Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Now a halfhearted daylight filled the circle of the cave mouth. Wren woke Theo as gently as she could, and scrambled around him to the entrance. Peeking out, she saw the deserted margins of the wreck stretching away in hazy sunlight. She craned out farther. It was too misty to make out Zhan Shan, but she could see the tower of smoke that stood above it, wet-slate gray, and as tall as the sky. The ground seemed to shake faintly, and she thought she heard a distant rumbling.

“Well, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “Why would the Storm turn the weapon on their own land?”

“It must be another civil war,” said Theo. He poured some water for them from the canteen Lavinia Childermass had given them. “Naga’s probably zapping his rivals.”

“Charming,” said Wren. “And these are the people whose mercy we’re going to be throwing ourselves on?”

“Either that or go back to Mr. Garamond.”

“Fair point. What’s for breakfast?”

“Gravel,” said Theo, opening a box that Lavinia Childermass had put inside Wren’s pack. “I think it started out as some kind of flapjack. It’s probably very nutritious…”

“Shhhh!”

The rumbling sound was growing louder. The ground was definitely shaking, vibrations flaking small scales of rust off the old wheel.

“The volcano?” said Wren.

Theo shook his head.

They scrambled down out of their shelter and stood on the wheel’s rim, staring westward. The rumblings came and went, gusting on the wind. A ridge bulged and shivered, its profile altering as they watched. A gleam of metal showed beneath the scrub, and a fist of exhaust smoke rose triumphantly into the air.

“Oh, Quirke!” said Wren.

“Harrowbarrow,” whispered Theo.

Wren nodded. She had almost forgotten the existence of Wolf Kobold. Her first thought was Thank Quirke we got out of the debris field before he arrived, but it was drowned out immediately by another thought coming close behind it: What about the others?

“We’ve got to warn them!” she said.

“Why?” asked Theo. “They’ll know soon enough. If it moves as fast as it did when I saw it tear through the line, they’ll hear the engines in London before long.”

“But they might not,” said Wren. “The lookouts are young; they’ve never heard town engines; they’ll think it’s the volcano, like we did…” She tried to tell herself that it served the Londoners right for accusing people and locking them in cages, but all she could think of were her friends: Angie and Saab, Clytie, Dr. Childermass. Even Mr. Garamond didn’t deserve to be eaten by Harrowbarrow. The waste of it appalled her; those years of thought and effort and hard work—

“We’ve got to delay it,” she said. “I’ll go aboard and divert them somehow. Even if it only buys an extra half hour, it might help. Don’t you see? New London has to move today; now, ready or not! Once it’s out of the fields, it should be able to outrun Harrowbarrow.”

“Oh, not on your own,” said Theo.

“Yes, because I can’t take you, because you’re the mossiest Mossie in the whole world and a terrible liar and Wolf Kobold doesn’t believe people like you even deserve to be alive. So you’re going to go and be safe somewhere.”

“Wren,” he protested.

She hugged him, tight, tight. It would be so easy to just keep out of Harrowbarrow’s way and pretend that none of this had anything to do with her, but it had; what would her father think of her if he knew she’d had a chance to save his city and she’d fluffed it? What would she think of herself? She kissed Theo. “Go,” she said. “Harrowbarrow sends scouts out ahead sometimes, on foot. If they catch you, they won’t ask questions. Please go.”

“How will I find you again?”

“I don’t know,” said Wren, pulling away from him. Harrowbarrow’s engines snarled. “I’ll think of something,” she promised. She couldn’t quite bring herself to let go of his hands. “Look, the gods went to all this trouble to bring us together; you don’t think they’d let a silly little enormously dangerous armored suburb come between us, do you?” She checked herself, because she was starting to babble. It had been the same on that air quay at Kom Ombo. She seemed to be able to say anything except the thing she wanted to say.

In the end, Theo said it instead. “I love you.”

“Gosh, really? Me too! You, I mean. I, I love you.” She started to move back toward him, then pulled herself away. There, she thought, I’ve told him; now I’ll have one less regret when I get down to the Sunless Country. She turned and started to stumble away through the brambles and the gobbets of rusting wreckage, northward into Harrowbarrow’s path. “Hide!” she shouted at him, seeing him standing there watching helplessly from the shadow of the abandoned wheel. “Go and hide!” She pressed on, half afraid and half hoping that he would insist on coming with her.

When she looked back again, she could no longer see him.

Theo ran a little way into the thickets of alder that filled the scooped-out hollow of an old track mark nearby. There he stopped. He wanted to be with Wren, but he knew that if the Harrowbarrovians were as bad as she’d described, he would only be going to his death, and bringing more danger down on her by making Kobold wonder why she was with an Anti-Tractionist.

Yet he could not just hide.

He turned east and started loping toward the debris field. The Londoners were not bad people. They deserved all the warning he could give them. He would run to the hangar at the west end of Holloway Road and tell the lads on guard there what was coming for them.

Wren waded through the waist-high weeds. The day was dimming as the pall of smoke from the distant volcano spread across the sky. End-of-the-world weather. Harrowbarrow’s engines had fallen silent. She wondered if Wolf Kobold was on his bridge, watching the land ahead through his periscope. She pulled off her jacket and turned it inside out. The red silk lining was tatty and faded after all her adventures, but it was still the brightest thing about. She climbed up on a nameless chunk of wreckage and started to wave the jacket above her head, shouting, “Wolf! Wolf! It’s me! It’s Wren!”

After a few minutes she jumped down and started plodding on again. She could feel the ground stirring underfoot as the harvester suburb drew nearer. From time to time she waved the jacket and shouted, but she couldn’t even see Harrowbarrow anymore; it had squirreled down into a deep trench. Wren glanced at the sky. No Stalker-birds. Honestly, she thought, where were the Green Storm and their city-zapping super-weapon when you needed them? It was sheer incompetence, letting Harrowbarrow drive so far behind their lines.

A hummock of grayish earth ahead of her suddenly proved that it wasn’t a hummock after all, by standing up and pointing a gun at her and shouting “Stop!” Wren screamed and dropped her jacket. All around her, more gray-clad men were appearing from the undergrowth. She didn’t recognize their faces, but she knew by their getups and their tinted goggles that they were one of Harrowbarrow’s scouting parties. She raised her hands and tried not to let her voice wobble as she said, “I’m Wren Natsworthy. I’m a friend of your mayor.”

One of the men searched her for weapons, more thoroughly than Wren felt was really necessary (surely they must know that you couldn’t hide anything very dangerous inside your bra?). Their leader said, “You come,” and they were off, running quickly through the rough, stumbly country, squeezing through crannies in the walls of track marks and wading across their flooded floors. The men moved fast and easily, and shoved Wren when she showed any sign of flagging. She was exhausted by the time the armored flank of Harrowbarrow came in sight, half submerged in mud and torn-up bushes.