Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve Read Free Book Online

behind that scarred mask. He wondered if she was slightly mad. It would be enough to send anyone mad, seeing your parents murdered.
    “How did it happen?” he asked her gently. “I mean, your mum and dad, are you sure it was Valentine who-?”
    “Shut up and walk,” she said.
    But long after dark, as they huddled in a hollow of the mud to escape the chill night wind, she suddenly started telling him her story.
    “I was born on the bare earth,” she said, “but it wasn’t like this. I lived on Oak Island, in the far west. It used to be a part of the Hunting Ground once, but the earthquakes drowned all the land around and made an island of it, too far off-shore for any hungry city to attack, and too rocky for the amphibious towns to get at. It was lovely; green hills and great outcrops of stone and the streams running through tangly oak woods, all grey with lichen—the trees shaggy with it, like old dogs.”
    Tom shuddered. Every Londoner knew that only savages lived on the bare earth. “I prefer a nice firm deckplate under me,” he said, but Hester didn’t seem to hear him; the words kept spilling out of her twisted mouth as if she had no choice in the matter.
    “There was a town there called Dunroamin’. It was mobile once, but the people got sick of running all the time from bigger towns, so they floated it across to Oak Island and took its wheels and engines off and dug it into a hillside. It’s been sitting there a hundred years or more, and you’d never know it used to move at all.”
    “But that’s awful!” Tom gasped. “It’s downright Anti-Tractionist!”
    “My mum and dad lived down the road a way,” she went on, talking straight over him. “They had a house on the edge of the moor, where the sea comes in. Dad was a farmer, and Mum was a historian like you—only a lot cleverer than you, of course. She flew off each summer in her airship, digging for Old-Tech, but in the autumn she’d come home. I used to go up to her study in the attic on winter’s nights and eat cheese on toast and she’d tell me about her adventures.
    “And then one night, seven years ago, I woke up late and there were voices up in the attic arguing. So I went up the ladder and looked, and Valentine was there. I knew him, because he was Mum’s friend and used to drop in on us when he was passing. Only he wasn’t being very friendly that night. ‘Give me the machine, Pandora,’ he kept saying. ‘Give me MEDUSA.’ He didn’t see me watching him. I was at the top of the ladder, looking into the attic, too scared to go up and too scared to go back. Valentine had his back to me and Mum was stood facing him, holding this machine, and she said, ‘Damn you, Thaddeus, I found it, it’s
mine!
’
    “And then Valentine drew his sword and he … and he…”
    She paused for breath. She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backwards to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star-charts like the map of a new constellation.
    “And then he turned round and saw me watching, and he came at me and I dived back so his sword only cut my face, and I fell back down the ladder. He must have thought he’d killed me. I heard him go to Mum’s desk and start rustling through the papers there, and I got up and ran. Dad was lying on the kitchen floor; he was dead too. Even the dogs were dead.
    “I ran out of the house and saw Valentine’s great black ship moored at the end of the garden with his men waiting. They came after me, but I escaped. I ran down to the boathouse and shoved off in Dad’s skiff. I think I meant to go round to Dunroamin’ and get help—I was only little, and I thought a doctor could help Mum and Dad. But I was so weak with the pain and all the blood… I untied the boat somehow, and the current swept it out, and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the shores of the Hunting Ground.
    “I lived in the Out-Country after that. At first I