Traction City

by Philip Reeve

  “It’ll be no loss if he’s dead,” says Nutter, as Anders pushes the wire gate open and the two of them advance into the Mortlake gloom. Their torch beams skid across the rusted deck. “If he’s dead. . .”

  “Young Smiff was not lying,” says Anders. He knows that boys like Smiff have no love for the police. Whatever happened here this evening must have been bad indeed to send him running to Airdock Green for help.

  It doesn’t take them long to find the bodies. They are lying just where Smiff said; Big Norm Trendlebeare and Spicy Rick, two of Mulligan’s mates. Blood has spread in lakes upon the rust around them. Both are missing their right hands. Anders goes to the nearby hole in the deck and shines his torch down. Snow eddies in the beam, dancing in the complicated breeze between the city’s wheels. Costa Mulligan hangs in the nets where Smiff left him, a fat fly in a rusty spider web.

  “There must have been more than one killer,” Nutter says. “These were big lads. To take all three down. . . Must have been a bunch of them.”

  “But the hands,” says Anders, feeling queasy and trying not to let it show. All these years a policeman and the sight of blood can still do that to him. “Why take their hands?”

  “As a warning,” says Nutter. “To rival gangs.”

  “There are no rival gangs.” Anders stoops to study a scrape mark on the deck. “Anyway, who’d see this warning? If Smiff hadn’t chanced to be here it might have been weeks before we found these fellows.”

  Nutter says nothing. He’s sulking.

  “The boy said there was just one attacker,” Anders reminds him.

  “The boy was jumping down a hole at the time,” says Nutter. “You can’t take his word on any of it. For all we know he helped do in Mulligan and his cronies and then came scampering to us to get himself an alibi.”

  “He was frightened.”

  “He was actin’.”

  “Nobody is that good an actor.”

  Anders torch lights up bright scratches in the rust. He follows them into the mouth of an alley where shadows sleep among the hulks of huge, abandoned machines. Beside them, flower-shaped stains where blood has dripped. The sort of stains that Anders would expect to see if, say, someone carrying three freshly severed hands had run into that alleyway. But what about the scratches? Are they the marks of hobnailed shoes? Metal boots?

  “You’re too soft on these scavenger kids, Sarge,” Nutter is saying, back at the alley’s mouth. “Same with that girl I nabbed. Foreign mossie scum, and you talk to her like she’s your long lost. . .”

  “Quiet!” says Anders.

  A few yards ahead, in the shadows beneath a huge old crane, he has spied the glint of moving metal.

  4

  Up, up the city climbs. Through gaps in the clouds the people on the higher tiers can see the lakes and rivers of the lowlands glinting in moonlit far behind. London has never climbed so high. There are parties to celebrate; the music of string quartets mingles with the steady howling of the wind. If London can conquer the Shatterlands, it can do anything.

  At Airdock Green, Smiff sits sipping at the tea which Constable Pym has given him. He’s calmer now, but not yet calm enough to face a night alone in his nest behind the starboard back-up heat exchangers on Tertiary Street. He sits and watches Pym, who is crouched in front of the station’s big wooden filing cabinet, flicking through the papers inside. Through the spy-hole on the cell door the prisoner watches too, with her unreadable eyes.

  “Here we go!” says Pym. He stands up with a sheaf of papers in his hands. Each week Airdock Green is sent a copy of all the police reports from other stations on Base Tier, badly typed on grey recycled paper. Constable Pym is the only one who bothers reading them. “I knew it reminded me of something,” he says, waving the reports cheerfully at Smiff. “Listen. ‘Friday 10th May. Body identified as Sid Simmonds, Track-Plate Cleaner 3rd Class, recovered from no.14 axle housing. Badly mangled; right hand missing.’ They’d put it down as accidental. Thought he’d got caught in the machinery. And here’s another, back in Sternstacks; right hand missing. And. . .” He sets the papers on the desk and leafs swiftly through them. “Disappearances. Eight . . . nine . . . ten of ’em this fortnight past. Ten men gone overboard, it seems. But did they fall, or were they pushed? And were they missing their right hands when they fell?”

