Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

“Tom! Are you all right?” Valentine ran up, barely winded by the long chase. “Where is she? Where is the girl?”

“Dead,” Tom said lamely.

Valentine stood beside him at the handrail and peered over. The shadows of the drifting smoke moved over his face like cobwebs. There was a strange light in his eyes, and his face was tight and white and frightened. “Did you see her, Tom? Did she have a scar?”

“Yes,” said Tom, wondering how Valentine could know that. “It was horrible! Her eye was gone, and her nose…” Then he remembered the terrible thing the girl had told him. “And she said…” But he wasn’t sure if he should tell Mr Valentine what she had said—it was a lie, insane. “She said her name was Hester Shaw.”

“Great Quirke!” hissed Valentine, and Tom flinched backwards, wishing he had never mentioned it. But when he looked up again Valentine was smiling kindly at him, his eyes full of sorrow. “Don’t worry, Tom,” he said. “I’m sorry. …”

Tom felt a big, gentle hand on his shoulder and then -he was never sure quite how it happened—a twist, a shove, and he was pitching over the handrail and falling, just as Hester Shaw had fallen, flailing wildly for a hold on the smooth metal at the brim of the waste chute. He pushed me! he thought, and it was more amazement that he felt than fear as the black throat swallowed him down into the dark.

Silence. Silence. He couldn’t understand it. Even when London wasn’t moving there was usually some sort of noise in the dormitory; the whirr of ventilators, the hum and rattle of distant elevator shafts, the snores of other apprentices in the neighbouring bunks. But now—silence. His head ached. In fact, all of him ached. His bunk felt strange, too, and when he moved his hands there was something cold and slimy that oozed between his fingers like…

MUD! He sat up, gasping. He wasn’t in the Third Class dormitory at all. He was lying on a great humpbacked mound of mud, on the edge of a deep trench, and in the thin, pearl-grey light of dawn he could see the girl with the ruined face sitting nearby. His horrible dream of sliding down that fire-blackened chute had been true: he had fallen out of London, and he was alone with Hester Shaw on the bare earth!

He moaned in terror, and the girl glanced quickly round at him and then away. “You’re alive, then,” she said. “I thought you’d died.” She sounded as if she didn’t much care either way.

Tom scrambled up on to all fours, so that only his knees and his toes and the palms of his hands were touching the mud. His arms were bare, and when he looked down he saw that his bruised body was naked to the waist. His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn’t find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg.

“Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!”

“So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.”

He pulled his tunic on. It was tattered and filthy from his fall down the waste-chute, full of rents that let the chill Out-Country air through. He hugged himself, shivering. Valentine pushed me! He pushed me and I fell down the shaft into the Out-Country! He pushed me… No, he can’t have done. It must have been a mistake. I slipped, and he tried to grab me, that’s what must have happened.

Hester Shaw finished her bandaging and stood up, grunting at the pain as she pulled her filthy, blood-stiffened breeches on over the wound. Then she threw what was left of Tom’s shirt back at him, a useless rag. “You should have let me kill him,” she said, and turned away, setting off with a kind of furious limp up the long curve of the mud.

Tom watched her go, too shocked and bewildered to move. It was only when she vanished over the top of the slope that he realized he didn’t want to be left alone here; he would prefer any company, even hers, to the silence.

He flung the torn shirt away and ran after her, slithering in the thick, clagging mud, stubbing his toes on fragments of rock and torn-up roots. The deep, sheer-walled trench yawned on his left, and as he reached the crest of the rise he realized that it was just one of a hundred identical trenches; the huge track-marks of London stretching ruler-straight into the distance. Far, far ahead he saw his city, dark against the brightening eastern sky, wrapped in the smoke of its own engines. He felt the cold tug of homesickness. Everyone he had ever known was aboard that dwindling mountain, everyone except Hester, who was stomping angrily after it, dragging her injured leg behind her.

“Stop!” he shouted, half-running, half-wading to catch her up. “Hester! Miss Shaw!”

“Leave me alone!” she snapped.

“But where are you going?”

“I’ve got to get back into London, haven’t I?’ she said. “Two years it took me to find it, trudging across the Out-Country on foot, jumping aboard little townlets in the hope it would be London that scoffed them. And when I finally get there and find Valentine, come down to strut round the yards just like the scavengers told me he would, what happens? Some idiot stops me from cutting his heart out like he deserves.” She stopped walking and turned to face Tom. “If you hadn’t shoved your oar in he’d be dead, and I’d have fallen down and died beside him and I’d be at peace by now!”

Tom stared at her, and before he could stop himself his eyes filled with stinging tears. He hated himself for looking like a fool in front of Hester Shaw, but he couldn’t help it; the shock of what had happened to him and the thought of being abandoned out here overwhelmed him, and the hot tears flooded down his face and cut white runnels through the mud on his cheeks.

Hester, who had been on the point of turning away, stopped and watched, as if she wasn’t sure what was happening to him. “You’re crying!” she said at last, quite gently, sounding surprised.

“Sorry,” he sniffed.

“I never cry. I can’t. I didn’t even cry when Valentine murdered my mum and dad.”

“What?” Tom’s voice was all wobbly from weeping. “Mr Valentine would never do something like that!

Katharine said he couldn’t even bring himself to shoot a wolf cub. You’re lying!”

“How come you’re here, then?” she asked, mocking him. “He shoved you out after me, didn’t he? Just because you’d seen me.”

“You’re lying!” said Tom again. But he remembered those big hands thrusting him forward; remembered falling, and the strange light that had shone in the archaeologist’s eyes.

“Well?” asked Hester.

“He pushed me!” murmured Tom, amazed.

Hester Shaw just shrugged, as if to say, See? See what he’s really like? Then she turned away and started walking again.

Tom hurried along at her side. “I’ll come with you! I’ve got to get back to London, too! I’ll help you!”

“You?” She gave a hissing laugh and spat on the mud at his feet. “I thought you were Valentine’s man. Now you want to help me kill him?”

Tom shook his head. He didn’t know what he wanted. Part of him still clung to the hope that it was all a misunderstanding and Valentine was good and kind and brave. He certainly didn’t want to see him murdered and poor Katherine left without a father… But he had to catch up with London somehow, and he couldn’t do it alone. And anyway, he felt responsible for Hester Shaw. It was his fault that she had been wounded, after all. “I’ll help you walk,” he said. “You’re injured. You need me.”

“I don’t need anybody,” she said fiercely.

“We’ll go after London together,” Tom promised. “I’m a member of the Guild of Historians. They’ll listen to me. I’ll tell Mr Pomeroy. If Valentine really did the things you said then the law will deal with him!”