of it. Don’t you think Pennyroyal would like to know that?”
Nabisco Shkin had been about to silence her again, but when she said that, he hesitated, and his eyebrow shot up a full quarter inch. He settled into his chair again, his eyes still fixed on Wren. “Explain,” he said.
“Well, he’ll want to know about Anchorage, won’t he?” Wren stammered. “I mean, if he’s made all that money telling people about us, think how interested he’ll be to learn what really happened. He could write a sequel! He could have an expedition to take me home, and write a book about it!” And even if he couldn’t, she thought, at least life as a slave in this floaty palace thing would be better than the arenas of Nuevo-Maya. She said eagerly, “He’ll be dying to talk to me.”
Shkin nodded slowly. A smile flickered for a moment around his thin mouth, then gave up the effort. He had been irritated by the crack that Pennyroyal had made about the underdeck in his interview in the
“If your story is true,” he said, “you might indeed be of interest to Mayor Pennyroyal. But how can you prove it?”
Wren pointed to the Tin Book, which lay on his desk. “That’s the proof. It’s a famous artifact from the margravine’s library…”
“I do not recall Pennyroyal mentioning it in his tediously detailed account of Anchorage’s treasures,” said Shkin. “What if he does not recognize it? That leaves only your word, and who would believe the word of a slave and a Lost Girl?”
“He can ask me stuff,” said Wren desperately. “He can ask me things about my mum and dad and Mr. Scabious and Miss Freya, stuff that’s not in his book, stuff that only somebody who’d lived in Anchorage could know about.”
“Interesting.” Shkin gave another of his slow-motion nods. “Monica,” he said, “this girl is to be transferred to the Second Tier. Make sure she is treated as a luxury item from now on.”
“Don’t forget Fishcake,” said Wren. “He’s been to Anchorage too.”
“Indeed,” said Shkin, and with a glance at Miss Weems, he added, “arrange for that boy to be brought to the questioning room. It’s time I had a word with him.”
Chapter 13
Dr Zero
As the airship that had carried her from Batmunkh Tsaka swung into the shoals of other ships above Tienjing, Oenone Zero looked down from the gondola windows, delighted by the gaily painted houses balanced on their impossible ledges, the gardens like window boxes, the sunlight silvering high-level canals, and the bright robes of the citizens thronging on the spidery bridges and the steep, ladderlike streets. This city, high in the central mountains of Shan Guo, had been the birthplace of Anti-Tractionism. Here Lama Batmunkh had founded the Anti- Traction League, and here the League had had its capital for a thousand years.
But the League was gone now, the old High Council overthrown, and the signs of the Green Storm’s war were everywhere. As the airship descended toward the military docking pans at the Jade Pagoda, Oenone found it harder and harder to ignore the hideous concrete rocket emplacements that disfigured Tienjing’s parks and the armies of ugly windmills flailing and rattling on the mountainsides, generating clean energy for the war effort. For fourteen years no one had been allowed to do anything that was
The Jade Pagoda was not made of jade, nor was it a pagoda. The name was just a relic that Tienjing’s founders had brought with them when they had first fled into these mountains; it had probably belonged once to some pleasant summer palace in the lowlands, long since devoured by hungry cities. It didn’t suit the grim stone fortress that loomed over Oenone as she disembarked on the snow-scoured pan. On spikes above the outer gates, the heads of antiwar protesters and people who failed to recycle their household waste were turning dry and papery as wasps’ nests in the mountain air. Huge slogans had been painted on the walls: THE WORLD MADE GREEN AGAIN! and ONE LAST PUSH WILL SMASH THE PAN-GERMAN TRACTION WEDGE!
Soldiers of the Stalker Fang’s elite air legion manned the inner gate, and stepped out to bar the way as Oenone heaved her pack onto her shoulder and started up the steps from the docking pan.
“Papers, young man,” barked the subofficer in charge. It was a mistake that Oenone was used to. In the Storm’s lands, all surplus food was earmarked for the fighters at the front, and the yearly famines of her childhood had left her as slight and flat-chested as a boy of fourteen. She waited patiently while the subofficer checked her pass, and saw his face change when he realized who she was. “Let her through! Let her through!” he shouted, lashing at his men with the flat of his sword, punishing them in the hope that Dr. Zero would not punish him. “Let her through at once! This is Dr. Zero, the leader’s new surgeon-mechanic!”
Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues’ Roost, was just a face in a photograph on the family shrine.
Oenone grew up shy and clever on an air base in remote Aleutia, where her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs like “The East Is Green” and “We Thank the Stalker Fang for Our Happy Childhoods.” At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother, Eno, told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken Stalkers shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them better, not understanding then that they were dead already and would best be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armor, the braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations for her mother and herself that way until she was sixteen, when the Green Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility, then to a front-line Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.
In that underground world of trenches and dugouts she toiled through the long, murderous winter of ’22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them marching back into the line.
She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity. She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way they weren’t people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the Resurrection room that Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked and teased one another as they worked, but because Oenone was so young, they called her “little sister” and took care of her. They were impressed by how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her, using words like “genius.”
Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.
At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming snout-gun rounds and the whistle of snipers’ bullets slicing the cold air above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months, and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in the Resurrection room: You learned to stop feeling things. She didn’t even feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother’s air base had been eaten by amphibious suburbs.