  “When I was a child,” says a voice behind him, in surprisingly clear Anglish with a northern lilt, “I worked in the base tier of the city of Arkangel. One time we ate a little scavenger town. A nasty little place, but it didn’t even bother to flee when Arkangel came swooping down on it, so it got eaten. Just thirty men aboard. All dead. All with their right hands missing. We found the hands heaped up in an old warehouse near the bows, like a nest of big white spiders.”

  “Blimey!” says Smiff, all saucer-eyed.

  “D-don’t listen to her, Smiff,” warns Pym. “She’s just tryin’ to frighten us. Spreadin’ panic and discontent, that’s what they do, these Anti-Tractionists. I went on a course about them.”

  “You should be frightened, policeman,” says the girl. “Your sergeant and the other one aren’t coming back. I know what it is, that thing out there. It will kill them too, and take their hands.”

  5

  “Who’s there?” says Karl Anders, into the dark under the old crane. He hears Nutter’s regulation-issue boots on the deck behind him and says without turning, “I don’t know why they don’t just clear this district. The council’s always nagging us to recycle everything. Why not recycle these old machines?”

  “’Cos the Engineers are always talking about getting the Wombs working again,” says Nutter wearily. “Good thing if they did, too. Trouble with this city is, we don’t make anything any more. . .”

  “Wait here,” says Anders, before the constable gets started on some recycling of his own, rehashing some tirade from the news-sheets about how foreign imports are crippling London’s industry. With his torch in one hand and his service revolver in the other he goes cautiously into the rattling, rust-scented dark.

  “You’d best come quietly,” he says to the shadows. “I’m armed.”

  Above his head big chains swing clanking, stirred by the city’s movement. Nothing else moves. Nobody answers. His torch beam lights up strewn ducts and old papers under the rusting crane. It lights up a square pit in the deck where some other hunk of machinery was once attached.

  The pit is full of hands.

  “Great Goddess!” Anders starts to say, but before he can get the words out a shadow moves. He starts to turn. Sees dark, oily robes, a hood with more shadows inside it and two . . . those can’t really be green glowing eyes, can they? They must be goggles, reflecting a green light from somewhere. . .

  A raised hands sprouts knives; not one, but four. Anders fumbles with the safety catch of his revolver. He hears himself say, “No!” Then the crash of Nutter’s pistol deafens him. The robed attacker stumbles but does not fall. Nutter comes running and the pistol goes off again. The robed shape goes backwards and then up, bounding like an ape up the side of the crane, dropping into the darkness beyond.

  “After him!” Anders yells.

  They go round the crane. The robes flap under an arch ahead. They follow. Round a corner, through stacks of old crates. Each time they think they’ve lost the fugitive he’s there again, a footfall ahead, robe tails vanishing around a corner.

  Above the ceaseless voices of the wheels and engines comes a new sound; the snare-drum rattle of the little railway that runs through Mortlake, carrying solid fuel from the Gut to the old auxiliary Godshawk Engines near Sternstacks. The line has been enclosed in a wire cage to stop men like Mulligan jumping aboard the unmanned trains and helping themselves to the fuel.

  “He’s trapped!” shouts Nutter.

  The fugitive is running down a street which both men know is a dead end. The walls of the shuttered con
struction hangars tower up on either side, and the railway in its cage cuts across the end. Beyond the railway line lie brighter districts: Engine 12 and Ditch Street. The glow from their street lamps flickers through gaps between the trucks of the passing train. The fugitive is silhouetted against it, slowing as he reaches the fence and realizes the policemen have him trapped.

  “He’s tall. . .” says Anders.

  The fugitive looks back at him, and again he catches that glint of green eyes. Then the fugitive goes through the fence. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the heavy mesh of the cage apart, tearing a hole that’s big enough for even him to climb through.

  “No!” says Nutter scornfully, as if his eyes expect him to believe something impossible.

