A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Later, after an evening meal in the communal canteen, we were all three of us brought to this house, which is to be our home while we’re in London. I say house, but it’s really just a sort of hut; a lot of sheets of old metal bolted and welded together at the base of one of the old brake blocks that support Crouch End’s roof. There are wire grilles over the window holes, but I don’t know if they’ve been put there to keep us from escaping or just because there’s no glass in London. Inside there are three rooms, linked by a lot of winding passages, the floors dug down into the ground so that we can stand upright inside. It’s a little damp, but homey enough, and close enough to the edge of Crouch End that the sun shines in for a half hour or so in the evenings, which is nice. Dad has the biggest room, Wolf is next to him, and I have chosen for myself a little semicircular chamber at the back; one wall is made from an old tin advertising sign (stick-phast paste—accept no imitations), and I have a window that lets in a little sunlight, and the light of the moon at night.

  * * *

  I thought that Wolf would try to escape or something, but he seems quite content at the moment, very interested in this little world the Londoners have made for themselves. He’s a strange person. It’s hard to tell what he is thinking.

  Dad is just glad to be home, of course. I was half hoping he’d find True Love with Clytie Potts, but it turns out she’s married (to an Engineer called Lurpak Flint, who flies her airship for her, so she’s not just Clytie Potts and Cruwys Morchard but Clytie Flint as well—I’ve never known a woman with quite so many names).

  29th May

  I think I like London. It’s funny—I’ve come so far, and I’ve ended up in a place that’s very like Anchorage-in-Vineland. It’s secret, and hidden, and so small that everyone knows everyone else, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I think I can’t wait to get back on the bird roads, but at other times I wish I was a Londoner myself. And it’s beautiful. You wouldn’t think there would be beauty in a great smashed-up heap of rubbish, but there is. In all the clefts and stretches of open earth, trees and ferns grow, and in every soil-filled nook among the debris too. Birds sing here; insects buzz about. Angie says that in another month the scrap-heaps above Crouch End will be pink with foxgloves.

  Angie is my best friend here. (Her name is short for Ford Anglia—her dad, Len Peabody, named all his children after Old Tech ground cars.) She’s sensible and funny, which is a good combination, and she reminds me of a badger or a mole or something; small and stocky and slightly furry, always busy with something. She’s been all over the debris fields, because she goes on patrol with Garamond’s militia, keeping an eye out for intruders and the Green Storm. All the young Londoners are always going off on patrol, or hunting, or scouring about for salvage in the farthest corners of the wreck. I suppose the Emergency Committee think it’s a way of using up all that teenage energy. I’d like to go with them, and use up some of mine, but Garamond says I can’t, because he still doesn’t trust me. What a fusspot that man is! He says that me and Wolf (Wolf and I?) have to spend our days helping the old folk dig over the vegetable plots, or listening to Dad talk History with Mr. Pomeroy.

  2nd June

  For all their kindness I am starting to feel sure the Londoners are hiding something from us. Wolf has said this from the first, but I thought he was wrong. Now I’m starting to believe him. It’s just little things, like the way people look at us, and the way Dr. Childermass kept shushing Len Peabody that first morning— what was she afraid he’d tell us? Sometimes, when Dad and Wolf and I go into the communal canteen in the middle of Crouch End where everybody eats, people who are deep in conversation about something suddenly stop and start talking about the weather instead. And when Dad asked Clytie Potts why she had been collecting Kliest Coils and other bits of Electric Empire technology, she went all red and changed the subject.

  Last night I heard voices outside again while I was trying to get to sleep, so I went to my window and pulled the curtain aside (it’s just a bit of old sack, really) and what do you think I saw? Engineers! Lavinia Childermass and half a dozen others! They were leaving Crouch End and walking off up a track that leads eastward over a steep ridge of debris. Where were they going? It looked a lot more purposeful than just a moonlit stroll. Do they do this every night? Maybe that’s why I hardly ever see any of the Engineers around in the daytime—they must be catching up on their sleep!

