled casters when Wren leaned her weight against them. The Peewit’s sleek envelope gleamed inside the hangar as Wren crept to the gondola. She found that she had been holding her breath, which was silly because there was nobody about. Over at the aerodrome, a gramophone was playing a popular tune. Wren reached for the gondola door, and that was not locked either. She crept inside and used the small flashlight she had pinched from the Pavilion’s caretaker to study the dials on the chromium instrument panels, remembering the diagrams in a book she’d looked at in the Pavilion’s library, Practical Aviation for Fun and Profit.

The gas cells were full, just as Cynthia had told her. The fuel gauge was still on empty, but Wren had thought of a way to deal with that. She took her nightgown off and stashed it behind the instrument panel. Underneath, she was still wearing her day clothes. She said a quick prayer to the gods of Vineland, then left the airship and walked briskly across the apron in front of the boathouse and through the woods toward the Ferrets’ base.

In an old summerhouse that had been commandeered by the mercenary air force, Orla Twombley and a few of her aviators were playing cards. They looked up suspiciously when Wren came tapping at the door.

“Who’s that?”

“Looks like one of Boo-Boo’s girls.”

The aviatrix stood up lazily and opened the door. “Well?”

“I’ve come with a message from Mrs. Pennyroyal,” said Wren. Her voice caught a little as she said it, but the aviatrix didn’t seem to notice. She looked worried. Maybe she thought Boo-Boo had sent Wren here to tell her off for flirting with the mayor. Wren started to feel more confident. “Mrs. Pennyroyal wants the Peewit to be fueled at once,” she explained. “She is going across to Benghazi tomorrow morning. Very early tomorrow morning, so she can find lots of bargains at the bazaar. She wonders if your ground crew would oblige?”

Orla Twombley frowned. “Why ours? Is it not the mayor’s men who should be refueling the old gasbag?”

“Yes,” said Wren. “His Worship was supposed to ask them this afternoon, but he forgot, and they’ve gone off duty now. So if you wouldn’t mind getting your people to do it, Mrs. Pennyroyal would be ever so grateful.”

The aviatrix thought for a moment. She did not want to upset the mayoress. Boo-Boo had powerful relatives who might force Pennyroyal to dispense with the Flying Ferrets’ services and hire some other freelance air force instead. Orla Twombley knew for a fact that the Junkyard Angels and Richard D’Astardley’s Flying Circus were both angling to take over the Brighton contract.

She nodded, and turned to her men. “Algy? Ginger? You heard what the young lady said…”

Grumpy but obedient, the two aviators set down their cards and their mugs of cocoa and went out with Wren into the night, muttering about what a waste of good fuel it was and wondering why anyone still bothered with airships when heavier-than-air was the way of the future. Wren trailed after them at a distance and watched as they ran fuel lines from the big tanks behind their airstrip and linked them to nozzles on the Peewit’s underside.

“She’ll take a good ten minutes,” one of the men said, turning to Wren with a friendly wink. “No need for you to hang about in the cold, kiddo.”

Wren thanked him and ran back to the Pavilion. Ten minutes would give her just enough time to fetch Cynthia.

She had decided right from the start that she would not tell Cynthia about her scheme. Cynthia was much too giggly and forgetful to keep a secret, and would probably have blurted out the whole thing to Mrs. Pennyroyal. But Wren had no intention of leaving her friend behind. While the Peewit was being fueled, she would slip into the dormitory where the girls slept, wake Cynthia as quietly as she could, and bring her down to the boathouse. By the time they got there, the yacht would be ready for takeoff.

Mr. Plovery used a novel lockpick that Shkin’s people had taken from the Lost Boys to open the door of the mayor’s private office. The office was in a tower room, with long windows reaching up toward a shadowy ceiling high above. The blinds were open and the moon shone brightly in, showing the antiques dealer Pennyroyal’s cluttered desk and the drawing by Walmart Strange behind which Pennyroyal’s private safe was hidden.

As he crossed the room, Plovery sensed a movement way up above him in the domed ceiling, and had the oddest feeling that he was being watched. He went cold with panic. What if Pennyroyal had got hold of one of those crab-camera things and was using it to guard his safe?

He almost gave up and ran, but the thought of his mother stopped him. With the money Shkin had promised him for the Tin Book, he would be able to move Mum into one of the luxury suites on the top floor of her nursing home, with a view of the parks at the city’s stern. He forced himself to stay calm. Pennyroyal wasn’t clever enough to set up a surveillance crab. And if he had, he would certainly have bragged about it to his dinner guests.

Plovery took the picture off the wall and set it down carefully against Pennyroyal’s chair. The circular door of the safe confronted him. He reached for the dial and turned it right, then left, then right again. On previous visits to the Pavilion he had often seen Pennyroyal open the safe, and had worked out the combination by listening to the number of clicks the dial made. Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven… Calmly, carefully, he went through the sequence, and the heavy door swung open.

Inside the safe was a small leather case. Inside the case was the Tin Book of Anchorage. Plovery took it out, holding it reverently, for old things were his love as well as his livelihood. There was something beautiful, he thought, about the way that human handiwork could outlive its makers by so many, many years.

As he reached up to shut the safe, he sensed a movement behind him, and turned, and—

Wren was halfway to the dormitory when she heard the horrible, quivering scream. She squeaked and froze, then dived behind a nearby statue. The scream ended in a sort of gargling noise. The echoes faded into silence, and then the Pavilion began to fill with the sounds of doors opening and people shouting to one another. Lights came on. Glancing through the window beside her, Wren saw that light was flooding the gardens too: big security lamps flicking on, and guards running about with wobbling handheld lanterns.

That’s that, she thought, no chance of escaping now —and then felt ashamed that she was feeling sorry for herself when she should really have been worrying about whoever it was who had let out that dreadful shriek.

She left her hiding place and ran toward the dormitory. Halfway there, she turned a corner and cannoned into Theo Ngoni, coming up a side passage from the direction of the kitchens. “Oh!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard someone scream…” he said.

“Me too…”

“The whole house heard someone scream, my dears.” Mrs. Pennyroyal was striding toward them in her billowing nightie, like a ship in full sail. Wren jumped away from Theo, wondering if they would be punished for speaking to each other, but the mayoress just looked kindly at them and said, “It seemed to come from my husband’s part of the house. Let’s see what has happened.”

Wren and Theo followed obediently in her wake as she swept toward the larboard wing. Wren thought privately that it had been the sort of scream you hurry away from, not toward, but Mrs. Pennyroyal seemed determined to get to the source of the disturbance. Perhaps she was hoping that her husband had scalded himself on a hot-water bottle or fallen off his balcony and didn’t want to waste good gloating time.

They climbed the winding stairs behind the ballroom and passed the door to a little staircase that led down to the Cloud 9 control room; it was open, with worried-looking crewmen peering out. Lights were burning in the mayor’s office, and as they drew closer, Wren heard Pennyroyal’s voice, shrill and wobbly with alarm, saying, “The intruder may still be at large!” Slaves and militia were crowded round the open door, but they drew aside respectfully as their lady mayoress approached.

Pennyroyal was standing beside his desk, along with two officers of his guard. He looked up as his wife and her retinue entered. “Boo-Boo! Don’t look…”

Boo-Boo looked, and gasped. Wren looked too, and wished she hadn’t. Theo looked, and seemed quite undisturbed, but then he’d been in battle and had probably seen things like this before.

Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face, Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try to protect himself. It had done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his evening robe into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and Remora.

“Must have been a knife,” one of the militia officers was saying lamely. “Or maybe a spear…”

“A spear?” shouted Pennyroyal. “In my Pavilion? On the night before the MoonFest ball?”

The officers swapped sheepish glances. Like most of Brighton’s soldiers, they had signed up mainly for the uniforms—fetching scarlet numbers with pink trimmings and a lot of gold tassels. They had never expected to have to face dead bodies and mysterious intruders, and now that they were, they both felt a bit queasy.

“How did he get in?” asked one.

“There’s no sign of a break-in,” agreed the other.

“Well, I expect he took the spare key from the vase outside,” said Pennyroyal. “I keep a spare key there…”

The officers studied the body at their feet and nervously fingered the hilts of their ornamental swords.

“It looks to me as if he was trying to burgle Your Worship’s safe,” decided the first.

“Yes; what is that thing he’s holding?” said the second.

“Nothing!” Pennyroyal snatched the Tin Book from the dead man’s hands and thrust it back inside the safe, locking the door behind it. “Nothing of value, and anyway, it isn’t here; you didn’t see it…”

There was a thunder of fleece-lined boots on the stairs, and Orla Twombley burst into the room with half a dozen Flying Ferrets at her back. They carried drawn swords, and the aviatrix used hers to point at Wren. “That’s the girl!”

“What? I say…” Pennyroyal turned to peer at Wren.

“She came asking my lads to ready your sky yacht,” Orla Twombley explained, taking a menacing step toward Wren as if she thought it might be safest to run the girl through where she stood. “Had some cock-and-bull story about the mayoress here wanting the old sack of gas refueled so she could go shopping in Benghazi…”

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Pennyroyal excitedly. “The girl was preparing her getaway! Once a burglar, always a burglar, eh?”

Oh, gods, thought Wren. She had never imagined that her careful plan could go as wrong as this. What would they do to her? Send her back to Shkin, probably, and demand a refund…

Everybody was talking excitedly Pennyroyal raising his voice above the rest. “Plovery must have recruited her to help him rob me, only she murdered him for the loot instead! And no doubt this Mossie devil was in it with her!” he added, pointing at Theo. “Well done, Orla, my angel! Without your quick thinking, they’d have made off aboard the Peewit with the… ah… contents of my safe.”

“Rubbish!” said Boo-Boo, in a voice that made them all fall silent and turn nervously to look at her. She had drawn herself up to her full height and turned the color that mayoresses turn when they hear their husbands refer to attractive aviatrices as “my angel” right in front of them. She put her arm around Wren. “What Wren told Miss Twombley was entirely true. I did ask for the Peewit to be refueled. I was planning to go shopping in Benghazi tomorrow, though I don’t suppose I shall feel up to it now. Anyway, Wren and Theo were with me when poor Plovery cried out; neither of them could possibly have done this dreadful deed.”

Wren and Theo stared at her, astonished that Boo-Boo would lie to protect them.

“But if it wasn’t them,” asked Pennyroyal, “who… ?”

“That is not for me to find out,” said Boo-Boo haughtily. “I am returning to my quarters. Please search for your murderer quietly. Come, Wren; come, Theo. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

She turned and strode out of the room, past the chastened aviators. Wren curtsied to Pennyroyal and hurried after Theo and her mistress. “Mrs. Pennyroyal,” she whispered as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Thank you.”

Boo-Boo seemed not to hear. “What a dreadful business!” she said. “That poor, poor man. My husband was to blame, I am sure.”

“You think the mayor killed him?” asked Theo. He sounded as if he didn’t believe it, but Wren knew Professor Pennyroyal was quite capable of murdering someone if it suited him. Look at how he had treated Dad! She could see now how he had fooled everyone in Anchorage for so long, for he was certainly a good actor. How shocked he had looked, standing over Plovery’s body…

“Old Tech!” sighed Boo-Boo. “It is never anything but trouble. Oh, I do not say that Pennyroyal wielded the fatal blade himself, but I expect he has set up some nasty booby trap to protect his safe. He would stop at nothing to protect that ridiculous Tin Book. What is so special about it, anyway? Do you know, child?”

Wren shook her head. All she knew was that the Tin Book had been the cause of yet another death. She wished she had never taken the horrid thing from Miss Freya’s library.

Outside the doors of her bedroom, Boo-Boo shooed away the guard and turned to Wren and Theo. She studied them both with a sad smile, taking Wren’s hands in hers. “My dear children,” she said, “I am so sorry that your attempt to fly away has failed. I’m sure that is what you were doing, Wren? Having my husband’s yacht fueled so that you and Theo could fly away together?”

“I—” said Theo.

“Theo had nothing to do with it!” Wren protested. “I ran into him in the corridor. We were both coming to see what had happened—”

Mrs. Pennyroyal raised a hand; she would hear none of it. She had done her best to stop this happening, but now that it had, she found that it was all rather thrilling and romantic. “You need not hide the truth from me,” she said, and tears came into her eyes. “I hope I am your friend as well as your mistress. As soon as I saw you together, your tryst interrupted by the death cry of that unhappy man, I understood everything. How I wish that I had known a burning passion like yours instead of getting married off to Pennyroyal to please my family…”

“But—”

“Ah, but yours is a forbidden love! You remind me of Prince Osmiroid and the beautiful slave girl Mipsie in Lembit Oriole’s wonderful opera Trodden Weeds. But you must be patient, my dears. What hope of happiness do you have if you escape? Runaway slaves, penniless and far from home, pursued by bounty hunters wherever you turn. No, you must stay here awhile, and meet only in secret. Now that I know how much you long to leave, I shall do all that is in my power to persuade Pennyroyal that he must set you free.”

Wren could feel herself blushing. How could anyone imagine that she was in love with Theo Ngoni, of all people? She glanced at him and was annoyed to see that he looked embarrassed too, as if the very idea that he might be in love with Wren were ridiculous.

“Patience, my lovebirds,” the mayoress said, and kissed each of them upon the forehead. She smiled, and opened her bedroom door. “Oh, by the way,” she murmured, “not a word to anyone about poor Mr. Plovery. I will not allow this terrible event to upset our MoonFest celebrations…”

Chapter 23 Bright, Brighter, Brighton

Moonfest! A buzz of expectation rose from the raft city as the sun came up. Actors and artists who usually never stirred before noon leaped from their beds at gull squawk and began putting the finishing touches on decorations and carnival floats, while shopkeepers rolled up their shutters with a gleeful air, dreaming of record takings. Brighton was not a religious city; most of its people thought that religion was at best a fairy tale, at worst a con. To them, the rising of the first full moon of autumn, which was a solemn, sacred night in other cities, meant only one thing: It was party time!

Actually, it was almost always party time aboard Brighton. When Wren arrived, the Estival Festival, a six-week celebration of the gods of summer, had been petering out in a slew of firework parties and parades. Since then there had been the Large Hat Festival, the Cheese Sculpture Biennale, the Festival of Unattended Plays, Poskitt Week, and Mime-Baiting Day (when Brightonians were allowed to get back at the city’s swarms of irritating street performers). But MoonFest still had a special place in the hearts and wallets of Brightonians, and the growing cluster of towns on shore seemed to promise a bumper harvest of visitors. Even the editor of the Palimpsest, who would usually have been delighted to print the rumors he’d been hearing about a mysterious death on Cloud 9 during the night, relegated the story to a small column on page 4 and filled his front page with Festival news instead.

“Everybody who is anybody is on their way to Brighton!” said Mrs. Pennyroyal. “What better place to celebrate Moon Festival than in this white city, adrift on an azure sea?”

Of course, it wasn’t really a white city on an azure sea at all; that was just how it looked from the observation platforms of Cloud 9. Down at deck level, Brighton was an off-white city, its rooftops streaked with gull droppings, its streets sticky with abandoned snacks, adrift on a slick of its own litter and sewage. But the weather was perfect: a soft onshore breeze to waft the air taxis across to Benghazi and Kom Ombo and cool their passengers on the journey back; the hot sun baking the metal pavements and releasing complex odors from the puddles of grease and vomit that last night’s revelers had left behind. As the day wore on, the city settled lower in the water, weighed down by the crowds of visitors who filled the streets and artificial beaches, and splashed and shrieked along the fringes of the Sea Pool. By midafternoon all the rubbish bins were overflowing, and the gulls fought one another for scavenged scraps of meat and pastry, swooping low over the heads of the long queues that had formed beneath the Pharos Wheel and outside the entrance to the Brighton Aquarium.

Tom Natsworthy, waiting in the line of holidaymakers, ducked as another screaming gull dived past. He had been afraid of large birds ever since he’d fought with the Green Storm’s flying Stalkers at Rogue’s Roost. But these greedy gulls were really the least of his worries. He felt sure that the aquarium’s uniformed attendants would be able to tell just by looking at him that he had come aboard Brighton only an hour before, climbing out of a manhole that the Screw Worm had bored through the city’s hull. He expected at any moment to be dragged out of the queue and denounced as an intruder and a stowaway.

The Screw Worm had caught up with Brighton that morning. Tom had approached slowly, frightened of triggering whatever Old Tech Brighton had used to catch the Lost Boys, but it seemed that the city had turned its sensors off now that its fishing trip was over. Even so, he and Hester had barely dared to breathe as the magnetic clamps engaged and the hull drill chewed noisily through the resort’s deck plates.

Tom had wanted to use the crab-cams to search for signs of Wren, but Hester disagreed. “We’re not Lost Boys,” she pointed out. “It’d take all sorts of skills we haven’t got to steer one of those things through Brighton’s plumbing. It could be weeks before we sighted Wren. We’ll go up ourselves. We ought to be able to find some sign of all those limpets they fished aboard.”

Hester was right. When they emerged from the Worm into a deserted alleyway behind Brighton’s engine district, almost the first thing they saw was a poster pasted to an exhaust duct. It showed a limpet surrounded by savage boys, beneath the words:

“Captives!” said Tom. “Wren might be there! That’s where we’ve got to go…”

Hester, a slower reader than her husband, was still halfway through the text. “What’s an aquarium?”

“A place for fish. A sort of zoo, or museum.”

Hester nodded. “Museums are your department. You go and have a look. I want to go and nose round the air harbor. I might hear something about Wren there, and I want to see if I can find us a ship; I don’t fancy going all the way home in that stinking old limpet.”

“We shouldn’t split up,” said Tom.

“It’s only for a while,” said Hester. “It’ll be quicker.” It was just an excuse, of course. The truth was that all the time she’d spent cooped up with Tom beneath the waves had made her irritable. She wanted to be alone for a while, to breathe and look around this city, without having to listen to him always worrying about Wren. She kissed him quickly and said, “I’ll meet you in an hour.”

“Back at the Worm?”

Hester shook her head. The engine district was getting busy as a new shift clocked on; passersby might notice them sneaking down their secret manhole. She pointed to another ad, half obscured by the aquarium poster, for a coffee shop in the Old Steine called the Pink Café.

“There…”

Luckily, the aquarium’s attendants were only interested in selling tickets and chatting to each other about their plans for the evening. They were not on the lookout for intruders, and even if they had been, there was nothing to distinguish Tom from the other visitors. He was just a youngish, tousled, slightly balding man, perhaps a scholar from the middle tiers of Kom Ombo, and if his clothes were rather rumpled and old-fashioned and he smelled faintly of mildew and brine, well, there was no rule against that. The girl at the turnstile barely glanced at him as she took his money and waved him through.

Inside the aquarium, bored-looking fish drifted in big, dim tanks, and there was such a smell of rust and salt water that Tom could almost have imagined he was back in Grimsby. But nobody was looking at the fish, or the sea horses, or the mangy sea lions. Everyone was heading to the central hall, following the brightly colored signs to the parasite-pirate exhibit.

Tom went with them, trying not to look too eager, reminding himself that Wren would probably not be here. He shuffled along among the other visitors, peering at a display of crab-cams and then at a limpet called Spider Baby that stood on a dais in the center of the hall. Whoever had put it there had given it a dramatic pose; it was rearing back on its four hind legs and waving its front feet in the air as if it were about to lash out at the visitors. Families posed in front of it to have their photographs taken, the children making scared faces, or sticking out their tongues at the looming machine.

Beyond the limpet, in a straw-lined cage, captive Lost Boys squatted and stared at the passing crowds. Sometimes one would fling himself at the bars, shouting abuse, and the visitors would scuttle away, frightened and delighted, while one of the burly attendants poked the savage with an electric prod. Tom felt sorry for the Lost Boys, and almost relieved that Wren was not among them.

Nearby, a pretty young woman in aquarium livery was pointing out details to a group of children. Tom waited until she had finished, then approached her. “Excuse me,” he asked, “could you tell me how many limpets were taken?”

The pretty young woman was really very pretty. Her smile almost dazzled Tom. “Nineteen in total, sir,” she said, “and three destroyed at sea.”

“And was one of them called the Autolycus?”

The smile faded. Flustered, the woman riffled through her exhibition notes. Nobody had ever asked her about a particular limpet before. “Let me see…” she muttered. “I believe… Oh, yes! The Autolycus was one of the first limpets we caught, way over in the western seas, far from the parasite lair.” Her smile returned. “She must have been swimming off on a burgling mission when we snapped her up…”

“And the crew?”

The young woman was still smiling, but her eyes were troubled; she was starting to wonder if Tom was some kind of weirdo. “You’d have to ask Mr. Shkin, sir. Mr. Nabisco Shkin. All the captives are property of the Shkin Corporation.”

“And what’s the Shkin Corporation?” asked Hester, who had just been told the same thing by a secondhand balloon salesman at the air harbor.

“Slaves,” said the man, spitting a black jet of tobacco juice onto the deck plate at his feet and winking at her. “All them boys and girls they fished up are all slaves now, and serves them right, I say.”

A slave, thought Hester as she strode away through the increasingly busy streets. The shadows of airships and balloon taxis slid over her as they poured into the air harbor to offload more cackling crowds of tourists. A slave. Hester shouldered a group of language students off the pavement. How was she going to break this to Tom? That his beloved little girl was cooped up in a slave hold somewhere, or enduring who knew what at the hands of cruel owners…

To make matters worse, she had learned that her plan of buying an airship would not work. Prices had rocketed since she’d last been aboard a city, and the gold that she had taken from Grimsby wouldn’t buy so much as a spare engine pod at the secondhand airship yards.

She spent some of it at a stall behind the harbor instead, buying a pair of jet-black sunglasses to hide her missing eye and a headdress of silver discs that more or less concealed the scar on her forehead. She bought a new veil too, and an ankle-length black coat with many buttons to replace the shabby thing she’d worn all the way from Anchorage. Walking on, she found her mood improving. She liked this city. She liked the sunshine and the crowds, the jangle of slot machines, the tatty facades of the hotels. She liked being among people who did not know her and could not guess what lay beneath her veil. She liked the handsome young aviators who smiled at her as she strode past, their eyes drawn to this mysterious woman with her hidden face and long, lean body. And—although she didn’t quite admit it to herself—she liked life without Wren. She was almost glad that the girl had got herself kidnapped.

