be captured by Brighton.
But it was not Uncle he saw when he trained one of his cameras on the group of visitors disembarking at the Kemptown Stair. He wasn’t sure whom he was seeing at first, only that there was something familiar about the little boy leading the cripple in the black robe. Then one of his slaves, a woman named Monica Weems, who had once worked for the Shkin Corporation and had a better memory for faces than Brittlestar, suddenly pointed at the screen and said, “Look! Look, master! It’s little Fishcake!”
Little Fishcake hurried his Stalker along litter-strewn pavements under the colonnades at the city’s edge, past boarded-up cafes and looted amusement arcades, out at last into the metallic sunlight of Plage Ultime. TO THE BEACH read a stenciled sign on a white wall, and Fishcake and his Stalker followed where it pointed, past abandoned hotels and empty swimming pools, past the gigantic housings of the resort’s Mitchell Nixon engines, down to where the limpets waited.
There was a chain-link fence and a padlock on the gate, but fences and padlocks meant nothing to the Stalker. She snapped the lock, and Fishcake pushed the gate open and ran among the limpets, feeling a strange nostalgia for the old days in Grimsby. Their armored cabs and crook-kneed legs, patched with barnacles and gull droppings, gave the limpets the appearance of enormous prehistoric crabs. Fishcake knew them all: the
He looked for his Stalker, but he had left her behind. Poor thing, stomping along on that table leg, she couldn’t keep up with him! He started to walk back through the zigzag shadows under the limpets, calling out, “Anna! Come here! I need you to open the hatch!”
With a howl of electric engines two bugs came speeding out of the streets beneath the engine housings and through the open gate. They were driving much too fast, and both were overloaded, with men and boys packed into their small cabins and standing on the roofs and running boards. Fishcake, noticing the swords and flare pistols and harpoon guns that they were waving at him, turned to run, but the only way out was through the gate, which the men spilling from the bugs quickly pushed shut. Whimpering, Fishcake veered toward the sea, but the Drys were all around him, and with them, staring at him, was a boy he knew: a tall, thin, highly strung redheaded boy named—
“Brittlestar,” said Brittlestar. “Remember me? ’Cos I remember you, Fishcake.” He was carrying a speargun. “You’re the sneak, ain’t you? The one as told Shkin where Grimsby lay? Don’t think I’ve forgot. We none of us have, we Lost Boys. Maybe when I show ’em that I’ve caught you, they’ll give me a bit of respect. Maybe Uncle will spare me when he comes to punish us. Maybe—”
Somehow, suddenly, Fishcake’s Stalker was standing behind Brittlestar. She gripped his chin and his red hair and twisted his head around so sharply that the noise of his neck snapping echoed like a gunshot. The last thing Brittlestar saw was his own surprised face reflected in her bronze mask. His finger tightened on the trigger of his speargun, which was pointing at the sky. A silver harpoon shot up into the sunlight, up through the steam from the idling engines, high into the clear air above the city.
Fishcake had just enough of his wits left to throw himself down beside Brittlestar’s flapping body as bullets began to bang and whine among the parked limpets. He watched the harpoon rise higher and higher, slower and slower, until it seemed to hang for a moment suspended in the blue sky, a flake of silver among all the gliding gulls. His Stalker bared her claws. As the harpoon started to fall, she began killing Brittlestar’s gang one by one, finding them by their scent and the sound of the guns they shot at her. By the time the harpoon clattered on the deck plate, they were all dead.
The Stalker sheathed her claws and helped Fishcake to stand, asking him gently if he was damaged.
“Anna?” said Fishcake, surprised. “I thought you had turned into—”
“The other is still asleep, I think,” his Stalker whispered, and patted at her robe, which was smoldering where someone had fired a flare pistol at her.
“I didn’t think you would be so …,” said Fishcake awkwardly, looking at the blood that smeared her hands and sleeves. On the deck plate beside him Brittlestar had stopped flapping and lay still. Fishcake remembered how, in Grimsby, Brittlestar had always been rather kind to him. He said, “I thought it was only
His Stalker said, “I have had to kill people sometimes. I had forgotten, but I remember now. I used to be quite good at it. In my work for the League. And at Stayns that time, to save poor Tom and Hester…”
“You know Tom and Hester?” asked Fishcake, almost more shocked by those names than by the sudden deaths of Brittlestar and his crew.
But his Stalker had taken him by the wrist and was leading him briskly toward the limpet he had chosen. She did not bother to answer his question, and as she climbed the boarding ladder and started to force the heavy hatches open, she was hissing to herself about Shan Guo and ODIN. Kind, murderous Anna had sunk once more beneath the surface of her mind, and she was the Stalker Fang again.
Chapter 8
On the Line
Wren had been dreaming about Theo, but what he had been saying or doing in her dream she did not know; the details, which had seemed so vivid and clear just a moment before, all faded in an instant as she woke. Her father was shaking her gently and calling her name.
“Bother,” she mumbled. “What is it?”
She was in her bunk aboard the
“No, no,” said Tom, “and I’m sorry to wake you early, but there’s a sight ahead that you won’t want to miss.”
Wren’s father believed firmly that there were certain sights in the world that were so beautiful, or awesome, or educational, that Wren would never forgive him if he let her sleep through them. He often recalled his own first glimpse of Batmunkh Gompa, and his first sight of the Tannhauser volcano chain, and several times during the journey east he had dragged Wren out of her bunk to see a beautiful sunrise or the approach of some fine city. Wren, who was a teenager and needed her sleep, was not always as grateful as he expected.
But on this particular morning, when she came grumpily onto the flight deck and saw what was framed in the
They were flying low, and beneath them stretched the same featureless, rut-scarred plain that they had been passing over for days. To the south, a whitish smear of mist hung over the Rustwater Marshes and the Sea of Khazak, but that was not what Tom had woken her for. Ahead, rising like mountains into a murk of their own smoke, stood more Traction Cities than Wren had yet seen in her life. Lighted windows and furnace vents shone like jewels in the predawn dark. Towns and cities that Wren would once have thought impressive were rolling to and fro, but they were dwarfed by the colossal armored ziggurats at the eastern edge of the cluster, ziggurats whose ten or fifteen tiers of homes and factories rose from base plates a mile across, all armored like medieval knights and prickly with guns and the mooring gantries of aerial warships. The
Fourteen years earlier, while Wren was busy learning to crawl and alarming her parents by eating stones, beetles, and small ornaments, the Green Storm had swept down from their strongholds in the mountains of Shan Guo to spread war and destruction across the Great Hunting Ground. Their air fleets and Stalker armies had surged
