was happening. He hunched himself deeper into the shadows, wondering what to do.
He knew what he should do; Uncle’s rules were very clear. When a host city was in danger of being eaten, any limpet attached to it must decouple and escape at once. It was part of the big rule: Don’t Get Caught. If even one limpet were to be found, and the cities of the north learned how they had been preyed on and robbed these many years, they would start posting guards and taking security measures. The life the Lost Boys led would become impossible.
And yet Caul did not start back towards the Screw Worm. He didn’t want to leave Anchorage; not yet, and not like this. He tried telling himself it was because this city was his patch: there were still good pickings to be had, and no stupid predator-suburb was going to snatch that from him. No way was he going to take his first command home early and defeated, with her holds barely half full!
But that wasn’t the real reason, and he knew it in the depths of his mind even as the surface seethed with anger at the impertinence of Wolverinehampton.
Caul had a secret. It was a secret so deep and dark that he could never begin to tell Skewer or Gargle about it. The terrible truth was, he liked the people he was burgling. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. He cared about Windolene Pye, and sympathized with her secret fear that she was not good enough to steer the city to America. He worried about Mr Scabious, and was moved by the courage of Smew and the Aakiuqs and the men and women who staffed the engine district and the livestock and algae farms. He felt drawn to Tom, because of his kindness and the life he had led in the sky. (It seemed to Caul that if Uncle hadn’t taken him to be a Lost Boy he might have been a lot like Tom himself.)
As for Freya, he had no word to describe the mixture of new feelings she stirred up in him.
The howl of the Scabious Spheres rose in pitch. The city lurched and jittered, heavy objects crashing to the deck and rolling somewhere in the streets behind Caul’s hiding place, but he knew he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t abandon these people, now that he had come to know them so well. He would take his chances and wait out the chase. Skewer and Gargle wouldn’t decouple without him, and even if they could see him hiding here, they couldn’t know what he was thinking. He’d tell them he hadn’t dared try to get back to the Screw Worm through all this chaos. It would be all right. Anchorage would survive. He trusted Miss Pye and Scabious and Freya to see it through.
Tom had often watched town-hunts from the observation decks on London’s second tier, cheering his city on as it raced after small industrials and heavy, lumbering trade-towns, but he had never experienced a chase from the prey’s point of view before, and he was not enjoying it. He wished he had a job to do, like Windolene Pye and her staff, who were busily laying out more charts and weighting the curly corners down with coffee mugs. They had been drinking endless mugs of coffee since the chase began, and kept darting prayerful glances at the statuettes of the Ice Gods on the Wheelhouse shrine.
“Why are they all so nervous?” Tom asked, turning to Freya, who stood nearby with just as little to do as him. “I mean, the wind’s not that bad, is it? It couldn’t really flip us over?”
Freya pursed her lips and nodded. She knew her city better than Tom did, and she could feel the uneasy quiver that ran through the deckplates as the gale slid its fingers under the hull and tried to lift it. And it wasn’t only the wind they had to fear. “Most of the High Ice is safe,” she said. “Most of the ice cap is a thousand feet thick, and in some places it goes right down to the ocean floor. But there are patches where it’s thinner. And then there are the polynyas — like lakes of unfrozen water in the midst of all the ice — and the Ice Circles, which are smaller, but could still turn us over if one of the skids plunged in. Polynyas shouldn’t be too hard to avoid, because they’re more or less permanent and they’ll be marked on Miss Pye’s charts. But the circles just appear on the ice at random.”
Tom remembered the photos in the Wunderkammer. “What causes them?”
