Theo said nothing, but he stiffened slightly, which Wren thought was a good sign.
“I know where we can get an airship,” she went on. “Cynthia Twite told me you used to be an aviator.”
Theo almost smiled at that. “Cynthia Twite is a fool who understands nothing.”
“True. But if you can fly an airship—”
“I did not fly airships. I flew Tumblers.”
“Tumblers?” asked Wren. “What are they? Are they like airships? I mean, if you know the basics…” But Theo had clammed up again, narrowing his eyes and staring past her at the horizon. “Oh, come on!” Wren whispered impatiently. “Do you
“I would never go back to the Storm!” Theo said suddenly, angrily, almost dropping the mayoral goggles as he turned to face her. “It is a lie, their great war, The World Made Green Again. My father was right; it is all lies!”
“Oh,” said Wren. “Well, what about your home, then? You must want to go back to Zagwa…”
Theo stared at the horizon again, but it was not the sea and the sky and the distant shore that he was watching. Even here, in the expensive sunlight of Cloud 9, he could see that last, desperate fight above the Rustwater. The light of guns and rockets and burning ships had glittered in all the little winding waterways below him as he fell. A doomed suburb had been bellowing its distress calls across the marshes, and the exultant voices of his comrades had crackled in his headphones, shouting, as they began their own drops, “The World Made Green Again!” and “Death to the Pan-German Traction Wedge!” He had thought that those would be the last sounds he would ever hear. But here he was, months later and half a world away, still alive. The gods of war had spared him so that he could stand beside a swimming pool and be talked at by this stupid, skinny white girl who thought herself so clever.
“I can never go home,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I disobeyed my father. I ran away. I can never go home.”
Wren shrugged. “All right, suit yourself,” she told him, and stomped away before Pennyroyal woke up and saw them talking to each other. She would show Theo Ngoni! She would steal the mayor’s yacht on her own and pilot it back to Vineland herself. It was only a silly airship, after all! How hard could it be?
Dusk settled over Brighton. Along the promenades at the edges of its three tiers, strings of colored bulbs were switched on. Lights blinked and swirled on the fairgrounds and the pleasure piers. Powerful lamps were lit atop each cabin of the revolving Pharos Wheel, which was mounted near the city’s bow and served as both a joyride for the tourists and a lighthouse to guide night-flying airships to Brighton.
The city was swinging eastward. Soon it would thread itself through the narrow strait that separated Africa from the Great Hunting Ground and swim proudly into the Middle Sea. Brighton’s businessmen were hoping for plenty of visitors when they anchored for Moon Festival. Word of the campaign against the Lost Boys would have spread along the bird roads by now, and the captured limpets displayed in the Brighton Aquarium would add a certain educational element to the attractions of the usual MoonFest celebrations. Already sightseers had started arriving from some of the small towns whose lights could be seen on the shore.
Above the coming and going of balloons, the shadows of evening pooled between the cypress groves of Cloud 9, and colored floodlights made the Pavilion blush pink and gold. A few airships circled it, up from Brighton on an evening pleasure trip. The amplified voices of their pilots were faintly audible on Cloud 9, pointing out features of interest, but new security arrangements prohibited them from coming too close. None of the sightseers noticed a small window swing open in one of the Pavilion’s domes, or the bird that flew out of it and up through the web of hawsers to join the cloud of gulls hanging ghostly in the city’s wake.
Although it was white like a gull and had a gull’s soaring flight, this bird was not a gull; not anymore. Its bill had been replaced with a blade, and in the spaces of its skull glowed dim green lights. It rose through the circling flocks and flew away into the deepening twilight.
On and on it flapped, untiring, while days and nights came out of the east to meet it. It crossed the town- torn spine of Italy and skirted the plumes of erupting volcanoes in Asia Minor. At a Green Storm air base in the Ziganastra Mountains, it landed to let the base commander peer at the slip of paper that it carried in a cavity inside its chest. She cursed under her breath when she saw whom the coded message was addressed to, and summoned a sleepy surgeon-mechanic to recharge the gull’s power cells.
It went on its way, flying into the haze of smoke above the Rustwater Marshes, where artillery duels were rumbling like autumn storms. A squadron of enormous Traction Cities was crawling eastward, trying to head off a Green Storm counterattack. On their lower tiers, whole buildings had been converted into snout guns. Railways carried huge high-explosive shells out of the cities’ innards, and the guns hurled them into the marshy Out-Country ahead, which was said to be crawling with Stalkers and mobile rocket units. Buffeted by passing airships and the fluffy white thistledown of antiaircraft bursts, the gull let the leading city’s slipstream carry it eastward for a while, then rose above the battle and flapped on toward the white mountains that stood on the rim of the world.
The sky grew cold, and the ground rose. The gull flew through zones of high white silence and over regions where the Storm’s troop movements gave the mountains the busy, scuttling look of anthills. At last, on a night of snow and starlight a week after it left Brighton, it landed on a windowsill of the Jade Pagoda and tapped its bill against the frosty pane.
The window opened. The Stalker Fang took the gull gently in her steel hands and opened its chest. The message she took out had been written by someone called Agent 28. Her green eyes flared slightly brighter. She tore the message into small pieces and sent for General Naga, commander of her elite air legion.
“Make ready an assault unit,” she told him. “And prepare my ship for battle. We leave for Brighton with the dawn.”
Chapter 22
Murder on cloud Nine
Late October. In Vineland, Wren thought, the grass would be white and stiff with frost until midmorning; fog would blanket the lake, and perhaps the first snow was already falling. But here on the Middle Sea it was still as warm as midsummer, and the only clouds in the sky were small white fluffy ones that looked as if they’d been put there for decoration.
Brighton had cruised slowly along the southern shores of the Hunting Ground for several weeks. Then, with Moon Festival drawing near, it headed south to its appointed rendezvous. Boo-Boo went with her handmaidens to watch from an observation balcony at the edge of Cloud 9 as the land came into view. “Look, girls, look!” she cried happily, indicating the coastline with a theatrical sweep of her hand. “Africa!”
Wren, standing at the mayoress’s side with an enormous parasol, tried to be impressed, but it was quite difficult. All she could see was a line of low reddish bluffs rising out of a landscape the color of biscuits, with a couple of big, ragged mountains lost in the haze beyond. Wren knew from things her father and Miss Freya had told her that Africa had been both the birthplace of mankind and its haven in the centuries of darkness that followed the Sixty Minute War, but the civilizations that once thrived upon those shores had left no traces—or, if they had, they had long since been snaffled up by hungry scavenger towns.
One of the towns that might have done the snaffling came into view soon afterward. A small three-tiered place, it was rumbling along on broad, barrel-shaped sand wheels, trailing a swirl of red dust like a wind-blown cape. Wren glanced at it without very much interest. It felt strange to remember how, two weeks before, she had deserted her post in the middle of Mrs. Pennyroyal’s hairstyling routine to run and stare in wonderment at a little townlet trundling down onto the shore. She’d seen so many towns and even small cities since then that they seemed quite ordinary now, and certainly not the fabulous things that she had imagined when she’d lived in Vineland.
And then she looked again, and felt as silly as she had on that long-ago day when she’d first seen Brighton
