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Tom, still thinking about Hester, scrabbled for an answer. He remembered Pennyroyal shouting something about the Green Storm during that chase above the Tannhausers, but so much had happened since that he could barely recall a word of it. “Not really,” he said.

“Well, they’ve heard of you,” said Uncle, leaning forward in his chair. “Why else would they have hired a spy to keep watch for your airship? And why else would your girlie be their house guest?”

“Hester is with them?” gasped Tom. “You’re sure?”

“That’s what I said, ain’t it?” Uncle sprang up again, rubbing his hands together, cracking the joints of his fingers as he circled Tom. “Though ‘house guest’ isn’t quite the phrase I’m looking for, perhaps. She ain’t comfortable exactly. Ain’t happy, exactly. Stuck in a cell, all alone. Taken out now and then for who knows what — questionings, torturings…”

“But how did she come there? Why? What do they want with her?” Tom was flustered, not sure if Uncle was telling the truth or having some sort of joke at his expense. All he could think of was Hester, imprisoned, suffering. “I can’t stay here!” he said. “I must get to this Roost place, try and help her…”

Uncle’s smile came back. “Of course you must, dear boy. That’s why I brought you down here, isn’t it? We got common interests, you and me. You’re going to go and save your poor girlie from the Roost. And me and my boys are going to help you.”

“Why?” asked Tom. He had a trusting nature — too trusting by half, Hester always used to say — but he was not so naive that he trusted Uncle. “Why would you want to help me and Hester? What’s in it for you?”

“Ooh, good question!” Uncle chuckled, rubbing his hands together, knuckles cracking like a string of squibs. “Come, let’s eat. Dinner is served in the Map Room. Caul, my boy, you come with us. Skewer, lose yourself.”

Skewer slunk out like a naughty dog, and Uncle ushered the others out of the chamber of screens by a back way, up twining staircases to a room lined from floor to rafters with wooden shelves. Rolled and folded maps had been crammed tightly into every chink of space, and sad, pasty-looking boys — failed burglars, barred from limpet-work — clambered from shelf to shelf, locating the charts and street-plans which Uncle needed to prepare fresh burglaries, replacing those he’d finished with. This is where poor little Gargle will end up, thought Caul, for he knew that after the reports he’d had from Anchorage Uncle would never send the boy out burgling again. It made him sad for a moment, imagining how the rest of Gargle’s life would be spent bird’s-nesting among these cliffs of parchment or tinkering with Uncle’s spy-cameras.

Uncle settled himself at the head of the table, switching on a little portable goggle-screen beside his plate so that he could keep watch on his boys even while he ate. “Sit down!” he cried, gesturing generously at the food laid out on the table, the waiting chairs. “Eat! Eat!”

There was nothing to eat in Grimsby except what the Lost Boys stole, and the Lost Boys stole only what boys who have no one to nag them about balanced diets and no-snacks-between-meals eat. Sugary biscuits, cheap, soapy chocolate, bacon sandwiches oozing grease, thin rounds of algae bread smeared thick with garish spreads, glasses of ill-chosen wine that kicked like airship fuel. The only concession to healthy eating was a tureen of boiled spinach in the centre of the table. “I always make sure the boys bring back a bit of greenstuff,” explained Uncle, dishing up. “Helps keep the scurvy at bay.” It spattered on to Tom’s plate like something dredged from a blocked sump.

“So why am I helping you, you ask,” said Uncle, eating quickly and talking with his mouth full, his eyes darting constantly to his goggle-screen. “Well, Tom, the fact is this. It ain’t so easy to spy on a place like Rogues’ Roost as it is aboard a city. We’ve had a listening post set up there for months, and we still don’t know what the Green Storm are up to. They’re serious bunnies. We can barely get any crab-cams inside, and I daren’t send one of my boys in; nine chances out of ten he’d be picked up by the sentries. So I thought I’d send you instead. You get a chance to rescue Hester, and I get to learn a bit about the Roost.”

Tom stared at him. “But your boys are trained burglars! If they can’t go in without getting caught, what makes you think I can?”

Uncle laughed. “If you got caught, it wouldn’t matter. Not to me. I’d still learn a lot about their security from watching how you got on, and if they questioned you you couldn’t give away any of my secrets. You don’t know where Grimsby lies. You don’t know how many limpets I’ve got. And they probably wouldn’t believe you anyway. It’ll just look as if you were acting alone, out of love for your girlie. How sweet!”

“It sounds as if you’re expecting them to catch me,” said Tom.

“Not expecting, exactly,” Uncle protested. “But we have to be prepared for all eventualities, Tom. With a bit of luck, and some help from my boys, you’ll get in, get the girl, get out, and we’ll all be sitting round this table again in a few days’ time listening to Hester tell us why the Green Storm are getting all secret and military on my patch.”

He stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth and turned back to his screen, flicking idly from channel to channel. Caul stared unhappily at his plate, shocked at what Uncle was suggesting. It sounded as if he just meant to use Tom as a sort of expendable, two-legged crab-cam…

“I won’t go!” said Tom.

“But Tom!” cried Uncle, looking up.

“How can I? I want to help Hester, but it would be madness! This Rogues’ Roost place sounds like a fortress! I’m a historian, not a commando!”

“But you’ve got to go,” said Uncle. “Because it’s Hester in there. I’ve read Caul and Skewer’s sad little reports about you. The way you love her. The way you’ve tortured yourself since you drove her away. Think how much worse it’ll be if you don’t try to save her now you’ve got the chance. She ’s probably being tortured for real. I don’t like to imagine the things those Green Storm are doing to her. They blame her for murdering old Anna Fang, you know.”

“But that’s not fair! It’s ridiculous!”

“Maybe that’s so. Maybe that’s what poor Hester’s telling the Green Storm interrogators right now. But I don’t suppose they believe her. And even if they do eventually decide she’s innocent, they’re hardly going to send her on her way with an apology, are they? It’ll be a bullet in the head and over the cliffs with her. Can you picture that, Tom? Good. Get used to it. If you don’t try and help her, you’ll be seeing it every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life.”

Tom pushed back his chair and strode away from the table. He wanted to find a window, to look at something other than Uncle’s leering, knowing face, but there were no windows in the Map Room and nothing to look out at anyway except cold water and the roofs of a drowned city.

On a board near the door a huge chart had been pinned up, showing Rogues’ Roost and the trenches and ridges of the sea floor around it. Tom stared at it, wondering where Hester was, what was happening to her among those little squares of buildings marked in blue on the island’s summit. He shut his eyes, but she was waiting for him in the dark behind his eyelids just as Uncle had promised.

It was all his fault. If he hadn’t kissed Freya, Het would never have flown off like that, never been captured by the agents of the Green Storm. Freya was in danger too, but she was far away and there was nothing he could do to help her or her city. He could help Hester though. He had one chance in ten of helping Hester.