“I have my overhead to consider, Your Worship.” Shkin was angry now, white with it, and struggling to keep himself under control.
“I’ll buy her myself, then,” said Pennyroyal. He wasn’t a sentimental man, but he didn’t like to think of this discerning girl being punished for her love of his books—besides, house slaves were tax deductible. “My wife can always use a few extra handmaidens about the place,” he explained, “especially now, with the preparations for the Moon Festival ball to attend to. Tell you what—I’ll give you twenty dolphins for her. That’s more than fair.”
“Twenty?” sneered Shkin, as if such a sum were too small to even contemplate.
“Sold!” said Pennyroyal quickly. “My people will pay you. And next time, my dear fellow, try not to be so gullible. Honestly, how could anyone believe that this girl came from America? Quite absurd!”
Shkin bowed slightly. “As you say, Your Worship. Absurd.” He held out his hand. “The Tin Book, if you please.”
Pennyroyal, who had been leafing through the Tin Book, snapped it shut and clutched it to his chest. “I think not, Shkin. The girl said this was a present for me.”
“It is my property!”
“No, it’s not. Your contract with the Council states that any Lost Boys you fished up were yours. This isn’t a Lost Boy, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s some sort of Ancient code, possibly valuable. It is my duty as mayor of Brighton to hang on to it for, ah, further study.”
Shkin stared for a long moment at the mayor, then at Wren. He manufactured a smile. “No doubt we shall all meet again,” he said pleasantly, and turned, snapping his fingers for his men to follow him as he walked briskly away.
Pennyroyal’s girls clustered around him, enclosing him within his changing tent. For a short time Wren was left alone. She grinned, flushed with her own cleverness. She might still be a slave, but she was a posh slave, in the house of the mayor himself! She would get good food and fine clothes, and probably never have to carry anything much heavier than the odd tray of fairy cakes. And she would meet all kinds of interesting people. Handsome aviators, for instance, who might be persuaded to fly her home to Vineland.
Her only regret was that she hadn’t managed to bring Fishcake up here with her. She felt responsible for the boy, and hoped that the slave dealer wouldn’t take out his anger on him. But it would be all right. One way or another, she would escape, and then maybe she’d find a way of helping Fishcake too.
Nabisco Shkin was not a man who let his emotions show, and by the time the cable car set him down again on Brighton’s deck plates, he had mastered his temper. At the Pepperpot he greeted Miss Weems with no more than his customary coldness and told her, “Bring me the little Lost Boy.”
Soon afterward he was sitting calmly in his office, watching Fishcake tuck into a second bowl of chocolate ice cream and listening again to his account of the Autolycus’s voyage to Vineland. This boy was telling the truth, Shkin was sure of it. But there was no point in trying to use him to discredit the mayor. He was young, and easily influenced: If it came to a trial, Pennyroyal’s lawyers would tear him to shreds. Shkin closed his eyes thoughtfully and pictured Vineland. “Are you quite certain you can find the place again, boy?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Shkin,” said Fishcake with his mouth full.
Shkin smiled at him over the tips of his steepled fingers. “Good. Very good,” he said. “You know, boy, every now and then I acquire a slave who proves too useful or too bright to part with; Miss Weems, for example. I hope that you will be another.”
Fishcake nervously returned the smile. “You mean you ain’t going to sell me off to them Nuevo-Mayan devils, sir?”
“No, no, no, no,” Shkin assured him, shaking his head. “I want you to serve me, Fishcake. We’ll have you trained up as an apprentice. And next summer, when the weather improves, I shall outfit an expedition, and you will lead us to Anchorage-in-Vineland. I imagine those Vinelanders or Anchorites or whatever they call themselves will fetch a good price at the slave markets.”
Fishcake listened wide-eyed, then grinned. “Yes, Mr. Shkin! Thank you, Mr. Shkin!”
Shkin leaned back in his chair, his temper quite restored. He would avenge himself on Pennyroyal by showing the whole world that Anchorage had survived. As for that treacherous little vixen Wren, let her see how clever she felt when the Shkin Corporation enslaved all her family and friends.
Chapter 15
Children of the Deep
The limpet Screw Worm had been built long before the Lost Boys started to use wireless crab-cams. Even its radio set had stopped working long ago. It had no way of receiving the broadcasts from Brighton, and so Hester, Tom, and Freya never had to find out whether Caul’s desire to meet his parents would have outweighed his loyalty to his friends. Deaf to WOPCART’s invitations, the Screw Worm swam north into the deep, cold waters of the Greenland Trench. On the same late-summer afternoon that Wren came face-to-face with Pennyroyal, its passengers finally sighted Grimsby.
Tom had visited the underwater city once before, but Hester and Freya knew it only from his descriptions. They jostled for a view as Caul steered the limpet closer.
Grimsby had been a giant industrial raft once. Now it was a drowned wreck, resting on the slopes of an undersea mountain. Weeds and barnacles and rust were all working hard to camouflage it, blurring the outlines of buildings and paddle wheels until it was difficult to tell where Grimsby ended and the mountain began.
“Where are the lights?” asked Tom. His strongest memory of the Lost Boys’ lair was the surreal glow of lamplight in the windows of Grimsby’s sunken Town Hall. Now the whole city lay in darkness.
“Something’s wrong,” said Caul.
Something bumped against the Screw Worm’s hull. Shards of splintered wood and torn plastic revolved in the splay of light from the nose lantern. The limpet was swimming through a zone of drifting wreckage.
“The whole place is dead—” Hester said, and then stopped short, because if that was true, then Wren was probably dead as well.
“Look at the Burglarium!” Caul whispered, shocked. A big building slid by on the starboard side, a building where he had spent much of his childhood, now lightless and open to the sea, litter swirling around huge, jagged rents in its walls. A boy’s body turned slow somersaults as the Worm’s wake reached it. Others tumbled in the flooded glastic tunnel that had once linked the Burglarium to the Town Hall. “Power plant’s gone too,” he added as they passed over a domed building that had been smashed like an eggshell. His voice sounded tight and strained. “The Town Hall looks all right. Nobody about, though. I’ll see if we can get inside.”
It was sixteen years since Caul had fled this place, but he had made the approach to the limpet pens a thousand times in his dreams since then. He swung the Screw Worm toward I40 the water-door at the base of the Town Hall. The door stood open. Silvery fish were darting in and out.
“Still no one,” he said. “It should be closed. There should be sentry subs to check us out.”
“Maybe they’re trying to raise us on the radio and we can’t hear them,” Tom suggested hopefully.
“What do we do?” asked Freya.
“We go in, of course,” said Hester. She checked the gun in her belt, the knife in her boot. If there were any Lost Boys left alive in there, she meant to show them what Valentine’s daughter was made of.