  Anders keeps running. The fugitive leaps aboard the last of the trucks as it trundles past. Anders runs right to the fence and stops to take careful aim. In all his years as a policeman he’s never yet shot anyone, but this seems like a good time to start. In another second the train will vanish through a tunnel beneath a big old metal building. He pulls the trigger and the gun jumps in his hand and he knows he’s hit the figure squatting on the last truck because he sees a puff of smoke or dust or something spurt from its chest. But it doesn’t fall; just turns and looks at him as the train carries it out of sight.

  As the clatter of the wheels fades he hears footsteps behind him. Spins with the gun ready, but it’s just Nutter, winded, running up behind. They stand there together, bracing themselves against the train cage as the city lurches under them, scrambling over some granite reef.

  “It wasn’t human,” says Anders. “Bullets don’t hurt it.”

  “Not human?” Nutter starts to chuckle, then realizes his chief’s not joking. “What, then? A werewolf? A nightwight? Maybe we should be using silver bullets! We missed him, that’s all.”

  “My shot hit all right. So did at least one of yours.” Anders shakes his head, staring at the curve and gleam of the narrow tracks where they plunge into that tunnel, trying to remember where they go. “It was a Stalker,” he says.

  “They’re just in stories, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, they were real enough.” The ghosts of long-ago history lessons stir in Anders’s memory. There was this rusty head he liked to go and look at, in the Hammershoi Museum, when he was a lad. He says, “There was a culture once that knew how to resurrect the dead. Not their minds, just their bodies. Armoured them and sent them into battle, in the wars they used to have back in the days before Traction, when rival cities worked out their differences by fighting instead of just eating one another. The last of the Stalkers were supposed to have perished at the Battle of Three Dry Ships, but there’s always been rumours of one or two survivors. Old things. Insane and dangerous.”

  “But how’s one come to London?” asks Nutter, still not sure if he should take this seriously or not.

  Anders shrugs. “Up from below, I suppose. London’s been moving slow these past few weeks. A thing like that, if it was lurking in the high places, could have climbed aboard. Unless. . .” He turns suddenly, looking at Nutter. “It’s no coincidence. This thing appears, and that girl you arrested, on the same night. There’s a connection.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get back to Airdock Green and ask her.”

  6

  “Sarge!” says Constable Pym excitedly, when the two of them get back to Airdock Green. But Anders goes straight past him to the cell, leaving Nutter to pour two mugs of tea, fortified with a good dash of something stronger from the bottle they keep for emergencies in the top drawer of the filing cabinet. Smiff, who seems to have appointed himself a sort of deputy constable for the night, fetches the official biscuit tin.

  The girl stands up as Anders opens the cell door.

  “She speaks Anglish, Sarge!” says Pym.

  “Of course she does,” says Anders. “Everybody speaks Anglish in the air-trade. And if she really doesn’t we can get a translator in. But by the time I can get one here, her creature may have killed again.”

  Something changes behind the girl’s eyes. She says, “It is not my creature.”

  “It arrived the same time you did. I think Corporal Nutter’s right; you’re some kind of saboteur and you’ve brought that thing aboard.”

  “No,” says the girl.

  “No,” says Pym, behind him in the doorway. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Sarge. It’s been here for days and days. A fortnight maybe. There’s been deaths and disappearances.”

  Anders looks at him, then back at the girl.

  “He’s right,” she says. “I tracked it here. It is very old and it has been wandering the world for a long time. I followed the stories, from city to city, settlement to settlement; stories of murders and missing right hands. In most of the places it’s been, people don’t even know what it is; they think it’s a bogeyman, a hungry ghost. Aboard Murnau they called it Struwelpeter; on Manchester it’s the Fingersmith. Most places, people just call it the Collector. It takes the right hand of everyone it kills.”

  Some of the anger goes out of Anders. He sits down on the cell’s hard bench. “Why?”

  “Maybe it’s planning to open a second-hand shop.”

  “Very funny, miss. But I meant, why did you trail it here?”

