A Web of Air (31 page)

It might have been different if Arlo had been there with her. He might have given her the strength to stand up to Wavey and Dr Crumb. She might have stayed on with him in Mayda. Or taken him with her aboard the
Lyceum
and let him be drawn into AP’s messy, cheerful family. But Arlo had gone off alone as soon as the
Supercollider
docked, refusing to even look at her. Gone back to Casas Elevado, Fever guessed.

And what would he do there? What could he do, with the
Goshawk
gone and the common folk of Mayda so stirred up against the idea of flight that they were burning even their children’s kites on the bonfires in the Quadrado Del Mar?

Dr Teal, rescued from Thursday Island by the
Supercollider
’s launch, had taken Fever aside when he saw those fires and said, “I have to admit, Miss Crumb, you’ve put the whole Suppression Office to shame! You’ve got the Sea Goddess to do our job for us. If this spreads – and I mean to make sure that it does – you’ll have set back the development of flying machines by a generation!”

From the smile he wore while he said it, she gathered that she was meant to feel good about that.

The play reached its end. The audience stood up, applauding as the actors formed a line along the stage-front, no longer characters out of the lost past but just themselves again, holding hands, bowing, waving. “Extraordinary!” Dr Crumb was saying. “I had no idea…!” AP brought Fern centre stage and requested a special round of applause “for young Fern Solent, who will one day be the brightest star of Bargetown”. And then the division between actors and audience dissolved and there was talk and laughter and drink and music, with Fever in the midst of it somewhere, being hugged by Dymphna and Lillibet and Cosmo. Ruan was showing Dr Crumb the backdrops he had helped to paint and explaining to him about perspective. Dymphna was having a long and serious conversation with Jonathan Hazell. Wavey was flirting with AP, telling him, “You must come to London soon! If not, London must come to you!”

Fever, all unnoticed, walked away. Through the throng and racket of Bargetown she went, and then along the quays to the Southern Stair. Although it was so late, the light still lingered in the western sky, and above the crags of the eastern wall a vast and sulphur-yellow moon had risen.

All the way to Casas Elevado she was working out in her head what she would say to Arlo.
I had to do it; Dr Teal and my mother would have found a way to kill you otherwise. What I told Orca Mo will be a nine-days wonder. It probably won’t spread much beyond Mayda. You’ll be able to go to another city and start working again. One day people will fly
…

Or should she suggest that Arlo come back to London with her, and offer his services to the Engineers? But Arlo’s fragile, beautiful machines had nothing in common with the huge, crude, all-devouring thing the Engineers were building. Like Fern and Ruan and all the good things in her life he belonged in sunlight, not in London.

And when she reached his house she found that she was too late anyway. His gate was not just open, it had been torn from its hinges. Angry feet had tramped a broad path through his garden. His house stood smashed and vandalized at the bottom of its rails, its windows shattered, its walls daubed with religious symbols; slogans; threats. The followers of the
Mãe Abaixo
had not forgotten Arlo Thursday and his gliders. When they had finished burning all their kites they had come for him.

Fever wandered through the ruined, moonlit rooms. In the bedroom, the picture of her grandfather and Arlo’s had been torn down, slashed and trampled until the two men’s faces were unrecognizable. Arlo’s clothes had been ripped and flung about. Books had been torn up, the pages lying in thick drifts on the floors. The people who had done it probably couldn’t read, and they’d imagined that these poems and stories were instructions for building godless flying machines.

Fever began to cry. She had never really done it before, although she had sometimes felt like it. She’d always been able to control herself till now. But suddenly she was sobbing. Sitting down in the wreckage of the kitchen where she had sipped Arlo’s coffee and listened to Arlo’s plans, she let the salt tears flow out of her.

When there were no more she went outside. Wavey was waiting for her in the day-bright moonlight on the veranda. She looked at Fever’s tear-stained face and said, “Surely, Fever, you knew this would happen? You of all people ought to know a bit about the madness of crowds.”

“What have they done with him?” asked Fever, feeling angry at herself because she knew Wavey must have heard her sobbing and mewling in the kitchen.

“Oh, Arlo wasn’t here,” said Wavey. “I seem to remember promising you that he wouldn’t be harmed. I think Dr Teal would have liked to interpret that as meaning that
we
would not harm him, and letting the Maydans do the deed for us. But that would have been cheating, don’t you think? So I made sure Arlo went aboard his cutter yesterday night, and stayed there. Some of our people sailed it for him from Thursday Island. It’s moored in the outer basin.”

“What will he do?”

“Leave Mayda, I imagine. After that, who cares? The Suppression Office will keep an eye on him, of course, but I doubt he’ll ever get another of his flying machines off the ground, not with so much feeling against it.”

