Free Traction City by Philip Reeve Page A

since the last suburb was launched, and Mortlake has fallen into disuse. DANGER – KEEP OUT say signs on the chain-link fences which bar all the approaches. Smiff’s spent his life ignoring signs like that.
    He looks left, then right, checking that no coppers are lurking. Then it’s over the fence as easy as a monkey and down again into Mortlake’s corroded gloom.
    No lights here. No names above the rusty shopfronts. Fly-posters pasted to the huge support pillars advertise shows and patent cure-alls from fifty years ago. The district’s few narrow streets wind around the flanks of the three colossal hangars in which suburbs were once built. In places where daylight can reach, wan clumps of nettles sprout among the rust flakes on the deck.
    Smiff takes out his home-made torch and shines it on the deck ahead. He plays it over the heaps of debris that have collected against forward-facing walls as the city climbs, looking for shiny stuff that might have trickled down from tiers above.
    In the first pile he searches there’s a pewter button. Not much, but better than nothing, Smiff thinks (which is actually quite a good description of his whole life). He pockets it and moves on.
    In the second pile there’s just a fish head; shiny enough, but worthless, even to Smiff.
    As he turns away the beam of his torch lights up the steel toecaps of a pair of boots.
    Smiff raises the torch, and his eyes. Above the boots are trousers. Above the trousers, a paisley waistcoat. Inside the waistcoat a big, broad, red-faced man. Behind the man, two more, much like him.
    â€œThis here is my patch, kid,” says Costa Mulligan, king of the Base Tier scavs.
    â€œI’m sorry, Mister M,” says Smiff, already sure that “sorry” won’t be good enough. He looks past the men for an escape route. There’s a rust hole in the deck plate there. If he could drop through that he’d land in the nets under the city. Provided the nets are strong enough to hold him. Provided Mulligan’s boys haven’t stripped them away to sell. He gauges the distance, wondering if he can make it to the hole before they grab him.
    Turns out he can’t. The men step forward and lift him, one by either arm. Mulligan grins down at him. A knife appears. The Life of Smiff seems destined to have a sudden and disappointing end. Until, surprising as a whirlwind, something comes out of the dark between the boarded-up buildings on the right. There is a scream. One of the men who was holding Smiff lets go. Then the other. Something reaches over his head for Mulligan. Smiff doesn’t wait to find out what it is. He’s gone, running for that rust hole and jumping through it, down into the wind beneath the city, the sudden, shocking cold of open air.
    Nets of metal mesh are strung across the gulfs between London’s banks of caterpillar tracks. They are meant to save hapless workers who tumble off the city’s underside while they are repairing it. They are rusty, and in places parts are missing altogether, but Smiff’s luck holds; the net beneath the rust hole is sound, and he doesn’t weigh much; he crashes down on it and lies there winded. All around him the chill wind whinnies, and the dark is full of the scherlink, scherlink, scherlink of the huge treads passing, the grumble of the wheels, the squeal and grind of axles. But Smiff’s not listening to any of those noises. He’s still hearing the sounds from above; the awful sobbing screams which cut off suddenly and leave a silence which is worse. The heavy footfalls, as if (he thinks) some statue’s sprung to life and is pacing about up there.
    Something drops on him through the rust hole and he sees it falling just in time and rolls aside so that it doesn’t crush him. It lands in the nets next to him, slack and weighty, unmoving till the movement of London sets it swinging. Smiff fumbles his torch on.
    The slack and weighty thing is