Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

They slept a little; talked a little; Wren made patterns with the straw on the floor of her cage. The day crept by. At evening time, when the dinner gong was summoning everyone to the communal canteen, Angie Peabody arrived with food and fresh water for them. She poked the tin bowls in through the bars of the cage and would not meet Wren’s eye.

“Angie?” Wren asked. “ You don’t believe what Garamond says about us, do you? You know I’m not any sort of spy.”

“Don’t know what to believe anymore,” the girl replied gruffly. “There’s been nothing but trouble ever since you got here, I know that. Them birds coming yesterday, and your friend turning up… Saab got hurt badly, Wren; we don’t even know if he’ll see again, and he’ll always have the scars, and you don’t care a bit; you just went off yesterday evening with your boyfriend or whatever he is… It don’t look good, does it?”

Wren felt dazed with shame. It was true she hadn’t spared much thought for Saab or the others hurt in the attack; she’d been too taken up with thoughts of Theo. “That was wrong of me,” she admitted. “But it hardly makes me a Green Storm spy. Angie, a week ago Garamond was saying we were in league with Harrowbarrow; it was me and my dad who brought Wolf Kobold here. Remember?”

“How do we even know Kobold was what he said he was?” Angie retorted. “You say he went off to find this Harrowbarrow place. He might be Green Storm too, and safe in Batmunkh Gompa or somewhere now.”

That made Wren think of her father. She reached out through the bars, trying to touch Angie, who backed quickly away. “Angie, you’ve got to get me out of here! I have to find a way of going after Dad.”

Angie took another step backward, disappearing into the shadows. “Mr. Garamond said we ain’t to talk to you,” she said.

Wren threw herself down on her mattress, which rewarded her by bursting and poking her in the side with a sharp, rusty spring. “I’m sorry, Theo,” she said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is. If I hadn’t written you that letter, you’d have stayed with your own people. You’d never have come here.”

“And if you hadn’t talked to me that afternoon by Pennyroyal’s swimming pool on Cloud 9, I’d have been killed or captured when the Storm attacked, and you wouldn’t have to worry about me at all.”

Wren reached out of her cage and touched his fingers. She traced the hard, warm curves of his nails, the little rough bits of skin beside them, the whorls of his fingertips like contour lines on a tiny Braille map.

Late that night they were awoken by the last person Wren had expected to come visiting them. “Wren?” a voice asked, and she opened her eyes to see Lavinia Childermass hunkered down outside the gate of her cage. The Engineer had an electric lantern with a blue glass shade. In its dim light her bald head shone like an alien moon. Wren scrambled up, spearing herself on the mattress spring again, and heard Theo moving in the neighboring cage.

“Wren, my dear, are you awake?”

“Sort of. What’s happening? Is it Dad?”

“He has not returned, child.”

“Then …”

“We have a new lord mayor,” said the Engineer. “The Committee elected him this evening.”

“But I thought you were Mr. Pomeroy’s deputy. I thought—”

“The Committee decided that it would be unwise to have an Engineer as mayor,” Dr. Childermass said calmly. “They still remember Crome’s regime. And with the war drawing closer, they thought it wiser to elect someone with a security background…”

“You can’t mean—”

“Mr. Garamond is lord mayor of London now, Wren. He played on the fears of the Committee to make them support him. I am sorry to say that he has turned a lot of people against you. I think most of London believes that you and Theo and your father had something to do with those birds and the death of poor Chudleigh.”

“But …”

“Shhh! I think they will forgive you, Wren; you are a Londoner’s daughter, after all. But Garamond is going to propose that Theo be killed, and from the talk at the canteen this evening, I think a majority of the Committee will side with him. He argues that we cannot allow an Anti-Tractionist to live here, learning our secrets.”

“He’s mad!”

“Perhaps he is, a little. Paranoid, certainly. Poor Garamond; he was no older than you on MEDUSA night. He survived because he was in one of the Deep Gut prisons, where Magnus Crome had sent him for being an Anti-Tractionist sympathizer. The day after the disaster he led a band of survivors east, imagining that the Anti-Tractionists he had always admired would help them. But the soldiers they met upon the plains just gunned them down; poor Garamond only escaped by playing dead, hidden under the bodies of his friends.”

“You can see why he wouldn’t trust Anti-Tractionists,” said Theo.

“But it doesn’t give him an excuse to start killing people!” Wren complained. “And it certainly doesn’t give everyone else an excuse to let him!”

“I agree,” said the old Engineer. “But they are scared; the birds, the war, the new weapon. Even the prospect of leaving the debris fields is enough to unsettle them after so many years. And when people are scared, it can bring out the worst in them. That is why I am going to let you go. I am sure that Theo will be able to find you shelter at one of the Storm’s settlements. I don’t imagine the war will last much longer now that the Storm have this orbital terror weapon, so you will be in far less danger there than with us.”

She reached inside her rubber coat and brought out some sort of Old Tech device; the type of thing Engineers presumably kept in their pockets all the time. It looked like a can opener and buzzed like a horsefly, and made the padlock on Wren’s cage clack open. “I brought your pack with me, Wren,” Dr. Childermass said as she moved across to Theo’s cage, and Wren, still not quite believing that they were going, fitted her arms through the shoulder straps and heaved it on.

“I should carry that,” said Theo, scrambling out of his cage.

“I can manage. We’ll take turns.”

Lavinia Childermass led them to a small back way out of Crouch End; a hole in the roof plate at its lowest point where it sloped down to touch the ground. She scrambled out with them and stood watching as they set off together into the wreckage, moving closer together as they went away from her, as if they thought an old Engineer would not approve of people holding hands and wanted to be safely hidden in the shadows before they finally touched.

Lavinia smiled. She had had a child of her own, once, but in those days the Guild of Engineers had taken all infants straight to the communal nurseries, and she had never known her little Bevis. Dead long ago, she thought, and the sudden sadness made her remember the funeral drum, and Chudleigh Pomeroy lying cold under the earth in Putney Vale. If she had not been a logical, disciplined Engineer, she would have found the world too sad a place to live in.

She watched Wren and Theo until the shadows and the wreckage swallowed them. Well, she thought, that is one less thing to worry about. And she went quickly through Crouch End and up the Womb road, returning to her work aboard New London.

The Fury reached Batmunkh Gompa shortly after sundown, crossing the Shield-Wall by the light of a smudged and bloodstained moon. She had been heading for Tienjing when the master of a passing freighter advised her captain to reroute. “Tienjing is burning! The barbarians have a new weapon! A lance of fire that strikes from the sky! Batmunkh Tsaka is gone too! Naga has fled to Batmunkh Gompa, but not even Batmunkh Gompa can stand against the fire from heaven! Save yourselves!”