Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

The boathouse doors were never locked, and big as they were, they were easy to move, rolling aside on well-oiled casters when Wren leaned her weight against them. The Peewit’s sleek envelope gleamed inside the hangar as Wren crept to the gondola. She found that she had been holding her breath, which was silly because there was nobody about. Over at the aerodrome, a gramophone was playing a popular tune. Wren reached for the gondola door, and that was not locked either. She crept inside and used the small flashlight she had pinched from the Pavilion’s caretaker to study the dials on the chromium instrument panels, remembering the diagrams in a book she’d looked at in the Pavilion’s library, Practical Aviation for Fun and Profit.

The gas cells were full, just as Cynthia had told her. The fuel gauge was still on empty, but Wren had thought of a way to deal with that. She took her nightgown off and stashed it behind the instrument panel. Underneath, she was still wearing her day clothes. She said a quick prayer to the gods of Vineland, then left the airship and walked briskly across the apron in front of the boathouse and through the woods toward the Ferrets’ base.

In an old summerhouse that had been commandeered by the mercenary air force, Orla Twombley and a few of her aviators were playing cards. They looked up suspiciously when Wren came tapping at the door.

“Who’s that?”

“Looks like one of Boo-Boo’s girls.”

The aviatrix stood up lazily and opened the door. “Well?”

“I’ve come with a message from Mrs. Pennyroyal,” said Wren. Her voice caught a little as she said it, but the aviatrix didn’t seem to notice. She looked worried. Maybe she thought Boo-Boo had sent Wren here to tell her off for flirting with the mayor. Wren started to feel more confident. “Mrs. Pennyroyal wants the Peewit to be fueled at once,” she explained. “She is going across to Benghazi tomorrow morning. Very early tomorrow morning, so she can find lots of bargains at the bazaar. She wonders if your ground crew would oblige?”

Orla Twombley frowned. “Why ours? Is it not the mayor’s men who should be refueling the old gasbag?”

“Yes,” said Wren. “His Worship was supposed to ask them this afternoon, but he forgot, and they’ve gone off duty now. So if you wouldn’t mind getting your people to do it, Mrs. Pennyroyal would be ever so grateful.”

The aviatrix thought for a moment. She did not want to upset the mayoress. Boo-Boo had powerful relatives who might force Pennyroyal to dispense with the Flying Ferrets’ services and hire some other freelance air force instead. Orla Twombley knew for a fact that the Junkyard Angels and Richard D’Astardley’s Flying Circus were both angling to take over the Brighton contract.

She nodded, and turned to her men. “Algy? Ginger? You heard what the young lady said…”

Grumpy but obedient, the two aviators set down their cards and their mugs of cocoa and went out with Wren into the night, muttering about what a waste of good fuel it was and wondering why anyone still bothered with airships when heavier-than-air was the way of the future. Wren trailed after them at a distance and watched as they ran fuel lines from the big tanks behind their airstrip and linked them to nozzles on the Peewit’s underside.

“She’ll take a good ten minutes,” one of the men said, turning to Wren with a friendly wink. “No need for you to hang about in the cold, kiddo.”

Wren thanked him and ran back to the Pavilion. Ten minutes would give her just enough time to fetch Cynthia.

She had decided right from the start that she would not tell Cynthia about her scheme. Cynthia was much too giggly and forgetful to keep a secret, and would probably have blurted out the whole thing to Mrs. Pennyroyal. But Wren had no intention of leaving her friend behind. While the Peewit was being fueled, she would slip into the dormitory where the girls slept, wake Cynthia as quietly as she could, and bring her down to the boathouse. By the time they got there, the yacht would be ready for takeoff.

Mr. Plovery used a novel lockpick that Shkin’s people had taken from the Lost Boys to open the door of the mayor’s private office. The office was in a tower room, with long windows reaching up toward a shadowy ceiling high above. The blinds were open and the moon shone brightly in, showing the antiques dealer Pennyroyal’s cluttered desk and the drawing by Walmart Strange behind which Pennyroyal’s private safe was hidden.

As he crossed the room, Plovery sensed a movement way up above him in the domed ceiling, and had the oddest feeling that he was being watched. He went cold with panic. What if Pennyroyal had got hold of one of those crab-camera things and was using it to guard his safe?

He almost gave up and ran, but the thought of his mother stopped him. With the money Shkin had promised him for the Tin Book, he would be able to move Mum into one of the luxury suites on the top floor of her nursing home, with a view of the parks at the city’s stern. He forced himself to stay calm. Pennyroyal wasn’t clever enough to set up a surveillance crab. And if he had, he would certainly have bragged about it to his dinner guests.

Plovery took the picture off the wall and set it down carefully against Pennyroyal’s chair. The circular door of the safe confronted him. He reached for the dial and turned it right, then left, then right again. On previous visits to the Pavilion he had often seen Pennyroyal open the safe, and had worked out the combination by listening to the number of clicks the dial made. Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven… Calmly, carefully, he went through the sequence, and the heavy door swung open.

Inside the safe was a small leather case. Inside the case was the Tin Book of Anchorage. Plovery took it out, holding it reverently, for old things were his love as well as his livelihood. There was something beautiful, he thought, about the way that human handiwork could outlive its makers by so many, many years.

As he reached up to shut the safe, he sensed a movement behind him, and turned, and—

Wren was halfway to the dormitory when she heard the horrible, quivering scream. She squeaked and froze, then dived behind a nearby statue. The scream ended in a sort of gargling noise. The echoes faded into silence, and then the Pavilion began to fill with the sounds of doors opening and people shouting to one another. Lights came on. Glancing through the window beside her, Wren saw that light was flooding the gardens too: big security lamps flicking on, and guards running about with wobbling handheld lanterns.

That’s that, she thought, no chance of escaping now —and then felt ashamed that she was feeling sorry for herself when she should really have been worrying about whoever it was who had let out that dreadful shriek.

She left her hiding place and ran toward the dormitory. Halfway there, she turned a corner and cannoned into Theo Ngoni, coming up a side passage from the direction of the kitchens. “Oh!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard someone scream…” he said.

“Me too…”

“The whole house heard someone scream, my dears.” Mrs. Pennyroyal was striding toward them in her billowing nightie, like a ship in full sail. Wren jumped away from Theo, wondering if they would be punished for speaking to each other, but the mayoress just looked kindly at them and said, “It seemed to come from my husband’s part of the house. Let’s see what has happened.”

Wren and Theo followed obediently in her wake as she swept toward the larboard wing. Wren thought privately that it had been the sort of scream you hurry away from, not toward, but Mrs. Pennyroyal seemed determined to get to the source of the disturbance. Perhaps she was hoping that her husband had scalded himself on a hot-water bottle or fallen off his balcony and didn’t want to waste good gloating time.