  “Because I want it. You’re right. I’m an Anti-Tractionist. I hate all mobile cities. But I’m not so stupid that I think I could blow them up with little fireworks like the one your man found on me.” She shoots a look of scorn at Nutter. “If I had a Stalker to do my bidding, he could tear your city apart with his iron hands. He could kill you all one by one.”

  “But why would it do your bidding?” Anders asks. “Why wouldn’t it just cut your throat for you, and take your pretty hand for a souvenir?”

  The girl shrugs. “Nothing, maybe. But I’ve heard about this other Stalker, a bounty killer up in the northlands. Mister Shrike, he’s called. Kills men and women without pity, for anyone who’ll pay. But he won’t harm children; the young, he takes pity on. I thought maybe the Collector would be the same. Maybe he’ll listen to me. Maybe I can make him turn his talents to a good cause, and help me rid the world of these juggernauts of yours.”

  Anders ignores the notion that destroying whole cities full of people is a good cause. “It spared Smiff,” he admits. “But you’re older than Smiff. What, fifteen? Sixteen? Not a child. Maybe he won’t take pity on you. . .” He laughs. “But you’ve already thought that through, haven’t you! That’s why you had the demolition charge with you!”

  The girl tilts her sharp little chin at him, sensing mockery. “If I clamp it to his armour and let it off, not even a Stalker could withstand that.”

  Anders shakes his head. “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Fang.” She spits it at him.

  “That’s not a name,” says Smiff.

  “It might pass for a name among heathen Anti-Tractionist easterlings,” Nutter admits grudgingly.

  “Well, believe me, Miss Fang,” says Anders, “I’ve met this Collector. If you were close enough to clamp things to its armour, you’d be dead.” Yet I’m not dead, he thinks. Why did it run when me and Nutter found it? A Stalker must know mere bullets couldn’t pierce its hide. Unless. . . “It doesn’t know that it’s a Stalker,” he mutters. “Old and insane. . . And the hands. What’s that about?”

  “Why are we stood here listening to this mossie minx?” asks Nutter. “We need to be calling for support. This Stalker thing could be halfway to Sternstacks by now, murderin’ as it goes. Send word up top, sarge. Get some of them lads from the Gut who think policing means posing about in plastic armour; let them help us deal with this thing.”

  “No,” says Anders. “If we call for help the Guild of Engineers will hear of it.”

  “Good!” says Nutter. “They got death rays and electric guns and all sort
s stashed away in the Engineerium, I’ve heard.”

  “Exactly. So you can imagine how they’d love to get their hands on a working Stalker. Not to mention young Miss Fang here. I want to deal with this thing myself, if I can.”

  He leaves the cell door open as he goes back out into the office. Fang’s demolition charge lies on his desk, neatly labelled as EVIDENCE in Constable Pym’s boyish handwriting. He picks it up, weighing it in his hand and trying to imagine the blast it would create. Powerful enough to tear apart a town’s deck plates, but focused. It seems to him that the girl has provided him with the perfect anti-Stalker weapon. If only he can get close enough to use it?

  “Did you hear all that, Smiff?” he asks, meeting the wide eyes of the boy who sits beside the stove.

  “Get him out of here, sarge,” says Nutter. “He scoffed all our best biscuits.”

  “But we need him,” says Anders. “You heard what Miss Fang said. These creatures are kindly to the young. That’s me and you ruled out, and even Pym. Smiff here is the one we need to talk to it for us; lure it close, so I can pin this pretty medal on it.” He holds up the demolition charge.

  Smiff shakes his head. He keeps on shaking it while he slides down off his chair and backs away. He keeps backing away until the wall stops him. “I ain’t going to go looking for that thing again, mister. I ’scaped it once, I might not get so lucky next time.”

  “But it won’t harm a child. That’s why it spared you last time. You’ll be perfectly safe. Well, safe. Safeish.”

  Smiff just shakes his head some more. “You don’t know that. You don’t know nuffink. You just got her word on that, and she’s not even a Londoner.”

  He points, which makes them all turn to look at Fang. She has emerged from the cell and stands behind them, listening. Nutter, when he sees her standing there, grabs her by her arm and says, “Get back in there, you—”