“It’s all right,” he told her, kneeling down beside her and rolling her over.
“Rohini,” she croaked.
“She’s gone,” said Theo, trying to help her to her feet. “She was never Rohini anyway. Her name’s Cynthia Twite; she was part of the Stalker Fang’s private spy ring.”
“Twite?” Lady Naga frowned and groaned. Thinking seemed to hurt. “No, she was a white girl, the Stalker’s agent on Cloud 9… Naga took her home aboard the
“Don’t try to talk,” said Theo, worried that she would injure herself still further by forcing all these words up her poor, bruised throat. “I’ll get you home, I promise. But first we have to get off this ship.” He checked his wristwatch. “There’s a b—” he said, and stopped.
It was still eight minutes to midnight.
He had just time to remember his father saying, “I don’t know why you youngsters wear these gimcrack bracelet watches. A pocket watch is more distinguished, and far, far more reliable,” before the explosion tore his ship apart beneath him.
Chapter 7
Brighton Rocks
Brighton had taken a turn for the worse since Wren and Theo had left. The flying palace of Cloud 9 was gone, and it had taken most of the city’s ruling elite with it. Brighton was ruled now by the Lost Boys. Dragged aboard as captives by the Shkin Corporation, they had escaped from their pens on the night of the Green Storm raid and quickly made themselves at home, setting up their own small kingdoms among the smart white streets of Queen’s Park and Montpelier and the dank labyrinths of the Laines, gathering private armies of beggars and rebel slaves about them. They fought among themselves, or formed shaky alliances that could be broken over a stolen pair of shoes or a covetous glance at a pretty slave girl. You could never tell what a Lost Boy would do next. They were vicious and sentimental, greedy and generous. A lot of them were mad. By night their followers fought running battles on the litter-strewn promenades, avenging botched deals and imagined insults.
Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys), and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guesthouses and frolic in the Sea Pool; but there was a certain sort of person—well-off artists from the comfortable middle tiers of cities that the war had never touched, and spoiled young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them— who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music, and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Ore with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St. Jean les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.
There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves, or gunrunners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy
In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead, he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he had encountered any of them, they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk, he realized he’d been wrong; the Lost Boys
The launch swung across Brighton’s decaying stern, past dirty paddle wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime, where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveler from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, “Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!”
“Lost Boy submarines!” the boy said. “You can buy pleasure trips aboard them and see the city from beneath. And that’s not all they’re used for. Lost Boys are still pirates at heart. I’ve heard stories of little towns that have crossed Brighton’s path and never been seen again…”
“Ugh!” said the girl again, but she looked delighted at the thought of boarding a city where real live pirates lived.
Fishcake did not share her enthusiasm. Returning seemed less and less like a good idea.
The launch entered a channel of calm, filthy water between the central hull and the outrigger district of Kemptown. Abandoned pleasure piers arched overhead, their corroded gantries sending down a rain of rust flakes as Brighton shifted on the swell. The voices of the launch crew echoed across the narrowing gap to dockers waiting on the mooring stair. Smells of oil and brine. A dead cat bobbed in a mat of drifting scum. The launch backed its engines, and the other passengers began to gather their bags and pat their clothes, checking that wallets and money belts were still secure, but Fishcake just turned up his collar and tugged down the peak of his greasy cap and wished that he could stay aboard the launch and let it take him back to Cairo.
His Stalker, who was standing silently beside him, wrapped in the long, hooded robe that he had stolen for her from the Lower Suq, seemed to sense his fear. Her steel fingers closed gently on his arm, and she whispered, “There is nothing to be afraid of. I am with you.”
She was Anna today. He took her hand in his and held it tight and felt a little braver. He did not even worry too much when a gust of wind snatched his cap off and sent it whirling up into the sunlight.
Two tiers above, in a fortified hotel on Ocean Boulevard, a Lost Boy named Brittlestar jerked around to stare as the lost cap went whirling past his window. “What was that?” he demanded.
His friends and bodyguards fingered the weapons in their belts and said they didn’t know. One of his slaves said she thought it was just a hat.
“Just a hat?” hissed Brittlestar. “Nothing is
The bodyguards, friends, and slaves swapped weary glances. Brittlestar was growing increasingly paranoid, and sometimes at night he woke the whole gang as he thrashed around in his sleep and screamed about Grimsby and somebody called Uncle. The bodyguards and friends were starting to think it might soon be time to pitch him overboard and offer their services to some less sensitive Lost Boy, like Krill or Baitball.
Brittlestar, the hem of his silk dressing gown swooshing behind him over the expensive carpets, went rushing to the room where he kept his screens. All the Lost Boys had screens, and all had crab-cameras that they sent sneaking about Brighton to spy on other Lost Boys. Everyone had grown quite used to the scraping of the machines’ metal feet inside the city’s ventilation shafts, and the echoey, rattling fights that broke out when two rival cameras met. Sometimes at dawn the pavements beneath air vents were littered with torn-off metal legs and shattered lenses, the debris of desperate battles that had raged through the shafts all night.
