Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

What about the other kites? Knowing Cynthia, she would have destroyed them. But maybe the delay that Theo had caused might have left her no time to deal with them. He glanced at his watch and saw with relief that there were still eight minutes to go before midnight. Ignoring the pain in his chest and side, he started climbing toward the kite locker. Even if he had not known where it was, he would have been able to find it by tracing the source of the cold wind howling in through the open escape hatch. Sure enough, the locker was empty; Cynthia had bundled the spare kites out through the hatch before she took flight herself. But when Theo stuck his head out, he saw one kite caught in the ratlines only a few yards from the hatch, and it was easy for him to reach out and drag it back aboard.

Breathing hard, he started to strap himself into the kite. Then he remembered Lady Naga. The kite was big, and she was small; Theo was sure it would carry both of them. But was she even still alive? He glanced quickly at his watch. The climb to the kite locker had not taken nearly as long as he’d thought. He had to try to save Lady Naga. He had promised.

He left the kite by the locker and flung himself back down the steep companionways to her cabin. She was lying where he had left her, but she started whimpering and trying to drag herself away when she heard him come in, imagining that he was Cynthia.

“It’s all right,” he told her, kneeling down beside her and rolling her over.

“Rohini,” she croaked.

“She’s gone,” said Theo, trying to help her to her feet. “She was never Rohini anyway. Her name’s Cynthia Twite; she was part of the Stalker Fang’s private spy ring.”

“Twite?” Lady Naga frowned and groaned. Thinking seemed to hurt. “No, she was a white girl, the Stalker’s agent on Cloud 9… Naga took her home aboard the Requiem Vortex, but she vanished when we reached Shan Guo… Oh, Theo, I have to get home. If I don’t, she or her friends will tell Naga that the townies killed me, and the peace will fail…”

“Don’t try to talk,” said Theo, worried that she would injure herself still further by forcing all these words up her poor, bruised throat. “I’ll get you home, I promise. But first we have to get off this ship.” He checked his wristwatch. “There’s a b—” he said, and stopped.

It was still eight minutes to midnight.

The fall down the stairs, he thought. My watch is broken…

He had just time to remember his father saying, “I don’t know why you youngsters wear these gimcrack bracelet watches. A pocket watch is more distinguished, and far, far more reliable,” before the explosion tore his ship apart beneath him.

Brighton had taken a turn for the worse since Wren and Theo had left. The flying palace of Cloud 9 was gone, and it had taken most of the city’s ruling elite with it. Brighton was ruled now by the Lost Boys. Dragged aboard as captives by the Shkin Corporation, they had escaped from their pens on the night of the Green Storm raid and quickly made themselves at home, setting up their own small kingdoms among the smart white streets of Queen’s Park and Montpelier and the dank labyrinths of the Laines, gathering private armies of beggars and rebel slaves about them. They fought among themselves, or formed shaky alliances that could be broken over a stolen pair of shoes or a covetous glance at a pretty slave girl. You could never tell what a Lost Boy would do next. They were vicious and sentimental, greedy and generous. A lot of them were mad. By night their followers fought running battles on the litter-strewn promenades, avenging botched deals and imagined insults.

Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys), and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guesthouses and frolic in the Sea Pool; but there was a certain sort of person—well-off artists from the comfortable middle tiers of cities that the war had never touched, and spoiled young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them— who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music, and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Ore with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St. Jean les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves, or gunrunners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy anything. And up at the bows, drenched in the spray that crashed over the gunwales every time the launch shoved its blunt nose through a wave, Fishcake stood staring at the approaching resort and wishing he had stayed safe ashore.

In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead, he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he had encountered any of them, they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk, he realized he’d been wrong; the Lost Boys were the Brighton authorities.

The launch swung across Brighton’s decaying stern, past dirty paddle wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime, where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveler from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, “Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!”

“Lost Boy submarines!” the boy said. “You can buy pleasure trips aboard them and see the city from beneath. And that’s not all they’re used for. Lost Boys are still pirates at heart. I’ve heard stories of little towns that have crossed Brighton’s path and never been seen again…”

“Ugh!” said the girl again, but she looked delighted at the thought of boarding a city where real live pirates lived.

Fishcake did not share her enthusiasm. Returning seemed less and less like a good idea.

The launch entered a channel of calm, filthy water between the central hull and the outrigger district of Kemptown. Abandoned pleasure piers arched overhead, their corroded gantries sending down a rain of rust flakes as Brighton shifted on the swell. The voices of the launch crew echoed across the narrowing gap to dockers waiting on the mooring stair. Smells of oil and brine. A dead cat bobbed in a mat of drifting scum. The launch backed its engines, and the other passengers began to gather their bags and pat their clothes, checking that wallets and money belts were still secure, but Fishcake just turned up his collar and tugged down the peak of his greasy cap and wished that he could stay aboard the launch and let it take him back to Cairo.