Free Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

it, it started to get looser still.
    It was slow, hard, painful work. Tom’s fingers filled with splinters and the sweat ran down his face and he had to stop each time someone passed along the walk-way outside. Hester watched silently, until he started to feel cross with her for not helping. But by evening, as the sky outside turned red and the racing townlet started to slow, he had made a gap just wide enough to get his head through.
    He waited until he was sure there was no one about, then leaned out. Speedwell was passing through the shadows of some tall spines of rock, the town-gnawed cores of old mountains. Ahead lay a natural amphitheatre, a shallow bowl between more rock-spires, and it was full of towns. Tom had never seen so many trading suburbs and traction villages gathered in one place before. “We’re here!” he told Hester. “It’s the trading cluster!”
    Speedwell slowed and slowed, manoeuvring into a space between a ragged little sail-powered village and a larger market town. Tom could hear the people on the new towns hailing Speedwell, asking where it had come from and what it had to trade. “Scrap metal,” he heard Mrs Wreyland bellow back, “and some wood, and a pretty seedy and two fine, fresh, healthy, young slaves!”
    “Oh, Quirke!” muttered Tom, working away at enlarging the hole he had made.
    “It’ll never be big enough,” said Hester, who always expected the worst and was usually right.
    “You could try helping, instead of just sitting there!” Tom snapped back, but he regretted it at once, for he could see that she was very ill. He wondered what would happen if she was too weak to escape. He couldn’t run off into the Out-Country alone and leave her here. But if he stayed, he would end up as a slave on one of these filthy little towns!
    He tried not to think about it and concentrated on making the hole bigger, while the sky outside grew dark and the moon rose. He could hear music and laughter drifting across the trading cluster and the sounds of gangways being run out as some of Wreyland’s people went off to enjoy themselves aboard the other towns. He scrabbled and scratched at the hole, prising at the planks, scraping at them with a rusty nail, but it was no use. At last, desperate, he turned to Hester and hissed, “Please! Help!”
    The girl stood up unsteadily and walked over to where he crouched. She looked sick, but not quite as bad as he’d feared. Perhaps she had been saving herself, harbouring her last reserves of strength until it was dark enough to escape. She felt around the edges of the holehe had made and nodded. Then, leaning all her weight on Tom’s shoulder, she swung her good foot up hard against the wall. Once, twice she kicked it, the wood around the hole splintering and yielding, and at the third kick a whole section of planking fell out, spilling across the walk-way outside.
    “
I
could have done that!” said Tom, staring at the ragged hole and wondering why he hadn’t thought of it.
    “But you didn’t, did you?” said Hester, and tried to smile. It was the first time he had seen her smile; an ugly, crooked thing, but very welcome; it made him feel that she was starting to like him and didn’t just regard him as an annoyance.
    “Come on then,” she said, “if you’re coming.”
    Hundreds of miles away across the moonlit mud, Shrike spots something. He signals to the Engineer pilots, who nod and grumble as they steer the Goshawk 90 down to land. “What now? How much longer are we going to keep flying back and forth along these track-marks before he’ll admit the kids are dead?” But they grumble quietly: they are terrified of Shrike.
    The hatch opens and Shrike stalks out. His green eyes sweep from side to side until he finds what he is looking for. A rag of white fabric from a torn shirt, soggy with rain, half-buried in the mud. “ HESTER SHAW WAS HERE ,” he tells the Out-Country at large, and begins sniffing for her scent.

9
THE
JENNY