Tom Natsworthy, waiting in the line of holidaymakers, ducked as another screaming gull dived past. He had been afraid of large birds ever since he’d fought with the Green Storm’s flying Stalkers at Rogue’s Roost. But these greedy gulls were really the least of his worries. He felt sure that the aquarium’s uniformed attendants would be able to tell just by looking at him that he had come aboard Brighton only an hour before, climbing out of a manhole that the Screw Worm had bored through the city’s hull. He expected at any moment to be dragged out of the queue and denounced as an intruder and a stowaway.
The Screw Worm had caught up with Brighton that morning. Tom had approached slowly, frightened of triggering whatever Old Tech Brighton had used to catch the Lost Boys, but it seemed that the city had turned its sensors off now that its fishing trip was over. Even so, he and Hester had barely dared to breathe as the magnetic clamps engaged and the hull drill chewed noisily through the resort’s deck plates.
Tom had wanted to use the crab-cams to search for signs of Wren, but Hester disagreed. “We’re not Lost Boys,” she pointed out. “It’d take all sorts of skills we haven’t got to steer one of those things through Brighton’s plumbing. It could be weeks before we sighted Wren. We’ll go up ourselves. We ought to be able to find some sign of all those limpets they fished aboard.”
Hester was right. When they emerged from the Worm into a deserted alleyway behind Brighton’s engine district, almost the first thing they saw was a poster pasted to an exhaust duct. It showed a limpet surrounded by savage boys, beneath the words:
PARASITE-PIRATES OF THE ATLANTIC!
ARTIFACTS AND CAPTIVES TAKEN FROM THE SUB-AQUATIC THIEVES’ DEN OF GRIMSBY DURING BRIGHTON’S RECENT EXPEDITION ARE ON PUBLIC DISPLAY AT THE BRIGHTON AQUARIUM, 11-17 BURCHILL SQUARE.
“Captives!” said Tom. “Wren might be there! That’s where we’ve got to go…”
Hester, a slower reader than her husband, was still halfway through the text. “What’s an aquarium?”
“A place for fish. A sort of zoo, or museum.”
Hester nodded. “Museums are your department. You go and have a look. I want to go and nose round the air harbor. I might hear something about Wren there, and I want to see if I can find us a ship; I don’t fancy going all the way home in that stinking old limpet.”
“We shouldn’t split up,” said Tom.
“It’s only for a while,” said Hester. “It’ll be quicker.” It was just an excuse, of course. The truth was that all the time she’d spent cooped up with Tom beneath the waves had made her irritable. She wanted to be alone for a while, to breathe and look around this city, without having to listen to him always worrying about Wren. She kissed him quickly and said, “I’ll meet you in an hour.”
“Back at the Worm?”
Hester shook her head. The engine district was getting busy as a new shift clocked on; passersby might notice them sneaking down their secret manhole. She pointed to another ad, half obscured by the aquarium poster, for a coffee shop in the Old Steine called the Pink Café.
“There…”
Luckily, the aquarium’s attendants were only interested in selling tickets and chatting to each other about their plans for the evening. They were not on the lookout for intruders, and even if they had been, there was nothing to distinguish Tom from the other visitors. He was just a youngish, tousled, slightly balding man, perhaps a scholar from the middle tiers of Kom Ombo, and if his clothes were rather rumpled and old-fashioned and he smelled faintly of mildew and brine, well, there was no rule against that. The girl at the turnstile barely glanced at him as she took his money and waved him through.
Inside the aquarium, bored-looking fish drifted in big, dim tanks, and there was such a smell of rust and salt water that Tom could almost have imagined he was back in Grimsby. But nobody was looking at the fish, or the sea horses, or the mangy sea lions. Everyone was heading to the central hall, following the brightly colored signs to the parasite-pirate exhibit.
Tom went with them, trying not to look too eager, reminding himself that Wren would probably not be here. He shuffled along among the other visitors, peering at a display of crab-cams and then at a limpet called Spider Baby that stood on a dais in the center of the hall. Whoever had put it there had given it a dramatic pose; it was rearing back on its four hind legs and waving its front feet in the air as if it were about to lash out at the visitors. Families posed in front of it to have their photographs taken, the children making scared faces, or sticking out their tongues at the looming machine.
Beyond the limpet, in a straw-lined cage, captive Lost Boys squatted and stared at the passing crowds. Sometimes one would fling himself at the bars, shouting abuse, and the visitors would scuttle away, frightened and delighted, while one of the burly attendants poked the savage with an electric prod. Tom felt sorry for the Lost Boys, and almost relieved that Wren was not among them.
Nearby, a pretty young woman in aquarium livery was pointing out details to a group of children. Tom waited until she had finished, then approached her. “Excuse me,” he asked, “could you tell me how many limpets were taken?”
The pretty young woman was really very pretty. Her smile almost dazzled Tom. “Nineteen in total, sir,” she said, “and three destroyed at sea.”
“And was one of them called the Autolycus?”
The smile faded. Flustered, the woman riffled through her exhibition notes. Nobody had ever asked her about a particular limpet before. “Let me see…” she muttered. “I believe… Oh, yes! The Autolycus was one of the first limpets we caught, way over in the western seas, far from the parasite lair.” Her smile returned. “She must have been swimming off on a burgling mission when we snapped her up…”
“And the crew?”
The young woman was still smiling, but her eyes were troubled; she was starting to wonder if Tom was some kind of weirdo. “You’d have to ask Mr. Shkin, sir. Mr. Nabisco Shkin. All the captives are property of the Shkin Corporation.”
“And what’s the Shkin Corporation?” asked Hester, who had just been told the same thing by a secondhand balloon salesman at the air harbor.
“Slaves,” said the man, spitting a black jet of tobacco juice onto the deck plate at his feet and winking at her. “All them boys and girls they fished up are all slaves now, and serves them right, I say.”
A slave, thought Hester as she strode away through the increasingly busy streets. The shadows of airships and balloon taxis slid over her as they poured into the air harbor to offload more cackling crowds of tourists. A slave. Hester shouldered a group of language students off the pavement. How was she going to break this to Tom? That his beloved little girl was cooped up in a slave hold somewhere, or enduring who knew what at the hands of cruel owners…
To make matters worse, she had learned that her plan of buying an airship would not work. Prices had rocketed since she’d last been aboard a city, and the gold that she had taken from Grimsby wouldn’t buy so much as a spare engine pod at the secondhand airship yards.