She was Anna today. He took her hand in his and held it tight and felt a little braver. He did not even worry too much when a gust of wind snatched his cap off and sent it whirling up into the sunlight.
Two tiers above, in a fortified hotel on Ocean Boulevard, a Lost Boy named Brittlestar jerked around to stare as the lost cap went whirling past his window. “What was that?” he demanded.
His friends and bodyguards fingered the weapons in their belts and said they didn’t know. One of his slaves said she thought it was just a hat.
“Just a hat?” hissed Brittlestar. “Nothing is just anything! It meant something! Where did it come from? Whose was it?”
The bodyguards, friends, and slaves swapped weary glances. Brittlestar was growing increasingly paranoid, and sometimes at night he woke the whole gang as he thrashed around in his sleep and screamed about Grimsby and somebody called Uncle. The bodyguards and friends were starting to think it might soon be time to pitch him overboard and offer their services to some less sensitive Lost Boy, like Krill or Baitball.
Brittlestar, the hem of his silk dressing gown swooshing behind him over the expensive carpets, went rushing to the room where he kept his screens. All the Lost Boys had screens, and all had crab-cameras that they sent sneaking about Brighton to spy on other Lost Boys. Everyone had grown quite used to the scraping of the machines’ metal feet inside the city’s ventilation shafts, and the echoey, rattling fights that broke out when two rival cameras met. Sometimes at dawn the pavements beneath air vents were littered with torn-off metal legs and shattered lenses, the debris of desperate battles that had raged through the shafts all night.
“Everything means something!” Brittlestar assured his followers, as they gathered in the doorway to watch him grapple with the screen controls. “You say it’s a hat, I say it’s a sign. It could be a message from Uncle!” Brittlestar had been dreaming a great deal about Uncle lately. Uncle kept whispering to him. He had come to believe that the old man was still alive, and would soon punish his Lost Boys for letting themselves be captured by Brighton.
But it was not Uncle he saw when he trained one of his cameras on the group of visitors disembarking at the Kemptown Stair. He wasn’t sure whom he was seeing at first, only that there was something familiar about the little boy leading the cripple in the black robe. Then one of his slaves, a woman named Monica Weems, who had once worked for the Shkin Corporation and had a better memory for faces than Brittlestar, suddenly pointed at the screen and said, “Look! Look, master! It’s little Fishcake!”
Little Fishcake hurried his Stalker along litter-strewn pavements under the colonnades at the city’s edge, past boarded-up cafes and looted amusement arcades, out at last into the metallic sunlight of Plage Ultime. TO THE BEACH read a stenciled sign on a white wall, and Fishcake and his Stalker followed where it pointed, past abandoned hotels and empty swimming pools, past the gigantic housings of the resort’s Mitchell Nixon engines, down to where the limpets waited.
There was a chain-link fence and a padlock on the gate, but fences and padlocks meant nothing to the Stalker. She snapped the lock, and Fishcake pushed the gate open and ran among the limpets, feeling a strange nostalgia for the old days in Grimsby. Their armored cabs and crook-kneed legs, patched with barnacles and gull droppings, gave the limpets the appearance of enormous prehistoric crabs. Fishcake knew them alclass="underline" the Sea Louse and the Thermoclyne Girl, the Hagfish 2 and the Finny Denizen, but he settled on the smallest, sleekest, newest one, the Spider Baby. It stood closer to the water than the rest, and had a board propped against its foreleg offering pleasure trips beneath the city, so he hoped it might already be fueled.
He looked for his Stalker, but he had left her behind. Poor thing, stomping along on that table leg, she couldn’t keep up with him! He started to walk back through the zigzag shadows under the limpets, calling out, “Anna! Come here! I need you to open the hatch!”
With a howl of electric engines two bugs came speeding out of the streets beneath the engine housings and through the open gate. They were driving much too fast, and both were overloaded, with men and boys packed into their small cabins and standing on the roofs and running boards. Fishcake, noticing the swords and flare pistols and harpoon guns that they were waving at him, turned to run, but the only way out was through the gate, which the men spilling from the bugs quickly pushed shut. Whimpering, Fishcake veered toward the sea, but the Drys were all around him, and with them, staring at him, was a boy he knew: a tall, thin, highly strung redheaded boy named—
“Brittlestar,” said Brittlestar. “Remember me? ’Cos I remember you, Fishcake.” He was carrying a speargun. “You’re the sneak, ain’t you? The one as told Shkin where Grimsby lay? Don’t think I’ve forgot. We none of us have, we Lost Boys. Maybe when I show ’em that I’ve caught you, they’ll give me a bit of respect. Maybe Uncle will spare me when he comes to punish us. Maybe—”
Somehow, suddenly, Fishcake’s Stalker was standing behind Brittlestar. She gripped his chin and his red hair and twisted his head around so sharply that the noise of his neck snapping echoed like a gunshot. The last thing Brittlestar saw was his own surprised face reflected in her bronze mask. His finger tightened on the trigger of his speargun, which was pointing at the sky. A silver harpoon shot up into the sunlight, up through the steam from the idling engines, high into the clear air above the city.
Fishcake had just enough of his wits left to throw himself down beside Brittlestar’s flapping body as bullets began to bang and whine among the parked limpets. He watched the harpoon rise higher and higher, slower and slower, until it seemed to hang for a moment suspended in the blue sky, a flake of silver among all the gliding gulls. His Stalker bared her claws. As the harpoon started to fall, she began killing Brittlestar’s gang one by one, finding them by their scent and the sound of the guns they shot at her. By the time the harpoon clattered on the deck plate, they were all dead.
The Stalker sheathed her claws and helped Fishcake to stand, asking him gently if he was damaged.
“Anna?” said Fishcake, surprised. “I thought you had turned into—”
“The other is still asleep, I think,” his Stalker whispered, and patted at her robe, which was smoldering where someone had fired a flare pistol at her.
“I didn’t think you would be so …,” said Fishcake awkwardly, looking at the blood that smeared her hands and sleeves. On the deck plate beside him Brittlestar had stopped flapping and lay still. Fishcake remembered how, in Grimsby, Brittlestar had always been rather kind to him. He said, “I thought it was only her who would do things like that.”
His Stalker said, “I have had to kill people sometimes. I had forgotten, but I remember now. I used to be quite good at it. In my work for the League. And at Stayns that time, to save poor Tom and Hester…”
“You know Tom and Hester?” asked Fishcake, almost more shocked by those names than by the sudden deaths of Brittlestar and his crew.
But his Stalker had taken him by the wrist and was leading him briskly toward the limpet he had chosen. She did not bother to answer his question, and as she climbed the boarding ladder and started to force the heavy hatches open, she was hissing to herself about Shan Guo and ODIN. Kind, murderous Anna had sunk once more beneath the surface of her mind, and she was the Stalker Fang again.