Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  “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 was 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 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 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 towards 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 spiralled down through the floor. She knew that they went through the floor below as well, and through the deckplate beneath it, opening eventually into that little glass bubble which 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, which led down through the deckplate. Theo was looking up at her from the foot of the stairs, and 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 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. Did
n’t you feel that lurch? Wren, somebody’s cut the tow-ropes! 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 backwards, 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 towards 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 gun-ports of an armoured 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.

  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, 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 were real, or just his body’s memory of the bullet.

  He had quickly lost track of time in this bland, windowless 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 towards 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 colour. 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 i
nsisted 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 have liked 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!”