She stopped to study a street plan and then crossed a footbridge over the Sea Pool and headed aft to the Old Steine. There was no sign of Tom at the tables outside the Pink Café. Hester considered having a coffee while she waited for him, then decided that she couldn’t afford one at Brighton prices. She wandered around the long curve of the Steine instead, looking at the shop fronts, until she came to one that stopped her short.

It was a shabby building that had once been a theater. A cheery pink sign above its door proclaimed THE NIMROD PENNYROYAL EXPERIENCE, and posters announced: RELIVE MAYOR PENNYROYAL’S ADVENTURES ON FIVE CONTINENTS AND A THOUSAND CITIES] EDUCATIONAL AND ENTERTAINING! In the window a waxwork of Pennyroyal, chained to the floor of a cardboard dungeon, raised and lowered its head, peering quizzically at a crescent-shaped blade that swung to and fro above it on a pendulum.

Mayor Pennyroyal? Hester had often wondered what had become of the fake explorer after he shot Tom and stole the Jenny Haniver. She had assumed that the gods would have punished him by now for all his lies and tricks; they’d had sixteen years to think of a suitable comeuppance, after all. Instead, they seemed to have rewarded him. Pennyroyal was alive. And Pennyroyal knew what she had done. She had told him herself, in the Aakiuqs’ smashed-up kitchen, while she was getting ready to murder Masgard and his Huntsmen.

She handed a bronze coin to the man at the ticket booth and went inside.

It seemed as though Brighton’s other visitors had found better ways of educating and entertaining themselves, for the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience was almost deserted. There was a dusty museum smell, and another smell, tantalizing and out of place, that was even more familiar. Hester wandered past unimpressive artifacts in glass cases, past a reconstruction of an Ancient landfill site that Pennyroyal had once excavated. Paintings and waxwork dioramas showed Pennyroyal battling a bear, escaping from air pirates, and almost being sacrificed by a cult of Old Tech-worshipping female warriors—all scenes from Pennyroyal’s bestselling books, and all total fibs. Only one of the paintings meant anything to Hester. It showed Pennyroyal, sword in hand, fighting off a horde of savage Huntsmen, while at his side a beautiful young woman expired prettily. It was only after she had stared at the picture for a minute or more that Hester noticed the martyred girl wore an eye patch and had a fetching little scar on her cheek.

“Gods!” she said aloud. “Is that bimbo supposed to be me?”

Her voice sounded loud in the empty, echoey rooms. As it faded, Hester heard footsteps, and the man from the kiosk put his head round the door and asked, “Everything all right, madam?”

Hester nodded, too angry to speak.

“Magnificent painting, eh?” the curator said. He was a friendly man, middle-aged, with a few strands of sandy hair combed carefully across his bald head. He came and stood next to Hester and beamed proudly at the picture. “It’s inspired by the closing chapters of Predator’s Gold, in which His Worship does battle with the Huntsmen of Arkangel.”

“Who’s the girl?” asked Hester.

“You haven’t read Predator’s Gold?” asked the man, surprised. “That is Hester Shaw, the aviatrix who sells Anchorage to the Huntsmen. She redeems herself, the poor creature, by dying at Pennyroyal’s side, cut down by the chief of the Huntsmen, Piotr Masgard.”

Hester turned away quickly, climbing a dusty metal staircase toward the upper floor of the museum, barely seeing the displays she passed, her head filled with panicky, racing thoughts. Everything was ruined! Pennyroyal didn’t just know what she’d done, he’d written a book about it! There were paintings! Even if Pennyroyal had twisted the facts, the truth was still there, in black and white on the pages of his book. Hester Shaw had sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen. And when Tom found out…

Would he still love her if he knew what she was really like?

She reached the top of the stairs. The familiar smell was stronger up here, and Hester remembered suddenly what it was: a mixture of aviation fuel and lifting gas. She looked up.

The whole upper story was a single glass-roofed room, and in its center, on metal stanchions, sat an airship. It was old and tattered, and the name painted along its flank was The Arctic Roll, but Hester would have known that clinker-built gondola and those much-repaired Jeunet-Carot engine pods anywhere. She had lived in those narrow cabins for two years, and flown halfway around the world beneath that old red gasbag. It was the Jenny Haniver.

“Ugly old tub, ain’t she?”

Hester had not realized that the curator had followed her up the stairs, but here he was, standing just behind her and smiling amiably. “Hester Shaw bequeathed her to Professor Pennyroyal with her dying breath, and he flew her home to Brighton through polar storms and swarms of air pirates.”

A wooden walkway had been built beside the gondola. Half listening to the curator, Hester climbed the steps and peered in through the dusty windows, remembering the ship’s real history. There was the stern cabin, with the narrow bunk where she used to sleep with Tom. There was the pilot’s seat where she had spent so many long watches. There, on the scuffed planking of the flight-deck floor, Wren had been conceived…

She sniffed the air. “She smells ready to fly…”

“Yes indeed, madam. Aviatrix, are you?”

Hester looked round at him with a start, wondering if he had guessed who she was, but he was just being friendly. “Yes,” she said, and then, because he looked as if he wanted to know more, “I’m Captain Valentine of the Freya.”

“Ah!” said the curator, satisfied, and nodded to the Jenny again. “She’ll be leading the Flyby of Historic Ships tomorrow, Ms. Valentine.”

Hester touched the cool underside of an engine pod and imagined it roaring into life. She was starting to recover from her shock. After all, Tom knew that Pennyroyal was a liar. Why would he believe anything the old fraud said about her? Beneath her veil, she smiled her crooked smile.

“It should be a very fine display,” the curator was saying, smiling up at her. “There’s going to be a reenactment of one of Professor Pennyroyal’s most desperate adventures: a battle between The Arctic Roll and a bunch of old air tugs dressed up as pirate ships. Real rockets and everything…”

Hester looked around the big room. “How do you get her out?”

“Eh?” said the curator. “Oh, the roof opens. Opens right up, like a docking hangar. The mayor will just fly her out.”

Hester nodded, and checked the time by her pocket watch. She had forgotten her meeting with Tom, and she was already twenty minutes late. She went back downstairs, with the curator hurrying behind her. In the souvenir shop near the exit she helped herself to a copy of Predator’s Gold and flipped a couple of coins at him to pay for it.

“If I might make so bold, Ms. Valentine,” said the curator, rummaging in his cashbox for change, “I was wondering whether you might care to accompany me to the display tomorrow, and perhaps to dinner afterward?”

But when he looked up, the mysterious aviatrix was gone and the exit door was swinging softly shut.

Hester walked briskly across the Old Steine toward the café, stuffing Pennyroyal’s book into her pocket. The curator’s foolish, flattering request made her feel attractive and mysterious again, and the panic she had felt earlier had completely vanished. She knew now that everything would be all right. She would show Tom the book, and they would laugh together at all Pennyroyal’s lies about her. Then she would spring Wren from the slave pens, and they would reclaim the Jenny Haniver and fly away together.

The tables outside the café were busy, but there was still no Tom. She turned around, looking for him, annoyed. It was not like Tom to be late, and she wanted to tell him her plans.

“Hester?” asked one of the slave girls from the café, approaching with a folded piece of paper in her hand. “You are Hester, ain’t you? The gentleman said you’d be coming. He asked me to give you this.”

The paper was a handbill advertising the aquarium. On the back, in his neat handwriting, Tom had penciled, Dearest Het, I will see you back at the SW. Wren has been taken as a slave; I am going to a place called the Pepperpot to see about buying her back.

Chapter 24 The Requiem Vortex

The air fleet had made good time since leaving Shan Guo. They had crossed the sequined turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and were sweeping westward now over the hills of Jabal Hammar. The four destroyers flew in line astern, and around them the air throbbed and tore with the roar of engine pods as an escort of fighter airships—Murasaki Fox Spirits and Zhang Chen Hawkmoths—scoured the sky for townie privateers.

Through a slit in the armored gondola of the Stalker Fang’s flagship, the Requiem Vortex, Oenone Zero peered toward the distant ground. Nothing moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of passing towns. Jagged bite marks pitted the hillsides where mining towns had scooped out gutfuls of ore-bearing rock.

When she’d first heard that she was to go with her mistress on this mysterious expedition, Oenone had felt glad. Isolated in the sky aboard the Stalker’s flagship, surely she would find a chance to use her weapon? But the world she had seen on the way, scarred and ruined by Municipal Darwinism, made her wonder afresh if she really had the right. She hated the war, but she hated Traction Cities too. By killing Fang, might she not be handing victory to them? If the Green Storm collapsed, the whole earth might soon look like those wrecked rubble heaps below her. She did not want that on her conscience.

“Still finding reasons not to do what you came here for, Oenone,” she told herself in the disappointed tone her mother had used when Oenone was a child and shirked her schoolwork. “What a coward you are!”

She looked ahead, into a brownish haze that she knew was made partly from the exhaust smoke of cities. Beyond it somewhere lay the Middle Sea, not far off now. Oenone tried to crush her doubts. A battle was coming, and she knew enough about battles to feel sure that there would be moments of such chaos and confusion that she would be able to unleash her device upon the Stalker Fang without anyone understanding what she had done.

She turned from the gun slit and climbed up into the thundering passageways inside the envelope. As she neared the officers’ mess, she could hear the voices of some of her comrades, and she paused at the open door, unnoticed, listening.

“She says we are to target only Brighton!” Lieutenant Zhao, the gunnery officer, was saying, pitching her voice low for fear the Stalker Fang might hear. “Why Brighton? I’ve read the intelligence reports. Brighton is the least of cities, the merest pleasure raft.”

“She has spies of her own,” said Navigator Cheung, staring into his empty cup as though he could divine the Stalker’s plans from the tea leaves there. “She has deep-cover agents who report to nobody but her.”

“Yes, but why would she have placed one aboard Brighton?”

“Who knows? There must be something important about the place.”

“Such as?” Zhao shook her head. “There are fat predator towns lurking in these hills below us. Why must I save my rockets for Brighton when I could be blowing the tracks off predator towns?”

“It is not for us to question her orders, Zhao.”

That came from the expedition’s second-in-command, General Naga. Oenone saw the junior officers stiffen and bow their heads at the sound of his voice. Naga had been with the Green Storm since its foundation. There was a famous photograph of him, young and handsome, raising their thunderbolt banner over the wreck of Traktiongrad; Oenone had had a poster of it on her bedroom wall when she was a girl. But Naga was not young anymore, and not handsome either: His hair was gray, his long ocher face seamed and scarred. He was thirty-five, an old man by the standards of the Green Storm military. He had lost an arm at Xanne-Sandansky and the use of his legs at the air siege of Omsk, and he could walk and fight only because the Resurrection Corps had built him a powered metal exoskeleton.

“I don’t like this mission,” he admitted, the segments of his mechanical armor scraping as he leaned across the table. “Brighton is no threat to us, and I hear it’s spent the summer hammering those parasite brigands up in the North Atlantic. I was a cadet at Rogues’ Roost when they attacked our air base there. I lost good friends to those devils, and I’m glad Brighton’s sorted them out. But orders are orders, and orders from the Fire Flower…”

He stopped suddenly, sensing Oenone standing in the doorway. “Surgeon-Mechanic,” he said gruffly, turning toward her. His mechanical hand clamped on his sword hilt; his exoskeleton clanked and hissed, making a clumsy half bow. Behind him, Oenone saw fear on the faces of the junior officers as they recognized her. She knew what they were thinking. How long has she been there? How much did she hear? Will she tell the Stalker? Even Naga was afraid of her.

“Please, forgive me,” she said, bowing formally to the general and again to the officers at the table. She went into the mess, poured a glass of jasmine tea that she did not want, and drank it quickly, in silence. Everyone’s eyes lingered on her. They were almost as wary of her as they were of the Stalker Fang herself, and she felt glad of that, because it proved that they did not suspect her real motives.

But someone aboard the Requiem Vortex suspected her. As she left the mess and climbed the companion ladders to her cabin high among the reinforced gas cells, Grike watched from the shadows, and waited patiently for her to make her move.

Chapter 25 The Pepperpot

Afternoon was turning into evening as Tom walked toward the Pepperpot through streets filled with carnival. A procession was moving slowly along Ocean Boulevard, with pretty girls and boys dressed up as mermaids cavorting on electric floats, giant dancing puppets of the sea gods, paper lanterns shaped like fish and serpents twirling on long poles, and drag queens in enormous feathery hats showering down confetti from low-flying cargo balloons. Through gaps between the white buildings, Tom kept glimpsing the sea, and once, with a scream of engines, a patrol of those unlikely flying machines came hurtling low over the rooftops. Tom clapped his hands over his ears and turned to watch them pass. He would have been thrilled by them when he was younger, but now they just reminded him of how dangerous the world was, and how much it had altered while he’d been away. The more he saw of it, the more he longed to find Wren and return to the peace of Vineland.

He pushed on through the crowds, heading for the address that the girl at the aquarium had given him. He knew that Hester would be cross with him later for going without her, but he had been far too anxious to wait any longer for her at the Pink Café. Besides, he kept remembering what she had done to Gargle, and it made him feel uneasy about how she might react when she learned Wren’s fate. He wanted to talk calmly to this Shkin fellow. He might turn out to be a reasonable man who would give Wren back to her parents when he learned the truth. If not, Tom would arrange to buy her back. Either way, there should be no need for violence.

When he saw the Pepperpot, he felt even more optimistic. Most slavers’ dens were dingy places, tucked away on unmentionable tiers of savage salvage towns, not elegant white towers. Outside the glass front door, a guard in smart black livery politely stopped him and ran a metal detector over him before letting him into a reception area as calm and tasteful as a hotel lobby. There were soft chairs, and hard metallic-green potted plants, and a plaque on the wall that read THE SHKIN CORPORATION, and underneath, in smaller letters, AN INVESTOR IN PEOPLE. The only real clue to what sort of place it was were the angry, muffled shouts and clanging sounds that came up faintly through the sea-grass carpet.

“I’m sorry about the noise,” said a well-dressed woman sitting behind a black desk. “It is those filthy Lost Boys. They were very meek when we first brought them aboard, but they are growing more troublesome and contumelious by the day. Never mind. The autumn auctions begin tomorrow, so we shall soon be rid of them.”

“Then you have not sold them yet?” cried Tom. “I’m so glad. I’m looking for my daughter. Wren Natsworthy. She was with the Lost Boys, and I think you might have taken her by mistake…”

The woman had penciled-on eyebrows as thin as wire, and she raised them both in surprise. “One moment, please,” she said, and leaned across her desk to whisper into a brass-and-Bakelite intercom that Tom thought very futuristic. The intercom whispered back, and after a moment the woman looked up at Tom and smiled and said, “Mr. Shkin will see you in person. You may go up.”

Tom moved toward the spiral staircase that led up through the ceiling, but the woman pressed a button on her desk, and a narrow door slid open in the wall. Tom realized that it was a lift. It looked nothing like the huge public elevators he remembered from his boyhood in London; it was just a posh cupboard, paneled in mother-of-pearl, but he tried not to look too surprised, and stepped inside. The door slid shut. He felt his stomach lurch. When the door opened again, he was in a quiet, luxurious office where a man was rising to meet him from behind another black steel desk.

“Mr. Shkin?” asked Tom, while behind him the door closed softly and the lift went purring down.

Nabisco Shkin bowed low and extended a gray-gloved hand. “My dear Mr. Natsworthy,” he said softly. “Miss Weems tells me you are interested in one of our slaves. The girl named Wren.”

It made Tom angry to hear Wren called a slave so calmly, but he controlled himself and shook Shkin’s hand. He said,

“Wren is my daughter. She was kidnapped by one of the Lost Boys. I’ve come to get her back.”

“Indeed?” Shkin nodded, watching Tom carefully. “Unfortunately I had no idea of the girl’s history. She has already been sold.”

“Sold?” cried Tom. “Where is she? Is she still aboard Brighton?”

“I shall have to check my files. We have processed so many slaves this month…”

The elevator door opened again, and the room began to fill with men, armed guards in black livery. Tom, taken by surprise, barely realized what was happening before one of the men slammed the handle of a truncheon into his side and two more caught him as he doubled over, breathless and choking.

Nabisco Shkin moved around the room, pulling down canvas blinds to hide the long windows. “A lot of pleasure craft in the sky today,” he said conversationally. “Wouldn’t want any happy holidaymakers peeking in on us, would we?” The room grew shadowy. He returned to his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Monica, send the boy here. Let’s find out if this wretch is really who he claims to be.”

Tom’s captors twisted his arms painfully behind him and held him tight, but they need not have bothered, for he was in no state to stand, let alone try to overpower four strong guards. He felt his heart flutter and thump, pain twisting through his side. Shkin came closer, pulled up Tom’s sleeve with a look of faint distaste, and removed his wedding bracelet.

“That’s my property!” Tom gasped. “Give it back!”

Shkin tossed the bracelet up in the air and caught it again. “You don’t have property anymore’ he said. “You are property unless you have papers to prove that you are a free man. But if you are who you say you are, you won’t.” He held the bracelet up and squinted at it. “HS and TN,” he read. “How touching…”

The lift bell rang again and another of Shkin’s black-clad guards stepped out. This one was just a boy, dressed up like the rest in a black uniform and a peaked black cap with a silver SHKIN logo on the front.

“Well, Fishcake?” Shkin asked him. “Do you recognize our guest?”

The boy stared at Tom. “That’s him, all right, Mr. Shkin,” he said. “I saw him on the screens when we was at Anchorage. That’s Wren’s dad.”

“How do you… ?” Tom started to ask, and then realized suddenly who this boy must be. Fishcake. That was the lad Uncle had talked about, the newbie who had kidnapped Wren! Tom knew he should feel angry with him, but he didn’t. He just felt more angry than ever with Shkin, because he could see the logo branded on the back of the boy’s thin hand. What sort of a man would do that to a child? What sort of a city would let a man like that grow rich and prosperous? He said, “Fishcake, please, is Wren all right? Was she hurt at all? Do you know who bought her?”

Fishcake was about to reply, but Shkin said, “Don’t answer him, boy.” One of the guards hit Tom again, knocking the air out of his lungs in a loud, wordless woof.

“Fishcake has learned obedience,” said Shkin. “He knows that if he disobeys me, I shall put him back in the holding cells with his friends, and they will rip him to pieces for betraying Grimsby.” He tore open Tom’s waistcoat, pulled up his shirt, and traced with one gray-gloved finger the scars that had been left by Windolene Pye’s amateur surgery. There was something like a smile on his face.

“The mayor of this city is a very irritating man, Mr. Natsworthy,” he said. “I believe that you may be able to help me expose him as a fraud and a liar. But first your daughter will help me to retrieve something he has stolen from me. Who knows—if you cooperate, I might let you both go free.” As he turned to his desk, he tossed the bracelet up into the air and caught it again. Leaning down to the brass mouthpiece of the intercom, he said, “Miss Weems, arrange a cell on the midlevels for Mr. Natsworthy, and have a bug ready to take me to the Old Steine at seven thirty. I think I shall be attending His Worship’s ball after all.”

Hester had already looked in through the front door of the pretty little tower once without seeing any sign of Tom. She had looked for him everywhere else that she could think of, hoping that he might have gone back to the Screw Worm before attempting to talk to the slavers, or circled back to the Pink Café. Now she was back outside the Pepperpot, feeling angry and faintly scared. She was sure Tom was in there, and that something bad had happened to him. The blinds had been drawn across the windows on one of the upper stories, and there was a bunch of black-overalled guards in the reception area, chatting to the snooty-looking woman there. Hester wondered if she should barge in and confront them, but she did not want to walk into the same trap as Tom.

The man outside saw her peering in again and stared, so she walked quickly past as if she were just a curious tourist and went into a coffee shop on the far side of the square, where she drank iced coffee through a straw and thought. This Shkin character must have decided to take Tom prisoner for some reason. Perhaps he thought Tom was connected with the Lost Boys. Well, that was not so big a problem. She would go and rescue him, just as Tom had come to rescue her when she had been a prisoner at Rogues’ Roost.

But how to get inside that tower? The guard at the door was already wary of her, and with all these carnival crowds about she could not just shoot her way in. Oh, poor Tom! Why had he come here alone? He should have known that he couldn’t cope on his own with people like this Nabisco Shkin.

She paid for her iced coffee and asked the waiter, “Is that Shkin’s place? The tower? It looks too small to hold many slaves.”

“It’s got hidden depths,” the waiter replied, glancing happily at the tip she put down on the table. “The cells and stuff are down below. That’s where they’re keeping all those horrible pirates.”

Hester thought again of Rogues’ Roost, and of how she had led Tom to safety through the confusion of a Lost Boy raid. Then she left the café, walking quickly, glancing down once to make sure that the gun in her belt didn’t spoil the cut of her new coat.

Chapter 26 Waiting for the moon

As the sun sank red and fat into the haze above Africa, the breeze stiffened. Brighton began to rock gently on the long, white-capped, shoreward-rolling combers. Undaunted by the heaving pavements, parades of children trooped round Ocean Boulevard with bright banners and huge moon-shaped paper lanterns, and a thousand self-styled artists held private viewings in one another’s houses.

“Keeps ’em busy, I suppose,” said Nimrod Pennyroyal, gazing down philosophically at it all from one of Cloud 9’s many observation platforms. “There are so many tenth-rate painters and performers on this city, we need a good festival every week or two to make them feel their silly lives are worthwhile.” Drifts of bubbles swirled past him, vomited into the evening sky by an art installation in Queen’s Park. The breeze brought carnival noises gusting up too: guitars and cacophoniums jangling in the streets of the historic Muesli Belt, premature fireworks banging and shrieking on the seafronts.

