Hester nodded, and checked the time by her pocket watch. She had forgotten her meeting with Tom, and she was already twenty minutes late. She went back downstairs, with the curator hurrying behind her. In the souvenir shop near the exit she helped herself to a copy of Predator’s Gold and flipped a couple of coins at him to pay for it.
“If I might make so bold, Ms. Valentine,” said the curator, rummaging in his cashbox for change, “I was wondering whether you might care to accompany me to the display tomorrow, and perhaps to dinner afterward?”
But when he looked up, the mysterious aviatrix was gone and the exit door was swinging softly shut.
Hester walked briskly across the Old Steine toward the café, stuffing Pennyroyal’s book into her pocket. The curator’s foolish, flattering request made her feel attractive and mysterious again, and the panic she had felt earlier had completely vanished. She knew now that everything would be all right. She would show Tom the book, and they would laugh together at all Pennyroyal’s lies about her. Then she would spring Wren from the slave pens, and they would reclaim the Jenny Haniver and fly away together.
The tables outside the café were busy, but there was still no Tom. She turned around, looking for him, annoyed. It was not like Tom to be late, and she wanted to tell him her plans.
“Hester?” asked one of the slave girls from the café, approaching with a folded piece of paper in her hand. “You are Hester, ain’t you? The gentleman said you’d be coming. He asked me to give you this.”
The paper was a handbill advertising the aquarium. On the back, in his neat handwriting, Tom had penciled, Dearest Het, I will see you back at the SW. Wren has been taken as a slave; I am going to a place called the Pepperpot to see about buying her back.
Chapter 24
The Requiem Vortex
The air fleet had made good time since leaving Shan Guo. They had crossed the sequined turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and were sweeping westward now over the hills of Jabal Hammar. The four destroyers flew in line astern, and around them the air throbbed and tore with the roar of engine pods as an escort of fighter airships—Murasaki Fox Spirits and Zhang Chen Hawkmoths—scoured the sky for townie privateers.
Through a slit in the armored gondola of the Stalker Fang’s flagship, the Requiem Vortex, Oenone Zero peered toward the distant ground. Nothing moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of passing towns. Jagged bite marks pitted the hillsides where mining towns had scooped out gutfuls of ore-bearing rock.
When she’d first heard that she was to go with her mistress on this mysterious expedition, Oenone had felt glad. Isolated in the sky aboard the Stalker’s flagship, surely she would find a chance to use her weapon? But the world she had seen on the way, scarred and ruined by Municipal Darwinism, made her wonder afresh if she really had the right. She hated the war, but she hated Traction Cities too. By killing Fang, might she not be handing victory to them? If the Green Storm collapsed, the whole earth might soon look like those wrecked rubble heaps below her. She did not want that on her conscience.
“Still finding reasons not to do what you came here for, Oenone,” she told herself in the disappointed tone her mother had used when Oenone was a child and shirked her schoolwork. “What a coward you are!”
She looked ahead, into a brownish haze that she knew was made partly from the exhaust smoke of cities. Beyond it somewhere lay the Middle Sea, not far off now. Oenone tried to crush her doubts. A battle was coming, and she knew enough about battles to feel sure that there would be moments of such chaos and confusion that she would be able to unleash her device upon the Stalker Fang without anyone understanding what she had done.
She turned from the gun slit and climbed up into the thundering passageways inside the envelope. As she neared the officers’ mess, she could hear the voices of some of her comrades, and she paused at the open door, unnoticed, listening.
“She says we are to target only Brighton!” Lieutenant Zhao, the gunnery officer, was saying, pitching her voice low for fear the Stalker Fang might hear. “Why Brighton? I’ve read the intelligence reports. Brighton is the least of cities, the merest pleasure raft.”
“She has spies of her own,” said Navigator Cheung, staring into his empty cup as though he could divine the Stalker’s plans from the tea leaves there. “She has deep-cover agents who report to nobody but her.”
“Yes, but why would she have placed one aboard Brighton?”
“Who knows? There must be something important about the place.”
“Such as?” Zhao shook her head. “There are fat predator towns lurking in these hills below us. Why must I save my rockets for Brighton when I could be blowing the tracks off predator towns?”
“It is not for us to question her orders, Zhao.”
That came from the expedition’s second-in-command, General Naga. Oenone saw the junior officers stiffen and bow their heads at the sound of his voice. Naga had been with the Green Storm since its foundation. There was a famous photograph of him, young and handsome, raising their thunderbolt banner over the wreck of Traktiongrad; Oenone had had a poster of it on her bedroom wall when she was a girl. But Naga was not young anymore, and not handsome either: His hair was gray, his long ocher face seamed and scarred. He was thirty-five, an old man by the standards of the Green Storm military. He had lost an arm at Xanne-Sandansky and the use of his legs at the air siege of Omsk, and he could walk and fight only because the Resurrection Corps had built him a powered metal exoskeleton.
“I don’t like this mission,” he admitted, the segments of his mechanical armor scraping as he leaned across the table. “Brighton is no threat to us, and I hear it’s spent the summer hammering those parasite brigands up in the North Atlantic. I was a cadet at Rogues’ Roost when they attacked our air base there. I lost good friends to those devils, and I’m glad Brighton’s sorted them out. But orders are orders, and orders from the Fire Flower…”
He stopped suddenly, sensing Oenone standing in the doorway. “Surgeon-Mechanic,” he said gruffly, turning toward her. His mechanical hand clamped on his sword hilt; his exoskeleton clanked and hissed, making a clumsy half bow. Behind him, Oenone saw fear on the faces of the junior officers as they recognized her. She knew what they were thinking. How long has she been there? How much did she hear? Will she tell the Stalker? Even Naga was afraid of her.
“Please, forgive me,” she said, bowing formally to the general and again to the officers at the table. She went into the mess, poured a glass of jasmine tea that she did not want, and drank it quickly, in silence. Everyone’s eyes lingered on her. They were almost as wary of her as they were of the Stalker Fang herself, and she felt glad of that, because it proved that they did not suspect her real motives.
But someone aboard the Requiem Vortex suspected her. As she left the mess and climbed the companion ladders to her cabin high among the reinforced gas cells, Grike watched from the shadows, and waited patiently for her to make her move.
Chapter 25
The Pepperpot
Afternoon was turning into evening as Tom walked toward the Pepperpot through streets filled with carnival. A procession was moving slowly along Ocean Boulevard, with pretty girls and boys dressed up as mermaids cavorting on electric floats, giant dancing puppets of the sea gods, paper lanterns shaped like fish and serpents twirling on long poles, and drag queens in enormous feathery hats showering down confetti from low-flying cargo balloons. Through gaps between the white buildings, Tom kept glimpsing the sea, and once, with a scream of engines, a patrol of those unlikely flying machines came hurtling low over the rooftops. Tom clapped his hands over his ears and turned to watch them pass. He would have been thrilled by them when he was younger, but now they just reminded him of how dangerous the world was, and how much it had altered while he’d been away. The more he saw of it, the more he longed to find Wren and return to the peace of Vineland.