belts and huge spherical gas-tanks. A gang of convict labourers looked up in amazement as the girl raced by. “Stop her!” yelled Tom. They just stood gawping as he passed, but when he looked back he saw that one of the Apprentice Engineers who had been supervising them had broken off his work to join the chase. Tom immediately regretted shouting out. He wasn’t going to give up his victory to some stupid Engineer! He put on an extra spurt of speed, so that he should be the one who caught her.
Ahead, the way was barred by a circular hole in the deckplate, ringed by rusty handrails—a waste chute, scorched and blackened where clinker from the furnaces had been tipped down. The girl broke her pace for a moment, wondering which way to turn. When she went on, Tom had narrowed her lead. His outstretched fingers grabbed her pack; the strap broke and she stopped and spun to face him, lit by the red glare of the smelters.
She was no older than Tom, and she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump and her single eye stared at him out of the wreckage, as grey and chill as a winter sea.
“Why didn’t you let me kill him?” she hissed.
He was so shocked that he couldn’t move or speak, could only stand there as the girl reached down for her fallen pack and turned to run on. But behind him police whistles were blowing, and crossbow darts came sparking against the metal deck-plates and the overhead ducts. The girl dropped the pack and fell sideways, gasping a filthy curse. Tom hadn’t even imagined that girls knew such words. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled, waving towards the policemen. They were lumbering down the spiral stair beyond the gas-tanks, shooting as they came, as if they didn’t much care that Tom was in the way. “Don’t shoot!”
The girl scrambled up, and he saw that a crossbow-dart had gone through her leg just above the knee. She clutched at it, blood welling out between her fingers. Her breath came in sobs as she backed up against the handrail, lifting herself awkwardly over it. Behind her, the waste-chute gaped like an open mouth.
“NO!” shouted Tom, seeing what she meant to do. He didn’t feel like a hero any more—he just felt sorry for this poor, hideous girl, and guilty at being the one who had trapped her here. He held out his hand to her, willing her not to jump. “I couldn’t let you hurt Mr Valentine!” he said, shouting to make her hear him above the din of the Gut. “He’s a good man, a kind, brave, wonderful…”
The girl lunged forward, shoving her awful noseless face towards him. “Look at me!” she said, her voice all twisted by her twisted mouth. “Look what your brave, kind Valentine did to me!”
“What do you mean?”
“Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”
The police were closer now; Tom could feel their footsteps drumming on the deck. The girl glanced past him, then heaved her wounded leg over the handrail, crying out at the pain. “No!” pleaded Tom again, but too late. Her ragged greatcoat snapped and fluttered and she was gone. He flung himself forward and peered down the shadowed chute. A cool blast of air came up at him, mingled with the smell of mud and crushed vegetation; the smell of the speeding earth beneath the city.
“No!”
She had jumped! She had jumped right out of the city to her death!
Shapes loomed out of the drifting smoke. The policemen were advancing cautiously, like watchful crabs, and Valentine was with them, running ahead. In the shadows under a gas-tank Tom saw the young Engineer looking on, shocked. Tom tried to smile at him, but his face felt frozen, and the next moment another thick swag of smoke had folded over him, blotting out everything.
“Tom! Are you all right?” Valentine ran up, barely winded by the long chase. “Where is she? Where is the girl?”
“Dead,” Tom said lamely.
Valentine stood beside him at the handrail and peered over. The shadows of the drifting smoke moved over his face like cobwebs. There was a strange light in his eyes, and his face was tight and white and frightened. “Did you see her, Tom? Did she have a scar?”
“Yes,” said Tom, wondering how Valentine could know that. “It was horrible! Her eye was gone, and her nose…” Then he remembered the terrible thing the girl had told him. “And she said…” But he wasn’t sure if he should tell Mr Valentine what she had said—it was a lie, insane. “She said her name was Hester Shaw.”
“Great Quirke!” hissed Valentine, and Tom flinched backwards, wishing he had never mentioned it. But when he looked up again Valentine was smiling kindly at him, his eyes full of sorrow. “Don’t worry, Tom,” he said. “I’m sorry. …”
Tom felt a big, gentle hand on his shoulder and then -he was never sure quite how it happened—a twist, a shove, and he was pitching over the handrail and falling, just as Hester Shaw had fallen, flailing wildly for a hold on the smooth metal at the brim of the waste chute.
4. THE OUT-COUNTRY
Silence. Silence. He couldn’t understand it. Even when London wasn’t moving there was usually some sort of noise in the dormitory; the whirr of ventilators, the hum and rattle of distant elevator shafts, the snores of other apprentices in the neighbouring bunks. But now—silence. His head ached. In fact, all of him ached. His bunk felt strange, too, and when he moved his hands there was something cold and slimy that oozed between his fingers like…
MUD! He sat up, gasping. He wasn’t in the Third Class dormitory at all. He was lying on a great humpbacked mound of mud, on the edge of a deep trench, and in the thin, pearl-grey light of dawn he could see the girl with the ruined face sitting nearby. His horrible dream of sliding down that fire-blackened chute had been true: he had fallen out of London, and he was alone with Hester Shaw on the bare earth!
He moaned in terror, and the girl glanced quickly round at him and then away. “You’re alive, then,” she said. “I thought you’d died.” She sounded as if she didn’t much care either way.
Tom scrambled up on to all fours, so that only his knees and his toes and the palms of his hands were touching the mud. His arms were bare, and when he looked down he saw that his bruised body was naked to the waist. His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn’t find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg.
“Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!”
“So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.”
He pulled his tunic on. It was tattered and filthy from his fall down the waste-chute, full of rents that let the chill Out-Country air through. He hugged himself, shivering.
Hester Shaw finished her bandaging and stood up, grunting at the pain as she pulled her filthy, blood- stiffened breeches on over the wound. Then she threw what was left of Tom’s shirt back at him, a useless rag. “You should have let me kill him,” she said, and turned away, setting off with a kind of furious limp up the long curve of the mud.
Tom watched her go, too shocked and bewildered to move. It was only when she vanished over the top of the slope that he realized he didn’t want to be left alone here; he would prefer any company, even hers, to the silence.
He flung the torn shirt away and ran after her, slithering in the thick, clagging mud, stubbing his toes on fragments of rock and torn-up roots. The deep, sheer-walled trench yawned on his left, and as he reached the crest of the rise he realized that it was just one of a hundred identical trenches; the huge track-marks of London stretching ruler-straight into the distance. Far, far ahead he saw his city, dark against the brightening eastern sky, wrapped in the smoke of its own engines. He felt the cold tug of homesickness. Everyone he had ever known was aboard that dwindling mountain, everyone except Hester, who was stomping angrily after it, dragging her injured leg behind her.