On the blue-green evening lawns of the Pavilion gardens, between the shadows of the cypress groves, the guests were starting to gather. All the men wore formal robes, and the women looked wonderful in ball gowns of moonlight silver and midnight blue. Paper lanterns had been strung along all the walks and between the pillars of the bandstand, where some musicians were tuning up. The Flying Ferrets had arrived, looking terribly dashing in their fleece-lined flying suits and white silk scarves, talking loudly about “archie” and “bandits” and “crates” being “ditched in the briny.” Orla Twombley, her hair lacquered into backswept wings, hung on Pennyroyal’s arm.

Drinks and snacks were being served before the dancing began, and Wren was one of the people doing the serving. She felt pretty and conspicuous in her MoonFest costume— baggy trousers and a long tunic made from some floaty, silvery fabric that she could not name—but the guests seemed not to notice her at all; they were interested only in the tray she carried. As she wove her way through the gathering crowds, hands reached out without a thank-you or a by-your-leave to snatch at her cargo of drinks and canapés.

Wren didn’t mind. She was still tired and uneasy after the events of the night before. All day there had been an odd atmosphere in the Pavilion, with militiamen coming and going and security being tightened up. The other slave girls kept coming to ask Wren if she had really seen the body, and had there been ever so much blood? To make matters worse,

Mrs. Pennyroyal smiled knowingly at Wren every time she saw her, and kept finding excuses to send her into rooms where Theo Ngoni was, or Theo into rooms where Wren was, as if she hoped someone would write an opera about them one day and there would be a part for a soprano of a certain age as Boo-Boo Pennyroyal, the thoughtful mistress who made their love possible.

Strangely, all this kindness made Wren like Boo-Boo less: It was one thing to keep slaves, but quite another to try to arrange their love affairs. She felt that the mayoress was pairing her and Theo off like a couple of prize poodles.

So she was glad to be invisible for a while, to look and listen. And everywhere she looked, she saw someone she recognized from the society pages of the Palimpsest. There were Brighton’s leading painters, Robertson Gloom and Ariane Arai. There was the gorgeous Davina Twisty, fresh from her triumph in Hearts Akimbo at the Marlborough Theatre. That man in the hat must be the sculptor Gormless, whose ridiculous artworks clogged the city’s public spaces like barbed-wire entanglements. And wasn’t that the great P. P. Bellman, author of atheistic pop-up books for the trendy toddler? Wren wondered how they would all feel if they knew that a man had been murdered, right here on Cloud 9, less than twenty-four hours ago.

She met Cynthia and asked her softly, “Is there any news?”

“News?” echoed Cynthia, as bright and brainless as sunshine.

“About poor Mr. Plovery? Have they found out who did it yet?”

“Oh!” Cynthia’s golden ringlets jiggled as she shook her head. “No. And Mrs. Pennyroyal says we ain’t to talk about it. But what’s all this I hear about you and Theo?”

“It’s nothing. Just Boo-Boo’s imagination.”

“You’re blushing, Wren! I knew you fancied him! I saw you talking to him that day at the pool, remember?”

Wren left Cynthia giggling and pressed on through the crowd, asking, “Would you care for a drink, sir? A canapé, madame?” and gathering up empty glasses and fragments of still emptier conversations.

“Just look what La Twisty is wearing!”

“You simply must meet Gloom, he’s 50 amusing!”

“Have you read Bellman’s latest? Quite brilliant! Some of the finest literature of our age is being written for the under-fives…”

Dusk deepened. Davina Twisty was persuading some friends and admirers to venture with her into Cloud 9’s insanely complicated box-hedge maze. The band played “Golden Echoes” and “The Lunar Lullaby.” Soon the moon would rise, and everyone would watch the fireworks before retiring to the Pavilion for dancing and more food. Wren, already exhausted, paused in a quiet part of the gardens near the deck plate’s edge. It felt nice to be alone at last. She looked across the sea at the armored cities and thought how melancholy they looked, crouching there upon the dunes like the temples of a vanished race.

A hand crept onto her shoulder like a gray silk spider. Turning, she looked into the expressionless face of Nabisco Shkin.

“Enjoying the view, my dear?” he asked. “I hope none of His Worship’s other guests has noticed you loafing here. The Shkin Corporation has a reputation as a purveyor of only the most hardworking slaves.”

Wren pulled away from him and tried to return to the light and laughter of the party but Shkin barred her way. What did he want with her? He must have been stalking her through the busy gardens, waiting for a moment when he could catch her alone. She felt cold and frightened. Raising her empty tray, she held it in front of her like a shield, but Shkin only laughed. She didn’t like his laugh. She’d preferred it when he was silent and icy.

“Why would I harm you, child?” he asked. “I just want you to do a job for me, the simplest and smallest of jobs. Do you know where your new master keeps his private safe?”

Wren nodded.

“Good girl.” Shkin held up a neat square of paper with a number written on it. “This is the combination. I’d like you to fetch me the Tin Book. I sent a friend for it yesterday, but I hear he met with an accident.”

Wren lowered her tray, thinking of poor Mr. Plovery.

“Don’t look so glum!” Shkin told her. “You’ve stolen it before. Young Fishcake told me all about it.”

“I won’t do it!” Wren said. “You can’t make me!”

“Your poor father,” said Shkin. He twirled the square of paper back into an inner pocket of his graphite-colored evening robe and shrugged faintly. “What a pity, after he came all this way to rescue you!”

Wren couldn’t imagine what he meant—not until he reached into another pocket and brought out a bracelet, which he laid on the tray between them. By the light of lanterns in the nearby trees Wren recognized Dad’s wedding bracelet. She had known it all her life, that loop of red gold with the letters HS and TN entwined. But what was it doing on Cloud 9?

“It’s a trick!” she said. “Fishcake must have described this to you, and you had a replica made…”

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that your dear daddy has come to Brighton to fetch you home?” asked Shkin. “He is a guest of the Shkin Corporation. If you fail in the task I have set you, he’ll die. Rather slowly. So be a good girl and run up to Pennyroyal’s office.”

The gardens were falling quiet. Some of the guests were organizing a search party to look for Davina Twisty, who was lost in the maze. The others shushed them. Moonrise was only a few moments away. The thought of Dad so near made Wren start to cry. How had he come here? How had Shkin found him? And where was Mum? She reached for the bracelet, but Shkin’s conjuror’s hands whisked it away and set the square of paper in its place.

“Do this little thing for me,” he soothed, “and you will be reunited. I’ll send you both home to Vineland in one of my own ships.”

Wren didn’t believe that, but she believed the rest. Dad was in Shkin’s power. If she didn’t do as Shkin asked, he’d be killed. And the worst of it was, it was all her fault: If she hadn’t taken that book in the first place, he would still be safe in Anchorage. So if stealing the book again was the only way to keep him safe a little longer, that was what she would have to do.

“But why me?” she asked. “You must know all sorts of people better at breaking into safes than me…”

“You should have more faith in yourself’ said Shkin. “You are an accomplished burglar, from what I’ve heard. Besides, if you are caught, the crime cannot be connected to me. You were the one who brought the Tin Book here; Pennyroyal will believe that you were simply trying to retrieve it for yourself.”

Wren picked up the paper. The darkness was growing deeper as her fellow slaves moved between the trees, snuffing out the lanterns, but the white square seemed to shine in her hand with a light of its own.

“All right,” she said, her voice shrunk down to a whisper; then, as she put down the tray, “What is it? I ought to know. What is this Tin Book, and why does everybody want it?”

“Not your business,” said Shkin, looking past her toward the horizon. “I can make a profit from it. What more reason do I need? Now go; you have work to do.”

Wren went, running away between the trees as the sacred moon peeked over the horizon. For a few seconds, perfect silence settled over Brighton, for according to the old tradition, wishes made at moonrise on this sacred night were often granted by the Moon Goddess. Pennyroyal’s guests were far too sophisticated to believe such fairy tales, of course, but they bowed their heads regardless, some with shrugs and smiles to show that they were just being ironic but were moved in spite of themselves, remembering the magical MoonFests of their childhood. They wished for love and happiness and yet more wealth, while down in the city Brighton’s artists wished for fame, and her actors for long runs in successful plays, and on the underdecks their slaves and indentured laborers wished for their freedom. And then the silence was ended by a single firework, then another, then a great broadside of rockets and bangers and a clamoring of gongs and bells and kitchen pans loud enough that the goddess herself might hear it as she strolled among her porcelain gardens.

Even if the Green Storm fleet had not already picked up the signal of Brighton’s wireless beacon, they would have been able to home in on the fireworks leaping into the sky above the raft resort. Feathering their steering vanes, the warships swung toward their target, spreading out across the sky while their crews prepared rocket projectors and machine cannon, Tumbler bombs and flocks of raptors, and their fighter escorts, went prowling ahead.

In the belly of the Requiem Vortex, Grike checked on Oenone Zero and found her in her cabin, trying on a steel helmet that made her look even younger and less soldierly than before. Her cowardice perplexed him. He had been sure that she would try to attack the Stalker Fang before the fleet reached its target. Had she given up her plan? Perhaps; he had searched her cabin several times and found no sign of any weapon.

Sirens were hooting. The ship’s companionways and passages were full of frightened Once-Borns and impassive battle-Stalkers hurrying to their posts. Grike made his way to the forward gondola and found his mistress there, ignoring the crew, staring out instead at the enormous moon.

“why are we here?” Grike asked.

The Stalker Fang’s bronze death mask turned to stare at him. She had still told no one the reason for this expedition, and Grike suspected that if any of the Once-Borns, even Naga, had asked her so bluntly, she would have torn his throat out with her claws for their impertinence. But she only stared at Grike, and then whispered, “Tell me, Mr. Grike, do you ever remember your former life? Your life as a Once-Born?”

“i do not even remember my life as a stalker,” said Grike. (Although a memory flared up as he spoke: a young girl with a bloody face lying on a heap of old cork fishing floats. He squashed it quickly, like a man stamping on a flame.) “I remember nothing before dr. zero awakened me on the black island.”

Fang turned away, looking out through the glass again, but he could see the reflection of her face, the odd marsh-gas flaring of her green eyes. “I remembered something once,” she said. “Or I almost did. There was a young man I encountered at Rogues’ Roost. Tom. When I saw him, I felt that I knew him. He was very handsome. Very kind. Anna Fang must have been fond of him. I am not Anna Fang, but when I looked at him I sensed… oh, all sorts of intriguing feelings.”

“we are the dead,” said Grike, who was starting to grow uncomfortable. “we do not feel. we do not remember. we were built to kill. what use are memories?”

“Who knows what the first of our kind were built for, back in the Black Centuries?” asked the other Stalker. “My memories are what have brought us here, Mr. Grike. I made inquiries about this Tom. I wished to learn more about him, and perhaps to recapture those strange sensations. I found out that he and his companions had a connection with an ice city called Anchorage, so I sent to the Great Library of Tienjing for books on Anchorage. They had only one: Wormwold’s Historia Anchoragia. It told me nothing about Tom, but it was there that I first learned of the Tin Book and guessed what it contains.

“what IS the tin book?” asked Grike.

“The Tin Book?” The Stalker looked playfully at him, her head on one side, a finger to her lips. “The Tin Book is what we are here for, Mr. Grike.”

Hester too had been waiting for the moon. Perched on a seat on the lower-tier promenade, she had whiled away the time by glancing through her copy of Predator’s Gold, and what she had found there cheered her. It seemed to her that Pennyroyal had buried the truth beneath so many lies that nobody would ever be able to unearth it.

At moonrise, as the rowdy crowds flooded out of Brighton’s underdecks to watch the fireworks, she shoved her way past them, pushing against the tide into the district of dank slave barracks and tenements called Mole’s Combe. By the time she reached the foot of Shkin’s tower, the streets around her were deserted except for the seagulls, which, startled from their roosts by the racket on the promenades, soared like white phantoms beneath the web of peeling girders overhead.

She had studied the Pepperpot earlier, and decided on a way in. Round on the sternward side, surrounded by bins and fat, snaky ducts, was a small back door made of rusty metal and studded with rivets like the hatch of a submarine. Above the door a spiffy brass security camera kept watch on visitors, but there were no other defenses; the Pepperpot had been designed to keep people in, not out.

Hester approached cautiously, keeping to the shadows. Her heart beat fast. She imagined the blood rushing through her veins and arteries, filling her with her father’s cold strength. She felt that both Wren and Tom were very close, and that soon they would all be together again, and happy. Smiling to herself behind her veil, she pulled the Schadenfreude out from inside her coat and waited until the next fusillade of fireworks, then shot the camera off its mountings.

She had just enough time to stuff the gun away before the door opened and a man came out and stood with his hands on his hips, peering up indignantly at the smoldering wreckage of the camera.

“Happy MoonFest!” called Hester.

The man turned. He looked surprised to see the veiled woman walking toward him, and even more surprised when she shoved a knife between his ribs. He died very quickly, and she heaved his body into the shadows behind the bins and went through the door, closing it softly behind her. She found herself in a corridor. Light and voices came from a small guardroom. She peeked in. There were three more men inside. One was stabbing irritably at the buttons beneath a circular screen that fizzed with static; the others were slumped, bored and uncomfortable, on office chairs, drinks in their hands, wishing they could be with their wives and their children at the celebrations.

Hester shot the one at the screen first, and killed the others as they sprang up, groping for their guns. She stood quiet for a time in the shadows, waiting for someone to come. No one did. There were so many rockets and firecrackers being let off in the streets outside the Pepperpot tonight that a few extra bangs made no difference. She reloaded the Schadenfreude, noticing with pride that her hands hardly shook at all.

The Shkin Corporation was well organized, and she was glad of it. A framed plan on the guardroom wall showed her the layout of the place. She took a moment to memorize it; then, silent and sure of herself, she moved toward the slave pens. Two men stood watch outside a pair of heavy double doors. One lunged at Hester with some sort of electric cattle-prod thing, but she sidestepped him and stuck her knife in his back, then cut the throat of the other as he reached for the alarm bell. There was a ring of keys on the second one’s belt, and it did not take her long to find the one she needed.

The slave pens were filled with soft breathing and the faint stirrings of caged things. As she grew used to the dark, she started to make out the cages ranged around the walls, and the faces staring out at her through the bars.

“Tom?” she called.

All around her, people were shifting and whispering. Some of the prisoners in the cages closest to the door could see the dead guards sprawled outside, and were reporting it to their neighbors.

“Who are you?” called a voice from one of the cages.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Name’s Krill.”

“A Lost Boy?” Hester walked toward the voice. Soon she was close enough to see his eyes shining in the thin spill of light from the door she’d opened. He was watching the keys she held, like a hungry dog watching a forkful of food. She jangled the keys softly, by way of encouragement, as she asked, “Is Wren here? Wren Natsworthy?”

“That Dry girl who was on the Autolycus?” asked Krill. “Who’s asking?”

“The lady with the keys,” said Hester.

She saw Krill’s fair head bob in the darkness, nodding. “She was in a cage near me for a while, but they took her away.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Fishcake went too, soon after.” (He paused to spit, as if he wanted to clean Fishcake’s name out of his mouth. There were murmurs of anger and disgust from the other cages. Fishcake wasn’t popular.) “Shkin’s men told us he turned nark; betrayed Grimsby. Walks about in a uniform now like he’s playing at soldiers. What happened to the girl I don’t know. Sold, I expect.”

“What about her father, Tom? He was taken today.”

“Never heard of him. There’s no Drys in here, lady. Just Lost Boys.”

“Could he be in the holding cells on the middle tier?”

“Could be.” Krill shifted thoughtfully. Around him, in the other pens, all the other captives were shifting too, listening, wary as animals. The ones who were close enough to see Hester never took their eyes off the keys. “There’ll be more guards up there, though. You’ll need something to distract them.”

“Did you have anything particular in mind?” asked Hester. Krill grinned, and behind her veil Hester grinned too, because this was exactly what she had planned. She dropped the keys into Krill’s cage. “Play nicely” she said. As she ran toward the stairs, she could hear him scrabbling through the bunch of keys, trying each one in the lock on the door of his pen, and the voices of the Lost Boys, like rising surf, urging him on.

Chapter 27 The Unsafe Safe

Mayor Pennyroyal had had the pavilion ballroom specially redecorated for the festival. The front wall had been replaced with a long row of French windows that opened onto the sundeck outside and let in the light of the sacred moon. Around the dance floor, swags and cascades of silvery fabric hung from every pillar and cornice, reflecting the Milky Way of tiny bulbs that swirled across the ink-blue ceiling. Spotlights illuminated a podium, where a small orchestra played. The walls were covered with priceless works of art: antique masterpieces by Strange and Nias hanging next to the latest snot paintings by Hoover Daley, master of the Expressionist Sneeze.

In a hive of hexagonal chambers opening off behind the main room were all manner of amusing diversions for the guests. In one was a replica of a “bouncy castle,” a strange inflatable fortification that Pennyroyal claimed had been a key feature of Ancient warfare, but that could also be used as a trampoline. In another a projector rattled, showing copies of copies of some of the fragments of film that had survived from before the Sixty Minute War. Armored knights rode through a burning wood, their shadows stretching up through the smoke; flying machines lifted into a tropical dawn; a little tramp walked down a dusty road; groundcars chased each other like tiny cities; a man dangled from a broken clock high above some enormous static settlement; and in soft, beautiful close-ups rose the dreaming faces of the screen goddesses.

Wren, running in from the garden on her mission for Shkin, barely noticed any of it. But as she darted past the film room toward the spiral staircase that would take her up to Pennyroyal’s office, she almost collided with Theo, who was coming in the other direction, clutching his ostrich-feather fan. He wore baggy silver trousers and a pair of silver angel’s wings.

“Hello,” said Wren. “What’s the wing thing about?”

Theo shrugged, and his wings flapped. “All the boys are dressed like this. Boo-Boo’s idea. Horrible, isn’t it?”

“Vile,” agreed Wren, though secretly she thought he looked rather fetching.

“Look,” he said, “this idea that Boo-Boo’s got about us—”

“It’s all right,” said Wren. “I don’t fancy you either.”

“Good.”

“Good.” She was glad he was there, though, and she didn’t want to part from him. She thought how much easier it would be to burgle Pennyroyal’s safe if she had an accomplice.

Especially an accomplice like Theo, who had been in battles and was probably ten times braver than herself.

“Look,” she said, “I’ve got to do something…”

“Another escape attempt?”

“No. I’ve got to take something from Pennyroyal’s safe.”

“What? After what happened to that antique dealer?” Theo stared at her, waiting for her to admit that it was all a joke. When she didn’t, he said, “It’s that book thing, isn’t it? That metal book?”

“The Tin Book of Anchorage,” Wren said. “Shkin sent Plovery for it, and now that Plovery’s dead, he’s sending me.”

“Why?” asked Theo. “What’s so important about it?”

Wren shrugged. “All I know is that everybody seems to want it… I think it might have something to do with submarines, but…” She paused uneasily. Maybe she shouldn’t be telling Theo this. He was Green Storm, after all, or had been once. But she was glad she had. She touched his arm. “He’s got my dad at the Pepperpot, and if I don’t do what he asks, he… I don’t know what he’ll do. Will you help me?”

She did know, of course; she just didn’t want to say it. She felt glad that she had Theo to confide in.

“Your dad?’ he asked. “I didn’t know Lost Girls had fathers…”

“I’m not really a Lost Girl,” said Wren. “Just mislaid. I told Pennyroyal I came from Grimsby because… Oh, Theo, it’s too complicated to explain. I just have to save Dad!”

She could tell that he understood. He looked scared and serious. “But if the safe’s booby-trapped…” he said.

“That’s why I want you to keep a lookout. Please, Theo. I don’t want to go in there alone.”

“I’m supposed to be on duty in the ballroom. Boo-Boo’s orders.”

“Boo-Boo’s having a wonderful time. She won’t notice if we sneak off for five minutes.”

Theo thought about it, then nodded. “All right. All right.”

Gripping his fan like a battle-axe, he followed Wren up some stairs and through a door at the top into an antique-lined corridor. The noise of the party faded as the door swung softly shut behind them, then dipped again as the corridor turned sharply to the left. Creeping past the door to the control-room stairs, they heard the faint voices of the crewmen chatting at their stations down below, but there were no other sounds. Everyone else was busy in the ballroom or the kitchens, and this part of the Pavilion was deserted.

They reached the end of the corridor and stopped, staring at Pennyroyal’s office door.

“What if he changed the combination of his safe after last night?” whispered Theo. “What if he’s changed the locks on the door?”

Wren hadn’t thought of that. She prayed that Pennyroyal hadn’t either. Her groping fingers quickly found the spare key, still hidden in the vase. At first it didn’t seem to fit the lock, but that was only because her hands were trembling so badly. After she spent a few moments swearing and fumbling, the lock snicked and she turned the handle and pushed open the door.

The office looked peaceful and safe. The Walmart Strange drawing was back in its place on the wall. Wren went to it and took it carefully off its hook, laying it down on the desk. Theo followed her into the office and quietly closed the door, then almost knocked a statue off its pedestal with his fan.

“Couldn’t you have left that stupid thing outside?” she hissed.

“What, where someone might see it lying about?”

Wren turned to the safe. “Ready?” she asked.

Theo didn’t look ready. “You think there’s a booby trap inside the safe?” he said.

Wren shook her head. “The safe was open last night, remember, and I didn’t see anything booby-trappish in there.” All the same, she made sure that she was standing well to one side as she reached for the dial. “Mr. Plovery opened the safe and got the book out. That’s when something got him. Now hush.” She frowned, remembering the combination. Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven…

As the dial clicked and the tumblers inside the lock chunked and grated, Theo turned slowly around, looking for hidden dangers. There was nowhere much in this small room that a trap could be concealed. The objects on the desk looked innocent enough—a blotter, a few pens, a photograph of Boo-Boo in a heavy black frame. There was a teak filing cabinet against the far wall, a picture hanging above it, and above that just a lot of architectural curlicues and the high, shadowy dome of the ceiling and…

Was it just his eyes playing tricks, or was something moving up there?

“Wren—” he said.

Wren had the safe door open. She reached in and drew out a battered black case. “Got it.”