She sighed, sensing Fever’s unhappiness, searching for some way to comfort her. “Honestly, Fever, it’s not your fault. Forget it. What are flying machines anyway? Just toys for children. Wait until you see the new London; see the
power
of it, I mean… We’ll walk together through the Engine District, you and I. Those immense turbines, like the mills of God… You’ll soon forget your silly
aëroplanes
…”

She smiled, and reached out to rearrange Fever’s hair. “He is a handsome boy, Fever. But he is not for you.”

Fever pushed her hand away and ran, back through the garden, along Casas Elevado, down a narrow stair to Rua Cĩrculo. A restaurant was starting to descend, and Fever leaped aboard. Waiters came to show her to a table but she waved them away, hurrying through the building, the diners all turning in their seats to stare at her. Some reached out to touch her as she passed, for luck.
That’s the girl – the girl who flew – the girl the Goddess spoke to
…

She ignored them, ran out on to the veranda at the far end; potted palms and bougainvillea, Chinese lanterns swaying in the breeze, the static buildings of the cliff side sliding by on either side. Below her, moonlight sprawled silvery across the waters of the harbour. In the outer basin a cutter had raised its sail.

She vaulted up on to the rail that ran around the veranda and balanced there, waiting for the restaurant to arrive at its lower buffers. The manager appeared behind her, pleading with her to get down, telling her that she was endangering herself and disturbing the diners. But Fever didn’t care about the diners, and this didn’t feel like danger, not compared to some of the things she’d done lately. When the buffers were still six feet away she sprang across the narrowing gap, landed hard and ran, leaving the watchers on the veranda behind her to shake their heads and tell each other that her encounter with the
Mãe Abaixo
had deranged her wits.

“Arlo!” she shouted, haring through the shadowed canyons between the warehouses.

The
Jenny Haniver’s
pale sail slid across a slit of moonlit water between two walls. Fever ran on, out on to the harbourside. It wasn’t rational, but she needed to talk to Arlo before he left, to stop him leaving if she could. If she could only get his forgiveness, then at least she would have salvaged something…

But the
Jenny Haniver
was making for the harbour mouth, and as she gathered speed and moved out into the wind-ruffled water beyond, a ghost-white storm of angels detached themselves from the bridges and cliffs and rooftops of the city and went soaring after her, surrounding her, wheeling around her masthead, flying low over her straight silver wake like gulls behind a trawler.

Fever ran and ran, right out to the uttermost end of Mayda’s long mole. She could see Arlo at the cutter’s helm, his injured arm bound up in the white sling the
Supercollider’s
surgeon had given him.
“Arlo!”
she shouted.

He did not look round, and Fever had no way of knowing if he was ignoring her or if he simply hadn’t heard. She thought at first that he must be heading back to the Ragged Isles, but as the cutter cleared the harbour mouth it turned due west.

Where was he going? Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he just wanted the solitude of the open ocean. Maybe he wanted to die out there.
It may be that the Gulfs will wash him down
… thought Fever, half-recalling some fragment of verse from one of AP’s poetry recitations.
It may be he will touch the Blessed Isles
… And it may be he was going where the angels had gone of old; letting their atlas guide him to whatever forgotten coastlines lay beyond the sea’s blue edge. And the angels were going with him. She could see skeins of them lifting from their eyries on the Ragged Isles, blowing like white banners across the sea.

“Arlo!” she screamed, standing at the end of the harbour wall in the moonlight, the sealight, in the spray of the steep salt waves. “Take me with you! Aa-a-a-r-lo!”

But the cutter just kept on getting smaller, shrinking into the huge emptiness of night and sea and sky, taking Arlo and the mysteries of flight away from her, no more than a flash of white sail now, smaller than a handkerchief, smaller than a pillow-feather, and after a while, when even her sharp Scriven eyes could not tell the
Jenny Haniver
from the whitecaps on the waves, Fever knew that she would never see him again.

She turned away and started walking slowly back along the harbourside towards the lights of the city and the black, waiting bulk of the
Supercollider.
There was nowhere for her to go now except home.

… to my editors, Marion Lloyd and Alice Swan; to Kjartan Poskitt, my Chief Scientific Advisor; to the Moorland Merrymakers and particularly Dave Booty, who told me about the scary home-made lighting-rigs of yesteryear. To Eamon O’Donoghue for the illuminated capital letters. And to David Wyatt, whose drawings of the people and places in the World of Mortal Engines have done so much to help bring it to life.

Fever’s adventures begin in the brilliant
Fever Crumb.

Don’t miss it!

Thousand of years from now a baby is abandoned in the ruins of London. Rescued by some eccentric Engineers, Fever Crumb grows up unaware that she is the keeper of an explosive secret. Are the mysterious powers she possesses the key that will save London from a new and terrible enemy?

There are four more great books, set centuries after
A Web of Air.