Philip Reeve: Infernal Devices

“I’m not coming, Tom,” she said. She was crying. Smoke blew past her, and burning scraps of envelope fabric, and the hot wind raised the skirts of her coat like black wings, and she looked like some terrible angel. “Go back to Vineland. Be happy. But not with me. I’m staying here.”

“Hester, don’t be stupid! This place is falling apart!”

“It’s just falling,” said Hester. “I’ll survive. There are towns below: hard desert towns, scav platforms. My kind of place.”

He had almost caught up with her. She could see his face shining with tears in the light from the blazing buildings. She wanted very badly to go to him, to kiss him and hold him, but she knew that she could never touch him again, because what she had done would always come between them. “I love you,” she said, and turned and ran, plunging into the maze while the deck plates pitched and reared beneath her, and sounds that were half sobs and half laughter came out of her mouth without her meaning them to. Behind her, fainter and fainter, she heard Tom shouting her name. Overhead, Cloud 9’s gasbags were igniting one by one, filling the maze with weird racing shadows. Hester sobbed and stumbled, the hedges scratching her face as she blundered into them. She was just beginning to realize that this was a bad place to be, that she would need better shelter than this when the deck plate came down, when she reached the heart of the maze. Something crouched there, as if it had been waiting for her all along.

She came to a stop, skidding on the grass. The waiting shape unfolded itself and stood up, towering over her. She thought at first that it was made of fire, but that was just the reflections from the burning gasbags shining in its dented, burnished armor. Its dead face widened into a smile. Hester knew that face; she had shoveled earth over it herself, eighteen years ago on the Black Island, burying the old Stalker deep and piling stones upon his grave. It seemed she’d been wasting her time, though. She could smell the familiar smell of him: formaldehyde and hot metal.

“Hester?” called Tom’s voice faintly, away in the gardens somewhere and lost to her now forever.

And Grike reached for her with his dreadful hands and said, “HESTER SHAW.”

Another gasbag went up with a roar, a geyser of light escaping into the sky. Tom found himself airborne for a moment as the deck plate dropped. He hit the grass hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a statue of Poskitt. “Hester!” he shouted as he scrambled up, but his voice was cracking with the effort, and then his heart seemed to crack too. He kneaded his chest, but there was no relief: He was on his knees; on his face; pain nailed him to the lawn. He blacked out, and when he woke, someone was with him. “Hester?” he mumbled.

“Daddy…” It was Wren, her hands on his back and his shoulders, her face looking down at him, tearstained and frightened.

“I’m all right,” he told her, and it was true, the pain was passing, though he felt sick and giddy. “It’s happened before… It’s nothing.”

He tried to stand, but Wren’s friend Theo came and picked him up, lifting him with barely an effort. He must have lost consciousness again as Theo carried him back across the gardens, because he thought that Hester was with him, but when he looked round she wasn’t, and they were already at the Jenny’s open hatchway, Pennyroyal peering out at them from the flight-deck windows. It was confusing, especially with the whole garden tilting and swaying like this, and the only thing he could be sure of was Wren, who was holding his hand very tightly and trying to smile at him, though she was crying at the same time. “Wren,” he said, “we can’t go; we have to find your mother…”

Wren shook her head, and helped Theo heave him aboard. “We’re going to get you away from this awful place before it’s too late,” she said.

The hatch closed, and as Theo went forward to the flight deck to help Pennyroyal start the engines, Wren knelt over her father, holding him the way that he had held her when she was a very little girl, when she was sick or frightened. “There, there,” he used to whisper to her, and so she whispered, “There, there,” and stroked his hair, and kissed him, until he was calm again. And she tried not to think about Mum, and the things that Mum had done and said, and the trembling light that had shone from the blade of Mum’s knife. She tried to remember that she did not have a mother anymore.

How she had aged!

Grike had thought he understood the Once-Borns and the things time did to them, but it was still a shock to see his poor child’s lined and weather-beaten face, her beautiful red hair turning coarse and gray. He reached toward her, sheathing his claws, and she reacted in the way most Once-Borns did when the chase was done and there was no escaping him: that wordless keening, and the sudden hot stink as her bowels emptied. It hurt him that she was afraid of him. He pulled her close as gently as he could and said, “I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH.”

And Hester, crushed against his dented armor, could only shudder, and weep, and listen to the saddest sound she’d ever heard: the dwindling roar of twin Jeunet-Carots as the Jenny Haniver took off without her.

And Cloud 9 touched down at last, first the dangling cable car plowing into the sand like a drag anchor, then the edge of the deck plate catching on a reef of rocks. Catwalks torn from the underside went striding end over end across the dunes; smashed flying machines and uprooted trees spilled down into the desert. A hawser snapped; a sagging gasbag broke free and fell upward, soaring through smoke and dust. Whole sections of the Pavilion burst, shedding antiques and objets d’art like shrapnel. Stairways crumpled; sundecks buckled; swimming pools imploded. Cloud 9 bounced, slicing the top off a gigantic dune. Candy-colored domes bowled off across the desert, pursued by greedy townlets. The wreckage crashed down again, belching fire, trailing cables and collapsing gasbags; crashed and skidded and spun and shuddered to a stop.

There was a time of silence, broken only by the mineral sigh of a billion grains of upflung sand sifting gently down. And in that silence, before the scavenger towns came roaring in to gobble up the wreckage, the Stalker Grike stood up and lifted Hester in his arms, and walked away with her into the desert, and the dark. The end.