“Wren!” Theo shoved her, knocking her sideways. She dropped the case, and had an impression as she fell of something white whirring past her. A blade struck the open door of the safe, hard enough to throw off sparks. Whatever it was scrabbled, turned, and came flapping at her as she sprawled on the floor. Wren glimpsed ragged wings, a curved steel beak, a glow of green eyes. Then Theo’s fan batted the thing sideways, slamming it hard against the wall. Wren heard something break. The flapping thing fell on the floor and kept on flapping, flailing small clawed feet like bunches of razors. Theo smacked at it with his fan. Whimpering, Wren groped across the desk, found the picture of Boo-Boo, and smashed it down hard on the creature’s head.

Theo helped Wren up. “All right?’ he asked shakily.

“I think so. You?”

“Yes.”

For a while after that, they didn’t speak. Theo’s arms were still around Wren, and her face was pressed against his shoulder. It was a nice shoulder, warm, with a pleasant smell, and she would have liked to stay like that for longer, but she made herself step away from him, shaking her head hard to clear away all the distracting thoughts that were trying to roost there. Feathers floated about in the moonlight.

“What was it?” she asked, nervously prodding the dead bird thing with her toe.

“A raptor,” said Theo. “A Resurrected bird. I thought only the Storm used them. It must have been set to keep watch on the safe.”

“How do you think old Pennyroyal got hold of it?” Wren wondered.

Theo shook his head, puzzled and worried. “Maybe it’s not Pennyroyal’s.”

“That’s silly,” said Wren. “Who else would want to guard his safe?” She picked up the black case and opened it. Inside, the Tin Book glinted faintly in the firework light from outside. It looked as dull as ever. It was hard to believe that it had caused so much trouble. She looked at Theo. “You go,” she told him. “I’ll tidy this place up and then find Shkin.”

Theo was staring at the Tin Book. He said, “I’ll help.”

“No.” Wren felt terribly grateful to him, and didn’t want to keep him here any longer than she had to. If they were discovered and Theo were punished for helping her, she would never forgive herself. “Go back downstairs,” she said. “I’ll follow in a minute or two. I’ll find you later.”

He started to object again, then seemed to see the sense in what she said. He nodded, looked thoughtfully at her for a moment, then took up his battered fan and left while Wren set to work. Gingerly she picked the dead bird up and stuffed it into one of the drawers of the desk, along with all the fallen feathers she could find. It had left a stain of oil or blood or something on the office floor, but there was nothing Wren could do about that. She pulled the Tin Book out of its case and replaced it with Boo-Boo’s broken picture, which was of a similar weight and size.

A sound came from the corridor, someone shouting something. Wren went very still, listening. The shouting sounded angry and scared, but Wren could not make out the words, and after a moment it stopped. “Theo?” said Wren aloud.

The office gave a sudden shudder, as if giant hands had shaken the Pavilion by the shoulders. The faint sound from the ballroom diminished as conversations faltered and the orchestra stopped playing. Wren imagined the musicians looking up from their scores in alarm. Then people laughed, and the music and chatter resumed, climbing quickly back to their former level, as if someone were turning up the volume on a recording of party sound effects.

“Just turbulence,” she told herself. Or maybe there had been some sort of problem with the engine pods; now that she thought about it, the shouts she had heard might well have been echoing up the little stairway from the control room. Relieved, she went back to work. She put the case back in the safe and closed it, then hung the Walmart Strange in front of it again. Lifting the back of her long tunic, she slipped the Tin Book under the waistband of her trousers. It would be safe there, she thought, but the metal struck cold against her bare back, and the wire binding kept scratching her.

She stepped out into the corridor and locked the door, replacing the key in its hiding place. “Theo?” she hissed. There was no answer. Of course not; he would be back in the ballroom by now, safe.

Then she glimpsed a movement from the corner of her eye. The door to the control-room staircase was open, swinging on its hinges with each faint movement of the building. She stood and stared at it, certain that it had been closed when she’d passed it with Theo a few minutes earlier. Had one of the men from the control room heard them crashing about in Pennyroyal’s office and come up to investigate?

The noise from the ballroom grew suddenly loud, and then faded again. Someone had come through the door at the far end of the corridor. Wren heard footsteps approaching quickly along the polished floor. At the place where the corridor bent, a shadow grew on the wall. Panicking, Wren started to move back toward Pennyroyal’s office, but there wasn’t time to find the key again, so she darted through the open control-room door and pulled it shut behind her.

She found herself in a shadowy little cubicle where iron stairs spiraled down through the floor. She knew that they went through the floor below as well, and through the deck plate beneath it, opening eventually into that little glass bubble that she had seen from the cable car on the day Shkin brought her to Cloud 9. She pressed her ear to the door and heard the footsteps go past out in the corridor.

She was about to breathe again when a voice from below her called, “Who’s there?”

The voice sounded frightened, and oddly familiar.

“Theo?” she said. A dizzy feeling of confusion swept over her. What would Theo be doing down there, in that control room full of Pennyroyal’s men? Had he been on Pennyroyal’s side all along? Had he gone to tell them about the slave girl who had just burgled their master’s safe?

“Wren,” the voice called, “something’s happened. I don’t know what to do…”

He did sound frightened. Deciding to trust him, Wren hurried down the tight spiral of stairs, with the Tin Book jabbing her in the small of her back at every step. She passed another entrance on the ground floor, and then descended through a shaft of white-painted metal, warty with rivets, that led down through the deck plate. Theo was looking up at her from the foot of the stairs, and he stood aside to let her step past him into the control room. Through its glass walls she could see the whole of Brighton beneath her, gaudy with MoonFest illuminations. All around, fireworks were bursting in the clear air, splashing the instrument panels with pink and amber light. It was probably the best view on Cloud 9, but it was wasted on the control room’s crew, who were slumped in their seats, dead. One of them still had a knife sticking out of his neck, an ordinary carving knife from the Pavilion kitchens with Pennyroyal’s crest on the handle.

“Oh, Quirke!” squeaked Wren, wishing she hadn’t eaten so many canapés. As she bent over to puke, a rush of thoughts swirled into her head. None of them were pleasant. Hadn’t Theo been coming from the direction of the kitchens when she ran into him last night? And now he was standing in a room full of men who’d been killed with a kitchen knife, and she was alone with him.

“It’s all right,” he said, and she squeaked again as he shyly touched her arm. He didn’t understand how scared of him she suddenly was. As she edged away from him, he said, “I mean, it’s not all right. Look.” He tugged at one of the big brass levers on the instrument panel. “Broken. All broken. And here…”

On the main control desk was a fat red lever, encased in a glass box and surrounded with exclamation marks and warnings that it should be used only in an emergency. Someone had used it anyway, breaking the glass to get at it.

“What does that do?” asked Wren, but she already knew, because Brighton looked smaller than it had when she’d entered the control room, and the bangs of the bursting fireworks were growing fainter and fainter.

“Explosive bolts,” said Theo. “They’re meant to sever the cables in case Brighton sinks or something. Didn’t you feel that lurch? Wren, somebody’s cut the towropes! We’re adrift!”

Wren stared at him, appalled, and in the silence she could clearly hear the sounds of the party continuing upstairs. She and Theo were probably the only people on Cloud 9 who knew what had happened.

“Theo,” she said, “you can have the book.”

“What?”

She pulled it out of her trousers and held it out to him. Her hands were shaking, making the reflections from the metal cover dance across his puzzled face. “Wren,” he said, “you don’t think I could do this? Even if I could, why would I?”

“Because you’re after the book, like everybody else,” said Wren. “You’re a Green Storm agent, aren’t you? I knew there was something strange about you! I bet you got yourself captured deliberately so that you could get into the Pavilion and spy on us all. I bet you left that gull to watch over the safe, and now you’ve set Cloud 9 adrift so that you can murder everybody and make off with the Tin Book! That’s why you wouldn’t help me steal the Peewit, wasn’t it? So you could escape in her yourself, once you had the book!”

“Wren!” shouted Theo. “You’re not thinking!” He caught her as she tried to dash past him to the stairs, caught her by both arms and looked earnestly into her face. “If I wanted that damned Tin Book, why would I have let you steal it? I would have let the gull kill you back in Pennyroyal’s office, and taken it for myself. For all I know, you could be the Green Storm agent. You’re so keen to get this book, and you were sneaking around when Plovery was killed too. One minute you’re a Lost Girl and the next you’re not… You could be the one who did this!”

“I’m not! I didn’t!” Wren gasped.

“Well, nor did I.” Theo let her go. She edged backward, trembling, still clutching the Tin Book.

“I was on my way back to the ballroom when I heard someone shout for help,” said Theo. “I opened the door and called down to ask if everything was all right. There was no answer, but I thought I heard someone moving about, so I came down. When I got here, they were all dead. I saw that the cable had been cut, and I was going to go and raise the alarm, but I was afraid that you were still upstairs and someone would find you.” He shuddered and ran his hand over his face.

“There was someone upstairs,” said Wren, remembering the footsteps, the shadow. “I heard them go past the door. There’s nothing else along that corridor but Pennyroyal’s office. They must have been after the same thing as us. The Tin Book.”

Theo stared at her. “That would fit. They came down here first and did this, but before they could go up the stairs to the office, they heard me coming down. They couldn’t risk killing me too, in case I was a guest who’d be missed, so they slunk out through the kitchens and then cut back by the ballroom and up to the office that way… But why cut us adrift? Why not just take the book?”

Wren tried to be sick again, but her stomach was empty. “They almost saw me!” she whimpered. “If I hadn’t hidden in time, they’d have killed me like they did these men…”

Theo reached out for her but wasn’t sure if she would want him to touch her. “So you don’t still think I did it?” he asked.

Wren shook her head and went gratefully to him, hiding her face against his chest. “Theo, I’m sorry…”

“It’s all right,” he told her gently. Then he said, “As for last night, I just couldn’t sleep. I went to the shrine to say prayers for my mother and father and my sisters. It was a year ago, last Moon Festival, that I left Zagwa. Slipped out of my parents’ house while everyone was celebrating, and stowed away on a freighter, off to Shan Guo to join the Green Storm. All the preparations yesterday just made me wonder what they were doing now; whether my parents have forgiven me; whether they miss me…”

“I bet they do,” said Wren. She turned away and leaned against the window, pressing her face to the cool glass. “That’s what parents do. They forgive us and miss us, no matter what we’ve done. Look at my dad, coming all this way to find me…”

She looked toward Brighton, longing for her father. Fireworks spurted into the sky from somewhere in Montpelier, bursting in bright stars of red and gold. Wren watched them fade as they drifted slantwise down the wind, and then her eye was caught by another movement. She turned her head. There was only the sea: a shifting, sliding pattern of moonlight. But what was that? That long shadow slipping across the wave tops?

Her view was blotted out by something vast and pale. Huge engine pods slid by, followed by the open gunports of an armored gondola. Wren saw men wearing goggles and crab-shell helmets standing in gun emplacements that jutted out on gantries, and then tall steering vanes, each emblazoned with a jagged green lightning bolt. “Theo!” she screamed.

Twenty feet from where they stood, an immense air destroyer was speeding past Cloud 9.

Chapter 28 The Air Attack

In a cell somewhere beneath the Pepperpot’s well-appointed reception area, Tom lay half dazed, feeling his face swell where Shkin’s heavies had hit him, and fearing for Wren. It had been enough at first just to know that she was alive. He didn’t mind too much what happened to him, as long as Wren was safe. But was Wren safe? Shkin’s men had told him she’d been sold to Pennyroyal, of all people. Pennyroyal was not a bad man, but he was selfish, and thoughtless, and unscrupulous, and he had once shot Tom in the heart. The old wound hurt Tom again as he lay on the bunk, waiting for something to happen. His chest ached, and he wasn’t sure if the ache was real or just his body’s memory of the bullet.

He had quickly lost track of time in this bland, window-less room, where a loop of argon tube glowed on the beige ceiling like a halo. He had no idea whether it was night or day when the door finally rattled open.

“Brought you something to eat, Mr. Natsworthy,” said a small voice. “And this.”

Tom rolled off the bunk and sat up, rubbing his bruised face. The boy Fishcake stood in the doorway, holding a tray with a bowl and a tin cup. A few feet of drab beige corridor were visible behind him. Tom thought vaguely about escape, but his chest hurt too much. He watched as Fishcake advanced toward him and set the tray down on the floor.

“I swapped shifts with someone so I could come and see you,” the boy confessed. “It was easy. All the others want the night off, ’cos it’s Moon Festival. That’s what all the bangs and crashes are about.”

Tom listened, and heard faintly the noise of fireworks and gongs from the streets outside.

“I’m sorry you got caught, Mr. Natsworthy,” Fishcake admitted. “Wren was very nice to me. So I thought you’d want to see this.”

He took a crumpled page of newspaper from the pocket of his uniform and held it out for Tom to read. The Palimpsest. And there, in the photograph beneath the headline, kneeling among a group of other girls around a large woman with enormous hair…

“That’s Wren, ain’t it?” said Fishcake. “See? I thought you’d want to know she’s all right. It’s a good life, they say, being a house slave up on Cloud 9. Look: She’s got a fancy frock and a new hairdo and everything.”

“Cloud 9? Is that where Wren is?” Tom remembered the floaty palace thing he had seen hovering above the city. He reached forward, laying a hand on Fishcake’s shoulder. “Fishcake, can you find my wife and get a message to her? Tell her where Wren is?”

“That one with the scar?” asked Fishcake, wriggling away. He looked scared and disgusted. “She’s not here, is she?”

“She’s in Brighton, yes. We came together.”

Fishcake had gone a curious color. His hands shook. “I ain’t going near her,” he said. “She’s evil, that one. She killed Gargle and Remora, and she’d have killed me too if she could. That’s why I had to bring Wren with me. I didn’t want to, but she’d have killed me elsewise.”

“I’m sure Hester only did what she had to,” said Tom, a little uneasily because he wasn’t sure of that at all. “It was tragic, but—”

“She’s evil,” Fishcake insisted sullenly. “And you’re as bad, even though you think you ain’t. Going about with her makes you as bad as she is.”

“You still brought me the paper, though,” Tom said. “You’re a good boy, Fishcake.” He smiled at the Lost Boy, who eyed him suspiciously. Tom felt sorry for him. He must have been hurt and betrayed by so many people that he had turned to the first grown-up who showed him any sort of kindness, even though it was only Nabisco Shkin. Tom wished he could take him away from this dreadful city to the safety of Vineland, where he would have the chance of living a normal life, like the children Freya had rescued from Grimsby.

He said, “Fishcake, can you get me out of here?”

“Don’t be soft!” said the boy. “Mr. Shkin would kill me.”

“Mr. Shkin would never find you. I’ll take you away with me, if you like. We’ll find Wren and Hester, and we’ll go away together.”

“Away where? Grimsby’s gone. I’ve got a good job here. Where would I want to go?”

“Anywhere,” said Tom. “We could drop you anywhere you liked. Or we could take you back with us to Anchorage-in-Vineland and you could live with us there.”

“Live with you?” echoed Fishcake. His eyes seemed to Tom to be as round and bright as the lamp on the ceiling. “What,” he said, “like a family?”

“Only if that’s what you wanted,” said Tom.

Fishcake swallowed loudly. He didn’t fancy going anywhere with Hester. Hester deserved to die, and one day he meant to make sure that she did, for he had not forgotten his vow. But he could not help liking Tom. Tom seemed kind, even kinder than Mr. Shkin. And Wren had been kind too, even if she hadn’t saved him from Brighton’s trap. He would like to live with Tom and Wren.

“All right,” he said. He glanced at the doorway, scared that someone might have overheard. “All right. As long as you promise—”

Out in the corridor, a nasty, harsh electric bell began to ring, making Tom and Fishcake jump. Doors slammed, and boots pounded on the metal floor. Fishcake snatched the piece of paper from Tom and scampered out of the cell, swinging the door shut behind him. Standing up, Tom ran to peer through the small grille in the top of the door, but he could see nothing. The bell jarred and jangled. Men’s voices shouted at the far end of the corridor, and more boots clanged. Then, a sudden, startling bang, and another.

Someone screamed. “Fishcake!” shouted Tom. There was another bang, very close, and then Hester’s voice, outside in the corridor, shouting, “Tom!”

“Here! In here!” he said, and a moment later her veiled face appeared at the grille.

“I got your note,” she said. He ducked away from the door, and her gun punched holes in the lock. She kicked the door open.

“Where’s Fishcake?” asked Tom. “You didn’t hurt Fishcake? He was here just a minute ago! He had a picture! Wren’s on Cloud 9!”

Hester pulled her veil down and kissed him quickly. She smelled of smoke, and her dear, ugly face was flushed. “Shut up and run,” she said.

He ran, ignoring the warning stabs of pain in his chest. Outside the door of his cell, the corridor made a tight turn. Two men lay dead at the corner. Neither of them was Fishcake. Tom clambered gingerly over the corpses and followed his wife up some stairs, past some more bodies. Smoke hung in the air. Shouts and screams came from somewhere below.

“What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on down there?”

Hester looked back at him, grinning. “Someone’s let the Lost Boys out. Careless, eh? We’d better go out the top way.”

The lights went out, all at once. Tom crashed into Hester, who steadied him and said very calmly, “Don’t worry.”

There was inkish darkness for as long as it took Tom’s heart to make five stuttering beats, then dull red lights came on. “Emergency generator,” said Hester.

Tom trailed after her, through a series of deserted offices where the blood-red light shone on the brass handles of filing cabinets and the ivory keys of typewriting machines. He wondered where Hester had found her new coat and what had happened to the old one. He was still wondering when they ran into a bunch of Shkin Corporation men hurrying in the opposite direction. “Get down!” shouted Hester, knocking Tom to the floor. “Not you!” she added, as the guards dived for cover.

The office filled with smoke and stabs of flame and a terrible noise. Not all of the men had guns, and the ones who did fired wildly. Bullets slammed against the walls, smashed the water cooler, and ripped pages from a calendar on the desk. Tom hid behind a filing cabinet and watched as Hester shot the men down one by one. He had not been with her when she’d fought the Huntsmen, and he had always imagined that she must have been angry and afraid, but there was a terrible calm about her now. When her gun was empty, she put it down and killed the last man with a typewriter, the carriage-return bell jingling cheerfully while she smashed in his skull. When she picked up her gun and started to reload it, she was smiling. Tom thought she looked more alive than he had ever seen her before.

“All right?” she asked, pulling him to his feet.

He wasn’t, but he was shaking too badly to tell her, so he just followed her again, up more stairs, and found himself back in the neat reception area where he had spoken to Miss Weems. Her chair was empty now, the sign on the door turned to CLOSED, the guard gone from his post outside. Fireworks boomed and crackled above the rooftops, punching shafts of pink and emerald light through gaps in the blinds. Hester shot the lock off the door and pushed it open, but as Tom crossed the room, he heard frightened breathing, then a whimper.

He went down on his knees and peered beneath Miss Weems’s desk.

Fishcake’s pale, terrified face looked out at him.

“Fishcake, it’s all right!” Tom promised as the boy scrabbled back deeper into the shadows. He waved at Hester to keep her away. “It’s only Fishcake,” he told her, looking round.

“Leave him, then,” said Hester.

“We can’t,” said Tom. “He’s alone and frightened, and he’s been working for Shkin. If the other Lost Boys find him, they’ll tear him to pieces. Just a figure of speech,” he added unconvincingly as Fishcake moaned with terror.

“That’s his fault,” said Hester, poised in the doorway, eager to go. “Leave him.”

“But he told me where Wren is.”

“Fine,” said Hester angrily. “He’s told you. So we don’t need him. Leave him.”

“No!” said Tom, more sharply than he meant to. Beneath the desk his hand found Fishcake’s, and he hauled the Lost Boy out. “He’s coming with us. I promised.”

Hester stared at the boy and the boy stared at Hester, and for a moment Tom thought she was going to shoot Fishcake where he stood, but a thunderous howl of defiance and rage came echoing up from the depths of the Pepperpot, the roar of Lost Boys on the warpath, and she stuffed her gun away and slipped through the door, holding it open so that Tom could drag the scared, quaking child with him out of the building and down the steps into the plaza. Huge, reverberating bangs were rebounding from the walls of the surrounding buildings, and dazzling flashes lit up the sky. Fireworks are so much louder than they were when I was little, Tom thought, and, looking up, saw fierce white airships swooping over the city at rooftop height, raining down rockets from their armored gondolas.

“Great gods and goddesses!” shouted Hester. “That’s all we need!”

“What is it?” whined Fishcake, clinging tight to Tom. “What’s happening?”

What was happening was that a squadron of Fox Spirits had been detached from the main body of the Green Storm fleet to silence Brighton’s air defenses. The MoonFest celebrations were disintegrating into panic as the aviators mistook the firework displays in Queen’s Park and Black Rock for antiaircraft fire and started strafing them. As carnival processions writhed across Ocean Boulevard like beheaded snakes, the Requiem Vortex cut through the smoke above them, powering toward Cloud 9. Ahead stood the armored mountains that were Kom Ombo and Benghazi, smaller towns and suburbs snuggling around their skirts.

“A whole cluster of them!” shouted General Naga, gleeful as a huntsman who has just spied the fox. “That big one ate Palmyra Static a few summers back!” His mechanical armor grated and hissed as it spun him round to face the Stalker Fang, raising his one arm in a jerky salute. “So this is why you brought us west, Excellency! I knew it could not be for that moth-eaten raft resort! Permission to lead the attack…”

“Silence,” whispered the Stalker Fang. The fires of Brighton shimmered in her bronze face. “The cluster is irrelevant. The other ships will keep those city’s batteries and fighters busy, and ensure that the Brightonians do not attempt to help their mayor. Our target is the flying palace. Prepare boarding parties.”

Naga had followed the Stalker unquestioningly for sixteen hard years, but this was almost too much for him. As his subofficers scrambled to relay her orders and fetch sidearms and battle armor, he stood for a moment, looking as if he’d been slapped. Then, recalling what became of officers who disputed the Stalker Fang’s commands, he hurried to obey.

Wren and Theo ran to the other side of the control room just in time to see the sky between Brighton and the shore blossom with gaudy explosions of flak from Benghazi’s air-defense cannon. The crackling, shifting light slid across the envelopes of four big warships and countless fighters.

“A Green Storm aerial attack unit,” Theo said.

