“It’s all right, Tom,” she kept telling him. “It’s all right…”
London was far away, motionless under banners of smoke. Tom found Miss Fang’s old field glasses and focused them on the city. “Someone must have survived,” he said, hoping that saying it would make it true. “I bet Mr Pomeroy and Clytie Potts are down there, organizing rescue parties and handing out cups of tea… …” But through the smoke, the steam, the pall of hanging ash he could see nothing, nothing, nothing, and although he swung the binoculars to and fro, growing increasingly desperate, all they showed him were the bony shapes of blackened girders, and the scorched earth littered with torn-off wheels and blazing lakes of fuel and broken tracks lying tangled on themselves like the cast-off skins of enormous snakes.
“Tom?” Hester had been trying the controls, and had found to her surprise that the rudder-levers still worked. The Jenny Haniver responded to her touch, turning this way and that on the wind. She said gently, “Tom, we could try and reach Batmunkh Gompa. We’ll be welcome there. They’ll probably think you’re a hero.”
But Tom shook his head: behind his eyes the 13th Floor Elevator was still spiralling towards Top Tier and Pewsey and Gench were riding their black, silent screams into the fire. He didn’t know what he was, but he knew he was no hero.
“All right,” said Hester, understanding. It took time to get over things sometimes, she knew that. She would be patient with him. She said, “We’ll head for the Black Island. We can repair the Jenny at the air-caravanserai. And then we’ll take the Bird Roads and go somewhere far away. The Hundred Islands, or the Tannhauser Mountains, or the Southern Ice Waste. I don’t mind where. As long as I can come too.”
She knelt beside him, resting her arms on his knees and her head on her arms, and Tom found that he was smiling in spite of himself at her crooked smile. “You aren’t a hero, and I’m not beautiful, and we probably won’t live happily ever after,” she said. “But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am gratefully indebted to Leon Robinson and Brian Mitchell, who provided me with inspiration, encouragement and good ideas, to Mike Grant, who published my early efforts in his late lamented small-press magazine The Heliograph, and to Liz Cross, Kirsten Skidmore and Holly Skeet, without whose patience, enthusiasm and sound advice this book would have ended its days in my fireplace as a lot of very neatly typed kindling.
Philip Reeve