A Darkling Plain

saving Tom. She refused to believe that there was no hope at all.

But Tom knew there was little point in trying to outrun the Stalker Fang, who turned and came toward them as they neared the window. He twisted around to face her. Hester was still trying to drag him to the window, but Tom shook free of her. He had come to Shan Guo to talk, not to fight; if Naga wouldn’t listen to him, perhaps this Stalker might. I am not Anna, she had said, just a bundle of Anna’s memories… But what was anyone but a bundle of memories?

Tom reached out to her. “We can’t stay,” he said. “We have a daughter. She’ll need us.”

The Stalker’s eyes flickered. “A daughter …”

“Her name’s Wren.”

“A daughter …” She clapped her hands together with a clang. “Tom, Hester … How wonderful! When I, when Anna first saw you together, she, I knew you were meant for each other! And now you have a baby girl.”

“She’s not a baby girl anymore,” said Hester. “She’s a great big stroppy young woman.”

“We brought her up,” said Tom, “we kept her safe; we taught her things; she learned to fly the Jenny Haniver… And now you want to kill her along with everybody else.”

The Stalker shrugged—an odd movement for a Stalker; it made her armor grate. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette, Tom. Or is it the other way around? Where is she, this daughter of yours?”

“In London,” said Tom. “In the wreck of London. The people there are building a new city, a floating city…” He wished now that he had paid more attention to Dr. Childermass’s technical explanations. “It doesn’t claw up the ground, it doesn’t eat other cities, it doesn’t even use up much fuel. Why can’t it have a place in your green world? Why can’t Wren?”

The Stalker hissed and turned away, going back to her machines.

Tom stumbled after her, and Hester, who had resigned herself to listening to the two of them chat, went with him.

The Stalker’s fingers were rattling at her keyboards again. The gray image on the central screen changed, from a view of Zhan Shan’s blazing wound to a more distant panorama of the clouded limb of the Earth. Then it began to close in again, the machinery behind the screen wheezing and clicking, the images flicking past like shuffled cards. A charcoal-gray patch expanded to become the wreck of London, then filled the screen. Tom recognized Putney Vale and the Womb as ODIN’s gaze slid eastward, then north.

“Nothing moving …,” whispered the Stalker. “What are those bright patches?” asked Tom. “Those are burning airships.”

“What?” Tom stared as more specks of white fire slid past; then, just off the northern edge of the wreck, a burning sprawl like a hole torn in the screen. What had happened in the debris fields since he’d been gone? What had happened to Wren? His heart clenched into a fist and began to batter at his ribs.

“Ah!” hissed the Stalker. “That must be your floating city…”

She was quicker at reading the grainy pictures than Tom. It took him a moment to understand that he was looking down at New London. It was well outside the debris fields, moving north. And still the machinery whirred and nattered and the image on the screen kept flicking, changing, pulling closer and closer to the new city until he could make out people milling about on its stern. Dozens of people, lining the handrails, staring back toward the debris fields as New London bore them safe away. And he could make out faces now, the faces of his friends: Clytie and her husband, Mr. Garamond laughing for once, looking happy—and there was Wren, disheveled, smeared with what looked like soot, but Wren for sure; he cried out as her face slipped across the screen, and the Stalker swung ODIN’s gaze to focus on her, still zooming in and in.

“It’s Wren! She’s all right!”

Tom felt Hester’s hands tighten on his arm as she watched their daughter’s face swim up toward them out of the gray fuzz of the picture. “Wren,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky. “What’s she done to her hair? It’s all lopsided… And there, behind her, look! It’s Theo!”

ODIN zoomed again, and there was nothing on the screen except their daughter’s face. Tom went closer, pushing past the Stalker Fang, reaching out to touch the glass. At such close range the image started to grow vague; Wren’s face broke down into lines and specks and flares of light; this smudge of shadow an eye, that white smear her nose. He traced with his hands the curve of her cheek, wishing he could push through the screen somehow and touch her, speak to her. Surely she must be able to feel him watching her? But she only smiled and turned her head to say something to the boy behind her. Tom felt as if he were already a ghost.

