The carton leapt happily inside after them.
“Curdle?” whispered Zanna.
“Oh shut up,” said Deeba. “Just get on with being Shwazzed, will you?”
There were a few other passengers on the bottom deck, oddly dressed men and women and a few even odder other things. As they always did on buses, Zanna and Deeba headed for the staircase to the upper level. The conductor stopped them.
“Not this time,” he said. “Wait a bit.”
He rang the bell, and the bus moved. Obaday and Skool sat, but Zanna and Deeba stood next to Jones on the platform at the back.
“Our next stop’s Manifest Station,” he said. “We’re heading straight there.”
“Not straight there,” Deeba said. She pointed through the front window. “I mean, there’s a wall in the way.” They did not seem to be slowing down.
“We’re going to hit it,” said Zanna. The bus gunned straight for the bricks. Deeba and Zanna winced and closed their eyes.
“Hold tight, please,” Jones shouted.
There was a hissing sound, the flapping of heavy cloth, and the thrumming of ropes. Zanna and Deeba opened their eyes again, hesitantly.
A tarpaulin bulged from the bus’s roof like an enormous fungus. It inflated into a huge balloon, tethered by ropes from the upper windows. The bus sped up, and the rugby-ball-shaped balloon stretched longer than the vehicle beneath it.
There was a thump behind them, as if something had hit the vehicle’s rear, a scuffing like an animal ascending the metal. Deeba and Zanna turned in alarm, then gasped and rocked and held on, as with a stomach-jolting tug, the bus started to rise.
Dangling below the balloon, it passed over the wall, leaving a threadwork of streets and buildings below, ascending over UnLondon.
12. Safe Conduct
“It’s beautiful,” Zanna said.
The girls held on to the pole and leaned out over the roofs.
“God,” said Zanna. “My dad would be sick if he saw me doing this.”
“Eeurgh,” said Deeba. “Imagine.” She leaned over and made a puking noise. “It’d go everywhere.”
Conductor Jones stood on the platform with them, and they both knew somehow that if they were to slip, he’d be there to grab them.
The bus puttered low over the streets. Towers poked up around it. UnLondoners looked up and waved at it.
They passed squat tower blocks, arches of brick and stone, the hotchpotch slopes of roofs. There were stranger things, too: skyscraper-high chests of drawers in polished wood, spires like melting candles, houses like enormous hats and bats. Deeba pointed at gargoyles and pigeons on some of the houses, then started: some of the gargoyles were moving.
“Your eyes,” said Jones. “Bigger than fried eggs. I remember seeing it the first time.”
He pointed out landmarks to them.
“That’s Wraithtown, where the roofs flicker. That’s the market. Those windowless towers? Backwall Maze. That big fat chimney-thing? It’s the entrance to the library.”
“Why you here?” Zanna said.
“I couldn’t do this back in London, could I?” Jones held on to the pole with one hand and leaned out over the city. “Do you see that?” He pointed at a building made from typewriters and dead televisions.
“We saw one like that before,” Zanna said. “Obaday called it…what was it?”
“A moily house?” said Deeba.
“You’ll see a lot of moil technology here,” Jones said. “Em Oh Aye Ell. Mildly Obsolete In London. Throw something away and you declare it obsolete. You’ve seen an old computer, or a broken radio or whatever, left on the streets? It’s there for a few days, and then it’s just gone.
“Sometimes rubbish collectors have taken it, but often as not it ends up here, where people find other uses for it. It seeps into UnLondon. You might see residue: maybe a dried-up puddle on a wall. That’s where moil dripped through. And here, it sprouts like mushrooms on the streets.
“The money your friend has? All the out-of-date and foreign coins and notes Londoners throw away. A few years ago when Europe got rid of its old money and you were all left with loads of useless old bits and bobs, so much found its way down here we had too much, and that meant terrible inflation. We had to feed loads of it to the moolaphage…Anyway. That’s sort of how things get down here.
“You could say I was a bit like that,” he said thoughtfully. “Obsolete, they said. If you find just the right manhole you can get here. The hard part wasn’t coming through, it was getting the bus through.
“I always worked on the buses, back in London. You probably grown up paying the driver, right? Or travelcards? Didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that most of the buses in London had a driver and conductor.
“I’d take the money and give the tickets.” He patted the machine he wore. “It was quicker, because the driver didn’t have to deal with everyone. And it was safer. Two of us there, all the time. But they decided they could save money if they got rid of half of us. Of course it messed things up. But them who made the decision were people who never took buses, so they didn’t care.
“We knew what we did was important. Look in the dictionary. ‘Conduct: verb. To lead, control, or guide.’ Some of us weren’t prepared to stop being guides. We look after travelers. It’s…” Conductor Jones looked down, suddenly shy. “Some people say it’s a sacred duty.”
“UnLondon…Well, sometimes, it can be a dangerous place. We had to be really ready to conduct.” He tapped the weapon on his belt, pointed into the cabinet beside him, at a bow and arrow, and coils of wire. “The drivers who came down swore to get the passengers from where they are to where they want to go. And to protect them.”
“Protect them from what?” Zanna said.
“There’s the occasional skymugger,” Jones said. “Airsquid, though mostly they hunt high, where the deep-sky fisherfolk go. And there are other things. Conductors on other routes, if they’re real unlucky, sometimes get attacked by giraffes.”
The girls stared at each other.
“You’re the second person to say that,” Deeba said.
“I’ve seen giraffes,” Zanna said.
“They’re so not scary…” Deeba said.
“Ha!” The whole bus looked up at Jones’s laugh. “They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves! Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course.
“There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots. You’ll find pigs, dogs, frogs, everything else getting through to here, though. There’s a lot of traffic back and forth. They know when things are happening. They pass messages.”
“Zann,” said Deeba. “That makes sense. All those animals, they knew you were…whatever you are.”
“The Shwazzy,” said Zanna.
“But no cats,” Jones went on. “Too busy trying to look cool. Anyway. You know what the main danger is down here. And it’s a danger that’s been growing. For years.”
“The Smo—” Zanna said, and he put his finger quickly to his lips.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”
“But what is it?” she said. “What does it want?”
“Can’t talk about it here,” Jones whispered. “Better safe than. You know what I mean. The Propheseers’ll explain.