Down below the pitching decks, on Brighton’s lowest level, Wren lay on the floor of her narrow cage in the Shkin Corporation’s holding pens and wished she were dead. Above her head, an argon lamp swung to and fro, splashing light across the metal walls and the rows of cages that sat waiting for more Lost Boys to be lured aboard. Fishcake lay in one; the others held the crews of the limpets that had been captured earlier. The burn on Wren’s hand hurt terribly. She supposed she would bear that raised weal for the rest of her life—although that might not be very long.
“Are we sinking?” she asked when the Shkin Corporation’s guard came round and aimed his flashlight at her to check that she was still alive.
The guard chuckled. “Feels like it, don’t it? But Brighton’s ridden out worse than this. Don’t worry; we’ll soon be hoovering up the rest of your chums.”
“They’re not my chums,” said Wren bitterly. “I’m not a Lost Boy…”
“Change the record, love,” the man said wearily. “I heard you telling Monica Weems that same story down on Fishmarket Hard when we first dredged you up. The answer’s still the same. Don’t matter who you are. You’re merchandise now. You’ll fetch a good price in Nuevo-Maya.”
Memories of old geography lessons stirred in Wren’s brain: the big globe in the schoolroom at the Winter Palace and Miss Freya saying, “Here is Nuevo-Maya, which used to be called South America before the isthmus that linked it to North America was severed by Slow Bombs in the Sixty Minute War.”
Nuevo-Maya was thousands of miles away! If they took her there, how could she ever find her way home?
The guard leaned on her cage and leered at her through the bars. “You don’t think Mr. Shkin’d try and sell a bunch of lairy pirates off as house slaves and nursemaids, do you? You’ll end up as fighters aboard one of them big Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities. Lovely shows they have in them arenas. Gangs of slaves pitched against each other, or fighting souped-up dismantling machines and captured Green Storm Stalkers. Blood and guts all over the shop. But it’s all done in honor of their funny Nuevo-Mayan gods, so it’s quite spiritual, really.”
Spiritual or not, Wren didn’t think she fancied it. She had to find a way out of this horrible mess. But her brain, about which Miss Freya had said such nice things, was too addled by the pitching of the city to think of anything.
“I hope we do sink!” she shouted weakly after the guard as he went on his way. “That’d serve you right! I hope we sink before you trap any more poor Lost Boys!”
But next day the storm slackened and the waves subsided, and that evening the crews of three more limpets were dragged, sheepish and weeping, into the slave pens. There were four more limpets that night, and another three the following day; one of them sensed a trap and fled before the magnetic grapples caught it, but Brighton gave chase and dropped depth charges until a white plume of water burst from the ocean to drench the cheering spectators on the starboard observation decks and bits of limpet and Lost Boy came bobbing to the surface.
“Word must have reached Grimsby by now,” said Krill, one of the boys who’d been taken earlier, watching white-faced from his cage as the pens around him filled with captives. “Old Uncle will do something. He’ll rescue us.”
“Word has reached Grimsby,” said the new arrivals.
“That’s where we came from…”
“We picked up that message a couple of days ago.”
“Uncle said it was a trap and we shouldn’t listen, but we sneaked out anyway.”
“We thought our mums and dads would be here…”
Krill hung his head and started to cry. He had led raiding parties against static cities in the Western Archipelago, slaughtering any Dry who stood against him, but here in the Shkin Corporation’s warehouse he was just another lost teenager.
Wren reached through the bars and tugged at Fishcake’s sleeve. He had not spoken to Wren since they were brought in, and she guessed he blamed her for what had happened to him. Maybe he was right. If only she hadn’t been so keen to persuade him to come to Brighton!
“Fishcake,” she asked gently, “how many Lost Boys are there? All together, I mean.”
Fishcake would not look at her, but after a moment he muttered, “About sixty, I s’pose. That’s not counting Uncle and the newbies too young to ride limpets.”
“But there are at least forty of you here!” Wren said. “Grimsby must be nearly empty…”
The warehouse door rattled open, letting in another bunch of people. More prisoners, Wren thought, and didn’t even bother to look at them; it was too depressing. But the sound of tramping feet stopped beside her cage, and she glanced up to see that the newcomers were not Lost Boys, just two Shkin Corporation guards and the odious Miss Weems.
“Fetch her out,” Miss Weems commanded. Wren was alarmed. Had Miss Weems finally accepted that she was not a Lost Girl? Perhaps the Shkin Corporation had realized that she would never cut the mustard in those Nuevo-Mayan arenas and were planning to throw her overboard rather than waste any more food and water keeping her alive?
“The master wishes to see you,” said Miss Weems. The captive Lost Boys watched from their cages as Wren was led away.
A door behind the slave pens opened onto a room no bigger than a cupboard. The guards shoved Wren inside, then crowded in behind her. It was only when Miss Weems pulled a lever on the wall and Wren felt the floor jerk under her that she realized this was an elevator. The elevators of Anchorage had all been out of order for years, but this one was working perfectly: It rose so fast that Wren felt as if her stomach had been left behind.
Having been dragged to the slave pens in a net, Wren did not really understand the layout of the Shkin Corporation building. It was a tower whose lower stories, down in Brighton’s depths, held the captive slaves. The middle floors, on the city’s second tier, housed a few special cells for luxury goods and the offices of administrators. The higher levels, which poked up through the resort’s top tier in a fashionable district called Queen’s Park, were the offices of the Corporation’s founder, Mr. Nabisco Shkin. This topmost part was as white and beautiful as any iceberg, and gave no hint of the dangerous nine tenths that lurked below. Local people called the tower the Pepperpot.
The elevator stopped on the top floor, and Wren stepped out into a large, circular room. It was beautifully furnished, with plush black draperies, black carpets, and black pictures in golden frames hanging on the black walls. But what made Wren catch her breath was the view from the windows. She was looking out over the rooftops of Brighton: The sun was shining, bright flags were flying, sky yachts and air pedalos were rising from the harbor, and legions of gulls were wheeling and soaring around the chimney pots and far out over the sparkling sea. Spray from the paddle wheels blew across the city on a gentle breeze, and the sunlight shining through it filled the streets with drifting rainbows.
For a moment Wren almost forgot her misery, her hunger, the pain of her branded hand. Joy bubbled up in her. She was on a raft city, on one of the wonderful cities she had always dreamed about, and it was even more beautiful than she could have hoped.
“The girl, Mr. Shkin,” announced Miss Weems with an ingratiating whine in her voice that Wren had not heard before. One of the guards turned Wren around to face a man who sat quietly watching her from a black swivel chair.
Nabisco Shkin sat very still, one leg crossed over the other, one patent leather shoe blinking with reflected light as his foot tapped ever so slightly up and down, his only movement. A dove-gray suit; gray gloves; gray hair; gray eyes; gray face; gray voice. He said, “I am delighted to meet you, my dear,” but he didn’t sound delighted. Didn’t look it either. Didn’t look as if he’d know what delight was. He said, “Monica tells me that you claim to come from Anchorage.”