The Stalker hissed like a kettle coming slowly to the boil. “Please don’t hurt her,” said Tom.

“She will die,” the Stalker whispered. “They will all die. For the good of the Earth. Your child will have a few years more, if she is lucky…”

“And what use will a few more years be if she’s starving and scared, watching the sky fill with ash?” asked Tom. He took another step toward the Stalker, excited by a sense that he was getting through to her, or to some weird, mechanized remnant of Anna Fang that nested within her. “Wren deserves to live a long time, in peace, and have children of her own, and see their children…”

“Sentimentality!” the Stalker sneered. “The life of a single child means nothing, compared with the future of all life.”

“But she is the future!” Tom cried. “Look at her! At her and Theo—”

“It is for the good of the Earth,” the Stalker repeated coldly. “They will all die.”

“You don’t believe that,” Tom insisted. “The Anna bit of you doesn’t. Anna cared about people. You cared about me and Hester enough to rescue us. Anna, don’t use the machine. Switch it off. Break it. Smash ODIN.”

He crumpled at the knees and would have fallen if Hester had not supported him. The Stalker was hissing angrily. Hester, thinking that she was about to attack, pulled Tom backward and turned so that her own body was between them. But the creature had swung away, flailing with one hand at its own skull. “Where is Popjoy?”

“Dead,” said Hester grimly. “You killed him. It’s the talk of Batmunkh Gompa.”

“Sathya, I…,” the Stalker said. “They must be exterminated. It is for the good of… Tom, Tom, Hester…”

That bony sound again; steel fingers on ivory keys. Green letters flicking up. “What is she doing?” asked Hester, afraid that the maddened Stalker was telling ODIN to drop fire on New London. Tom shook his head, as lost as her. The Stalker paused, studied a ribbon of green light that scrolled down another of her screens, typed again, hit a final key, and turned to them. She was trembling; a quick, mechanical vibration, like an engine pod on full power. Her marsh-gas eyes flared and flickered. She reached out to her guests with her long, shining hands.

“What have you done?” asked Tom.

“I have … she has … we have …”

From the far side of the room, through another doorway, they heard a crunch and slither of feet on broken tiles. The Stalker spun to face the noises, her finger-glaives sliding out, and Pennyroyal shouted out in terror as he stepped into the chamber and her green eyes lit up his face. He was holding the lightning gun in front of him, and as the Stalker tensed to spring at him, he squeezed the trigger. A vein of fire opened in the air, juddering between the gun’s blunt muzzle and the Stalker’s chest. The Stalker hissed and bared her claws, and Pennyroyal backed away from her wailing, “Argh! Poskitt! Please! Spare me! Help! Stay away!” and never taking his fingers off the trigger. The Stalker’s robes began to burn. Lightning was crawling across her calm bronze face, St. Elmo’s fire pouring from her finger-glaives. She fell heavily against the ODIN machinery, and the lightning wrapped that too. Stalker brains and Goggle Screens exploded, broken keyboards sent anagrams of ivory keys rattling across the floor like punched- out teeth, flames ran up the cables and set fire to the ceiling, and still Pennyroyal kept firing, and shouting, and firing, until the gun faltered and failed.

After a while, when they had started to grow used to the silence, he said, “I did it! I killed it! Me! You wouldn’t have a camera about you, I suppose?”

The Stalker Fang lay on her pyre of machinery. Tom waved away the smoke and went closer, watching her cautiously. Things were on fire inside her; he could smell the gamey stench, and see the firelight flicker beneath her armor. Her bronze mask had come off, baring the gray face beneath, shriveled and grinning. Tom tried not to feel disgusted as he looked at it; after all, he would soon be taking the same journey himself.

The dead mouth moved. “Tom,” sighed the Stalker. “Tom.”