Philip Reeve: Infernal Devices

And what was the Tin Book, anyway? What made Gargle want it so? Wren was not stupid. She knew that documents from the Ancient Era sometimes held clues to things that were very dangerous indeed: Dad had told her once that London, the city he grew up in, had been blown entirely to pieces by a machine called MEDUSA. What if the Tin Book contained instructions for building something like that and Gargle had found a way of reading it?

She wandered to the south side of Anchorage and down the well-worn fishermen’s stairs to the mooring beach, where she sat in the shade of an old, rusted-up caterpillar unit and tried to work out what to do. Her huge secret, which had seemed so exciting, was beginning to feel like a bit of a burden. She wished there was someone she could share it with. But who? Certainly not Mum or Dad or Miss Freya; they would be horrified at the thought of Lost Boys in Vineland. Tildy would probably panic too. She imagined telling Nate Sastrugi and asking him to help her, but somehow, now that she knew Gargle, Nate Sastrugi seemed not nearly so handsome: just a boy, rather dull and slow, who didn’t know much about anything except fishing.

She didn’t notice the rowboat nosing in toward the beach until her mother got out of it and shouted, “Wren? What are you doing? Come and help me with this.”

“This” was a poor little deer, stone dead with a hole in its chest, and Mum was dragging it out of the boat and getting ready to take it up to Dog Star Court, where she would butcher it and salt the meat for winter. Wren stood up and went toward her, then noticed how high the sun was. “I can’t!” she said.

“What?”

“I’ve got to meet someone.”

Hester put the deer down and stared at her. “Who? That Sastrugi boy, I suppose?”

Wren had been trying not to start another argument, but the tone of Mum’s voice was enough to make her temper flare. “Well, why not?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t have to be as miserable as you all the time. I’m not a child anymore. Just because no boys ever liked you when you were my age—”

“When I was your age’ Mum said, low and dangerous, “I saw things you wouldn’t believe. I know what people are capable of. That’s why we’ve always tried to protect you and keep you close and safe, your dad and me.”

“Oh, I’m safe, all right,” said Wren bitterly. “What do you think is going to happen to me in Vineland? Nothing ever happens to anybody here. You’re always hinting about what a terrible time you had and saying how lucky I am compared with you, but I bet your old life was more exciting than this! I bet Dad thinks so! I’ve seen the way he looks at that picture of your old ship. He loved being out in the world, flying about, and I bet he would still be if he hadn’t got himself stuck here with you.”

Mum hit her. It was a hard, sudden slap, with the flat of Mum’s open hand, and as Wren jerked her head backward, away from the blow, Mum’s wedding bracelet grazed her cheek. Wren had not been slapped since she was small. She felt her face burning, and when she touched it, little bright specks of blood came away on her fingers from where the bracelet had caught her. She tried to speak, but she could only gasp.

“There,” said Mum gruffly. She seemed almost as shocked as Wren. She reached out to touch Wren’s face, gently this time, but Wren whirled away from her and ran along the beach and into the cool shadows under Anchorage, running beneath the old city and out into the pastures behind, with her mother’s voice somewhere behind her shouting furiously, “Wren! Come back! Get back here!” She kept to the woods so the pickers in the orchards wouldn’t see her, and ran and ran, barely thinking about where she was running to, until she arrived tearful and out of breath among the crags at the top of the island, and there was Gargle, waiting for her.

He was all kindness and concern, sitting her down on a mossy stone, taking off his neckerchief to wipe her face, holding her hand until she was calm enough to speak. “What is it, Wren? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing really. My mum. That’s all. I hate her.”

“Now, I’m certain that isn’t true.” Gargle knelt down beside her. She didn’t think that he had looked anywhere but at her face since she’d found him, and his eyes, behind the smoked blue glasses that he wore, were a friend’s eyes, kind and worried. “You’re lucky to have a mum,” he said. “We Lost Boys, we’re just kidnapped when we’re little. We none of us know who our mums or our dads are, though we dream about them sometimes, and think how sweet it would be if we could meet them. If your mum’s hard on you, I think it’s just a sign that she’s worried about you.”

“You don’t know her’ said Wren, and held her breath to stop hiccuping. When she had finished, she said, “I saw the book.”

“The Tin Book?” Gargle sounded surprised, as if he’d been so worried about Wren that he’d forgotten the thing that had brought him to Vineland in the first place. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve done in a morning what might have taken a limpet crew a week or more. Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Wren. “I mean, I don’t know if I should tell you. Not unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but… why would anybody want it? What’s it for?”

Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the pines. Wren thought he looked angry and was afraid that she’d offended him, but when he turned to her again, he just seemed sad.

“We’re in trouble, Wren,” he said. “You’ve heard of Professor Pennyroyal?”

“Of course,” said Wren. “He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to ruin. He stole Mum and Dad’s airship and flew off in her…”

“Well, he wrote a book about it,” Gargle said. “It’s called Predator’s Gold, and in it he talks about what he calls ‘parasite-pirates’ who come up from under the ice to burgle cities. It’s mostly rubbish, but it sold like hotcakes among the cities we used to live off of: the North Atlantic raft towns and the ice runners. They all started installing Old Tech burglar alarms and checking their undersides for parasites once a day, which makes it kind of hard to attach a limpet to them.”

Wren thought about Professor Pennyroyal. All her life she’d been hearing stories of that wicked man. She’d seen the long, L-shaped scar on Dad’s chest where Mrs. Scabious had opened him up to fetch the bullet out. And now it turned out that the Lost Boys were Pennyroyal’s victims too!

“But I still don’t see why you need the Tin Book,” she said.

“We’ve had to send our limpets farther and farther south,” Gargle explained. “Right down into the Middle Sea and the Southern Ocean, where the raft cities don’t bother to keep watch for us. At least they never used to. This past summer, we’ve started losing limpets. Three went south and never returned. No word, no distress signal, nothing. I think maybe one of those cities has got hold of some kind of device that lets them see us coming, and they’ve been sinking our limpets, or capturing them. And if some of our people are captured, and tortured, and talk…”

“They might come looking for Grimsby?”

“Exactly.” Gargle looked thoughtfully at her, as if he was glad he had chosen to tell all this to such an intelligent, perceptive girl. He took her hands again. “We need something that will get us ahead of the Drys again, Wren. That’s why I need the Tin Book.”

“But it’s just a load of old numbers,” said Wren. “It came off some old American submarine…”

“Exactly,” said Gargle. “Those Ancients had subs way ahead of anything we’ve got. Ships the size of cities that could cruise right around the world without once having to come up for air. If we had that kind of technology, we’d never have to fear the Drys again. We could set the whole of Grimsby moving and they’d never find us.”