“Oh, Quirke!” whispered Wren, thinking of her father. “Do you think they’ll sink Brighton? My dad’s down there! Theo, he’ll be killed, and it’ll all be my fault!”

“They aren’t here for Brighton,” said Theo, taking her hand. “They’ve come for the book! Whoever it was who set the gull on guard and killed these men must have called these ships here, and they’ve cut us adrift so we can be boarded more easily.”

From somewhere outside came the screech of air-raid alarms, like fingernails dragging down the blackboard of the sky.

“We’ve got to get away,” said Wren. “How?” asked Theo.

“On the Peewit, of course. I don’t suppose anybody had time to drain her fuel tanks after last night.”

Theo shook his head. “Even if we made it to the boathouse, the Storm would shoot us down before we were out of Cloud 9’s airspace.”

“But the Peewit’s a yacht, not a warship!”

“The Storm don’t care about details like that.”

“But don’t you know codes and passwords and things? Couldn’t you radio them and tell them you’re one of their own people?”

“Wren, I’m not one of their people,” said Theo. “Not anymore. I failed them. If they capture me, they’ll have me sent to Batmunkh Tsaka and killed.”

Wren wasn’t sure what that meant, but she could see that he was scared, perhaps as scared as she was. The control room shook as something hit the deck plate overhead, and a rain of sparks and burning wreckage came tumbling down past the windows. She looked up into Theo’s face and tried to sound brave. “Theo,” she said, “my dad’s waiting for me in Brighton, and your mother and father are waiting for you in Zagwa, and they’ll all be really miffed if we just hang about up here and let ourselves get killed. Come on. We have to try!”

Still holding hands, they ran up the stairs to the ground-floor entrance, the door the murderer must have left by. It opened into a corridor outside the kitchens. There was no one about. Above them they could hear screams and shouts and the rumble of feet as people fled the ballroom. Explosions in the sky outside splashed skewed diamonds of sour yellow light on the floor under the kitchen windows, and glinted on fallen pans and trays of sweetmeats dropped by slaves who had left in a hurry.

They ran to the nearest exit and blundered out into the gardens in front of the Pavilion. Crowds of party guests were hurrying across the lawns like frightened sheep. There was no way off Cloud 9, but they wanted to get as far as they could from the Pavilion for fear the Green Storm were about to bomb it. Anyway, they were wealthy, and used to getting everything they needed. Even if the cable car was gone, surely there would be a ship there, or an air taxi, or some plucky Brightonians organizing a rescue with air pedalos and sky yachts?

Not wanting to be caught up in the stampede, Theo pushed Wren into the shelter of one of Pennyroyal’s abstract statues. They huddled together and watched moonlit exhaust trails billow in the sky around Cloud 9 like skeins of spider silk as the Flying Ferrets buzzed and tumbled, hurling themselves at the Storm’s airships. It was as if each ship had a seed of fire inside it and the Flying Ferrets were patiently probing for it with streams of incendiary bullets. When they found it, the airship would begin to glow from inside like a MoonFest lantern; then blinding patterns of light would checker the envelope; and finally the whole thing would become a dazzling pyre, casting eerie shadows from the cypress groves as the wind carried it past Cloud 9.

But the airships were fighting back, and so were the clouds of Resurrected eagles and condors that flew with them. The birds descended in flapping black clouds upon the Ferrets’ flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them, they made easy targets for the airships’ rockets and machine cannon. Wings were shredded; fuel tanks blew apart; rotor blades came flipping and fluttering across the Pavilion’s lawns like bits of an exploding Venetian blind. The Bad Hair Day, its wings ripped off, plunged burning into the cable car station. The Group Captain Mandrake veered sideways into the Wrestling Cheese, and both machines crashed together through the flank of a Green Storm destroyer and went down with it, a vast barrel of fire sinking gracefully toward the sea.

Just off the edge of the gardens, a larger ship circled, waiting for the fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armored island from a sea of smoke. A fat airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling, twirling things that looked like silver seedpods until they struck a fortress or a gun emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the beat of a huge drum.

“Tumblers,” Theo muttered.

“What, those silver things?” asked Wren. “No, those are bombs. You can tell by the way they go off, bang! You told me you used to fly Tumblers.”

Theo nodded.

“You mean those things have pilots? But they’ll be blown to bits!”

Another nod.

“Then how come… ?”

“How come I’m not dead?” Theo shook his head and would not look at her. “Because I’m a coward,” he said. “I’m a coward, that’s why.

The Requiem Vortex prowled through the veils of smoke and ash that hung above the coast. Panic had broken out among the clustered towns and cities there, who all assumed the Green Storm fleet had come for them. Some were running for the shelter of the desert; some inflated buoyancy sacs and splashed into the sea; some took advantage of the confusion to try to eat their neighbors. Benghazi and Kom Ombo launched clouds of fighter airships, which were torn apart by the faster, fiercer Fox Spirits and by flocks of Stalker birds.

A gas cell had exploded somewhere near the Requiem Vortex’s stern, and spidery Mark IV Stalkers were crawling around on the sheer sides of her envelope, training extinguishers on the blaze. There was damage to the steering vanes too, and frantic voices echoing from the speaking tubes claimed that the rear gondola had been destroyed.

The Once-Borns on the bridge were pale and tense; Grike could see their faces shining with sweat in the hellish light that blazed in through the windows. Beneath her steel helmet, Oenone Zero was weeping with fear. The radio crackled out distress calls and damage reports from other ships: The Sword Flourished in Understandable Pique had been rammed amidships and was going down in flames; the Autumn Rain from the Heavenly Mountains was rudderless and drifting into the flank of Benghazi. Someone aboard a doomed corvette kept screaming and screaming until the signal suddenly cut out.

The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman, she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent city.

“Follow that building,” she said.

The ships that had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle other targets, but the raft resort’s troubles were not over. Its engine room was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its moorings as the attack began and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and saffron flame, leaking burning fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge was either dead or at the mayor’s party.

In all the confusion, no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside the Pepperpot, not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the sewage farms of the undertier and the stinking filter beds beneath the Sea Pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them. Arming themselves with wrenches and pool rakes and meat tenderizers, they swarmed up the city’s stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, fled for their lives, spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor launches.

Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no longer attached to the rest of Brighton.

Chapter 29 The Unexploded Boy

Wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow of the big statue, their backs to the plinth that it perched on. A few glasses of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets’ machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm’s guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked. “These Tumbler things?”

“No.”

“You might as well. There’s not much else to do.”

Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a soft voice that she could barely hear over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.

“It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater,” he said. “Enemy suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back toward the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artifact that mustn’t be allowed to fall into townie hands…”

Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots scrambled for their ships.

“The waiting was worst,” he said. “Strapped into our ships, hanging there in the racks in the Tumbler bay with the doors open under us. You could see the guns going off below. Then the order—’Tumblers away!’—and we went for it.”

They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn’t zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?

“The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg,” he told Wren. “I hit somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I was heading for an armored fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of silage bales. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t killed, just knocked out for a minute or two. I suppose that’s why the Tumbler didn’t blow. They’re supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there’s a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t bring myself to…”

“Of course not,” said Wren softly. “You’d missed your target. You couldn’t blow up workers. Civilians. It would have been murder.”

“It would,” said Theo. “But that’s not what stopped me. I just didn’t want to die.”

“Bit late to decide that, wasn’t it?”

Theo shrugged. “I just sat there and cried. And after a while, they came and defused my Tumbler and dragged me out and took me away. I thought they were going to kill me. I wouldn’t have blamed them. But they didn’t.

“All my life I’d been hearing stories about the cruelty of the barbarians, the way they tortured prisoners, and maybe some are like that, but these ones tended me like I was one of their own sons. They fed me, and explained how sorry they were that they’d have to sell me as a slave. They couldn’t afford to keep Green Storm prisoners aboard, you see, for fear we’d band together and revolt. But I wouldn’t have revolted. They’d made me realize how wrong the Storm are. How stupid it all is, this fighting.”

He looked up at Wren. “That’s why I gave up on the Storm. And now, when they catch me and they find out what I am and what I did, they’re going to kill me.”

“They won’t!” promised Wren. “Because we won’t let them catch you! We’ll get away somehow…”

A growl of engines drowned her out. She stood up cautiously and looked out across the gardens. A huge, battle-scarred white airship was shoving her way in through Cloud 9’s rigging.

“Great gods!” said Theo, looking over Wren’s shoulder. “That’s the Requiem Vortex] That’s her ship!”

Snub-nosed projectors mounted on the airship’s engine pods swiveled this way and that, effortlessly blasting any Flying Ferret that came within range. The Visible Parity Line and the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Machiney were smashed apart by rockets, showering shreds of balsa wood and singed canvas over the crowds who cowered on the Pavilion lawns. An ornithopter called Is That All There Is? fluttered around the airship like a gnat pestering a dinosaur, but it could not pierce the reinforced envelope, and after a few seconds a flight of Stalker birds found it and ripped it into kindling. Damn You, Gravity! plunged toward the airship’s gondola in a desperate attempt to ram it, but more rockets battered it aside, and it went plowing through the flank of one of Cloud 9’s outer gasbags. The Pavilion shuddered, the screaming guests on the lawn began to scream still louder, and the whole deck plate tilted steeply as some of the gas that had been supporting it went spewing into the night.

Orla Twombley and the other surviving Ferrets, realizing that they could do no more, turned tail and sped away.

Wren shielded her face against the dust and smoke as the Requiem Vortex swung her engine pods into landing position and touched down on the lawns of Cloud 9. Party guests who had fled the Pavilion earlier now came fleeing back past Wren and Theo’s hiding place, or stood their ground and fashioned flags of surrender out of shirtfronts and napkins. Redcoats hared through the shrubbery flinging down their weapons and trying to rid themselves of their fancy uniforms. Machine guns nattered among the ornamental palms. From the open hatches of the warship’s gondolas spilled spiky armored shapes.

“Stalkers!” yelped Wren. She’d never seen a Stalker, had never really quite believed in Stalkers, but something about the way those armored figures moved was enough to convince her that they were not human and that she very much wanted to be far away from them. She started to run, calling out to Theo to follow her. “Come on! We’ll cut back through the Pavilion to the boathouse!”

The stairways of the Pavilion were deserted now. Wren and Theo climbed them quickly, stumbling over abandoned party hats and trampled bodies. On the sundeck where Shkin had sold her to Pennyroyal, Wren slipped and went crashing down. The Tin Book, jammed in her waistband, grazed her spine and dug painfully into her bottom. She thought she could feel blood running down inside her trousers as Theo helped her up. She wondered if she should try to get rid of the book, or surrender it to the Storm and beg for mercy. But the Storm had no mercy, did they? She’d seen pamphlets and posters since she’d been in Brighton, headlines in the foreign-affairs pages of the Palimpsest about MORE MOSSIE ATROCITIES and FURTHER BEASTLINESS BY THE GREEN STORM. If they found that Wren had the Tin Book…

From the entrance to the ballroom, they looked back across the lawns. The battle was over, and Stalkers were moving about down there, herding crowds of captive guests ahead of them. “I wonder if Shkin’s down there,” said Wren.

“And what about Boo-Boo?” said Theo as they pressed on, crossing the ballroom, where the lights on the walls and ceiling had failed and broken glass crunched underfoot. “What about Pennyroyal?”

“Oh, he’ll be all right.” said Wren. “I bet it was him who brought them here. Shkin said he was looking for a buyer for the Tin Book. That’s just the sort of thing Pennyroyal would do, sell his own city for a profit…”

They passed the film room, where the projector was still rattling away. By its light Wren glimpsed a movement on the spiral staircase. “Cynthia!” shouted Theo.

Their fellow slave came running down the stairs, her party costume flickering softly with the reflected colors of the film loop. What she had been doing up there Wren could not imagine. Perhaps she had got flustered and run the wrong way when everybody was fleeing from the ballroom. Or maybe Mrs. Pennyroyal had sent her back to fetch something; she was carrying something shiny in one hand.

“Cynthia,” said Wren, “don’t be frightened. We’re leaving. We’ll take you with us. Won’t we, Theo?”

“Where is it, Wren?” snapped Cynthia.

“Where’s what?” asked Wren.

“The Tin Book, of course.” Cynthia’s expression was one that Wren didn’t recognize: cold and hard and intelligent, as if her face were under new management. “I’ve already checked Pennyroyal’s safe,” she said. “I know it was you who took it. I’ve known you were up to something ever since you came aboard. Who are you working for? The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft? The Africans?”

“I’m not working for anybody” said Wren.

“But you are, Cynthia Twite,” said Theo. “You’re with the Green Storm, aren’t you? You killed Plovery and the others. It was you who cut Cloud 9 adrift!”

Cynthia laughed. “Ooh, you catch on fast, African!” She made a polite curtsy. “Agent 28, of the Stalker Fang’s private intelligence group. I was rather good, wasn’t I? Poor, silly Cynthia. How you all laughed at me, you and Boo-Boo and the rest. And all along I have been working for a different mistress, for one who will Make the World Green Again.” She held her arm out stiffly toward Wren. The shiny thing in her hand was a gun.

Numbly, Wren fetched the Tin Book out from beneath her tunic and held it up for Cynthia to see. Cynthia snatched it and stepped back. “Thank you,” she said, with a trace of her old sweetness. “The Stalker Fang will be delighted.”

“She sent you here to find it?” asked Wren, confused. “But how did she know… ?”

Cynthia beamed. “Oh, no. She believed it was still in Anchorage. She sent an expedition to the place where Pennyroyal said Anchorage went down, but there was nothing there. So I was placed aboard Cloud 9 to spy on him, in case he knew what had really become of it. I could hardly believe my luck when I heard that you had brought the Tin Book itself aboard! I sent a message to the Jade Pagoda at once, and orders came back telling me to leave it safe in Pennyroyal’s office until help arrived. It is important. It may be the key to a final victory. My mistress does not want it copied, or sent by the usual channels. She is coming to fetch it in person. That is her ship out there on the lawn.” She looked down fondly at the Tin Book. “She will reward me well when I give it to her.”

The gunfire from the gardens had ceased. Wren could hear voices out on the sundeck, shouting orders in a language she didn’t recognize. She stepped toward Cynthia, wary of the gun in the other girl’s hand. “Please,” she said, “you’ve got the Tin Book. Can’t you let us go? If the Storm catch Theo…”

“They will kill him like the coward he is,” said Cynthia calmly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m sure my mistress will want to question you both first and find out how much you know about the book.”

“We don’t know anything about it!” cried Theo.

“That’s your story, African. You may decide to change it once the inquiry engines get to work on you.”

“But Cynthia…” Wren shook her head, still numb with the shock of Cynthia’s betrayal. “I don’t suppose Cynthia’s even your real name, is it?”

The other girl looked surprised. “Of course it is. Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Well, it’s not very spy-ish,” said Wren.

“Oh? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, nothing… just—”

A bulging suitcase, dropped from the gallery above, hit Cynthia on the head and burst open, scattering gold coins, jewelery and valuable-looking bits of Old Tech. “Oh—” said the girl, crumpling. Her gun went off and punched a hole in the ceiling somewhere above Wren’s head. Theo grabbed Wren and tugged her backward, afraid that there might be more luggage to follow, but when they looked up, they saw only the round, pale face of Nimrod Pennyroyal peering down over the banisters.

“Is she out?” he asked nervously.

Wren went to stoop over Cynthia. There was blood in the girl’s hair, and when Wren touched her neck she could feel no pulse, but she didn’t know if she was feeling in the right place. She said, “I think she might be dead.”

Pennyroyal hurried down the stairs. “Nonsense—it was only a playful little tap. Anyway, she’s an enemy agent, isn’t she? Probably would have killed the pair of you if it weren’t for my quick thinking. I was just upstairs, gathering a few valuables, and I heard you talking.” He chuckled as he prized the book from Cynthia’s fingers. “What a stroke of luck! I thought I’d lost this. Now come along, help me gather up the rest.”

Wren and Theo began to do as he asked. Pennyroyal, perhaps afraid that they would try to rob him, picked up Cynthia’s gun and held it ready while he stuffed coins and statuettes and ancient artifacts back inside the case and sat on the lid to force it shut. The shouting outside drew nearer as Green Storm soldiers, attracted by the sound of the gunshot, converged on the ballroom. “There!” said Pennyroyal. “Now, ho for the boathouse! I tell you what, if you help me carry this lot, you can both come with me. But hurry up!”

“You can’t just leave,” protested Wren, trailing after him through the listing corridors while Theo stuggled along with the suitcase. “What about your people?”

“Oh, them,” said Pennyroyal dismissively.

“What about your wife? She’s probably a prisoner by now…”

“Yes, poor Boo-Boo…” Pennyroyal pushed open a door and led them out into the gardens at the rear of the Pavilion. “I shall miss her, of course—terrible loss—but time is a great healer. Anyway, I can’t risk my neck trying to rescue her. I owe it to the reading public to save myself, so that the world can hear my account of the Battle of Brighton and my heroic stand against the Storm…”

They hurried through the gardens, Pennyroyal in the lead, Wren and Theo taking turns with the suitcase. The Storm’s troops had not reached this part of Cloud 9 yet; nothing moved among the cypress groves and pergola-covered walks. Smoke drifted from the wreckage of the Flying Ferrets’ aerodrome, but the Green Storm must have thought Pennyroyal’s boathouse an unworthy target, for it still stood unharmed among the trees, bulbous and comical, specks of firelight glinting on its daft copper spines.

“I can hear engines,” said Theo as they made their way through the trees onto the landing apron in front of the boathouse. “Someone’s opened the doors…”

“Great Poskitt Almighty!” shouted Pennyroyal.

The Peewit sat poised in the open doorway, her engines purring as they warmed up for takeoff. The lights were on in her gondola, and Wren could see Nabisco Shkin at the controls. He must have given up waiting for her to bring him the Tin Book and decided to cut his losses and save his own skin. She hung back, scared of him, but Pennyroyal put on a last spurt of speed, charging toward the yacht. “Shkin! It’s me! Your old friend Pennyroyal!”

Shkin swung himself out through the hatch in the side of the Peewit’s sleek gondola and shot Pennyroyal twice with a pistol he pulled from inside his robes. Wren saw an exclamation mark of blood fly upward into the glare of the yacht’s lights. Pennyroyal did an ungainly somersault and crashed against a heap of hawsers and was still.

“Oh, gods,” whispered Wren. Pennyroyal was so much a part of her life from all the stories she had heard in Anchorage that she had imagined he was indestructible.

Shkin stepped down from the gondola and strode toward them with his gun held ready. “Do you have my book?” he asked.

“No,” said Theo before Wren could answer. “The Storm took it.”

“Then what’s in the suitcase?” asked Shkin, and Theo opened it so that he could see. The slaver smiled his cold gray smile. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” he said. “Close the case and hand it to me.”

Theo did as he was told. Shkin’s chilly eyes slid toward Wren again.

“Now what?” she asked. “You’ll shoot us, I suppose?”

“Good gods, no!” Shkin looked genuinely shocked. “I am not a murderer, child. I am a businessman. What profit would I make by killing you? It’s true you managed to annoy me, but it sounds as if our friends from the Green Storm will soon be arriving to teach you some manners.”

Wren listened, and heard harsh foreign voices drifting across the garden. Lights were moving among the trees behind the boathouse. She wanted to ask Shkin about her father, but he had already heaved Pennyroyal’s case aboard the Peewit and was climbing in after it. The engines roared.

“No!” screamed Wren. She couldn’t believe that the gods were really going to let that villain Shkin fly away unscathed. But the Peewit’s docking clamps released, and she rose from the boathouse floor, engine pods swinging neatly into takeoff position. “It’s not fair!” howled Wren, and then, “The book! We’ve got the book! Theo lied! Take us with you and I’ll give you the book!”

Shkin heard her voice, but not her words. He glanced down at her and smiled his faint smile, then turned his attention to the controls again. The yacht sped across its landing apron, passed between two clumps of trees that bowed aside to let it through, and rose gracefully into the sky.

“It’s not fair!” Wren said again. She was sick of Shkin, and sick of being afraid. She understood why Mum and Dad had never wanted to talk about the adventures they had had. If she survived, she would never even want to think about this awful night.

“Why did you lie about the book?” she asked Theo. “He might have taken us with him if we’d given him the book.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Theo. “Anyway, if everybody wants it so badly, it must be something dangerous. We can’t let a man like Shkin get his hands on it.”

Wren sniffed. “Nobody should have it,” she said. She walked to where Pennyroyal lay and gingerly fetched the Tin Book out from inside the mayor’s torn robes. One of Shkin’s bullets had made a deep dent in the cover, but it looked otherwise unharmed. The touch of it disgusted her. All the trouble it had caused! All the deaths! “I’m going to throw it into the sea’ she said, and ran with it across the smoldering, cratered airstrip toward the edge of the gardens.

But it was not the sea that she saw when she looked down over the handrail. Cloud 9 had drifted farther and faster than she had thought. The white wriggle of surf that marked the coast lay several miles away toward the north, with the lights and fires of the other cities strung out along it like pearls on a necklace. Below her, the hills of Africa lay stark beneath the moon.

And as she stood there staring at them, clutching the Tin Book in both hands, she heard running feet behind her, and turned to meet the torches and the upraised guns of a squad of soldiers. There were Stalkers too, one of whom seized hold of Theo, and a man who seemed almost a Stalker himself, a hawk-faced man in mechanized armor with a sword in his iron hand, who stepped in front of the others and said, “Don’t move! You are prisoners of the Green Storm!”

As the Peewit slid out through Cloud 9’s rigging into open sky, Nabisco Shkin permitted himself a thin smile of satisfaction. Most of the Green Storm’s ships were miles away, still engaged above Benghazi and Kom Ombo, and the troops they had landed in Pennyroyal’s garden had better things to worry about than the odd absconding slave trader.