  Well, I always dreamed of being a daring schoolgirl detective, like Milly Crisp in those books I used to read when I was little. So this afternoon I wandered off on my own up that track that I saw the Engineers taking last night. From the top of the ridge you can see it winding on across the debris fields for about half a mile, toward a really big, wedge-shaped chunk of wreckage that looks as if it must have been a section of London’s Gut.

  Nobody about, but something flashed in one of the holes or window openings in the side of that big old chunk. Then, all of a sudden, I heard footsteps behind me, and there was Mr. Garamond with a couple of his favorite young warriors, Angie’s brother Saab and a girl called Cat Luperini. “What are you doing here?” he shouted, all purple with rage, nearly as cross and ugly as Mum. I tried to explain that I’d just felt like stretching my legs, but he wouldn’t have any of it. “You’re on the edge of a hot zone!” he shouted, and Cat got hold of me and started steering me back toward Crouch End. Saab leaned over and said, “You mustn’t go wandering off like this, Wren. That’s a dangerous part of the fields. We don’t want you to get crisped by a sprite.”

  He was quite kind about it, actually. I like Saab. But if that part of the wreckage is so dangerous, why is there such a well-trodden track leading through the middle of it?

  * * *

  Later, I talked about some of this with Wolf. He doesn’t believe in the sprites at all. When I reminded him about the one that almost fried us on our first day here, he just laughed and said it had been “remarkably well timed.” He thinks the sprites are a sort of trick the Engineers have dreamed up to keep people out of the wreck. He’s got a point, hasn’t he? I mean, if they can make those electric anti-Stalker guns, why not sprites, too?

  Well, I’m not going to let stupid old Garamond put me off. He leaves a couple of his people on guard outside our hut at night, for fear we’ll try and run off to sell this little static to a predator, but the guards don’t really believe we will, and they usually just chat and then fall asleep. Tonight, as soon as all is quiet, I am going to creep out and see what’s really going on in that big old wedge of rust they have out there.

  (If this is the lust entry in this journal, you’ll know that Wolf is wrong about the sprites, and I’ve been roasted crispier than Milly Crisp herself…)

  Wren put away her pencil, slipped her notebook into the inside pocket of her flying jacket, and lay waiting. She listened to Tom’s soft, steady breathing coming through the gaps in the tin wall from the room next door, and wondered what he was dreaming about. Did he have any suspicions about the Londoners? He had not said anything. He just seemed happy to be home.

  She could hear Wolf moving about in the room to her right. Little metal noises; clicks and scrapings. What was he up to? Outside, Mr. Garamond’s guards spoke softly to one another.

  Wren did not remember going to sleep, but she must have, because she woke suddenly to find that the luminous hands of her wristwatch stood at half past three.

  “Oh, Clio!” she groaned, rolling off her bedding and scrambling to her feet.

  She went to the door and looked out into the narrow passage. For some reason she felt uneasy. Wolf’s door was half open, moonlight spilling through. She crept to it and peered into his tiny room. His bedroll was empty. Wren ran to the window and stifled a cry as the steel-mesh shutter came free in her hands. Wolf had unfastened it somehow, and hung it back in position after he’d climbed out so that the guards would not notice anything wrong.

  “Oh, Gods!” Wren whispered, thinking of the Jenny Haniver. She had not forgotten the ruthles
s streak in Wolf’s nature. What if he were already creeping away through the debris fields to steal the Jenny? How long had he been gone? Was it the sound of his going that had woken her?

  She scrambled out under the loosened grille and peeked around the corner of the hut. The guards were sitting on the doorstep, bored and sleepy; one was already snoring, and the other’s head was nodding. Wren tiptoed away, then ran between the silent shacks and huts and out of Crouch End. The ruins of London were a maze of stark moonlight and inky shadows. Eastward, a figure showed for a moment on the spiky skyline.

