Infernal Devices

shouted, “You promised you’d take me with you!” She could see Remora watching her, whispering something to little Fishcake that made him smirk too. How stupid they must think her!

“I want to see things!” she shouted. “I want to do things! I don’t want to stay here and marry Nate Sastrugi and be a schoolteacher and get old and die!”

Gargle seemed to be angered by all the noise she was making. “Wren,” he hissed, and instantly, like a furious echo, another voice out of the darkness shouted, “Wren!”

“Mum!” gasped Wren.

“Damn!” muttered Remora.

Gargle didn’t say anything at all, just dragged the gas pistol from his belt and fired toward the beach. In the blue flash of the gun, Wren saw her mother striding across the shingle, barely flinching as the shot whipped past her. She held her own gun out stiffly in front of her. Whack, it went, whack, whack, whack: dull, flat sounds like books being snapped shut. The first bullet rebounded from the Autolycus with a clang; the next two hissed away over the lake; the fourth hit Gargle between the eyes. Something thick and wet spattered Wren’s face and clothes.

“Gargle!” shrieked Fishcake.

Gargle went down on his knees, then flopped forward with his bottom in the air and his face in the chuckling waves.

Fishcake scrambled through the shallows toward him, getting in Remora’s way as she pulled out her own gun. “Fishcake, get aboard!” she screamed. “Get back to Grimsby!”

Hester put two bullets through her, kicking her backward and down into the lake.

“Gargle!” Fishcake was wailing.

Hester was reloading her gun, empty shells jinking on the shingle around her feet. She shouted, “Wren, come here!” Shaking with fright, Wren stumbled gladly toward her, but suddenly Fishcake’s arm was around her waist, tugging her back. The snout of Gargle’s pistol ground against her chin.

“Drop the gun!” Fishcake shouted. “Or I’ll… I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!”

“Mummy!” squeaked Wren. She couldn’t breathe properly. She knew suddenly that she had had all the adventures she would ever want. She longed to be safe at home. “Mummy! Help!”

Hester edged forward. Her gun was raised, but she dared not pull the trigger, they all knew that; there was too much danger of hitting Wren.

“Let her go!” she ordered.

“What, so you can shoot me?” sobbed Fishcake. Twisting Wren about so that her body was always between him and her mother, he started to drag her with him up the boarding ramp. The gun was still pressed under her chin, pushing her head up. She could feel him shaking, and although she could easily have overpowered him, she dared not try, in case the gun went off. He pulled her through the hatch into the limpet, and slammed his elbow against the button that raised the ramp. A ricochet howled off across the lake as Hester shot at the hydraulics and missed. “Mummy!” shouted Wren again, and had a brief glimpse of her mother shouting something back as the hatch closed. Then Fishcake shoved her through a doorway into the complicated electrical clutter of the control cabin. She felt the limpet shiver as he began working the controls with one hand, the other still pointing the gun at her head. “Please,” she said. The cabin lurched. Wren saw lights on the hillside behind the beach. “Help!” she shouted. Waves were slapping at the cabin windows, and she glimpsed the moon for a moment, shivery and unreal through the rising water. Then it was gone, and the note of the engines changed, and she thought, We’ve submerged— never get home now! and her stomach turned over and she fainted.

Hester ran down the beach, firing her gun at the limpet until its black hull was lost in a boiling of white water. Then there was nothing to do but shout Wren’s name over and over, hoarse, useless, her lonely voice the only sound remaining as the lap and wash of the Autolycus’s wake faded into silence.

No, not quite silence. Slowly Hester became aware of other sounds: dogs barking, shouts. Lanterns and flashlights bobbed on the hillside. Mr. Smew came charging through the gorse, waving an antique wolf rifle twice as tall as him and shouting, “Where are they, the subaquatic fiends? Let me at them!”

More people followed him. Hester went to meet them, shrugging aside the hands that reached for her, the questions. “Are you all right, Mrs. Natsworthy?”

“We heard shooting!”

“Was it the Lost Boys?”

The bodies in the shallows stirred gently as the waves broke round them, dragging long smears of red away into the lake. Caul knelt beside one of them and said in a soft, puzzled voice, “Gargle.” The air stank of gun smoke and exhaust fumes.

Tom ran up, looking stupidly about and seeing only his daughter’s going-away bag lying forlorn upon the shingle. “Where’s Wren?” he asked. “Hester, what happened?”

Hester turned away and would not answer. It was Freya Rasmussen, in the end, who came to him and took his hands in hers and said, “Oh, Tom, they’ve gone, and I think Wren is with them; I think they’ve taken Wren.”

Chapter 8 Kidnapped

“Daddy, Mummy’s face is all funny.”

“I know.”

“But why is it all funny?”

“Because a bad man cut her when she was just a little girl.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I think so. I think it hurt a lot, and for a long time. But it’s all right now.”

“Will the bad man come back?”

“No, Wren, he’s dead. He’s been dead a long time. There are* no bad men in Anchorage-in- Vineland. That’s why we live here. We’re safe here; nobody knows about us, and nobody will try to hurt us, and no hungry cities will come to gobble us up. It’s just us, quite safe: Mummy, and Daddy, and Wren.”

The voices of her childhood whispered in Wren’s memory as she slowly returned to her senses. She was lying on the floor of a tiny cabin that held a metal washbasin and a metal toilet. The toilet smelled of chemicals. A dim blue bulb glowed in a cage on the roof. The walls vibrated slightly. She could hear the threshing, churning sound of the Autolycus motors, and another sound, a creaking and whispering, which she guessed was water pressing against the hull.

Well, bad men have come to Anchorage-in-Vineland now, she thought, and they’ve escaped with what they wanted, and I’ve helped them. Only question left is, What are they going to do with me?

Dad had been taken by the Lost Boys once, yet he’d survived all right, and returned to Anchorage to marry Mum. So that must mean that there was hope for Wren, mustn’t it? But thinking of Dad made her think of Mum, and that made her remember what Mum had done, and the memory filled her with a sick horror. Inside her head, like an echo that would not fade, she could hear the crack and spatter of the bullet hitting Gargle.

She was not sure how long she lay there, shivering, whimpering, too shocked and miserable to move. At last the hard floor grew so uncomfortable that she forced herself to stand up. Get a grip, Wren, she told herself crossly.

The stuff on her clothes had dried brown and crusty, like spilled goulash. She ran some water into the metal handbasin and tried to sponge it off, then washed her face and hair as well as she could.

After a long time, a key grated in the lock and the door opened. Fishcake came and looked in at her. The gun was still in his hand. His face looked hard and white in the blue light, as if he’d been carved out of ivory. “I’m sorry,” she said.