He settled into the yacht’s comfortable seats and patted the case that lay on the deck beside him. Far ahead, the lights of the smaller cities twinkled in the desert night. He would set down on one of those until he was sure the Storm had finished with Brighton; then he would go and see what damage had been done to his business there. The Pepperpot would have been battered, no doubt. Servants and merchandise killed, probably. No matter—they were all insured. He hoped the boy Fishcake was still alive. But even without him, it should be possible to find Anchorage-in-Vineland and fill the holds of a slave ship or two…

He was still dreaming of Vineland when the raptors found him. They were part of a patrol flock set to guard the skies around Cloud 9. Shkin thought they were just a cloud as they came sweeping down on him, dimming the moonlight. Then he saw the flap and flutter of their wings, and an instant later the birds started slamming into the Peewit’s glastic windows, tearing at her pod cowlings, slashing her delicate envelope with talons and beaks. Torn-off steering vanes whirled away on the wind. The propellers sliced dozens of birds to scrap, but dozens more kept taking their places until the Peewit’s engines choked on feathers and slime. Shkin reached for the radio set, opening all channels and shouting, “Call off your attack! I am a legitimate businessman! I am strictly neutral!” But the Green Storm warships that picked up his signal did not know where it was coming from, and the birds themselves did not understand. They tore and rent and clutched and worried, stripping the envelope fabric from its metal skeleton until Nabisco Shkin, looking up through the bare ribs, saw nothing but a kaleidoscope-churning of bird shapes circling black and splay-winged against the sacred moon. And as the wreck began to fall, they ripped the roof off the gondola and got inside with him.

Nabisco Shkin was not usually a man who let his emotions show, but there were a great many birds, and it seemed a terribly long way to the ground. He screamed all the way down.

Chapter 30 Captives of the Storm

The man in the mechanical armor was called Naga. Wren heard his men call him that as they took the Tin Book from her and started marching her back toward the Pavilion. It was a scary sort of name, and he looked pretty scary too, stomping along inside that hissing, grating exoskeleton, but he seemed civilized enough, and told his men off when they prodded Wren with their guns to make her walk faster. She was surprised, and relieved; she’d heard stories about the Storm shooting prisoners on sight. She thought about asking Naga what he meant to do with her, but she wasn’t quite brave enough. She glanced at Theo, hoping he’d explain what the Green Storm soldiers were saying to each other in their strange language, but Theo was walking with his head down and would not look at her.

They climbed one of the Pavilion’s outside stairways, past a walled garden where a crowd of captured slaves and party guests had been penned by a company of Stalkers. Boo-Boo Pennyroyal was there, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up with a rousing song, but it didn’t look to Wren as though it was working.

She assumed at first that she and Theo were being taken to join those other captives, but the soldiers kept them moving, past Pennyroyal’s swimming pool, which had emptied itself across the tilting deck in a broad wet stain. Outside the ballroom windows stood a Stalker far more frightening than the mindless, faceless brutes Wren had seen so far. He was big and gleaming, and his armored skull piece did not extend down to hide his face the way those of the others did, but left it partly bare; a dead white face, with a long gash of a mouth that twitched slightly as his green eyes lighted on Wren. She looked away quickly, horrified at catching the thing’s attention. Was he going to speak to her? Attack her? But he just returned Naga’s salute and stepped aside, letting the Stalkers and their captives past him into the ballroom.

Someone had got the lights working again. Medical orderlies were taking Cynthia out on a stretcher. Wren heard her groan as they carried her past and felt glad that her friend was still alive, then remembered that she had only been a fake friend, and wasn’t sure if she should be glad or not.

Up on the podium where the musicians should have been playing, a group of officers had gathered. Naga marched over to them and saluted smartly, making his report. The tallest of them turned to stare at the captives. Her face was a bronze death mask pierced by two glowing emerald eyes.

“Oh!” cried Theo.

Wren knew at once that this was the Stalker Fang. Who else could it be? She seemed to exude power; it crackled in the air about her like static electricity, making the small hairs on the back of Wren’s neck stand up on end. At her side she could feel Theo shaking as if he were in the presence of a goddess.

Naga said something else, and the Stalker stepped gracefully down from the podium, her eyes glowing more brightly as he drew the Tin Book from a hatch in his armor. Snatching it, she studied the symbols scratched into its cover and gave a long, shivery sigh of satisfaction. Naga pointed at Wren and Theo and asked something, but the Stalker waved his question away. Settling herself cross-legged in the rubble, she opened the Tin Book and began to read.

“What now?” muttered Theo. “I thought she’d want to question us…”

“I think Naga thought so too,” said Wren. But it seemed they had been forgotten by the Stalker Fang. The Green Storm troops were watching her as if waiting for more orders, but she was engrossed in the Tin Book. Naga muttered something to one of his companions. Then a woman—young and pretty, in a black version of the white uniforms the others wore—spoke to him, bowed, and jumped down from the podium, making her way to where the two prisoners waited. “You will please come with me,” she said in Anglish.

Wren felt relieved. This person looked less stern than the rest of the Green Storm landing party. DR. ZERO said the printed name tag on her uniform, under a pair of squiggly characters that Wren guessed would say the same in Shan Guonese. She looked far too young to be a doctor. Her tilted eyes and broad cheekbones reminded Wren of Inuit friends at home in Anchorage, and that cropped green hair suited her elfin face surprisingly. But there was no kindness in her voice. She took a gun from one of the troopers and leveled it at the two captives. “Outside, please. Now!”

They did as she said. As she herded them out onto the sundeck, Wren glanced up and saw the big Stalker watching her again. What had she done to interest him so? She looked away quickly, but she could still feel that green gaze following her.

Dr. Zero motioned with her gun for the prisoners to cross the sundeck and go down the stairs, as if she were taking them to join the others in the walled garden. But at the stairs’ foot, on a half-moon-shaped terrace out of sight and earshot of the ballroom, she suddenly stopped them and said in her soft, accented Anglish, “What is that thing the Stalker took from you?”

Wren said, “The Tin Book. The Tin Book of Anchorage…”

Dr. Zero frowned, as if the name were one she had not heard before.

“Isn’t it what you came here for?” asked Theo.

“Apparently. Who knows?” Dr. Zero shrugged and glanced back in the direction of the ballroom, lowering her voice as if she feared that her mistress might overhear her. “Her Excellency did not see fit to share with anyone her reasons for attacking your city. What is this Tin Book? What makes it so important that she had to come here with warships to get it?”

“Cynthia said that whoever had the Tin Book could win the war,” said Wren.

She was trying to be helpful, but Dr. Zero just stared at her. Was it only the moonlight that drained her face of color? Her eyes were wide, looking through Wren toward some terrible vision of things to come. “Ai!” she breathed. “Of course. Of course] The book must be a clue to some kind of Old Tech weapon. Maybe something like MEDUSA, powerful enough to destroy whole cities. And you have given it to the Stalker Fang! You fools!”

“That’s not fair!” protested Wren. “It wasn’t our fault…”

Dr. Zero let out a little laugh, but there was no trace of humor in it, only fear. “It’s up to me now, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s up to me to stop her!”

She turned and started to run back up the stairs toward the ballroom, flinging her gun aside as she went.

Chapter 31 The Moment of the Rose

General naga, still angry at being denied a chance to tackle Benghazi and the rest of the cluster, had led his shock troops off to scour the lower levels of the Pavilion, hoping to find some lurking nest of townie warriors who might put up a decent fight. In the ballroom, a few battle-Stalkers stood guard while the Stalker Fang sat reading. The metal pages of the book glowed softly green in the light from her eyes; her steel fingertips, tracing the ancient scratch marks, made faint clicking sounds.

Grike waited at the window, watching his mistress but not really seeing her. He focused instead on the face in his mind: the face of the young girl prisoner whom Oenone Zero had just led away. He was sure, or almost sure, that he had seen that face before—those sea-gray eyes, that long jaw, that coppery hair, had all sent sparks of recognition darting through his mind. And yet, when he tried to match the girl’s features to the other faces in his memory, he found none that fitted.

Running feet on the sundeck. Grike turned, and sensed behind him in the ballroom the other Stalkers all reacting too, baring their claws in readiness. But it was only Dr. Zero.

“Mr. Grike!”

She picked her way toward him between the bodies on the sundeck. She was trying to smile, but the smile had gone wrong somehow and turned into a kind of grimace. Grike sensed her ragged breathing, the quick drumbeat of her heart, the sharp, warning odor of her sweat, and knew that something was about to happen. For whatever reason, Oenone Zero had decided that this was the moment to unleash her mysterious weapon against the Stalker Fang.

But where was it? Her hands were empty; her trim black uniform left nowhere to hide anything powerful enough to harm a Stalker. He switched his eyes quickly up and down the spectrum, searching in vain for a concealed gun or the chemical tang of explosives.

“Mr. Grike,” said Dr. Zero, stopping at his side and looking up into his face. “There is something important that I must tell you.” Beads of perspiration were pushing their way out through the pores of her face. Grike turned his head and scanned the ballroom, wondering if she had brought something with her from the Requiem Vortex when they had first landed. He checked the sundeck too, looking for hidden devices behind the statues on the balustrades. Nothing. Nothing.

A touch on his hand. He looked down. Dr. Zero’s fingers were resting lightly on his armored fist. She was smiling properly now. Behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were filling with tears.

She said, “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration.”

And Grike understood.

He turned and walked quickly away from her into the ballroom. He didn’t mean to go; he had not told his legs to move, but they moved anyway. He was Dr. Zero’s weapon; that was all he had been all along.

“stop me !” he managed to shout as he neared the Stalker Fang. Two of the battle-Stalkers leaped forward to bar his path, and with two blows he disabled them both, knocking their heads off and leaving their blind, stupid bodies to stumble about, jetting sparks and fluids. But at least he had warned Fang of what was happening. She turned, and rose to meet him. The Tin Book shimmered in her long hands.

“What are you doing, Mr. Grike?”

Grike could not explain. He was a prisoner in his own body, with no power to control its sudden, deliberate movements. His arms raised themselves, his hands flexed. Out from his finger ends sprang shining blades, longer and heavier than his old claws. Like a passenger in a runaway tank, he watched himself charge at the other Stalker.

The Stalker Fang unsheathed her own claws and swung to meet him. They crashed together, armor grating, sparks flashing. From behind the Stalker Fang’s bronze death mask came a furious hiss. The Tin Book fell, snapping its rusty bindings, metal pages bounding across the floor. This is why I couldn’t see the danger, thought Grike, remembering Oenone Zero’s clever fingers busy in his brain through all those lonely night shifts in the Stalker Works. Why had he never guessed what she was doing to him? He had looked everywhere for the assassination weapon, but he had never suspected himself. And all this time the urge to kill his new mistress had been embedded in his mind, waiting for Oenone Zero to speak the words that would awaken it…

He could hear her behind him, scrambling through the wreckage of the ballroom, shouting out as if to encourage him, “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree…”

Breaking free, he drove the blades of his right hand through Fang’s chest in a spray of sparks and lubricants. The new claws were good, harder than Stalker skin. Fang hissed again, her gray robes in tatters, her armor ripped open and running with thick rivulets of the stuff that served her for blood. Oenone Zero was behind her, shouting, “You can’t harm him! I built him to kill you, and I gave him the weapons to do it! Reinforced armor! Tungsten-alloy claws! Strength you can only dream of!”

Irritated, the Stalker Fang lashed backward and caught Dr. Zero a glancing blow that flung her across the dance floor. Grike broke into a run and hit the other Stalker hard, the impact driving her away from the fallen woman, out into the moonlight on the sundeck. More battle-Stalkers grabbed at him, but he kicked their legs from under them and drove his claws through the couplings in their necks. Necks seemed to be the weak point of Popjoy’s Stalkers: Their severed heads clattered on the paving like dropped skillets, green eyesgoing dark. Grike smashed the flailing bodies out of his way. One of them tangled itself in the rags of curtain hanging inside the shattered windows, and the sparks spraying from its neck set the fabric alight. Flames spilled up the curtain and spread quickly across the ballroom ceiling, their light filling Fang’s armor as she scrambled away across the sundeck, one leg trailing, one arm hanging by a tangle of wires, dented and leaking like a half-squashed bug.

Grike wanted to give up this fight. He wanted to go back into the blazing ballroom and help Dr. Zero. But his rebel body had other ideas. He strode toward the Stalker Fang, and when she lunged at him, he was ready for her, caught her by the head, and drove the blades of his thumbs in through her eyes so that the green light died and he felt his claws grate against the machine inside her skull.

She hissed and shrieked and kicked at him, tearing the armor of his torso—she had blades on her toes too; he had not foreseen that—and he slammed her hard against the balustrade at the deck’s edge. Stonework splintered, fragments of pillar and architrave exploding whitely in the moonlight and Fang tumbling through it. Grike, all his nerves buzzing with the fierce joy of a fighting Stalker, leaped after her.

And Wren? And Theo? Abandoned by their captors, they stood gawking at each other on the crescent terrace, not quite daring to believe that they had been forgotten, and too alarmed by the terrible noises coming from above them to risk a break for freedom. Now fragments of balustrade came showering down around them, and the Stalker Fang and her attacker dropped like spiky comets from the deck above. Huddled against Theo, Wren watched, wide-eyed. The clash of Stalker against Stalker was something nobody had seen for centuries, not since the Nomad Empires of the North sent their undead armies against each other back in the lost years before the dawn of Traction, when men were men and cities stayed where you put them.

“But I thought that he was on her side,” complained Wren.

“Shhh!” hissed Theo urgently, afraid that her words would reveal their presence to the Stalkers.

But the Stalkers had other things on their minds. Fang sent Grike reeling backward with a kick, but lacked the strength to follow through; instead, she looked about for an escape route, calling out in her whispery voice for help. She gripped the handrail at the terrace’s edge and, as Grike recovered and struck viciously at her back, heaved herself over and dropped down into the gardens.

Grike jumped after her. He could hear the shouting of alarmed Once-Borns behind him and, looking back, saw Naga and his men running to the broken balcony, staring down. He ran on, following the trail of oil and ichor that the injured Stalker had left. She seemed at first to be heading toward the Requiem Vortex, but she was blind now, and perhaps her other senses were damaged too. Grike followed the sick machine smell of her through thick shrubbery, through the green corridors of an ornamental maze, down the steep slope of the park. Against the railings at the brim she turned, at bay. The trailing arm hung uselessly, and she barely had strength to raise the other. Her claws slipped and grated like broken scissors.

Filled with pity, Grike blurted out, ” I’m Sorry.”

“The Zero woman!” hissed the Stalker Fang. “She is a traitor, and you are her creature. I should have been wiser than to put my faith in the Once-Borns…”

With a savage blow, Grike smashed the bronze mask from her face. Her head lolled backward on damaged neck joints, and moonlight fell across the face of the dead aviatrix: a gaunt gray face, black lips drawn back from olive-stone teeth, smashed green lamps where eyes should have been. She raised her maimed steel hand to hide herself, and the familiar gesture startled Grike. Where had he seen it before?

She turned suddenly away from him, awkward and broken, her blind eyes staring up at the stars. “Do you see it?” she asked. “The bright one in the east? That is ODIN, the last of the great orbital weapons that the Ancients set in heaven. It has been waiting up there, sleeping, since the Sixty Minute War. It is powerful. Powerful enough to destroy countless cities. And the Tin Book of Anchorage holds the code that will awaken it. Help me, Mr. Grike. Help me to awaken ODIN and Make the World Green Again.”

Grike severed her neck with three fierce blows, her long scream dying as the head came free.

He pitched her body over the handrail, then picked up the head and the fallen mask and flung them after it. The mask flashed in the moonlight as it fell, and Grike’s rage and his new strength seemed to drain out of him. Jagged interference patterns crackled across his mind as the secret instincts Oenone Zero had installed there shut down.

Memories came flying at him like bats. He raised his hands to ward them off, but still they came. They were not the calm, sad human memories that had filled his mind while he lay dying on the Black Island, but just the memories of every terrible thing he had done since he’d become a Stalker: the battles and the murders, the Once-Born outlaws butchered for a bounty, the beggar boy he’d broken once in Airhaven for no better reason than the simple joy of killing. How had he done such things? How had he not felt then the guilt and shame that overwhelmed him now?

And then a scarred face rose in his memory like something surfacing from deep water, so clear that he could almost put a name to it: “h… hes…”

“There it is!” shouted voices close behind him: Once-Born soldiers blundering out of the shrubbery. “Stop it! Stop, Stalker, in the name of the Green Storm!” Led by Naga in his clanking battle armor, the Once-Born approached cautiously, leveling huge hand cannon and steam-powered machine guns.

“Where is she?” Naga demanded. “What have you done with the Stalker Fang?”

“she is dead,” said Grike. He could barely see the soldiers; the scarred face filled his mind. “the stalker fang is dead. she is twice-dead. i have destroyed her.”

Naga said something more, but Grike did not hear. He had a feeling that he was flying apart, dissolving into rust, and all that held him together was that memory, that face. She was the child whom he had saved, the only good thing that he had ever done. “hes… hest…”

Forgetting the soldiers, he started to run. Stalkers came at him, and he smashed them aside. Bullets danced on his armor, but he barely noticed. Damage warnings flashed inside his eyes, but he did not see them. “HESTER!” he howled, and the gardens swallowed him.

Chapter 32 The Flight of The Arctic Roll

On Ocean Boulevard beneath a lid of smoke, streamers and paper hats lay in drifts on the tilting pavements, the debris of street parties that had ended suddenly when the air attack began.

Tom, Hester, and Fishcake crept along in the shadows, trying to avoid the gangs of looters and rebellious slaves who roamed the smashed arcades. Troupes of flames were dancing on the stage of the open-air theater, and every few minutes the deck plates shook as one of the gas tanks at the air harbor exploded, sending wreckage sleeting across the rooftops and prickling the Sea Pool into a thousand white splashes. The elaborate, tattered costumes of dead carnival-goers stirred gently in the night air like the plumage of slaughtered birds.

“They’re still rioting on the underdecks,” said Tom, listening to the noises that came echoing up the stairwells. “How are we going to get back to the Screw Worm?”

Hester laughed. She was still feeling happy and proud at the way she had been able to free Tom from Shkin’s lockups, and even his insistence on bringing Fishcake with him had not dented her good mood for long. “I forgot!” she said. “Can you believe it? In all the excitement it went clean out of my head. Tom, we don’t need the Screw Worm anymore. After all, we can’t fly up to Cloud 9 in a limpet, can we?”

“You mean an airship?’ asked Tom doubtfully. “How can we hope to get hold of an airship? They’ve been pouring out of the air harbor ever since the battle, and all overloaded, by the sound of them.”

Hester stopped walking and stood and beamed at Tom, while Fishcake cowered behind him. “The Jenny Haniver is here,” she said. “In Pennyroyal’s stupid museum. She’s been waiting for us, Tom. We’ll steal her. We used to be good at that.”

She explained quickly, and then they hurried on toward the Old Steine. Shouting and the sound of smashing glass came through the smoke, and sometimes shots rang out. The bodies of minor council officials and promising performance artists dangled from the lampposts. Hester walked with her gun ready, and Fishcake watched her and remembered the promise he had made to kill her. He wished he had the nerve to do it, but she scared him too much. And there was something about the way she looked at Tom, a tenderness, that unsettled him and made him think she might not be entirely evil, and that it might be lovely to live with the Natsworthys. Shyly, he took Tom’s hand.

“Did you mean it, what you said?” he asked. “About me coming with you? You’ll really take me home with you to Vineland?”

Tom nodded, and tried to smile encouragingly. “We just have to make a stop at Cloud 9 on the way…”

But when they reached the Old Steine, he saw the severed hawsers strewn around the cable car station. Cloud 9 had gone.

“Oh, Quirke!” he shouted. “Where is it?”

It had never occurred to him that it would not still be hanging there, damaged like the rest of Brighton but airborne, and with Wren somewhere aboard it, waiting to be rescued. Now he saw how foolish he had been. That flying palace with its cloud of gasbags must have been a sitting duck for the Storm’s air destroyers.

“Wren…” he whispered. He could not believe that the gods had brought her so close to him, only to snatch her away.

Hester took his hand and gripped it hard. “Come on, Tom,” she said. “If we can get off this dump, we might still find the stupid place, ditched in the sea or adrift. It’s Pennyroyal who runs it, remember: He won’t have put up much of a fight.”

She pointed to the stained white frontage of the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience. The front wall had a few nasty cracks in it and was sagging out over the pavement. The doors had been blown off their hinges too, and as Hester led Fishcake and Tom inside, she began to feel a terrible fear that she was too late, that some other desperate refugee would have come here before her and taken the Jenny away. But when she ran up the stairs, she found the old airship sitting where she had left her. The glass roof of the museum had shattered, scattering shards across the floor and the Jenny’s envelope, but she looked completely undamaged. She had actually been cleaned up a bit since Hester last saw her, and a large number I had been pasted to her flank, ready for the regatta. There were even a couple of small rockets in her rocket racks.

Behind her, Tom reached the top of the steps and stopped. “Het,” he said. “Oh, Het—” Tears ran down his face, and he laughed at himself as he wiped them away. “It’s our ship!”

“What a pile of junk!” exclaimed Fishcake, pulling on a coat that he’d taken from one of the waxworks down below.

“Fishcake, see if you can turn the lights on,” Tom said, and climbed up into the gondola. The old ship smelled like a museum. He ducked under dangling cords and ran his hands over the control panels, recognizing the familiar instrument arrays. Lights came on in the room outside, shining in through the Jenny’s freshly squeegeed windows.

“Remember how it works?” asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the sort of whisper you would use in a temple.

“Oh, yes,” Tom whispered back. “You don’t ever forget…” He reached out reverently and pulled a lever. An inflatable dinghy dropped from a compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over. He shoveled it under the chart table and tried another lever. This time the Jenny shivered and shifted, and the museum was filled with the rising thunder of her twin Jeunet-Carot engines.

Outside, hands clamped over his ears, Fishcake was coughing in the exhaust smoke and shouting, “How do you get it out?”

“The roof opens!” Hester yelled back, pointing upward.

Fishcake shook his head. “I don’t think so…”

Tom killed the engines. Leaning out of the Jenny’s hatch, he looked up at the ceiling. With the lights switched on, it was easy to see why no one else had bothered coming in here to steal the Jenny. A huge hawser, one of the cables that had once linked Brighton to Cloud 9, had crashed down across the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, smashing the glass above the Jenny Haniver and buckling the delicate struts and girders of the roof.