  Wolf! Wren started after him, relieved that at least he was not heading for the Jenny. So what was he doing? Snooping about, she guessed, just as she had been planning to snoop. It annoyed her to think that he had beaten her to it. She had wanted to learn London’s secrets herself, and impress him with her discoveries over breakfast…

  She started to go after him, up the track that she had taken earlier. She told herself there was no reason to be afraid; the Londoners were softies, and even if they caught her, they would do nothing worse than return her to her prison and screw the window grilles down tighter. But she could not help feeling tense, and when a shape suddenly stepped out of the shadows beside the path to grab her, she cried out loudly and shrilly.

  An arm went round her middle, and a strong hand covered her mouth. She twisted her head around and saw Wolf Kobold’s face above her in the moonlight. “Shhhh,” he said softly. His hand left her mouth, but lingered for a moment on her face. “Wren … what are you doing out here?”

  “Looking for you, of course,” she said, her voice wobbling slightly. “Where are you going?”

  Wolf grinned and released her. He pointed along the moonlit road to the enormous segment of wreckage that lay ahead. In some of the openings lights were moving about, bobbing like marsh lanterns.

  “Listen!” he said.

  Across the wastes of moonlit metal came a low rumbling noise, rising and falling, then cutting out altogether. White light flashed and flickered out of the openings in the hulk.

  “Sprite?” asked Wren.

  Wolf shook his head. “Machinery of some sort. The same sound I heard two years ago.”

  “Engineers come up here at night,” she whispered. Wolf just nodded. “I’ve seen them too. And I’ve seen people bringing crates up here; crates filled with salvage from the debris fields. And Engineers poring over plans. Why? What are they building in there, Wren?”

  Wren felt a little annoyed that he had found out more than her. Milly Crisp never had this sort of competition. She tried to look as if his findings came as no surprise to her.

  “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  Side by side they hurried on, and soon reached the Gut segment. It really was immense; a sea cliff pitted with countless caves where ducts and corridors had once linked it to the rest of London. Wolf clambered in through one of them, and reached back to haul Wren up behind him. “It looks like some kind of factory from London’s Deep Gut,” he whispered. “It seems to have survived almost intact.”

  They moved deeper. The floors were tilted at a slight angle, making walking tricky. Metallic noises echoed along the drippy corridors. They reached a bolted door, retraced their steps, climbed a flight of sloping metal stairs. They passed a wall stenciled with the symbol of a red wheel and the words LONDON GUILD OF ENGINEERS: EXPERIMENTAL HANGAR 14. The higher corridors were lit by shafts of stuttering white and orange light that grew brighter as Wren and Wolf crept on into the heart of the building. The steady, reassuring glow of argon lamps shone through hanging curtains of transparent plastic.

  Wren felt more excited than afraid now. She let her hand brush against Wolf’s, and he gripped it and squeezed it reassuringly as he pushed the curtains aside.

  Together, hand in hand, they looked down into an immense open space at the center of the hangar.

  “Great Gods!” Wren whispered. “So that’s it!” said Wolf.

  “Put your hands up, Mr. Kobold,” said another voice, quite close behind them. “You too, Miss Natsworthy. Both of you, put your hands up and turn around very slowly.”

  Chapter 23

  The Childermass Experiment

  Hester?” mumbled Tom, waking slowly. He had been dreaming of the old London Museum again, but this time it had been Hester who was leading him through the dusty galleries. In his dream, he had been happy to see her.

  Now someone was crouching beside his bed, shaking him. He remembered that it could not be Hester and sat up. A lantern dazzled him. He turned his head away and saw a couple of Garamond’s boys in the doorway. The person who had woken him was Clytie Potts.

  “There’s a problem, Tom. It’s Kobold and your daughter. Oh, they’re quite all right, but—I think you’d better come.”

  Out across the ruins. Moonlight and scrap metal. Clytie walked with Tom, the two of them surrounded by silent Londoners, some carrying guns.

  “What has Wren been doing?” he asked as they hurried him along.

