“come back !” begged Grike. ” help me! i have to find her !” He started to run after her, then stopped. Chasing the girl would only add to her fear, and he had already been appalled by the terror and loathing of him that he had seen in that strange, familiar face. He watched her fade into the smoke. Behind him, the Pavilion’s central dome collapsed into the ballroom in a gush of sparks. Catherine wheels of debris went bowling past him to crash into fountains and flower beds or bound off the deck plate’s edge entirely and plummet down into the desert.
Grike ignored them and tilted his head inquisitively. Above the noise, his sensitive ears had picked up the drone of aero-engines.
Whooping for breath, her heart hammering, Wren plunged back into the cypress grove. Pennyroyal was asleep or unconscious again, but Theo leaped up. “Wren, what is it?”
“Stalker!” she managed to gasp. “The Green Storm left a Stalker behind. That big ugly one that fought the other one…
Pennyroyal groaned and stirred. Theo drew Wren gently away. “Wren, if this Stalker had wanted to kill us, it would have found us by now, wouldn’t it? It would have chased you, and be here by now.”
Wren thought about that. “I think it was damaged,” she said.
“There you are then.”
“I think it was mad,” she went on, remembering the strange way the Stalker had spoken to her. She giggled nervously. “I suppose if ordinary Stalkers are meant to go around killing people, maybe a mad one is the best sort to be stuck on a doomed hovery island thing with. Maybe it just wanted to have a nice chat about the weather. Or knit me a cardigan.”
Theo laughed. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to be all right. At the rate we’re losing gas, we should touch down in the desert in another half hour or so.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“It is,” said Theo. “Come and see.”
She went with him through the trees to the far side of the grove. From there, only a short, steeply tilted stretch of lawn separated them from the deck plate’s edge. Beyond the handrail they could see the ground, and Cloud 9’s shadow slithering over curved dunes and barren outcroppings of stone. All around, clusters of lights and ghostly fans of dust marked the approach of small towns and villages, racing toward the place where they thought Cloud 9 would fall.
“Scavenger towns!” wailed Wren. “We’ll be eaten!”
“Cloud 9 will be eaten,” said Theo. “We won’t. We’ll get off into the desert before the towns arrive and go aboard them as travelers, not prey. We’ll take some gold or Old Tech or something from the Pavilion to pay our way. We’ll be all right.”
Wren calmed herself. This is what brought Mum and Dad together, she thought. There’s a togetherness that comes from sharing adventures like this, and it’s strong enough to overcome anything: mistrust, ugliness, anything. Not that Theo was ugly. Far from it. She turned her head to look at him, and their faces were so close that the tip of her nose brushed his cheek.
And it was then—just when Wren knew that they were about to kiss, and half of her really wanted to and the other half was more scared of kissing than it was of scavenger towns—it was then that the lawn, like the deck of a boat in a stormy sea, dropped suddenly from beneath her feet, throwing her against Theo and Theo against a tree.
“Bother!” she said.
Bad things were happening up among Cloud 9’s corona of gasbags. Roasted by the flames leaping from the Pavilion, the central cell had ruptured, and the gas was blurting out in a rush of blue fire. A few of the lesser bags still held, but they were not enough to support the weight of Cloud 9 for long. The deck plate tipped even more steeply, and the water from fountains and swimming pools poured off the brim in brief white cataracts. Debris fell too: statues and summerhouses, potted palms and garden furniture, marquees and musical instruments, dropping like manna on the dunes below.
The brindled towns of the desert increased their speed, jostling and squabbling in their haste to be first at the crash site.
The Jenny Haniver flew through smoke and dust into the shadow of Cloud 9. Seen through her larboard windows, the tilted underside resembled a vast, ruined wall, pocked with shell craters and burned-out wrecks. Hester turned the searchlight on it and watched as some twisted maintenance walkways slid by, then a warning notice in stenciled white letters ten feet high: NO SMOKING. The cable car swung from severed hawsers, blood-stained ball gowns and evening robes billowing from the shattered cabin.
“We’re too late,” said Hester. “There’s not going to be anyone alive up there.”
“Don’t say that!” Tom told her. He spoke sharply, still feeling scratchy and shaky from their argument. He did not want to argue anymore, because finding Wren was what mattered now, but things had altered between himself and Hester, and he was not sure they could be put right. The hardness of her, the calm way she had abandoned Fishcake, made his insides curl.
Angrily, he tugged at the Jenny’s controls, swinging her up over the top edge of the deck plate and carefully in through the tangle of rigging. He wished suddenly that Freya were with him instead of Hester. She would not have left poor Fishcake behind. She would have found some way out of Shkin’s tower without murdering all those poor men. And she would not have given up hope of finding Wren so easily.
“Remember London?” he said. “Remember the night of MEDUSA, when I came to fetch you from London? That looked hopeless too, but I found you, didn’t I? And now we’re going to find Wren.”
Below them, Cloud 9 swung like a censer. Hester aimed the searchlight at its ruined gardens.
Dragging Pennyroyal between them, Wren and Theo went crabwise across the steep face of the gardens, looking for a place where they could shelter when the deck plate touched down.
“Good work!” Pennyroyal told them, briefly coming to. “Splendid effort! I’ll see that you get your freedom for this…” Then he passed out again, which made him impossibly heavy. They laid him down, and Wren sat next to him. The ground was five hundred feet below, perhaps less; Wren could make out individual scrubby bushes struggling to grow among the long crescents of rock that dotted the desert, and individual windows and doorways on the upperworks of a town that was bounding along on big, barrel-shaped wheels in Cloud 9’s shadow. The air was filled with the sounds of overstrained rigging. Beneath the long-drawn-out metallic moans, another noise was rising. Wren looked up. Through the tangles of hawsers that swayed across the garden, the beam of a searchlight poked, dazzling her. Then it swung away, a long finger of light tracing aimless paths across the lawns, and behind it she saw a small airship.
“Look!” she shouted.
“Scavengers,” groaned Theo. “Or air pirates!”
The people in the town below seemed to have the same idea, for a rocket came sputtering up to burst in the sky behind the little ship. It veered away, then came edging back, steering vanes flicking like the fins of an inquisitive fish. A face showed at the gondola window. The steering vanes flicked again, the engine pods swiveled, and the ship touched down on a metal patio, not too close to Wren and Theo, but not so far away that Wren could not recognize the people who climbed out of the gondola and came scrambling toward her across the canted lawn.
At first she refused to believe it. It seemed so impossible that Mum and Dad could be here that she closed her eyes and tried to make the hurtful hallucination go away. It couldn’t be them, it couldn’t, no matter what her silly eyes were telling her; clearly the adventures she had lived through had all been too much for her, and she had started imagining things.