The stairs ended; the passage made a tight dog-leg and widened suddenly into the hangar. In the jitter of Hester’s torch-beam Tom glimpsed the Jenny Haniver ’s patched red envelope hanging above him. Hester found a panel of controls on the wall and pulled on one of the levers. Pulleys grumbled into life somewhere up on the dark roof and flakes of rust came showering down as wheels turned and hawsers tightened, heaving open the huge storm-doors at the hangar mouth. The widening gap revealed a narrow landing-apron jutting from the cliff outside, and fog, fog all around the Roost, a dense white dreamscape of hills and folds and billows veiling the sea. Above it the sky was clear, and the light of stars and dead satellites reached into the hangar, revealing the Jenny Haniver on her docking pan, revealing the line of bloody footprints on the concrete floor.
From the shadows under the Jenny ’s steering vanes stepped a tall shape, blocking the way back to the door. Two green eyes hung in the dark like fireflies.
“Oh Quirke!” Tom squeaked. “Is that — ? That’s not a — ? Is it?”
“It’s Miss Fang,” said Hester. “But she’s not herself.”
The Stalker walked forward into the spill of light from the open storm-doors. Faint reflections slithered over its long steel limbs, its armoured torso, the bronze mask of its face, glinting on small dents and scars which the Lost Boys’ useless bullets had made. Their blood still dripped from the Stalker’s claws and covered its hands and its forearms like long red gloves.
The Stalker had enjoyed the massacre in the Memory Chamber, but when the last of the Lost Boys was dead it had not known what to do next. The smell of gunsmoke and the muffled sounds of battle echoing down the corridors aroused its Stalkerish instincts, but it regarded the open door cautiously, remembering the electric barriers which had sprung up last time it tried to leave. At last it chose the other door, drawn by feelings it did not understand, down to the hangar and the old red airship that waited there. It had been circling the Jenny in the darkness, running its metal fingers over the grain of her gondola planking, when Hester and Tom came bursting in. Its claws sprang out again and the fierce yearning to kill crackled through its electric veins like a power-surge.
Tom turned, thinking to run out on to the apron, but crashed against Hester, who slipped on the bloody floor and went down hard. He bent down to help her, and suddenly the Stalker was standing over them.
“Miss Fang?” Tom whispered, looking up into that strange, familiar face.
The Stalker watched him crouching over the girl on the blood-speckled concrete, and a little meaningless flake of memory fluttered suddenly into the machinery of its brain, itchy and confusing. It hesitated, claws twitching. Where had it seen this boy before? He had not been among the portraits on the walls of its chamber, but it knew him. It remembered lying in snow with his face staring down. Behind the mask its dead lips shaped a name.
“Tom Nitsworthy?”
“Natsworthy,” said Tom.
That alien memory stirred again inside the Stalker’s skull. It did not know why this boy seemed so familiar, only that it did not want him to die. It took a step backwards, then another. Its claws slipped back into their sheaths.
“Anna!”
The voice, a brittle scream, echoed loudly in the cavernous hangar, making all three of them look towards the door. Sathya stood there, a lantern in one hand and her sword in the other, her face and hair still white with plaster-dust, blood dribbling from the wound on her head where shrapnel from the exploding duct had caught her. She set the lantern down and walked quickly towards her beloved Stalker. “Oh, Anna! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I should have known you’d be here, with the Jenny…”
The Stalker did not move, just swung its metal face to stare down at Tom again. Sathya stopped short, noticing for the first time the figures huddled at its feet. “You’ve caught them, Anna! Well done! They are enemies, in league with the intruders! They were your murderers! Kill them!”
“All enemies of the Green Storm must die,” agreed the Stalker.
“That’s right, Anna!” Sathya urged. “Kill them now! Kill them, like you killed those others!”
The Stalker put its head on one side. The green light from its eyes washed Tom’s face.
“Then I’ll do it!” Sathya shouted, striding forward, lifting her sword. The Stalker made a quick movement. Tom squealed in terror and felt Hester scrunch closer to him. Steel claws blazed in the lantern light, and Sathya’s sword clattered on the floor, her hand still wrapped around the hilt.
“No,” said the Stalker.
For a brief time there was silence, while Sathya stared at the blood which came in unbelievable jets from the stump of her arm. “Anna!” she whispered, falling to her knees, crumpling forward on to her face.
Tom and Hester watched, not speaking, not breathing, crouched as still and small as they could, as if in their stillness the Stalker might forget them. But it turned, gliding back towards them, and raised its dripping claws again. “Go,” it whispered, pointing towards the Jenny Haniver. “Go, and do not cross the path of the Green Storm again.”
Tom just stared, crouched against Hester, too scared to move, but Hester took the Stalker at its word and eased herself up and backwards, dragging him with her, urging him towards the airship. “Come on, for the gods’ sake! You heard what it said!”
“Thank you,” Tom managed to whisper, remembering his manners as they edged past the Stalker and up the Jenny ’s gangplank. The inside of the gondola smelled cold and strange after her long grounding, but when Hester switched on the engines they came sputtering to life with their old, familiar shudder, their roar filling the hangar. Tom eased himself into the pilot’s seat, trying not to look out at the thing which stood watching him, its armour gaudy with the green and red reflections of the running-lights.
“Is she really going to let us go?” he asked. His teeth were chattering, and he was trembling so violently that he could barely grip the controls. “Why? Why doesn’t she kill us like the others?”
Hester shook her head, switching on instruments, heaters. She was remembering Shrike, and the strange emotions which had prompted him to collect broken automata, or rescue a disfigured, dying child. But all she said was, “It’s an it, not a she, and we can’t know what it’s thinking. Just go, before it changes its mind.”
The clamps released, the pods swung into take-off position, and the Jenny lifted uncertainly from its pan and edged out into the night, grazing a vane on the hangar wall as it went. The Stalker walked out on to the landing-apron, and watched as the old airship pulled clear of Rogues’ Roost, dropping into the fog before the Green Storm’s rocket batteries could decide whether she were friend or foe. And again that strange half-memory brushed moth-like against the Stalker’s mind; the once-born called Tom kneeling over it in snow and saying, “Miss Fang! It’s not fair! He waited until you were dazzled!”
For a moment it felt an odd satisfaction, as though it had returned a favour.
“Which way?” asked Tom, when Rogues’ Roost was a mile behind him in the fog and he felt calm enough to speak again.
“North-west,” Hester replied. “Anchorage. I’ve got to go back there. A terrible thing’s happened.”
“Pennyroyal!” guessed Tom. “I know. I worked it out just before I left. There wasn’t time to tell anyone. You were right about him. I should have listened to you.”