“Oh, Quirke Almighty!” cried Tom. He was starting to get the feeling that his god was playing games with him. If he survived this, he was going to think seriously about finding himself a different deity.

He ran back to the flight deck, and Hester. “The roof’s smashed. We’ll never get her out!”

“Someone’s coming!” yelled Fishcake, peering from one of the museum windows. “A big gang of them. Lost Boys, I bet, come to see what the noise was about!”

Hester stared through the Jenny’s nose windows at the roof. “Reckon we could shift that debris?”

Tom shook his head. “That hawser is fatter than the two of us put together. We’re trapped in here!”

“Don’t worry,” Hester said. “We’ll think of something.” She closed her eye, concentrating, while Fishcake ran from window to window, hollering something else about Lost Boys. Then she looked up at Tom and grinned.

“Thought of something,” she said.

She started flipping switches on the long, dusty control desks. The Jenny Haniver lurched, throwing Tom backward.

Amid all the racket of engines starting up and docking clamps releasing, he didn’t realize at first all of what Hester had done. Then, as the shock wave of the twin explosions bowed the windows, as the Jenny lifted and surged forward, he saw that she had emptied the rocket projectors into the damaged front wall, blasting it into the street and leaving a hole large enough to let the little airship out into the sky.

“You’ve forgotten Fishcake!” he yelled over the long screech of an engine pod grazing the museum wall.

“Oh, dear!” Hester shouted back.

“Go back!”

“We don’t need him, Tom. Not Wanted On Voyage.”

Tom scrambled back to the open hatch and reached out, shouting Fishcake’s name. The boy was running toward the lifting gondola, hands outstretched, face white and horrified beneath a clown mask of powdered plaster. Over the roar of the engines and the dull hiss of the explosion still echoing in his ears, Tom could not hear the words, but he didn’t need to. “Come back!” Fishcake was shouting as the Jenny Haniver rose through the smoke and dust and swung across an Old Steine full of the startled upturned faces of Lost Boys and looters, up into the sky where she belonged. “Don’t leave me! Mr. Natsworthy! Please! Come back! Come back! Come back!”

The Jenny Haniver flew on, weaving unsteadily this way and that because Tom and Hester were struggling with each other at the controls.

“For Quirke’s sake!” Tom shouted. “We’ve got to turn back! We can’t just leave him behind!”

Hester pulled his hands free of the steering levers and flung him aside. He crashed against the chart table and fell heavily, shouting out with pain. “Forget him, Tom!” she screamed. “We can’t trust him. And he said the Jenny was a piece of junk! He’s lucky I didn’t knife him!”

“But he’s a child! You can’t just leave him! What will happen to him?”

“Who cares? He’s a Lost Boy! Have you forgotten what he did to Wren?”

The Jenny came up suddenly into clear air and moonlight. The smoke lay like a field of dirty snow fifty feet beneath the gondola, with the fire-flecked upperworks of Kom Ombo and Benghazi poking out of it a few miles to larboard. Airships were buzzing about, but none showed an interest in the Jenny Haniver. Hester scanned the sky ahead and saw, far away toward the south, the tattered envelopes of Cloud 9. She pointed the Jenny’s nose at it, locked the controls, and knelt beside Tom. He looked up with an odd expression, and she suddenly realized that he was afraid of her. That made her laugh. She took his face between her hands and kissed him, and licked away the salt tears that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he turned his head away. She started to feel afraid herself. Had she gone too far this time?

“I’m sorry,” she told him, though she wasn’t. “Look, Tom, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I panicked. We’ll turn back if you like.”

Tom pulled away from her and scrambled up. He kept remembering the strange smile that had flickered on her face as she’d led him from the Pepperpot. “You enjoy it,” he said.

“Don’t you? Like when you killed all those people at Shkin’s place, you were enjoying it…”

Hester said, “They were slavers, Tom. They were villains. They were the ones who sold Wren. They sold our little girl. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

“But…”

She shook her head and gave a cry of frustration. Why could he not understand? “Look,” she said, “we’re just little people, aren’t we? We always have been. Little small people, trying to live our lives, but always at the mercy of men like Uncle and Shkin and Masgard and Pennyroyal and… and Valentine. So yes. It feels good to be as strong as them; it feels good to fight back and even things up a bit.”

Tom said nothing. By the light of the instrument panels she could see a fresh bruise forming on his head where it had struck the chart table. “Poor Tom,” she said, leaning over to kiss it, but he twitched away again, staring at the fuel gauges.

“The tanks are only half full,” he said. “You knew that when we took off. If we go back, we might never reach Wren. Anyway, those slaves will have got poor Fishcake by now.”

Hester shrugged awkwardly and wished he’d let her hold him. His obsession with the Lost Boy angered her. Why did Tom have to be so concerned about other people all the time? She controlled herself. “Fishcake will be able to look after himself,” she promised.

Tom looked hopefully at her, wanting to believe her. “You think so? He’s so young…”

“He must be twelve if he’s a day. I lived alone in the Out-Country when I wasn’t much older than that, and I did all right. And I didn’t have his Burglarium training.” She touched Tom’s face. “We’ll find Wren,” she promised. “Then we’ll find fuel, and go back to Brighton and get Fishcake, when things have calmed down a bit.”

She put her arms around him, and this time he did not pull away, although he did not exactly hug her back. She kissed him and ran her fingers through his thinning hair. She hated fighting with him. And she hated Fishcake for making them argue like this. She hoped the other Lost Boys were already using his nitty little head for a football.

Chapter 33 Departures

Theo and Wren had not waited for the Storm to recapture them. They were running away through the gardens when they heard the Stalker Fang’s death cry echoing between the trees.

“What was that?” Wren wondered, stopping, shocked by the awful, lonely sound.

“I don’t know,” said Theo. “Something bad, I think.”

They ducked into the shrubbery as another Green Storm squad went running past. The soldiers’ helmets blinked with orange light. Peeking behind her, Wren saw that the Pavilion was starting to burn.

“Theo] It’s on fire!”

“I know,” he said. He was standing near to her, near enough that, in the firelight, she could make out the goose pimples on his bare chest and see that he was shivering slightly in the chilly air. Suddenly he put his arms around her. “You should let the Storm take you, Wren. Cloud 9 is going down. You might be safer as a prisoner. I can’t let them take me, but you could. You should go back.”

“What about you?” she asked. “I can’t just leave you here.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, and then said it again, trying to sound more certain about it: “I will be all right. This place is sinking slowly. It’ll come down in the desert, and I’ll try and make my way south; there’s a static settlement in the Tibesti Mountains, south of the sand sea. Maybe I could make it on foot.”

“No,” said Wren. She pulled herself away from him, because when he was holding her, her brain stopped working and she found herself wanting to agree with everything he said, but she knew deep down that he was talking rubbish. Even if he survived Cloud 9’s fall, setting out across the desert on foot would be suicide. “I’m staying with you,” she said. “We’re going to find a way off, and that’s final. Come on. We’ll head back to the aerodrome. Maybe there’s a flying machine that’s still usable…”

She set off through the smoky gardens, feeling unaccountably hopeful and rather pleased with herself, but when they reached the aerodrome again, she saw that it had been destroyed more completely than she’d realized. The Ferrets’ prefab hangars and barracks had been ripped open and scattered, and of the machines that had been caught on the ground only scorched shards remained. But among the ruins of the summerhouse where she had spoken to Orla Twombley the previous night, she found a couple of fleece-lined leather jackets hanging incongruously from a coat stand that still stood upright and undamaged amid the rubble. That seemed some sort of consolation. She threw one to Theo, who pulled it on gratefully, hanging up his silver wings like an angel banished from heaven.

Snuggling into the other jacket, Wren tried to think of a new plan. “All right,” she said. “Maybe we will end up in the desert. We’ll need water, and food. And a compass would be useful…”

Theo wasn’t listening. A rustling in the foliage beyond the ruins had caught his attention. He gestured for Wren to be quiet.

“Oh, gods!” she whispered. “Not the Storm again?”

But it was only Nimrod Pennyroyal. Shkin’s first shot had slammed against the Tin Book in his robe pocket, breaking several ribs, and the second had grazed his temple, knocking him out and covering one side of his face with blood, but he had regained his senses and dragged himself down to the aerodrome with the same idea as Wren and Theo, of finding some way off Cloud 9. Looking up plaintively at them from the shrubbery, he whispered, “Help!”

“Leave him,” said Theo as Wren went toward him.

“I can’t,” said Wren. She wished she could. After all the things he’d done, Pennyroyal didn’t deserve her help, but not helping him would make her as bad as he was. She knelt down beside him and tore a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage his head.

“Good girl,” Pennyroyal whimpered as she worked. “I think my leg’s broken, too, from when I fell… That devil Shkin! The beast! He shot me! Shot me and flew off!”

“Well, now you know how poor Tom Natsworthy felt,” said Wren. Blood soaked through her makeshift bandage as soon as it was in place. She wished she’d paid more attention to Mrs. Scabious’s first-aid lessons back in Vineland.

“That was entirely different,” Pennyroyal said. “It was— Great Poskitt! How do you know about Tom Natsworthy?”

“Because I’m his daughter,” said Wren. “What Shkin told you about me was true. Tom’s my dad. Hester’s my mother.”

Pennyroyal made gurgly noises, his eyes bulging with terror and pain. He watched Wren tear another strip of fabric from her clothes, looking as if he expected her to strangle him with it. “Isn’t there anybody on this flaming deck plate who is who they say they are?” he asked weakly, and went heavy and limp in Wren’s arms.

“Is he dead?” asked Theo, coming up behind her.

Wren shook her head. “It’s just a flesh wound, I think. He’s fainted. We have to help him, Theo. He saved us from Cynthia.”

“Yes, but only so he could get his hands on the Tin Book again,” said Theo. “Leave him. Maybe the Storm will find him and take him with them when they leave…”

But behind him, with a roar of aero-engines, Hawkmoths and Fox Spirits were beginning to rise from behind the trees, casting long shadows on the smoke as they threaded their way out through Cloud 9’s rigging. The Storm were leaving already.

Oenone Zero had been dragged out of her dreams by the stink of burning curtains. There was a pain in her head, and when she tried to breathe, sharp smoke caught at the back of her throat and made her choke and gasp and roll over onto her back.

Above her, flames were washing across the ornate ceiling of the ballroom in rippling waves, like some bright liquid. She pushed herself up, groping for her glasses, but her glasses were smashed, and the flames were rising all around her. Among them she saw the scattered pages of the Tin Book beginning to blacken.

She plunged through a swaying curtain of fire and out onto the terrace. It was a blur of smoke and firelight and running bodies, and as she reeled through it, looking for the stairs, General Naga barred her way. She backed away from him, tripped over a fallen Stalker, and sat down, helpless, in the path of the armored man.

“Dr. Zero?” he said. “This… this attack… it was your doing?”

Oenone knew that he was going to kill her. She was so full of fear that it came seeping out of her mouth in thin, high-pitched noises. She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a prayer to the god of the ruined chapel in Tienjing, because although she’d never had much time for gods, she thought that he must know what it meant to be frightened, and to suffer, and to die. And the fear left her, and she opened her eyes, and beyond the smoke the moon was flying, full and white, and she thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

She smiled at General Naga and said, “Yes. It was me. I installed secret instructions in the Stalker Grike’s brain. I made him destroy her. It had to be done.”

Naga knelt, and his big metal hands gripped her head. He leaned forward and placed a clumsy kiss between her eyebrows. “Magnificent!” he said, as he helped her to stand. “Magnificent! Set a Stalker to kill a Stalker, eh?”

He led her away from the fire, through staring, flame-lit groups of shocked troops and aviators, out across the lawn toward the Requiem Vortex. He took a cloak from someone and wrapped it around her trembling shoulders. “You can’t imagine how long I’ve waited for this day!” he said. “Oh, she was a good leader in those first few years, but the war’s dragged on, and she keeps wasting men and ships as if they’re counters in a game. How long I’ve tried to think of a way… And you’ve done it! You’ve rid us of her! Your friend Mr. Grike has run off somewhere, by the way. Is he dangerous?”

Oenone shook her head, imagining what Grike must be going through. “It’s hard to know. I suppressed some of his memories to make room for my secret programs. Now that he has fulfilled his duties, those memories will be starting to resurface. He’ll be confused… perhaps insane… Poor Mr. Grike.”

“He’s just a machine, Doctor.”

“No, he’s more than that. You must tell your men to search for him.”

Naga waved a couple of sentries aside and climbed the gangplank of the Requiem Vortex. Inside the gondola, he guided Oenone to a chair. She felt terribly tired. Her own face stared back at her from his burnished breastplate, smeared with blood and ash and looking naked without her spectacles. Naga patted her shoulder and muttered gruffly, “There, girl, there,” as if he were calming a spooked animal.

He had a soldier’s touch, awkward and unused to gentleness. “You’re a very brave young woman.”

“I’m not. I was afraid. So afraid…”

“But that’s what bravery is ; my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you’re not afraid, it doesn’t count.” He fetched a flask out of a hatch in his armor. “Here, try some brandy; it will help to steady you. Of course, we won’t let anyone know that you were responsible. Officially, at least, we must mourn the Stalker Fang’s passing. We’ll blame the townies. It’ll fire up our warriors like nothing since this war began] We’ll launch attacks on all fronts, avenge our leader’s fall…”

Oenone spluttered at the sharp taste of the brandy and pushed the flask away. She said, “No] The war must stop…”

Naga laughed, misunderstanding. “The Storm can still win battles without that iron witch telling us what to do] Don’t worry, Dr. Zero. We’ll do better without her. Blast those barbarian cities to a standstill] And when I take my place as leader, you’ll be rewarded—palaces, money, any job you like…”

Dazed, Oenone shook her head. Watching this armored man stride about the cramped, battle-damaged gondola, she saw that she had underestimated the Green Storm. War had made them, and they would make sure that the war went on and on.

“No,” she said. “That’s not why I—”

But General Naga had forgotten her for the moment and was issuing orders to his subofficers: “Put out a message on all frequencies: The Stalker Fang has fallen in battle. Need for calm and stability at this tragic time, etc., etc. In order to continue our glorious struggle against Tractionist barbarism, I am assuming supreme command. And prepare the Requiem Vortex for departure; I want to be back in Tienjing before one of our comrades tries to seize power for himself.”

“And the prisoners, General?”

Naga hesitated, glanced at Dr. Zero, and said, “I won’t start my reign with a massacre. Bring them aboard. But please tell that Pennyroyal woman to stop singing.”

The Stalker Grike watched from a hiding place among the bushes as the Storm’s boarding parties hurried back aboard the Requiem Vortex. Someone with a bulhorn was shouting, “Mr. Grike! Mr. Grike! Come aboard! We are leaving!”

Grike knew that Dr. Zero must have ordered them to find him and felt grateful to the surgeon-mechanic, but he did not show himself. He had to stay on Cloud 9. The girl he had seen outside the ballroom was not among the prisoners who were being shepherded into the air destroyer. If she was staying, Grike would stay. In some way that he did not yet understand, that girl was connected with Hester. Perhaps by staying near her, he would find Hester again.

Chapter 34 Finders Keepers

Fishcake lay in the dunes behind the beach. Numb with cold and betrayal, he watched as Brighton fired up its battered engines and paddled lopsidedly away, the voices of the victorious Lost Boys drifting raucously across the water with the smoke.

He had barely escaped with his life. As the Lost Boys stormed the museum, he had run like a hare from the hunt, out of a back entrance and away through the burning streets, sobbing hopelessly, “Mr. Natsworthy, come back, come back…” until at last he reached the city’s stern and flung himself blindly off an observation platform there, seeking safety in the sea.

The swim to the shore had exhausted him, and he had almost drowned in the surf. Now, tired and frozen as he was, it was time for him to move again. For hungry desert towns were rolling past him through the dunes, and fierce amphibious suburbs were steaming toward him, drawn by the wrecked airships and flying machines that littered the sand and washed in and out on the surf. Fishcake, who had never been near a Traction Town before, could barely believe how high their wheels towered over him in the smoky air, or how the ground shook and shifted as they went lumbering by. Choking on exhaust smoke and upflung sand, he scrambled away from them and ran into the desert.

He really was a Lost Boy now. He had no idea where he was, or where he was going. He ran on and on, hour after hour, slithering over dunes, stumbling across dry expanses of gravel and piles of barren rocks. He was scared of the dark and the deep shadows, which were growing deeper still as the moon sank toward the western horizon. At last, on the bank of an empty creek, he collapsed, hugging his damp knees against his chest for warmth and whining aloud, “What’s to become of poor little Fishcake?”

Nobody answered, and that was what scared him most of all. Gargle and Remora and Wren had let him down, and the fake mummies and daddies had tricked him; Mr. Shkin had failed him, and Tom Natsworthy had abandoned him; but he would rather have been with any of them than out here on his own.

The moon gleamed on something that lay nearby. Fishcake, who had been trained to hunt for gleaming things, crept closer without thinking.

A face gazed up at him from the sand. He picked it up. It was made of bronze and had been quite badly dented. There were holes for the eyes. The lips were slightly parted in a smile that Fishcake found reassuring. It was beautiful. Fishcake held it to his own face and peered through the eyeholes at the westering moon. Then he stuffed the mask inside his coat and moved on, feeling braver, wondering what other treasures this desert held.

A few dozen yards farther on, his sharp eyes caught a movement down on the floor of a dry watercourse. Nervous as an animal, he edged closer. A severed hand was creeping across the gravel. It appeared to be made of metal. It moved like a broken crab, dragging itself along by its fingers. Wires and machinery and something that looked like a bone poked out of the wrist. Fishcake watched it, and then, because it seemed to have a sense of purpose about it, he began to follow.

Soon he began to pass other, less lively body parts: a torn-off metal leg bent the wrong way and draped across a boulder, then a gashed and dented torso. The hand spidered over that for a while, then crept on its way. A few hundred yards farther on he found the other hand, still attached to most of an arm, feeling its way toward a slope of gravel and small boulders where stunted acacia trees grew.

And there he found the head: a skeletal gray face cupped in a metal skull, surrounded by a tangle of cables and ducts. It looked dead, but as Fishcake crouched over it, he knew that it had sensed him. The lenses of the glass eyes were shattered, but the spidery machinery inside twitched and clicked, still struggling to see. The dead mouth moved. So faintly that Fishcake could barely hear, the head whispered to him.

“I am damaged.”

“Just a bit,” Fishcake agreed. He felt sorry for it, poor old head. He said, “What’s your name?”

“I am Anna” the head whispered. Then it said, “No, no. Anna is dead. I am the Stalker Fang.” It seemed to have two voices, one harsh and commanding, the other hesitant, astonished. “We were taken by Arkangel,” said the second voice. “I am seventeen years old. I am a slave of the fourth type in the shipyards of Stilton Kael, but I am building my own ship and…” Then the first voice hissed, “No! That was long ago, in Anna’s time, and Anna is dead. Sathya, my dear? Is that you? I’m so confused…”

“My name’s Fishcake,” said Fishcake, a bit confused himself.

“I think I am damaged,” said the head. “Valentine tricked me—the sword in my heart—I’m so cold… 50 cold… No. Yes. I remember now. I remember. The Zero woman’s machine… and General Naga stood by and let it happen… I was betrayed.”

“Me too,” said Fishcake. He could see the twisted fittings around the edges of the skull where the bronze mask had been torn off. He took the mask out of his coat and fixed it back into place as best he could.

“Please help her,” the head whispered, and then, “You will repair me.”

“I don’t know how.”

“She —I will tell you.”

Fishcake looked around. Bits of the Stalker’s body were edging toward him through the sand, homing in on the head. The clutching movements of the fingers made him think of crab-cams he’d repaired for Gargle. “I might be able to,” he said. “Not here. I’d need tools and stuff. If we could gather up all your bits and find a city or something…”

“Do it,” commanded the head. “Then I will travel east. To Shan Guo. To my house at Erdene Tezh. I will have my revenge upon the Once-Born. Yes, yes…”

“I’ll come with you,” said Fishcake, eager not to be deserted again. “I can help you. You’ll need me.”

“I know the secrets of the Tin Book,” the head said, whispering to itself. “The codes are safe inside my memory. I will return to Erdene Tezh and awaken ODIN.”

Fishcake did not know what that meant, but he was glad to have someone telling him what to do, even if she was only a head. He stood up. A little way off, a torn gray robe flapped from the branches of a bush. Fishcake pulled it free and knotted it into a sort of bag. Then, while the Stalker Fang’s head whispered to itself about The World Made Green Again, he began collecting up the scattered pieces of her body.

Chapter 35 Marooned in the Sky

It seemed very quiet on Cloud 9 once the storm Were gone. The wind still sang through the drooping rigging, the remaining gasbags jostled against each other, and the crash of collapsing floors came sometimes from inside the burning Pavilion, but none of them were human sounds, so they did not seem to matter.

Theo and Wren carried the unconscious Pennyroyal into the shelter of a grove of cypress trees between his boathouse and the ornamental maze. There was a fountain at the heart of the grove, and they laid Pennyroyal down and did their best to make him comfortable. Then Theo sat down and rested his head on his arms and went to sleep too. That surprised Wren. Tired as she was, she knew she was far too scared and anxious to sleep. It was different for Theo, she supposed. He’d been in battles before; he was probably used to this sort of desperate uncertainty.

“Boo-Boo, my dove, I can explain everything!” muttered Pennyroyal, stirring and half opening his eyes. He saw Wren sitting beside him and mumbled, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Go back to sleep,” said Wren.

“You don’t like me,” said Pennyroyal grumpily. “Look, I’m sorry about your father, I really am. Poor young Tom. I never meant to hurt him. It was an accident, I swear.”

