Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

It had been so easy to steal that it hadn’t felt like stealing at all. It wasn’t stealing, Wren kept assuring herself: Miss Freya didn’t need the Tin Book, and no one else in Anchorage would care that it had gone. It wasn’t stealing at all.

But even so, as she propped the note she had spent all evening writing against the bread bin and crept out into the star-silvered streets, she could not help feeling sad that her life in Vineland was ending like this.

When she’d left Gargle, she had run straight back down the hill to the Winter Palace. Miss Freya had still been in the garden, chattering away to Mrs. Scabious about the play the younger children would be performing at Moon Festival. Wren went to the library and took down the old wooden casket that Miss Freya had shown her earlier. She took out the Tin Book and locked the box again, setting it safely back in its place on the shelf. Through the open window she could hear Miss Freya saying, “Please, Windolene, just call me Freya; we’ve known each other long enough…”

Wren slipped out of the library and out of the palace, and hurried home with the Tin Book nestled safely inside her jacket, trying not to feel like a thief.

The moon was a windblown feather, caught on the spires of the Winter Palace. A lamp burned in Freya Rasmussen’s window, and as Wren hurried past, she thought, Good-bye, Miss Freya, and felt as if she would cry.

At home it had been worse. All evening she had been close to tears at the thought of leaving Dad, and she had even started to think she would miss Mum. But it was only for a while. She would come back one day, a princess of the Lost Boys, and everything would be all right. She had given Dad a special hug before she went to bed, which had surprised him.

He probably thought she was just upset about her latest fight with Mum.

She went down into the engine district and walked quickly toward the city’s edge. She had just left the shadow of the upper tier and was walking along a broad street between two derelict warehouses when Caul stepped into her path.

Wren hugged her bag against herself and tried to dodge past him, but he moved to block her way again. His eyes gleamed faintly in the cage of his hair.

“What do you want?” asked Wren, trying to sound cross instead of just scared.

“You mustn’t go,” said Caul.

“Why not? I can go if I want. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Gargle. I watched last night. I looked back when I reached the hilltop, and I saw you come out of that limpet. Did he ask you to help him? Did you agree?”

Wren didn’t answer.

“Wren, you can’t trust Gargle,” Caul told her. “He was just a boy when I worked with him, but he was cunning even then. He knows how to use people. How to hide what he really wants. Whatever he’s asked you to do for him, don’t.”

“And how are you going to stop me?” asked Wren.

“I’ll tell Tom and Hester.”

“Why not tell Miss Freya too, while you’re about it?” Wren teased. “I’m sure she’d love to know. But you won’t do it, will you? If you were going to tell Mum and Dad, you’d have done it as soon as you saw me come off the Autolycus. You wouldn’t betray your own people.”

“You have no idea —” Caul started to say, but while he was still busy hunting for the right words, she darted past him and away, her running footsteps ringing down the metal stairs at the end of the street and then falling quiet as she jumped off the last stair and onto the earth. The bag banged against her side, and her heart was thumping. She looked back to see if Caul was chasing her, but he was just standing where she had left him, not moving. She waved, then turned away and started running up the hill.

Hester had fallen asleep quickly that night, but something disturbed Tom just as he was drifting off. Only later would he realize that it had been the sound of the street door closing.

He lay in the dark and listened to his heart beat. Sometimes it seemed to him to falter, and sometimes there was a pain, or not quite a pain but a sense that something was wrong inside him, where Pennyroyal’s bullet had torn into his body all those years ago. Exercise always made it worse. He should not have cut those logs this morning. But the logs had needed cutting, and if he had not cut them, he would have had to explain to Hester about the pains around his heart, and she would worry and make him go and consult Windolene Scabious, who was Anchorage’s doctor, and Windolene would want to examine him, and he was afraid of what she might discover. It was better not to think about it. Better just to thank the gods for these good years he’d had with Hester and with Wren, and worry about the future when it happened.

But his future was already running toward him, down Rasmussen Prospekt, through the Boreal Arcade, up Dog Star Court; it was through the front gate and sprinting up the steps; it was pounding hard at his front door.

“Great Quirke!” said Tom, startled, sitting up. Beside him, Hester groaned and rolled over, surfacing slowly. Tom threw the covers off and ran downstairs in his nightshirt. Through the glass panels of the front door a blurred figure loomed like a ghost, fists hammering the woodwork. A voice called Tom’s name.

“Caul?” he said. “It’s open.”

This was not the first time Caul had awoken Tom with bad news. Once before, when Anchorage was iceborne and Hester had taken off alone aboard the Jenny, he had appeared out of the night to warn Tom what was happening. He had been just a boy then. Now, with his long hair and his beard and his wide, wild eyes, he looked like some maniac prophet. He burst into the hall, knocking over the hatstand and sweeping Tom’s collection of Ancient mobile telephone casings to the floor.

“Caul, calm down!” said Tom. “What’s the matter?”

“Wren,” said the former Lost Boy. “It’s Wren…”

“Wren’s in her room,” said Tom, but he felt suddenly uneasy, recalling the strange way Wren had hugged him when she said good night, and that scratch on her cheek which she’d said she got walking into a thornbush. He’d sensed that something was wrong. “Wren?” he called up the stairs.

“She’s gone!” shouted Caul. “Gone? Gone where?”

Hester was halfway down the stairs, pulling on her shirt.

She ran back up ; and Tom heard her kick the door of Wren’s bedroom open. “Gods and goddesses!” she shouted, and reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Tom, he’s right. She’s taken her bag and her coat…”

Tom said, “I expect she’s out with Tildy Smew on some midnight jaunt. This is Vineland. What harm can come to her?”

“Lost Boys,” said Caul. He was pacing to and fro, his hands deep in the pockets of his filthy old coat. The wild-animal smell of him filled the hall. “You remember Gargle? He left a note. Wanted me to help him. Stealing something. Don’t know what. Wren must have followed me and got caught. He’s using her. She’s gone to him.”

Hester went into the kitchen and came back with a square of paper.

“Tom, look…”

It was a note from their daughter.

“Dearest Daddy and Mummy,” she had written,

I have decided to leave Vineland. Some Lost Boys are here. Don’t worry, they mean no harm. They are going to take me with them. I shall see the Raft Cities and the Hunting Ground and the whole wide world, and have adventures, like you did. I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye but you would only try to stop me going. I will take good care of myself and come home soon with all sorts of tales to tell you.

Hester dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the hall rug. Beneath it, set into the floor, was the safe where the merchant whose house this had been once stored his valuables. All it held now were a few cardboard boxes of ammunition and a gun. Hester pulled the gun out, unwrapping it from its oilcloth bindings.