“Nobody knows,” said Freya. “Currents in the ice, maybe, or the vibration from passing cities. You often see them where a city has passed by. They’re very odd. Perfectly round, with smooth edges. The Snowmads say they’re made by ghosts, cutting fishing holes.” She laughed, glad to be talking about the mysteries of the High Ice instead of thinking about the all-too-real predator out there in the storm. “There are all sorts of tales about the High Ice. Like the ghost crabs — giant spider-crab things, as big as icebergs, that people have seen scuttling about in the light of the aurora. I used to have nightmares about them when I was little…”
She moved closer to Tom, until her arm brushed the sleeve of his tunic. She felt very daring. It had been scary at first, going against the old ways, but now that they were racing through the storm, defying both Wolverinehampton and all the traditions of Anchorage, it felt more than scary. Exhilarating, that was the word. She was glad Tom was here with her. If they survived this, she decided, she would break another tradition and invite him to dine with her, all alone.
“Tom…” she said.
“Look out!” shouted Tom. “Miss Pye! What’s that?”
Beyond the dim outlines of Anchorage’s roofs a row of lights blazed suddenly through the darkness, then gigantic claw-toothed wheels and the bright windows of buildings, all rushing past at right-angles to Anchorage’s new course. It was the stern of Wolverinehampton. The heavy wheels spun into reverse as its lookouts sighted Anchorage, but the suburb’s massive jaws made it slow to turn, and already the storm was clamping down again, thick, furious snow hiding the predator from its prey.
“Thank Quirke!” Tom whispered, and laughed with relief. Freya squeezed his fingers, and he found that in the shock of seeing the predator they had reached for each other, and her warm, plump hand was nestled in his. He let go quickly, embarrassed. He had not thought of Hester since the chase began.
Miss Pye ordered course-change after course-change, steering the city deep into the labyrinths of the blizzard. An hour passed, and then another, and slowly a feeling of reprieve seeped into the Wheelhouse. Wolverinehampton would not waste more fuel trying to follow them through the night, and by the time dawn came the storm would have erased their tracks. Miss Pye hugged her colleagues, then the helmsman, then Tom. “We’ve done it!” she said. “We’ve escaped!” Freya was beaming. Professor Pennyroyal, sensing that the danger had passed, had fallen asleep in a corner.
Tom returned the navigator’s hug and laughed, happy to be alive and very, very happy to be aboard this city, among these good and friendly people. He would talk to Hester as soon as the storm was over, and make her see that there was no need for them to go flying off as soon as the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage’s engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home.
In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton’s air-quay Widgery Blinkoe’s five wives turned five unbecoming shades of green. “Ooooh!” they groaned, clutching their delicate stomachs as the suburb tilted and veered, angrily scouring the blizzard for its vanished prey.
“I’ve never been aboard such a horrid little town!”
“Does this hotel have no shock absorbers at all?”
“What were you thinking of, husband, setting us down here?”
“You should have known you’d find no trace of the Jenny Haniver aboard a mere suburb!”
“I wish I’d flown away with dear Professor Pennyroyal. He was madly in love with me, you know.”
“I wish I’d listened to my mother!”
“I wish we were back in Arkangel!”
Widgery Blinkoe carefully stoppered his ears against their complaints with small balls of wax, but he, too, was sick and scared and missing his home comforts. Bother and blast the Green Storm, for sending him on this wild goose chase! For weeks now he’d been trailing across the Ice Wastes like some Snowmad sky-tramp, setting down on every town he saw to ask for news of the Jenny Haniver. People he had questioned in Novaya Nizhni said they had seen her fly off northwards after wrecking the Green Storm’s fighters, but there had not been a sighting since. It was as if the wretched airship had simply vanished!
Dimly, he wondered about the city Wolverinehampton had just tried to snaffle; Anchorage. If he took off when the storm ended he could probably spot the place and catch up with it… But what was the point? He was sure those two young aviators could not have brought their old ship this far west. Besides, he was beginning to think that he would rather face the assassins of the Green Storm than tell his wives they had to land at yet another dingy little harbour.
It was definitely time for a change of plan.
He took out his earplugs, just in time to hear wife number three say plaintively, “…and now they’ve lost their catch, the ruffians who run this town will grow angry and wild! We shall be murdered, and it will all be Blinkoe’s