Wren checked his bandages. “It’s not just that,” she said. “It’s that book of yours. It’s so full of lies! About Miss Freya, and Anchorage, and about my mum cutting a deal with the Huntsmen…”

“Oh, but that bit’s true,” said Pennyroyal. “I admit I may have spiced up the facts a little here and there, purely for reasons of pacing, but it really was Hester Shaw who brought Arkangel down on us. She told me so herself. ‘I’m the one who sent the Huntsmen here,’ she said. ‘I wanted Tom for myself again. He’s my predator’s gold.’ And a few months later, among a bunch of refugees from Arkangel, I ran into a charming young person called Julianna. She’d been a slave girl in the household of that lout Piotr Masgard, and she told me she’d seen the deal done: An aviatrix came to her master with word of Anchorage’s position. A young aviatrix, barely more than a girl, with her face split in two by a terrible scar…”

“I don’t believe you,” said Wren crossly, and left him there and went out into the gardens. It couldn’t be true; Pennyroyal was up to his old tricks again, twisting the truth about. But why does he insist on sticking to that part of his story, when he’s admitted the rest was fibs? she wondered uneasily. Well, maybe he believed it. Maybe Mum had told him that, to scare him. And as for Masgard’s slave girl, just because she’d seen Masgard talking to a scarred aviatrix, that didn’t mean it was Mum: The air trade was a dangerous life; there must be lots of aviatrices with messed-up faces…

She shook her head to try to drive the disturbing thoughts away. She had better things to worry about than Pennyroyal’s silly stories. Cloud 9 was wobbling beneath her feet, and the night air was filled with the groan of stressed rigging. Smoke poured across the tilted lawns, obscuring scattered bodies and overturned buffet tables. Wren gathered up some fallen canapés and stood staring at the Pavilion while she ate them. It was hard to believe the change that had come over the beautiful building. It was stained and sagging, and the only light that came from its broken windows was the reddish glow of spreading fires. The great central dome gaped like a burst puffball. Above it, the gasbags seemed to be holding, but they were smoke blackened, and some of the fiercer flames jumping up from the roof of the Pennyroyals’ guest wing were getting dangerously close to their underbellies.

And as she stood there watching it, Wren became aware of someone standing nearby, watching her. “Theo?” she said, turning.

But it was not Theo.

Startled, she lost her balance on the steep grass and fell, hiccuping with fright. The Stalker did not move, except to brace himself against the tilting of the garden. He was staring at Wren. How could he do anything but stare, with only those round green lamps for eyes? The firelight gleamed on his battered armor and his stained claws. His head twitched.

Oil and lubricant dripped from his wounds. “you are not her,” he said.

“No,” agreed Wren in a shrill little mouse-squeak. She had no idea who the horrible old machine was talking about, but she wasn’t about to argue. She wriggled on her bottom across the grass, trying to edge away from him.

The Stalker came slowly closer, then stopped again. She thought she could hear weird mechanisms whirring and chattering inside his armored skull. “you are like her,” he said, ” but you are not her.”

“No, I know, a lot of people get us mixed up,” said Wren, wondering who he could have mistaken her for. There was no point running, she told herself, but her body, with its eagerness to go on living, wouldn’t listen. She pushed herself up and fled, slithering on the wet grass, careering down the sick slope of the gardens.

“come back !” begged Grike. ” help me! i have to find her !” He started to run after her, then stopped. Chasing the girl would only add to her fear, and he had already been appalled by the terror and loathing of him that he had seen in that strange, familiar face. He watched her fade into the smoke. Behind him, the Pavilion’s central dome collapsed into the ballroom in a gush of sparks. Catherine wheels of debris went bowling past him to crash into fountains and flower beds or bound off the deck plate’s edge entirely and plummet down into the desert.

Grike ignored them and tilted his head inquisitively. Above the noise, his sensitive ears had picked up the drone of aero-engines.

Whooping for breath, her heart hammering, Wren plunged back into the cypress grove. Pennyroyal was asleep or unconscious again, but Theo leaped up. “Wren, what is it?”

“Stalker!” she managed to gasp. “The Green Storm left a Stalker behind. That big ugly one that fought the other one…

Pennyroyal groaned and stirred. Theo drew Wren gently away. “Wren, if this Stalker had wanted to kill us, it would have found us by now, wouldn’t it? It would have chased you, and be here by now.”

Wren thought about that. “I think it was damaged,” she said.

“There you are then.”

“I think it was mad,” she went on, remembering the strange way the Stalker had spoken to her. She giggled nervously. “I suppose if ordinary Stalkers are meant to go around killing people, maybe a mad one is the best sort to be stuck on a doomed hovery island thing with. Maybe it just wanted to have a nice chat about the weather. Or knit me a cardigan.”

Theo laughed. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to be all right. At the rate we’re losing gas, we should touch down in the desert in another half hour or so.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“It is,” said Theo. “Come and see.”

She went with him through the trees to the far side of the grove. From there, only a short, steeply tilted stretch of lawn separated them from the deck plate’s edge. Beyond the handrail they could see the ground, and Cloud 9’s shadow slithering over curved dunes and barren outcroppings of stone. All around, clusters of lights and ghostly fans of dust marked the approach of small towns and villages, racing toward the place where they thought Cloud 9 would fall.

“Scavenger towns!” wailed Wren. “We’ll be eaten!”

“Cloud 9 will be eaten,” said Theo. “We won’t. We’ll get off into the desert before the towns arrive and go aboard them as travelers, not prey. We’ll take some gold or Old Tech or something from the Pavilion to pay our way. We’ll be all right.”

Wren calmed herself. This is what brought Mum and Dad together, she thought. There’s a togetherness that comes from sharing adventures like this, and it’s strong enough to overcome anything: mistrust, ugliness, anything. Not that Theo was ugly. Far from it. She turned her head to look at him, and their faces were so close that the tip of her nose brushed his cheek.

And it was then—just when Wren knew that they were about to kiss, and half of her really wanted to and the other half was more scared of kissing than it was of scavenger towns—it was then that the lawn, like the deck of a boat in a stormy sea, dropped suddenly from beneath her feet, throwing her against Theo and Theo against a tree.

“Bother!” she said.

Bad things were happening up among Cloud 9’s corona of gasbags. Roasted by the flames leaping from the Pavilion, the central cell had ruptured, and the gas was blurting out in a rush of blue fire. A few of the lesser bags still held, but they were not enough to support the weight of Cloud 9 for long. The deck plate tipped even more steeply, and the water from fountains and swimming pools poured off the brim in brief white cataracts. Debris fell too: statues and summerhouses, potted palms and garden furniture, marquees and musical instruments, dropping like manna on the dunes below.

The brindled towns of the desert increased their speed, jostling and squabbling in their haste to be first at the crash site.

The Jenny Haniver flew through smoke and dust into the shadow of Cloud 9. Seen through her larboard windows, the tilted underside resembled a vast, ruined wall, pocked with shell craters and burned-out wrecks. Hester turned the searchlight on it and watched as some twisted maintenance walkways slid by, then a warning notice in stenciled white letters ten feet high: NO SMOKING. The cable car swung from severed hawsers, blood-stained ball gowns and evening robes billowing from the shattered cabin.

“We’re too late,” said Hester. “There’s not going to be anyone alive up there.”

“Don’t say that!” Tom told her. He spoke sharply, still feeling scratchy and shaky from their argument. He did not want to argue anymore, because finding Wren was what mattered now, but things had altered between himself and Hester, and he was not sure they could be put right. The hardness of her, the calm way she had abandoned Fishcake, made his insides curl.

Angrily, he tugged at the Jenny’s controls, swinging her up over the top edge of the deck plate and carefully in through the tangle of rigging. He wished suddenly that Freya were with him instead of Hester. She would not have left poor Fishcake behind. She would have found some way out of Shkin’s tower without murdering all those poor men. And she would not have given up hope of finding Wren so easily.

“Remember London?” he said. “Remember the night of MEDUSA, when I came to fetch you from London? That looked hopeless too, but I found you, didn’t I? And now we’re going to find Wren.”

Below them, Cloud 9 swung like a censer. Hester aimed the searchlight at its ruined gardens.

Dragging Pennyroyal between them, Wren and Theo went crabwise across the steep face of the gardens, looking for a place where they could shelter when the deck plate touched down.

“Good work!” Pennyroyal told them, briefly coming to. “Splendid effort! I’ll see that you get your freedom for this…” Then he passed out again, which made him impossibly heavy. They laid him down, and Wren sat next to him. The ground was five hundred feet below, perhaps less; Wren could make out individual scrubby bushes struggling to grow among the long crescents of rock that dotted the desert, and individual windows and doorways on the upperworks of a town that was bounding along on big, barrel-shaped wheels in Cloud 9’s shadow. The air was filled with the sounds of overstrained rigging. Beneath the long-drawn-out metallic moans, another noise was rising. Wren looked up. Through the tangles of hawsers that swayed across the garden, the beam of a searchlight poked, dazzling her. Then it swung away, a long finger of light tracing aimless paths across the lawns, and behind it she saw a small airship.

“Look!” she shouted.

“Scavengers,” groaned Theo. “Or air pirates!”

The people in the town below seemed to have the same idea, for a rocket came sputtering up to burst in the sky behind the little ship. It veered away, then came edging back, steering vanes flicking like the fins of an inquisitive fish. A face showed at the gondola window. The steering vanes flicked again, the engine pods swiveled, and the ship touched down on a metal patio, not too close to Wren and Theo, but not so far away that Wren could not recognize the people who climbed out of the gondola and came scrambling toward her across the canted lawn.

At first she refused to believe it. It seemed so impossible that Mum and Dad could be here that she closed her eyes and tried to make the hurtful hallucination go away. It couldn’t be them, it couldn’t, no matter what her silly eyes were telling her; clearly the adventures she had lived through had all been too much for her, and she had started imagining things.

And then a voice cried, “Wren!” and someone’s arms went round her and held her tight, and it was her father, and he was hugging her, laughing and saying, “Wren!” over and over, while tears made white channels through the ash and dust that smeared his face.

Chapter 36 Strange Meetings

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, I’ve been so stupid—” and after that she couldn’t speak; she couldn’t think of a single thing more to say.

“It’s all right,” Dad kept telling her. “It doesn’t matter; you’re safe, that’s all that matters…”

Then Dad stepped aside, and it was Mummy hugging her, a harder, tighter hug, pulling Wren’s face against a bony shoulder, and Mum’s voice in her ear asking “You’re all right? You’ve not been hurt?”

“I’m fine,” sniffled Wren.

Hester stepped back and cupped Wren’s face in her two hands, surprised at how much love she felt. She was crying with happiness, and she almost never cried. Not wanting Tom and Wren to think she’d gone soft, she looked away and noticed the tall black boy hanging back behind Wren, watching.

“Mum, Dad,” said Wren, turning to pull him closer, “this is Theo Ngoni. He saved my life.”

“We saved each other,” said Theo shyly. He was crying too, imagining how his own mother and father would welcome him if ever he found his way home to Zagwa.

Hester looked suspiciously at the handsome young aviator, but Tom shook his hand and said, “We’d better get aboard.”

He turned away toward the waiting airship and Theo went with him, but as Hester started to follow them, Wren said, “No, wait; Pennyroyal…”

Tom and Theo didn’t hear her, but her mother did.

Wren hurried through the trees to the fountain. Pennyroyal, revived by the sound of aero-engines, was struggling to his feet. He grinned as he saw Wren, and said weakly, “What did I tell you, eh? Never say die!” Then, recognizing the figure who loomed behind her, he added, “Oh, Great Poskitt!”

The last time Hester had seen Pennyroyal, he had been running away into the snow and dark of Anchorage the night she’d killed the Huntsmen. The last time she had spoken to him had been shortly before that, in the ransacked kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Aakiuq’s house, when she had told him how the Huntsmen had come to be there.

Pennyroyal backed weakly away, his face a dead, cheesy white beneath the crusted drizzles of blood. Hester caught him with two swift strides, knocked him down, drew her knife as he groveled and pawed at her feet.

“Please!” he whined. “Spare me! I’ll give you anything!”

“Shut up,” said Hester, baring his throat to her blade, bending so the blood wouldn’t splash her new coat.

Wren hit her from the side, shoving her away. “Mummy, no!” she yelled.

Hester grunted, winded and angry. “You stay out of this…”

But Wren would not stay out of it. She had seen the look in her mother’s eye when she saw Pennyroyal. Not hate, or anger, or a thirst for revenge, but fear. And why would Mum be frightened of Pennyroyal unless the thing that Pennyroyal had said about her was true? As Hester started toward him again, Wren leaped between them, spreading her arms to protect him. “I know!” she shouted. “I know what you did! So if you want to silence him, you’re too late! If you want to keep it secret now, you’ll have to kill me too.”

“Kill you?” Hester grabbed Wren by the collar of her jacket and pushed her hard against a tree. “I wish you’d never been born!” she shouted. She turned the knife, changing her grip on the worn bone handle. The blade filled with firelight. Reflections slid across Wren’s appalled, defiant face, and suddenly it seemed to Hester very like the face of her own half sister, Katherine Valentine, who had died defending her from their father’s sword.

“Mummy?” asked Wren, in a tiny, shocked voice.

Hester lowered the knife.

Tom and Theo came hurrying through the trees, slithering down the steep lawn. “What’s happening?” shouted Theo, who was in the lead. “Wren? Are you all right?”

“She’s trying to kill him!” Wren had sunk to her knees. She was crying so much that they could hardly make out her words, but she kept repeating them until they understood.

“She wants to kill Pennyroyal!”

Tom looked down at Pennyroyal, who raised a trembly hand.

“Tom, my dear fellow, let’s not be hasty…”

Tom didn’t answer for a moment. He was remembering how it had felt to lie on his back in the snow of Anchorage, sure that he was about to die. He could still feel the hole in his chest, and taste the blood. He could still hear the fading throb of the Jenny’s engines as Pennyroyal made off with her. For a moment he felt as fierce as Hester, ready to seize the knife himself and finish the old scoundrel. But the feeling passed quickly, and he reached for his wife’s hand. “Het, look at him. He’s old and helpless and his palace is going down in flames. Isn’t that revenge enough? Let’s get him aboard the Jenny quickly, before this place sinks any lower.”

“No!” shouted Hester. “Have you forgotten what happened last time we let him aboard? Have you forgotten what he did to you? He nearly killed you! You can’t just forgive him!”

“Yes, I can,” said Tom firmly. Kneeling beside Pennyroyal, he nodded to Theo to help lift him. “What’s the alternative? Murder him? What would that achieve? It wouldn’t change anything…”

“It would,” said Wren, and there was such an odd sound to her voice that Tom looked up at her. She was crying with big, unladylike sobs, her face wet with snot and tears. She scrambled away fearfully when her mother turned toward her, and shouted out, “If she kills him, he won’t be able to tell you how she sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen.”

Hester jerked her head as if the girl had hit her. “Lies!” she said. She tried to laugh. “Pennyroyal’s been filling her up with his lies!”

“No,” said Wren. “No, it’s true. All these years everybody’s been so grateful to her for saving us from the Huntsmen, when all along it was her who brought them down on us in the first place. I wanted it not to be true. I told myself it couldn’t be. But it is.”

Tom looked at Hester, waiting for her to deny it.

“I did it for you,” she said.

“Then it’s true?”

Hester took a step backward, away from him. “Of course it’s true! Where do you think I went to, that night I took the Jenny? I flew straight to Arkangel and told Masgard where he’d find Anchorage. It was that or lose you, and I couldn’t have—I couldn’t have! Oh, Tom, for the gods’ sakes, it was sixteen years ago; it doesn’t matter now, does it? Does it? I sorted it out, didn’t I? I killed Masgard and his men. And I only did it for you…”

But it had been a different Tom Natsworthy whom she had loved enough to betray whole cities for. That Tom had been a brave, handsome, passionate boy who might have forgiven her; but this older Tom, this timid Anchorage historian who stood staring at her with his stupid mouth hanging open in dismay and his stupid daughter sniveling beside him, would never understand what she had done. Neither of them would. She was nothing like them. She had been a fool to believe that she could live in their world.

“All these years,” she said, flinging her knife away. “All these years in Vineland,” she said, watching it flash as it stuck quivering in Pennyroyal’s lawn. “All these years with you both… Gods, I’ve been so bored!

She was shaking, and it made her remember the night of MEDUSA, when she’d first dared to kiss Tom. She had shaken uncontrollably then, back at the beginning of it all, and here she was shaking again as it all came to an end. She turned and walked quickly away from him across the ruined gardens. Through a gap in the smoke ahead, she saw something loom square and low. She thought it was a building, then realized it was some sort of stupid maze. Well, it would do. She strode fast toward the entrance.

“Hester!” shouted Tom behind her.

“Go!” She glanced back. He was scrambling after her, a frantic silhouette against the blaze of the Pavilion, Wren hanging back behind him with her African boy. “Go!” she shouted, turning without stopping, walking backward for a pace or two, pointing at the Jenny Haniver. “Just get Wren aboard and go, before Pennyroyal steals the bloody thing again…”

But Tom only shouted again, “Hester!”

“I’m not coming, Tom,” she said. She was crying. Smoke blew past her, and burning scraps of envelope fabric, and the hot wind raised the skirts of her coat like black wings, and she looked like some terrible angel. “Go back to Vineland. Be happy. But not with me. I’m staying here.”

“Hester, don’t be stupid! This place is falling apart!”

“It’s just falling,” said Hester. “I’ll survive. There are towns below: hard desert towns, scav platforms. My kind of place.”

He had almost caught up with her. She could see his face shining with tears in the light from the blazing buildings. She wanted very badly to go to him, to kiss him and hold him, but she knew that she could never touch him again, because what she had done would always come between them. “I love you,” she said, and turned and ran, plunging into the maze while the deck plates pitched and reared beneath her, and sounds that were half sobs and half laughter came out of her mouth without her meaning them to. Behind her, fainter and fainter, she heard Tom shouting her name. Overhead, Cloud 9’s gasbags were igniting one by one, filling the maze with weird racing shadows. Hester sobbed and stumbled, the hedges scratching her face as she blundered into them. She was just beginning to realize that this was a bad place to be, that she would need better shelter than this when the deck plate came down, when she reached the heart of the maze. Something crouched there, as if it had been waiting for her all along.

She came to a stop, skidding on the grass. The waiting shape unfolded itself and stood up, towering over her. She thought at first that it was made of fire, but that was just the reflections from the burning gasbags shining in its dented, burnished armor. Its dead face widened into a smile. Hester knew that face; she had shoveled earth over it herself, eighteen years ago on the Black Island, burying the old Stalker deep and piling stones upon his grave. It seemed she’d been wasting her time, though. She could smell the familiar smell of him: formaldehyde and hot metal.

“Hester?” called Tom’s voice faintly, away in the gardens somewhere and lost to her now forever.

And Grike reached for her with his dreadful hands and said, “HESTER SHAW.”

Another gasbag went up with a roar, a geyser of light escaping into the sky. Tom found himself airborne for a moment as the deck plate dropped. He hit the grass hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a statue of Poskitt. “Hester!” he shouted as he scrambled up, but his voice was cracking with the effort, and then his heart seemed to crack too. He kneaded his chest, but there was no relief: He was on his knees; on his face; pain nailed him to the lawn. He blacked out, and when he woke, someone was with him. “Hester?” he mumbled.

“Daddy…” It was Wren, her hands on his back and his shoulders, her face looking down at him, tearstained and frightened.

“I’m all right,” he told her, and it was true, the pain was passing, though he felt sick and giddy. “It’s happened before… It’s nothing.”

He tried to stand, but Wren’s friend Theo came and picked him up, lifting him with barely an effort. He must have lost consciousness again as Theo carried him back across the gardens, because he thought that Hester was with him, but when he looked round she wasn’t, and they were already at the Jenny’s open hatchway, Pennyroyal peering out at them from the flight-deck windows. It was confusing, especially with the whole garden tilting and swaying like this, and the only thing he could be sure of was Wren, who was holding his hand very tightly and trying to smile at him, though she was crying at the same time. “Wren,” he said, “we can’t go; we have to find your mother…”

Wren shook her head, and helped Theo heave him aboard. “We’re going to get you away from this awful place before it’s too late,” she said.

The hatch closed, and as Theo went forward to the flight deck to help Pennyroyal start the engines, Wren knelt over her father, holding him the way that he had held her when she was a very little girl, when she was sick or frightened. “There, there,” he used to whisper to her, and so she whispered, “There, there,” and stroked his hair, and kissed him, until he was calm again. And she tried not to think about Mum, and the things that Mum had done and said, and the trembling light that had shone from the blade of Mum’s knife. She tried to remember that she did not have a mother anymore.

How she had aged!

Grike had thought he understood the Once-Borns and the things time did to them, but it was still a shock to see his poor child’s lined and weather-beaten face, her beautiful red hair turning coarse and gray. He reached toward her, sheathing his claws, and she reacted in the way most Once-Borns did when the chase was done and there was no escaping him: that wordless keening, and the sudden hot stink as her bowels emptied. It hurt him that she was afraid of him. He pulled her close as gently as he could and said, “I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH.”

And Hester, crushed against his dented armor, could only shudder, and weep, and listen to the saddest sound she’d ever heard: the dwindling roar of twin Jeunet-Carots as the Jenny Haniver took off without her.

And Cloud 9 touched down at last, first the dangling cable car plowing into the sand like a drag anchor, then the edge of the deck plate catching on a reef of rocks. Catwalks torn from the underside went striding end over end across the dunes; smashed flying machines and uprooted trees spilled down into the desert. A hawser snapped; a sagging gasbag broke free and fell upward, soaring through smoke and dust. Whole sections of the Pavilion burst, shedding antiques and objets d’art like shrapnel. Stairways crumpled; sundecks buckled; swimming pools imploded. Cloud 9 bounced, slicing the top off a gigantic dune. Candy-colored domes bowled off across the desert, pursued by greedy townlets. The wreckage crashed down again, belching fire, trailing cables and collapsing gasbags; crashed and skidded and spun and shuddered to a stop.

There was a time of silence, broken only by the mineral sigh of a billion grains of upflung sand sifting gently down. And in that silence, before the scavenger towns came roaring in to gobble up the wreckage, the Stalker Grike stood up and lifted Hester in his arms, and walked away with her into the desert, and the dark. The end.