Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

“Patience, my lovebirds,” the mayoress said, and kissed each of them upon the forehead. She smiled, and opened her bedroom door. “Oh, by the way,” she murmured, “not a word to anyone about poor Mr. Plovery. I will not allow this terrible event to upset our MoonFest celebrations…”

Moonfest! A buzz of expectation rose from the raft city as the sun came up. Actors and artists who usually never stirred before noon leaped from their beds at gull squawk and began putting the finishing touches on decorations and carnival floats, while shopkeepers rolled up their shutters with a gleeful air, dreaming of record takings. Brighton was not a religious city; most of its people thought that religion was at best a fairy tale, at worst a con. To them, the rising of the first full moon of autumn, which was a solemn, sacred night in other cities, meant only one thing: It was party time!

Actually, it was almost always party time aboard Brighton. When Wren arrived, the Estival Festival, a six-week celebration of the gods of summer, had been petering out in a slew of firework parties and parades. Since then there had been the Large Hat Festival, the Cheese Sculpture Biennale, the Festival of Unattended Plays, Poskitt Week, and Mime-Baiting Day (when Brightonians were allowed to get back at the city’s swarms of irritating street performers). But MoonFest still had a special place in the hearts and wallets of Brightonians, and the growing cluster of towns on shore seemed to promise a bumper harvest of visitors. Even the editor of the Palimpsest, who would usually have been delighted to print the rumors he’d been hearing about a mysterious death on Cloud 9 during the night, relegated the story to a small column on page 4 and filled his front page with Festival news instead.

Boo-Boo’s Bevy of Beauties Boosts Brighton!

Lady Mayoress Boo-Boo Pennyroyal predicted yesterday that this year’s MoonFest celebrations will be Brighton’s best ever. Mrs. Pennyroyal (39)— pictured at left posing for the Palimpsest’s photographer along with a bevy of her most beautiful handmaidens—will tonight play hostess to the Middle Sea’s richest partygoers when the Pavilion opens its doors and dance floors for the Mayoral Ball.

“Everybody who is anybody is on their way to Brighton!” said Mrs. Pennyroyal. “What better place to celebrate Moon Festival than in this white city, adrift on an azure sea?”

Of course, it wasn’t really a white city on an azure sea at all; that was just how it looked from the observation platforms of Cloud 9. Down at deck level, Brighton was an off-white city, its rooftops streaked with gull droppings, its streets sticky with abandoned snacks, adrift on a slick of its own litter and sewage. But the weather was perfect: a soft onshore breeze to waft the air taxis across to Benghazi and Kom Ombo and cool their passengers on the journey back; the hot sun baking the metal pavements and releasing complex odors from the puddles of grease and vomit that last night’s revelers had left behind. As the day wore on, the city settled lower in the water, weighed down by the crowds of visitors who filled the streets and artificial beaches, and splashed and shrieked along the fringes of the Sea Pool. By midafternoon all the rubbish bins were overflowing, and the gulls fought one another for scavenged scraps of meat and pastry, swooping low over the heads of the long queues that had formed beneath the Pharos Wheel and outside the entrance to the Brighton Aquarium.

Tom Natsworthy, waiting in the line of holidaymakers, ducked as another screaming gull dived past. He had been afraid of large birds ever since he’d fought with the Green Storm’s flying Stalkers at Rogue’s Roost. But these greedy gulls were really the least of his worries. He felt sure that the aquarium’s uniformed attendants would be able to tell just by looking at him that he had come aboard Brighton only an hour before, climbing out of a manhole that the Screw Worm had bored through the city’s hull. He expected at any moment to be dragged out of the queue and denounced as an intruder and a stowaway.

The Screw Worm had caught up with Brighton that morning. Tom had approached slowly, frightened of triggering whatever Old Tech Brighton had used to catch the Lost Boys, but it seemed that the city had turned its sensors off now that its fishing trip was over. Even so, he and Hester had barely dared to breathe as the magnetic clamps engaged and the hull drill chewed noisily through the resort’s deck plates.

Tom had wanted to use the crab-cams to search for signs of Wren, but Hester disagreed. “We’re not Lost Boys,” she pointed out. “It’d take all sorts of skills we haven’t got to steer one of those things through Brighton’s plumbing. It could be weeks before we sighted Wren. We’ll go up ourselves. We ought to be able to find some sign of all those limpets they fished aboard.”

Hester was right. When they emerged from the Worm into a deserted alleyway behind Brighton’s engine district, almost the first thing they saw was a poster pasted to an exhaust duct. It showed a limpet surrounded by savage boys, beneath the words:

PARASITE-PIRATES OF THE ATLANTIC!

ARTIFACTS AND CAPTIVES TAKEN FROM THE SUB-AQUATIC THIEVES’ DEN OF GRIMSBY DURING BRIGHTON’S RECENT EXPEDITION ARE ON PUBLIC DISPLAY AT THE BRIGHTON AQUARIUM, 11-17 BURCHILL SQUARE.

“Captives!” said Tom. “Wren might be there! That’s where we’ve got to go…”

Hester, a slower reader than her husband, was still halfway through the text. “What’s an aquarium?”

“A place for fish. A sort of zoo, or museum.”

Hester nodded. “Museums are your department. You go and have a look. I want to go and nose round the air harbor. I might hear something about Wren there, and I want to see if I can find us a ship; I don’t fancy going all the way home in that stinking old limpet.”

“We shouldn’t split up,” said Tom.

“It’s only for a while,” said Hester. “It’ll be quicker.” It was just an excuse, of course. The truth was that all the time she’d spent cooped up with Tom beneath the waves had made her irritable. She wanted to be alone for a while, to breathe and look around this city, without having to listen to him always worrying about Wren. She kissed him quickly and said, “I’ll meet you in an hour.”

“Back at the Worm?”

Hester shook her head. The engine district was getting busy as a new shift clocked on; passersby might notice them sneaking down their secret manhole. She pointed to another ad, half obscured by the aquarium poster, for a coffee shop in the Old Steine called the Pink Café.

“There…”

Luckily, the aquarium’s attendants were only interested in selling tickets and chatting to each other about their plans for the evening. They were not on the lookout for intruders, and even if they had been, there was nothing to distinguish Tom from the other visitors. He was just a youngish, tousled, slightly balding man, perhaps a scholar from the middle tiers of Kom Ombo, and if his clothes were rather rumpled and old-fashioned and he smelled faintly of mildew and brine, well, there was no rule against that. The girl at the turnstile barely glanced at him as she took his money and waved him through.

Inside the aquarium, bored-looking fish drifted in big, dim tanks, and there was such a smell of rust and salt water that Tom could almost have imagined he was back in Grimsby. But nobody was looking at the fish, or the sea horses, or the mangy sea lions. Everyone was heading to the central hall, following the brightly colored signs to the parasite-pirate exhibit.