Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

She reached out and touched him, and said, “She needs a doctor, Valentine.”

He looked at the Engineers, clustering around their machine in a frantic scrum. There would be no help from them. Outside the cathedral doors curtains of golden fire swung across Paternoster Square. He looked up, and saw something red catch the firelight beyond the high windows of the starboard transept.

“It’s the Jenny Haniver!” shouted Hester, scrambling to her feet. “Oh, it’s Tom! And there’s a medical bay aboard…” But she knew the Jenny couldn’t land amidst the flames of Top Tier. “Valentine, can we get on to the roof somehow?”

Valentine picked up his sword and cut the cords on her wrists. Then, flinging it aside, he lifted Katherine and started to carry her between the spitting coils to where the metal stairway zig-zagged up into the dome. Stalkers reached out for Hester as she scurried after him, but Valentine ordered them back. To a startled Beefeater he shouted, “Captain! That airship is not to be fired upon!”

Magnus Crome came running to clutch at his sleeve. “The machine has gone mad!” he wailed. “Quirke alone knows what commands your daughter fed it! We can’t fire it and we can’t stop the energy build-up! Do something, Valentine! You discovered the damned thing! Make it stop!”

Valentine shoved him aside and started up the steps, through the rising veils of light, the crackling static, through air that smelted like burning tin.

“I only wanted to help London!” the old man sobbed. “I only wanted to make London strong!”

Hester took the lead, climbing up through the open top of the dome into smoky firelight and the shadow of the great weapon. Off to her right, the charred skeleton of the 13th Floor Elevator lay draped over the ruins of the Engineerium like a derelict rollercoaster. The fire had spread to the Guildhall, and the Planning Department and the Hall of Records were blazing, hurling out firefly-swarms of sparks and millions of pink and white official forms. St Paul’s was an island in a sea of fire, with the Jenny Haniver swinging above it like a low-budget moon, scorched and listing, veering drunkenly in the updraughts from the burning buildings.

She climbed higher, out on to the cobra-hood of MEDUSA. Valentine came after her; she could hear him whispering to Katherine, his eyes fixed on the struggling airship.

“What idiot is flying that thing?” he shouted, working his way across the cowl to join her.

“It’s Tom!” Hester called back, and stood up, waving both arms and shouting, “Tom! Tom!”

It was the shawl that Tom saw first, the one he had bought for her in Peripatetiapolis. Knotted round her neck now, streaming on the wind, it made a sudden flash of red, and he saw it from the corner of his eye and looked down and saw her there, waving. Then a black wing of smoke came down over her and he wondered if he had only imagined that tiny figure inching out on to the cobra’s hood, because it seemed impossible that anyone could survive in this huge fire that he had caused. He made the Jenny Haniver swoop closer. The smoke lifted, and there she was, flapping her arms, with her long black coat and her long-legged stride and her ugly, wonderful face.

Katherine opened her eyes. The cold inside her was growing, spreading from the place where the sword had gone in. She was still hiccuping, and she thought how stupid it would be to die with hiccups, how undignified. She wished Dog was with her. “Tom! Tom!” somebody kept shouting. She turned her head and saw an airship coming down out of the smoke, closer and closer until the side of the gondola scraped against MEDUSA’s cowl and she felt the down-draught from its battered engine pods. Father was carrying her towards it, and she could see Tom peering out at her through the broken windscreen, Tom who had been there when it all began, whom she had thought was dead. But here he was, alive, looking shocked and soot-stained, with a V-shaped wound on his forehead like the mark of some unknown Guild.

The gondola was much bigger inside than she expected. In fact, it was a lot like Clio House, and Dog and Bevis were both waiting for her there, and her hiccups had stopped, and her wound wasn’t as bad as everyone had thought, it was just a scratch. Sunlight streamed in through the windows as Tom flew them all up and up into a sky of the most perfect crystal blue, and she relaxed gratefully into her father’s arms.

Hester reached the airship first, hauling herself aboard through its shattered flank. But when she looked back, holding out her hand to Valentine, she saw that he had fallen to his knees, and realized Katherine was dead.

She stayed there, still with her hand outstretched, not quite knowing why. There was an electric shimmer in the air above the white metal hood. She shouted, “Valentine! Be quick!”

He lifted his eyes from his daughter’s face just long enough to say, “Hester! Tom! Fly! Save yourselves!”

Behind her Tom was cupping his hands to his ears and shouting, “What did he say? Is that Katherine? What’s happened?”

“Just go!” she yelled, and, clambering past him, started switching all the engines that still worked to full power. When she looked down again Valentine was dwindling away below, a dark shape cradled in his arms, a pale hand trailing. She felt like Katherine’s ghost, rising into the sky. There was a terrible pain inside her and her breath came in sobs and something wet and hot was spilling down her cheek. She wondered if she could have been wounded without noticing it, but when she put her hands to her face her fingers came away wet, and she understood that she was crying, crying for her mum and dad, and Shrike, and Katherine, and even for Valentine as the crackling light around the cathedral grew brighter and Tom steered the Jenny Haniver away into the dark.

Down in the Gut, London’s enormous motors suddenly cut out, without warning and all at once, doused by the strange radiations that were starting to sleet through the city’s fabric. For the first time since it crossed the land-bridge the great Traction City started to slow.

In a hastily barricaded gallery in the London Museum, Chudleigh Pomeroy peered cautiously over the replica of the Blue Whale and saw that the squads of Stalkers advancing on his last redoubt had all stopped in their tracks, pale clouds of sparks coiling about their metal skulls like barbed wire. “Great Quirke!” he said, turning to his surviving handful of Historians. “We’ve won!”

Valentine watches the red airship fly away, lit by the flames of Top Tier and by the spitting forks of light that are beginning to flare around St Paul’s. He can hear hopeless fire-bells jangling somewhere below, and the panic-stricken shouts of fleeing Engineers. A halo of St Elmo’s fire flares around {Catherine’s face and her hair sparks and cracks as he strokes it. He gently moves a stray strand which has blown into her mouth, and holds her close, and waits—and the storm-light breaks over them and they are a knot of fire, a rush of blazing gas, and gone: the shadows of their bones scattering into the brilliant sky.

London wore a wreath of lightning. It was as if the ray that should have reached out across a hundred miles to sear the stones of Batmunkh Gompa had tangled around the upper tiers instead, sending cataracts of molten metal splashing down the city’s flanks. Explosions surged through the Gut, heaving vast fragments of wreckage end-over-end into the sky like dead leaves in a gale. A few airships rose with them, seeking to escape, but their envelopes ignited and they shrivelled and fell, small bright flakes of fire amid the greater burning.