Philip Reeve: Infernal Devices

Wren began to move, very carefully and quietly, getting ready for the moment when he would turn his back on her and she could creep away between the trees. But Gargle did not turn. Instead, he raised his head and looked straight at her hiding place and said, “My eyes and ears are sharper than old Caul’s, my friend. You can come out now.”

Wren stood up and turned and started running, all in the same lurching, panicked movement, but before she had taken three steps a second stranger came out of the dark to her left and seized hold of her, swinging her around, dumping her on the ground. “Caul!” she started to shout, but a cold hand went across her mouth. Her captor looked down at her—another pale face, half hidden by black swags of hair— and the man from the beach came running up. A flashlight came on, a thin blue wash of light that made Wren blink.

“Gently,” said the man called Gargle. “Gently now. It’s a woman. A young woman. I thought as much.” He held the flashlight away so that Wren could see him. She had expected someone Caul’s age, but Gargle was younger. He was smiling. “What’s your name, young woman?”

“Wr-Wren,” Wren managed to stammer out. “Wr-Wren N-N-N-N-Natsworthy.” And when Gargle had managed to filter out all those extra N’s, his smile grew broader and warmer.

“Natsworthy? Not Tom Natsworthy’s child?”

“You know Dad?” asked Wren. In her confusion, she wondered if her father had also been coming down for secret meetings with the Lost Boys in the coves of the north shore, but of course Gargle was talking about the old days, before she was born.

“I remember him well,” said Gargle. “He was our guest for a bit aboard the Screw Worm. He’s a good man. Your mother would be his girl, the scar-faced one? What was she called…? Yes, Hester Shaw. I always thought that spoke well of Tom Natsworthy, that he could love someone like her. Appearances don’t matter to him. He looks deeper. That’s rare among the Drys.”

“What are we going to do with her, Gar?” asked the stranger who had caught Wren, in an odd, soft voice. “Is she fish food?”

“Let’s bring her aboard,” said Gargle. “I’d like to get to know Tom Natsworthy’s daughter.”

Wren, who had been calming down, grew panicky again. “I have to go home!” she squeaked, trying to edge away, but Gargle slipped his arm through hers.

“Just come aboard a moment,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “I’d like to talk. Explain why I’m lurking in your lake like a thief. Well, I am a thief, of course, but I think you should hear my side of the story before you make your decision.”

“What decision?” asked Wren.

“The decision about whether or not you tell your parents and your friends what you’ve seen here tonight.”

Wren thought she trusted him, but she wasn’t sure. She had never had to think about trusting people before. Confused by Gargle’s smile, she looked past him down the beach. The water between the headlands was shining blue. She thought at first that it was just the afterimage of the flashlight on her eyes, but then the blue grew brighter, and brighter still, and she saw that it was a light shining up through the water from below. Something huge broke the surface about thirty feet offshore.

Behind Caul’s shack in the engine district, the limpet that had brought him to Anchorage lay rusting. It was called the Screw Worm, and Wren and her friends had often played hide-and-seek between its crook-kneed legs when they were children. She had always thought it a comical sort of thing, with its big flat feet and its windows at the front like boggly eyes. She had never imagined how smoothly a limpet would move, how sleek its curved hull would look, moonlight sliding off it with the water as it waded to the beach.

This limpet was smaller than the Screw Worm, and its body was flatter, more like a tick’s than a spider’s. Wren thought it was painted with jagged camouflage patterns, but it was hard to be sure in the moonlight. Through the bulging windows she could see a small boy working the controls, his face distorted by the water draining down the glass. He brought the machine to a stop at the water’s edge, and a ramp came down out of its belly with a shush of hydraulics and grated against the shingle there.

“The limpet Autolycus,” said Gargle, gesturing for Wren to go aboard. “Pride of the Lost Boy fleet. Come aboard, please. Please. I promise we won’t submerge until we’ve put you ashore.”

“What if more Drys come?” asked the other Lost Boy, who wasn’t a boy, Wren noticed, but a girl, pretty and sullen-looking. “What if Caul raises the alarm?”

“Caul gave us his promise,” said Gargle. “That’s good enough for me.”

The girl glared at Wren, not convinced. The short black jerkin that she wore hung open, and there was a gun stuffed through her belt. don’t have a choice, thought Wren. I’ll have to trust Gargle. And once she had decided that, it was an easy thing to walk up the ramp into the cold blue belly of the limpet. After all, if Gargle had wanted to murder her, he could have done it just as easily on the beach.

She was taken aft into what she guessed was Gargle’s private cabin, where hangings hid the dull steel walls and there were books and trinkets laid about. A joss stick smoldered, masking the mildew-and-metal smell of the limpet with another smell that made Wren think of sophisticated people and far-off places. She sat down in a chair while Gargle settled himself on the bunk. The girl waited at the bulkhead door, still glaring. The little boy Wren had seen through the window stood behind her, watching Wren with wide, astonished eyes until Gargle said, “Back to your post, Fishcake.”

“But…”

“Now!”

The boy scampered off. Gargle gave Wren a wry smile. “I’m sorry about that. Fishcake’s a newbie, ten years old and fresh from the Burglarium. He’s never seen a Dry before, except on the crab-cam screens. And you such a pretty one too.”

Wren blushed and looked down at the floor, where her boots were leaking muddy water over Gargle’s rich Stamboul rugs. The Burglarium was where the Lost Boys were trained, she remembered. They were kidnapped from the underdecks of raft towns when they were too young to even know it, taken down to the sunken city of Grimsby, and trained in all the arts of thieving. And crab-cams were the robot cameras they used to spy on their victims. Miss Freya had made her pupils do a whole project on the Lost Boys. At the time, Wren had thought it a pointless thing to have to learn about.

Gargle turned to the girl at the door. “Remora, our guest looks chilly. Fetch her some hot chocolate, won’t you?”

“I didn’t know there were any Lost Girls,” said Wren when the girl had gone.

“A lot’s changed in Grimsby since Caul was last there,” Gargle replied. “Just between the two of us, Wren, I pretty much run the old place now. I managed to get rid of a lot of the rough, bullying boys who surrounded Uncle, and I sort of persuaded him to start bringing girls down as well as boys. It was doing us no good living without girls. They’re a civilizing influence.”

Wren looked toward the door. She could see the girl called Remora clattering pans about in some sort of kitchen. She didn’t look to Wren like a civilizing influence. “So is she your wife?” she asked, and then, not wanting to seem too prim, “Or your girlfriend or something?”

In the kitchen, Remora looked up sharply. Gargle said,

“Mora? No! The fact is, some of the girls have turned out to be better thieves than the boys. Remora’s one of the best burglars we’ve got. Just as young Fishcake is the best mechanic, for all his tender years. I wanted only the best with me on this mission, see, Wren. There’s something in Anchorage that I need very badly. I saw it all those years ago, when I was here with Caul aboard the Screw Worm, but I didn’t steal it then because I didn’t think it was of any use.”