Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

Behind her, Tom reached the top of the steps and stopped. “Het,” he said. “Oh, Het—” Tears ran down his face, and he laughed at himself as he wiped them away. “It’s our ship!”

“What a pile of junk!” exclaimed Fishcake, pulling on a coat that he’d taken from one of the waxworks down below.

“Fishcake, see if you can turn the lights on,” Tom said, and climbed up into the gondola. The old ship smelled like a museum. He ducked under dangling cords and ran his hands over the control panels, recognizing the familiar instrument arrays. Lights came on in the room outside, shining in through the Jenny’s freshly squeegeed windows.

“Remember how it works?” asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the sort of whisper you would use in a temple.

“Oh, yes,” Tom whispered back. “You don’t ever forget…” He reached out reverently and pulled a lever. An inflatable dinghy dropped from a compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over. He shoveled it under the chart table and tried another lever. This time the Jenny shivered and shifted, and the museum was filled with the rising thunder of her twin Jeunet-Carot engines.

Outside, hands clamped over his ears, Fishcake was coughing in the exhaust smoke and shouting, “How do you get it out?”

“The roof opens!” Hester yelled back, pointing upward.

Fishcake shook his head. “I don’t think so…”

Tom killed the engines. Leaning out of the Jenny’s hatch, he looked up at the ceiling. With the lights switched on, it was easy to see why no one else had bothered coming in here to steal the Jenny. A huge hawser, one of the cables that had once linked Brighton to Cloud 9, had crashed down across the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, smashing the glass above the Jenny Haniver and buckling the delicate struts and girders of the roof.

“Oh, Quirke Almighty!” cried Tom. He was starting to get the feeling that his god was playing games with him. If he survived this, he was going to think seriously about finding himself a different deity.

He ran back to the flight deck, and Hester. “The roof’s smashed. We’ll never get her out!”

“Someone’s coming!” yelled Fishcake, peering from one of the museum windows. “A big gang of them. Lost Boys, I bet, come to see what the noise was about!”

Hester stared through the Jenny’s nose windows at the roof. “Reckon we could shift that debris?”

Tom shook his head. “That hawser is fatter than the two of us put together. We’re trapped in here!”

“Don’t worry,” Hester said. “We’ll think of something.” She closed her eye, concentrating, while Fishcake ran from window to window, hollering something else about Lost Boys. Then she looked up at Tom and grinned.

“Thought of something,” she said.

She started flipping switches on the long, dusty control desks. The Jenny Haniver lurched, throwing Tom backward.

Amid all the racket of engines starting up and docking clamps releasing, he didn’t realize at first all of what Hester had done. Then, as the shock wave of the twin explosions bowed the windows, as the Jenny lifted and surged forward, he saw that she had emptied the rocket projectors into the damaged front wall, blasting it into the street and leaving a hole large enough to let the little airship out into the sky.

“You’ve forgotten Fishcake!” he yelled over the long screech of an engine pod grazing the museum wall.

“Oh, dear!” Hester shouted back.

“Go back!”

“We don’t need him, Tom. Not Wanted On Voyage.”

Tom scrambled back to the open hatch and reached out, shouting Fishcake’s name. The boy was running toward the lifting gondola, hands outstretched, face white and horrified beneath a clown mask of powdered plaster. Over the roar of the engines and the dull hiss of the explosion still echoing in his ears, Tom could not hear the words, but he didn’t need to. “Come back!” Fishcake was shouting as the Jenny Haniver rose through the smoke and dust and swung across an Old Steine full of the startled upturned faces of Lost Boys and looters, up into the sky where she belonged. “Don’t leave me! Mr. Natsworthy! Please! Come back! Come back! Come back!”

The Jenny Haniver flew on, weaving unsteadily this way and that because Tom and Hester were struggling with each other at the controls.

“For Quirke’s sake!” Tom shouted. “We’ve got to turn back! We can’t just leave him behind!”

Hester pulled his hands free of the steering levers and flung him aside. He crashed against the chart table and fell heavily, shouting out with pain. “Forget him, Tom!” she screamed. “We can’t trust him. And he said the Jenny was a piece of junk! He’s lucky I didn’t knife him!”

“But he’s a child! You can’t just leave him! What will happen to him?”

“Who cares? He’s a Lost Boy! Have you forgotten what he did to Wren?”

The Jenny came up suddenly into clear air and moonlight. The smoke lay like a field of dirty snow fifty feet beneath the gondola, with the fire-flecked upperworks of Kom Ombo and Benghazi poking out of it a few miles to larboard. Airships were buzzing about, but none showed an interest in the Jenny Haniver. Hester scanned the sky ahead and saw, far away toward the south, the tattered envelopes of Cloud 9. She pointed the Jenny’s nose at it, locked the controls, and knelt beside Tom. He looked up with an odd expression, and she suddenly realized that he was afraid of her. That made her laugh. She took his face between her hands and kissed him, and licked away the salt tears that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he turned his head away. She started to feel afraid herself. Had she gone too far this time?

“I’m sorry,” she told him, though she wasn’t. “Look, Tom, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I panicked. We’ll turn back if you like.”

Tom pulled away from her and scrambled up. He kept remembering the strange smile that had flickered on her face as she’d led him from the Pepperpot. “You enjoy it,” he said.

“Don’t you? Like when you killed all those people at Shkin’s place, you were enjoying it…”

Hester said, “They were slavers, Tom. They were villains. They were the ones who sold Wren. They sold our little girl. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

“But…”

She shook her head and gave a cry of frustration. Why could he not understand? “Look,” she said, “we’re just little people, aren’t we? We always have been. Little small people, trying to live our lives, but always at the mercy of men like Uncle and Shkin and Masgard and Pennyroyal and… and Valentine. So yes. It feels good to be as strong as them; it feels good to fight back and even things up a bit.”

Tom said nothing. By the light of the instrument panels she could see a fresh bruise forming on his head where it had struck the chart table. “Poor Tom,” she said, leaning over to kiss it, but he twitched away again, staring at the fuel gauges.

“The tanks are only half full,” he said. “You knew that when we took off. If we go back, we might never reach Wren. Anyway, those slaves will have got poor Fishcake by now.”

Hester shrugged awkwardly and wished he’d let her hold him. His obsession with the Lost Boy angered her. Why did Tom have to be so concerned about other people all the time? She controlled herself. “Fishcake will be able to look after himself,” she promised.

Tom looked hopefully at her, wanting to believe her. “You think so? He’s so young…”

“He must be twelve if he’s a day. I lived alone in the Out-Country when I wasn’t much older than that, and I did all right. And I didn’t have his Burglarium training.” She touched Tom’s face. “We’ll find Wren,” she promised. “Then we’ll find fuel, and go back to Brighton and get Fishcake, when things have calmed down a bit.”