Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

The Stalker’s claws slid from her finger ends. “Your opinion is irrelevant, Doctor. You are no longer needed.”

“But—but you do need me! Your memory problems … with the right trigger, they could flare up again… No!”

The Stalker Fang caught him as he tried to dodge past her to the door. “Thank you for your assistance, Doctor,” she whispered.

Fishcake shut his eyes tight and covered his ears, but he could not quite block out the crunch and spatter of Popjoy’s dying. When he looked again, his Stalker was helping herself to things from the shelves: fragments of circuitry, wires and ducts, the brains of lesser Stalkers. The walls of the workshop had been redecorated with eye-catching slashes of red.

“Find food and water for yourself, boy,” she whispered. “I shall need your help when we reach Erdene Tezh.”

London (!!!)

28th May

I’ve always thought that only smug, self-satisfied people keep diaries, but so much has happened in the past few days that I know I’ll forget half of it if I don’t write it down, so I have cadged this notebook off of Clytie Potts and made a promise to myself to write a journal of my time in London. Maybe if we ever get back to the Hunting Ground, I can turn it into a book, like one of Professor Pennyroyal’s. (Only true!)

It seems hard to believe that it is only two days since we arrived in the debris fields. So much has happened, and I have met so many new people, and found out so much, that it feels as if I have been here a year at least.

I’ll try to start at the beginning. After our meeting with the lord mayor, Mr. Garamond and some of his young warriors took Dad back to where we’d left the Jenny Haniver and made him move her round into the same secret hangar where the Archaeopteryx is kept. They say she will be safer there, and won’t be seen by the Green Storm spy birds that cruise over from time to time. But I think it’s also so they can keep an eye on her; they keep saying we’re not prisoners, but they obviously don’t want us sneaking off. They seem terrified that we’ll tell some other city that they’re here, which seems a bit pathetic—I mean, what do they have that another city would want to cross hundreds of miles of Storm Country to eat?

Later, after an evening meal in the communal canteen, we were all three of us brought to this house, which is to be our home while we’re in London. I say house, but it’s really just a sort of hut; a lot of sheets of old metal bolted and welded together at the base of one of the old brake blocks that support Crouch End’s roof. There are wire grilles over the window holes, but I don’t know if they’ve been put there to keep us from escaping or just because there’s no glass in London. Inside there are three rooms, linked by a lot of winding passages, the floors dug down into the ground so that we can stand upright inside. It’s a little damp, but homey enough, and close enough to the edge of Crouch End that the sun shines in for a half hour or so in the evenings, which is nice. Dad has the biggest room, Wolf is next to him, and I have chosen for myself a little semicircular chamber at the back; one wall is made from an old tin advertising sign (stick-phast paste—accept no imitations), and I have a window that lets in a little sunlight, and the light of the moon at night.

I thought that Wolf would try to escape or something, but he seems quite content at the moment, very interested in this little world the Londoners have made for themselves. He’s a strange person. It’s hard to tell what he is thinking.

Dad is just glad to be home, of course. I was half hoping he’d find True Love with Clytie Potts, but it turns out she’s married (to an Engineer called Lurpak Flint, who flies her airship for her, so she’s not just Clytie Potts and Cruwys Morchard but Clytie Flint as well—I’ve never known a woman with quite so many names).

29th May

I think I like London. It’s funny—I’ve come so far, and I’ve ended up in a place that’s very like Anchorage-in-Vineland. It’s secret, and hidden, and so small that everyone knows everyone else, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I think I can’t wait to get back on the bird roads, but at other times I wish I was a Londoner myself. And it’s beautiful. You wouldn’t think there would be beauty in a great smashed-up heap of rubbish, but there is. In all the clefts and stretches of open earth, trees and ferns grow, and in every soil-filled nook among the debris too. Birds sing here; insects buzz about. Angie says that in another month the scrap-heaps above Crouch End will be pink with foxgloves.

Angie is my best friend here. (Her name is short for Ford Anglia—her dad, Len Peabody, named all his children after Old Tech ground cars.) She’s sensible and funny, which is a good combination, and she reminds me of a badger or a mole or something; small and stocky and slightly furry, always busy with something. She’s been all over the debris fields, because she goes on patrol with Garamond’s militia, keeping an eye out for intruders and the Green Storm. All the young Londoners are always going off on patrol, or hunting, or scouring about for salvage in the farthest corners of the wreck. I suppose the Emergency Committee think it’s a way of using up all that teenage energy. I’d like to go with them, and use up some of mine, but Garamond says I can’t, because he still doesn’t trust me. What a fusspot that man is! He says that me and Wolf (Wolf and I?) have to spend our days helping the old folk dig over the vegetable plots, or listening to Dad talk History with Mr. Pomeroy.

2nd June

For all their kindness I am starting to feel sure the Londoners are hiding something from us. Wolf has said this from the first, but I thought he was wrong. Now I’m starting to believe him. It’s just little things, like the way people look at us, and the way Dr. Childermass kept shushing Len Peabody that first morning— what was she afraid he’d tell us? Sometimes, when Dad and Wolf and I go into the communal canteen in the middle of Crouch End where everybody eats, people who are deep in conversation about something suddenly stop and start talking about the weather instead. And when Dad asked Clytie Potts why she had been collecting Kliest Coils and other bits of Electric Empire technology, she went all red and changed the subject.

Last night I heard voices outside again while I was trying to get to sleep, so I went to my window and pulled the curtain aside (it’s just a bit of old sack, really) and what do you think I saw? Engineers! Lavinia Childermass and half a dozen others! They were leaving Crouch End and walking off up a track that leads eastward over a steep ridge of debris. Where were they going? It looked a lot more purposeful than just a moonlit stroll. Do they do this every night? Maybe that’s why I hardly ever see any of the Engineers around in the daytime—they must be catching up on their sleep!

Well, I always dreamed of being a daring schoolgirl detective, like Milly Crisp in those books I used to read when I was little. So this afternoon I wandered off on my own up that track that I saw the Engineers taking last night. From the top of the ridge you can see it winding on across the debris fields for about half a mile, toward a really big, wedge-shaped chunk of wreckage that looks as if it must have been a section of London’s Gut.

Nobody about, but something flashed in one of the holes or window openings in the side of that big old chunk. Then, all of a sudden, I heard footsteps behind me, and there was Mr. Garamond with a couple of his favorite young warriors, Angie’s brother Saab and a girl called Cat Luperini. “What are you doing here?” he shouted, all purple with rage, nearly as cross and ugly as Mum. I tried to explain that I’d just felt like stretching my legs, but he wouldn’t have any of it. “You’re on the edge of a hot zone!” he shouted, and Cat got hold of me and started steering me back toward Crouch End. Saab leaned over and said, “You mustn’t go wandering off like this, Wren. That’s a dangerous part of the fields. We don’t want you to get crisped by a sprite.”