  “Spying,” said Clytie. “She and Kobold were found … where they should not be.”

  “Wren’s just a girl!” Tom protested. “She may be inquisitive and foolish, but she’s not a spy! What was she spying on, anyway? What is this place you found her in?”

  “Easier to show you than explain,” said Clytie.

  Tom pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn’t just the cold that made him shiver. He had a feeling that he was close to learning the secret of his city. Had Wren discovered it already for herself? Was that was this was all about? He felt proud of her bravery, but worried too, in case she was in danger.

  In an open doorway at the foot of a wall of wreckage Dr. Childermass and five of her fellow Engineers stood waiting; six bald heads like a clutch of eggs. “Mr. Natsworthy,” said the Engineer with a faint, weary smile, “you may as well see the project. No doubt your daughter and her friend will tell you about it anyway. As long as we can dissuade our more excitable colleagues from shooting them, that is.”

  Up a stairway, through a plastic curtain, and out onto a narrow metal viewing platform where Garamond and a gaggle of his people stood around Wren and Wolf Kobold. They had both been made to kneel, and their hands were tied. Dr. Childermass said, “Oh, don’t be such a twerp, Mr. Garamond!”

  “They were in a restricted area! Spying!” Garamond complained.

  “Only because you let them come here,” retorted the Engineer. “Really, Garamond, your people are appallingly slack. Now let them go.”

  Garamond and his young followers reluctantly freed their prisoners and let them stand. Tom ran to hug Wren, intending to tell her how foolish she’d been, but just as he reached her, he noticed what lay below, filling the hangar, and surprise drove all the words out of his head.

  It was a town. Not a large town, nor a very elegant one (most of the buildings on its upper deck were missing, and there were no wheels or tracks) but a town nonetheless. It had no jaws, but in most other ways it seemed to Tom to match the basic blueprint of a London suburb: those small places like Tunbridge Wheels and Crawley that London had built to carry her excess population during the golden age of Municipal Darwinism.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” asked Clytie, gazing down with a look of awe and affection at the unfinished town.

  Dr. Childermass said, “The fruit of many, many years of hard work, now nearing completion.”

  A big saw was at work somewhere beneath the town, which was resting on a cradle of rusty stanchions. A spray of sparks scattered across the hangar floor like boisterous glowworms.

  “You built this?” asked Tom, letting go of Wren and moving over to stand at the edge of the platform, gripping the pitted metal of the handrail to convince himself that it was not all a dream.

  “Not quite,” said the Engineer. “The chassis and most of the upperworks were here already. My division began working on this project long before MEDUSA. Luckily this experimental hangar was deep enough in the Gut to survive without too
much damage.”

  “But why didn’t I know about it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, if London was building a whole new suburb, surely it would have been news?”

  Dr. Childermass shrugged. “It was a secret. My Guild was very keen on secrecy. Anyway, this little place was only intended as a prototype. Experimental Suburb M/Ll is its official designation. We designed it as an answer to London’s problems, but Magnus Crome was never keen on it. He thought that MEDUSA was a better solution, and gradually he withdrew more and more funding from my Mag-Lev Research Division and diverted it to MEDUSA. Now those of us who survived MEDUSA’s failure have been able to pick up the work. It is not just the Engineers’ project anymore, Tom. Everyone in London has worked together on it.”

  “And please don’t think of it as a suburb,” said Clytie. “It may be small, but to everyone in London it is a city; our new city. Soon we shall climb aboard it and leave these debris fields behind forever.”

  Tom gazed down at the tiny forms of Londoners clambering over the new city, laying cables, welding girders, marking out the shapes of streets and buildings on the bare deck plates.

  “But it’s got no wheels,” Wren pointed out.

  “I can see you don’t know what Mag-Lev stands for, my dear,” said Dr. Childermass.

  “It’s a code name, isn’t it?” asked Tom, who didn’t know either.

  “Oh no,” Dr. Childermass said. “Mag-Lev is just a shorter way of saying Magnetic Levitation.”