world as quiet as the place she lived in—Anchorage-in-Vineland, a derelict ice city dug into the rocky southern shore of an unknown island, on a lost lake, in a forgotten corner of the Dead Continent.
But quiet as it was, she could not sleep. She turned on her side and tried to get comfortable, the hot sheets tangling round her. She had had another row with Mum at supper-time. It had been one of those rows that started with a tiny seed of disagreement (about Wren wanting to go out with Tildy Smew and the Sastrugi boys instead of washing up) and grew quickly into a terrible battle, with tears and accusations, and age-old grudges being dredged up and lobbed about the house like hand grenades, while poor Dad stood on the sidelines, saying helplessly, “Wren, calm down,” and “Hester, please!”
Wren had lost in the end, of course. She had done the washing up, and stomped up to bed as loudly as she could. Ever since, her brain had been hard at work, coming up with hurtful comments that she wished she had made earlier. Mum didn’t have any idea what it was like being fifteen. Mum was so ugly that she probably never had any friends when she was a girl, and certainly not friends like Nate Sastrugi, whom all the girls in Anchorage fancied, and who had told Tildy that he really liked Wren. Probably no boy had
She rolled over again and tried to stop thinking about it, then gave up and scrambled out of bed. Maybe a walk would clear her head. And if her parents woke and found her gone, and worried that she had drowned herself or run away, well, that would teach Mum not to treat her like a child, wouldn’t it? She pulled on her clothes, her socks and boots, and crept downstairs through the breathing silence of the house.
Mum and Dad had chosen this house for themselves sixteen years before, when Anchorage had only just crawled ashore and Wren was nothing but a little curl of flesh adrift in Mum’s womb. It was family history, a bedtime story Wren remembered from when she was small. Freya Rasmussen had told Mum and Dad that they might take their pick of the empty houses in the upper city They had chosen this one, a merchant’s villa on a street called Dog Star Court, overlooking the air harbor. A good house, snug and well built, with tiled floors and fat ceramic heating ducts, walls paneled in wood and bronze. Over the years, Mum and Dad had filled it with furniture they found among the other empty houses round about, and decorated it with pictures and hangings, with driftwood dragged up from the shore, and with some of the antiques Dad unearthed on his expeditions into the Dead Hills.
Wren padded across the hall to take down her coat from the rack by the front door, and did not spare a glance or a thought for the prints on the walls or the precious bits of ancient food processors and telephones in the glass-fronted display case. She had grown up with all this stuff, and it bored her. This past year, the whole house had begun to feel too small, as if she had outgrown it. The familiar smells of dust and wood polish and Dad’s books were comforting, but somehow stifling too. She was fifteen years old, and her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.
She closed the door behind her as quietly as she could and hurried along Dog Star Court. Mist hung like smoke over the Dead Hills, and Wren’s breath came out as mist too. It was only early September, but she could already smell winter in the night air.
The moon was low but the stars were bright, and overhead the Aurora was shimmering. At the heart of the city, the rusty spires of the Winter Palace towered black against the glowing sky, shaggy with ivy. The Winter Palace had been home to Anchorage’s rulers once, but the only person who lived there now was Miss Freya, who had been the city’s last margravine and was now its schoolteacher. On every winter weekday since her fifth birthday, Wren had gone to the schoolroom on the ground floor of the palace to listen to Miss Freya explaining about geography and logarithms and Municipal Darwinism and a lot of other things that would probably never be any use to her at all. It had bored her at the time, but now that she was fifteen and too old for school, she missed it horribly. She would never sit in the dear old schoolroom again, unless she did as Miss Freya had asked and went back to help teach the younger children.
Miss Freya had made that offer weeks ago, and she would need an answer soon, for once the harvests were in, the children of Anchorage would be going back to their lessons. But Wren didn’t know if she wanted to be Miss Freya’s assistant or not. She didn’t even want to think about it. Not tonight.
At the end of Dog Star Court, a stairway led down through the deck plates into the engine district. As Wren went clanging down the stairs, a summery smell came up at her, and she heard flakes of rust dislodged by her boots falling amid the heaped hay below. Once this part of the city would have been full of life and noise, as Anchorage’s engines sent it skating over the ice at the top of the world in search of trade. But the city’s travels had ended before Wren was born, and the engine district had been turned into a storeroom for hay and root vegetables, and winter quarters for the cattle. Faint shafts of moonlight, slanting through skylights and holes in the deck plates overhead, showed her the bales stacked up between the empty fuel tanks.
When Wren was younger, these abandoned levels had been her playground, and she still liked to walk here when she was feeling sad or bored, imagining what fun it must have been to live aboard a city that moved. The grown-ups were always talking about the bad old days, and how frightening it had been to live in constant danger of being swallowed up by some larger, faster city, but Wren would have loved to see the towering Traction Cities, or to fly from one to another aboard an airship, as Mum and Dad had done before she was born. Dad kept a photograph on his desk that showed them standing on a docking pan aboard a city called San Juan de Los Motores, in front of their pretty little red airship the
A door closed somewhere in the darkness ahead, making her jump. She’d grown so used to the quiet and her own company that the idea of someone else moving around down here was almost frightening. Then she remembered where she was. Busy with her thoughts, she’d walked all the way to the heart of the district, where Caul, Anchorage’s engineer, lived alone in an old shed between two tier supports. He was the only inhabitant of Anchorage’s lower levels, since nobody else would choose to live down here amid the rust and shadows when there were pretty mansions standing empty in the sunlight up above. But Caul was an eccentric. He didn’t like sunlight, having been brought up in the undersea thieves’ hole of Grimsby, and he didn’t like company either. He’d been friendly once with old Mr. Scabious, the city’s former engineer, but since the old man had died, he had kept himself to himself down here in the depths.
So why would he be wandering about in the engine district at this hour? Intrigued, Wren crept up a ladder onto one of the overhead walkways, from where she had a good view across the old engine pits to Caul’s shack. Caul was standing outside the door. He had an electric lantern, and he had raised it up so that he could study a scrap of paper that he held in his other hand. After a moment, he pocketed the paper and set off toward the city’s edge.
Wren scrambled back down the ladder and started following the light. She felt quite excited. When she was younger, working her way steadily through the small stock of children’s books in the margravine’s library, her favorite stories had been the ones about plucky schoolgirl detectives who were forever foiling smugglers and unmasking Anti Tractionist spy rings. She had always regretted that there were no criminals to detect in Vineland. But hadn’t Caul been a burglar once? Maybe he was reverting to his old ways!
Except, of course, that there was no point stealing anything in Anchorage, where everyone took what they liked from the hundreds of abandoned shops and houses. As she picked her way through the heaps of half- dismantled machinery behind Caul’s shack, she tried to think of a more likely explanation for his nighttime wanderings. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, like her. Maybe he was worried about something. Wren’s friend Tildy had told her that years and years ago, way back when Anchorage first came to Vineland, Caul had been in love with Miss Freya and Miss Freya had been in love with Caul too, but nothing had come of it because Caul had been so strange, even in those days. Maybe he wandered the streets of the engine district every night, yearning for his lost love? Or maybe he was in love with someone else and was going to meet her for a moonlit tryst out on the city’s edge?
Pleased by the idea that she would have something really juicy to tell Tildy in the morning, Wren quickened her pace.
