“what IS the tin book?” asked Grike.
“The Tin Book?” The Stalker looked playfully at him, her head on one side, a finger to her lips. “The Tin Book is what we are here for, Mr. Grike.”
Hester too had been waiting for the moon. Perched on a seat on the lower-tier promenade, she had whiled away the time by glancing through her copy of Predator’s Gold, and what she had found there cheered her. It seemed to her that Pennyroyal had buried the truth beneath so many lies that nobody would ever be able to unearth it.
At moonrise, as the rowdy crowds flooded out of Brighton’s underdecks to watch the fireworks, she shoved her way past them, pushing against the tide into the district of dank slave barracks and tenements called Mole’s Combe. By the time she reached the foot of Shkin’s tower, the streets around her were deserted except for the seagulls, which, startled from their roosts by the racket on the promenades, soared like white phantoms beneath the web of peeling girders overhead.
She had studied the Pepperpot earlier, and decided on a way in. Round on the sternward side, surrounded by bins and fat, snaky ducts, was a small back door made of rusty metal and studded with rivets like the hatch of a submarine. Above the door a spiffy brass security camera kept watch on visitors, but there were no other defenses; the Pepperpot had been designed to keep people in, not out.
Hester approached cautiously, keeping to the shadows. Her heart beat fast. She imagined the blood rushing through her veins and arteries, filling her with her father’s cold strength. She felt that both Wren and Tom were very close, and that soon they would all be together again, and happy. Smiling to herself behind her veil, she pulled the Schadenfreude out from inside her coat and waited until the next fusillade of fireworks, then shot the camera off its mountings.
She had just enough time to stuff the gun away before the door opened and a man came out and stood with his hands on his hips, peering up indignantly at the smoldering wreckage of the camera.
“Happy MoonFest!” called Hester.
The man turned. He looked surprised to see the veiled woman walking toward him, and even more surprised when she shoved a knife between his ribs. He died very quickly, and she heaved his body into the shadows behind the bins and went through the door, closing it softly behind her. She found herself in a corridor. Light and voices came from a small guardroom. She peeked in. There were three more men inside. One was stabbing irritably at the buttons beneath a circular screen that fizzed with static; the others were slumped, bored and uncomfortable, on office chairs, drinks in their hands, wishing they could be with their wives and their children at the celebrations.
Hester shot the one at the screen first, and killed the others as they sprang up, groping for their guns. She stood quiet for a time in the shadows, waiting for someone to come. No one did. There were so many rockets and firecrackers being let off in the streets outside the Pepperpot tonight that a few extra bangs made no difference. She reloaded the Schadenfreude, noticing with pride that her hands hardly shook at all.
The Shkin Corporation was well organized, and she was glad of it. A framed plan on the guardroom wall showed her the layout of the place. She took a moment to memorize it; then, silent and sure of herself, she moved toward the slave pens. Two men stood watch outside a pair of heavy double doors. One lunged at Hester with some sort of electric cattle-prod thing, but she sidestepped him and stuck her knife in his back, then cut the throat of the other as he reached for the alarm bell. There was a ring of keys on the second one’s belt, and it did not take her long to find the one she needed.
The slave pens were filled with soft breathing and the faint stirrings of caged things. As she grew used to the dark, she started to make out the cages ranged around the walls, and the faces staring out at her through the bars.
“Tom?” she called.
All around her, people were shifting and whispering. Some of the prisoners in the cages closest to the door could see the dead guards sprawled outside, and were reporting it to their neighbors.
“Who are you?” called a voice from one of the cages.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Name’s Krill.”
“A Lost Boy?” Hester walked toward the voice. Soon she was close enough to see his eyes shining in the thin spill of light from the door she’d opened. He was watching the keys she held, like a hungry dog watching a forkful of food. She jangled the keys softly, by way of encouragement, as she asked, “Is Wren here? Wren Natsworthy?”
“That Dry girl who was on the Autolycus?” asked Krill. “Who’s asking?”
“The lady with the keys,” said Hester.
She saw Krill’s fair head bob in the darkness, nodding. “She was in a cage near me for a while, but they took her away.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Fishcake went too, soon after.” (He paused to spit, as if he wanted to clean Fishcake’s name out of his mouth. There were murmurs of anger and disgust from the other cages. Fishcake wasn’t popular.) “Shkin’s men told us he turned nark; betrayed Grimsby. Walks about in a uniform now like he’s playing at soldiers. What happened to the girl I don’t know. Sold, I expect.”
“What about her father, Tom? He was taken today.”
“Never heard of him. There’s no Drys in here, lady. Just Lost Boys.”
“Could he be in the holding cells on the middle tier?”
“Could be.” Krill shifted thoughtfully. Around him, in the other pens, all the other captives were shifting too, listening, wary as animals. The ones who were close enough to see Hester never took their eyes off the keys. “There’ll be more guards up there, though. You’ll need something to distract them.”
“Did you have anything particular in mind?” asked Hester. Krill grinned, and behind her veil Hester grinned too, because this was exactly what she had planned. She dropped the keys into Krill’s cage. “Play nicely” she said. As she ran toward the stairs, she could hear him scrabbling through the bunch of keys, trying each one in the lock on the door of his pen, and the voices of the Lost Boys, like rising surf, urging him on.
Chapter 27
The Unsafe Safe
Mayor Pennyroyal had had the pavilion ballroom specially redecorated for the festival. The front wall had been replaced with a long row of French windows that opened onto the sundeck outside and let in the light of the sacred moon. Around the dance floor, swags and cascades of silvery fabric hung from every pillar and cornice, reflecting the Milky Way of tiny bulbs that swirled across the ink-blue ceiling. Spotlights illuminated a podium, where a small orchestra played. The walls were covered with priceless works of art: antique masterpieces by Strange and Nias hanging next to the latest snot paintings by Hoover Daley, master of the Expressionist Sneeze.
In a hive of hexagonal chambers opening off behind the main room were all manner of amusing diversions for the guests. In one was a replica of a “bouncy castle,” a strange inflatable fortification that Pennyroyal claimed had been a key feature of Ancient warfare, but that could also be used as a trampoline. In another a projector rattled, showing copies of copies of some of the fragments of film that had survived from before the Sixty Minute War. Armored knights rode through a burning wood, their shadows stretching up through the smoke; flying machines lifted into a tropical dawn; a little tramp walked down a dusty road; groundcars chased each other like tiny cities; a man dangled from a broken clock high above some enormous static settlement; and in soft, beautiful close-ups rose the dreaming faces of the screen goddesses.