Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

“Eugh, there’s another one! The whole place is crawling with females!”

“Uncle?” asked Caul.

The old man twitched around, frowning, as if the sound of Caul’s voice had tripped a rusty switch inside his head. “Caul, my boy!” he said, and then, with a snarl, “This your doing, is it? You got something to do with this? Tell the Drys how to find us, did you? You alone, or are there more?”

He limped away, stabbing at his remote control until the jumbled screens were filled with views of Grimsby, thrusting his parchment face close to the glass to stare at the empty corridors and chambers, the empty limpet pen, the flooded, ruined halls of the Burglarium.

“It’s just the four of us, Uncle,” said Caul. “We barely know what’s happened here. It has nothing to do with us.”

“No?” Uncle stared at him, then let out a high-pitched cackle. “Gods, then you’ve picked a fine time to drop in for a visit!”

“We’ve come for Tom and Hester’s daughter,” Caul said patiently. “Her name’s Wren. She was taken from Vineland by the newbie who was with Gargle aboard the Autolycus.”

“Fishcake? Fishcake, that was his name…” Uncle hung his head. When he spoke, he sounded close to tears. “The Autolycus is missing. They’re all missing, Caul, my boy. The fools got that message about their mums and dads and they went haring straight off to Brighton.”

“To Brighton?” Tom had heard of Brighton. A resort town, a bit bohemian, but not a bad sort of place. If Wren was there, she might be all right.

“Why would Brighton want them?” asked Hester suspiciously.

Uncle shrugged and spread his hands and made various other twitchy gestures to show that he had no idea. “I told my boys it was a trap. I told them. But they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe if Gargle had been here. They listen to Gargle. Don’t listen to their poor old Uncle anymore, what’s slaved and worried for them all these years…” Tears of self-pity went creeping down his crumpled old face, and he blew his nose on his sleeve. His gaze slid listlessly over Tom and Hester, then settled on Freya again. “Gods, Caul, is that great fat whale the girl you ran off to Anchorage for? She’s let herself go! Come to think of it, you don’t look too good yourself. I like my boys to be well turned out, and you… Well, you’re shabby, that’s the truth of it. Gargle told me you’d gone to make something of yourself among the Drys.”

Caul felt as if he were a newbie again, being told off for forgetting part of his burgling kit. “Sorry, Uncle,” he said.

Freya moved to his side and took his hand in hers. “Caul has made something of himself,” she said. “We couldn’t have built Anchorage-in-Vineland without his help. I’d like to tell you all about it, but first I think we all have to leave this place.”

“Leave?” Uncle stared at her as if he’d never heard the word before. “I can’t leave! What makes you think I’d want to leave?”

“Sir, this place is finished. You can’t keep the children here…”

Uncle laughed. “Those lads aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “They’re the future of Grimsby.”

The children edged in closer to Freya. She let go of Caul’s hand to stroke their heads. Everyone could hear the faint groan of stressed metal from the lower floors, the distant splatter of water spilling in.

“But Mr. Kael,” said Freya. She had remembered something Caul had told her once. Before Uncle became Uncle, he had been Stilton Kael, a rich young man from Arkangel. Freya hoped that by using his real name, she might be able to get through to him, but it only made him hiss and glare. She pressed on anyway. “Mr. Kael, this place is leaking. It’s half flooded, and the air smells stale. I don’t know much about secret underwater lairs, but I’d say Grimsby’s future is going to be pretty short.”

Hester snapped off the safety on her Schadenfreude and aimed it in Uncle’s general direction. “If you don’t want to come,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

Uncle peered at her, then up at his hovering globe of screens, where there was an image of her face far clearer than the one his poor old eyes could provide him with. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not leaving, and nor are you. We’re going to rebuild. Make the place watertight again. Stronger than ever. Make more limpets, better ones. We are none of us leaving. Tell them, Caul.”

Caul flinched and wondered what to do. He didn’t want to betray his friends, but he didn’t want to let Uncle down either. The sound of the old man’s voice made him shiver with love and pity.

He looked at Freya. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, with a sudden, quick movement, he jerked Hester’s gun out of her hand and pointed it at her, then at Tom.

“Caul!” Tom shouted.

Uncle cackled some more. “Good work, boy! I knew you’d come right in the end! I’m quite glad I didn’t finish hanging you now. What a shame those others scarpered off before they had a chance to meet you, Caul. You’d be an object lesson. Return of the Prodigal. All these years gone and you’re still loyal to your poor old Uncle.” He pulled a key from one of his pockets and held it out toward Caul. “Now get rid of this lot. Lock ’em in Gargle’s quarters while we have a proper talk.”

Caul kept pointing the gun at Tom, because he knew that Hester was the only one reckless enough to try and overpower him and that Hester cared more about Tom’s safety than her own. He fished the knife out of Hester’s boot, then took the key from Uncle and started shooing everyone else backward, toward the open door.

“But Caul—” Freya said.

“Forget it,” Hester told her. “I knew we were wrong to trust him. I expect this is the only reason he agreed to bring us here—so he could see his precious Uncle again.”

“You won’t be hurt,” Caul promised. “We’ll sort this out. It’ll be all right.” He didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he was glad to be a Lost Boy again. “Uncle Knows Best,” he said as he forced his prisoners down the stairs and into Gargle’s quarters, locking the doors behind them. “It’ll be all right. Uncle always Knows Best.”

Night fall in Tienjing. above the city, the mountains hung huge and pale, a pennant of powder snow flying from each cold summit. Above the mountains, colder yet, the stars were coming out, and the things that were not stars, the dead satellites and orbital platforms of the Ancients, danced their old, slow dance in heaven.

The Stalker Grike patrolled the silent corridors of the Jade Pagoda, his night-vision eyes probing the shadows, his ears detecting conversations in a distant room, a gust of laughter from the guardhouse, the woodworm busy in the paneled walls. He roamed through galleries decorated with ancient carvings of monsters and mountain demons, none of them as scary as himself. Relishing the grace and power of his retuned body, he checked with all his many senses for the faint chemical signature of hidden explosives, or the body-glow of a lurking assassin. He hoped that soon some foolish Once-Born would try to attack his mistress. He was looking forward to killing again.

A cold breath touched him: a faint change in air pressure that told him of an outside door being opened and closed four floors below. He moved quickly to a window and looked down. A forked blob of body heat was moving through the shadows of the courtyard toward the checkpoint at the gate. Grike measured its height and stride against the data he had gathered during his time as bodyguard, and recognized Dr. Zero.

Where was she going on such a cold night, with curfew due in less than an hour? Grike pondered the motives of the Once-Born. Perhaps Dr. Zero had a lover in the lower city. But Dr. Zero had never seemed interested in love, and anyway, this was not the first time that Grike had caught her acting strangely. He had noticed the way her heartbeat raced when she was near the Stalker Fang, and smelled the sharp scent that came from her sometimes when Fang glanced her way. He was surprised that his mistress had not noticed these things herself—but then, Fang did not share his interest in the Once-Borns and their ways. Perhaps she did not realize, or did not care, that her surgeon-mechanic was afraid of her.