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

didn’t remember much. It was as if when he cut my head open some of my memories spilled out, and the rest got muddled about. But slowly I started remembering, and one day I remembered Valentine and what he’d done. That’s when I decided to come and find him. Kill him the same way he killed my mum and dad.”
    “What was this machine?” asked Tom, in the long silence. “This MEDUSA thing?”
    Hester shrugged. (It was too dark to see her by this time, but he
heard
her shrug, the hunch of her shoulders inside her filthy coat.) “Something my mum found. Old-Tech. It didn’t look important. Like a metal football, all bashed and dented. But that’s what he killed her for.”
    “Seven years ago,” whispered Tom. “That’s when Mr Valentine got made head of the Guild. They said he’d found something in the Out-Country and Crome was so pleased that he promoted him, straight over the heads of Chudleigh Pomeroy and all the rest. But I never heard what it was he’d found. And I never heard of a MEDUSA before.”
    Hester said nothing at all. After a few minutes she began to snore.
    Tom sat awake for a long time, turning her story over and over in his mind. He thought of the daydreams that had kept him going through long, tedious days in the Museum. He had dreamed of being trapped in the Out-Country with a beautiful girl, on the trail of some murderous criminal, but he had never imagined it would be so wet and cold, or that his legs would ache so, or that the murderer would be London’s greatest hero. And as for the beautiful girl…
    He looked at the blunt wreck of Hester Shaw’s face in the faint moonlight, scowling even in her sleep. He understood her better now. She hated Valentine, but she hated herself even more, for being so ugly, and for being still alive when her parents were dead. He remembered how he had felt when the Big Tilt happened, and he came home and found his house flattened and Mum and Dad gone. He had thought that it was all his fault somehow. He had felt full of guilt, because he had not been there to die with them.
    “I must help her,” he thought. “I won’t let her kill Mr Valentine, but I’ll find a way to get the truth out. If it
is
the truth. Maybe tomorrow London will have slowed down a bit and Hester’s leg will be better. We’ll be back in the city by sundown, and
somebody
will listen to us…”
     
    * * *
     
    But next morning they woke to find that the city was even further ahead, and Hester’s leg was worse. She moaned with pain at almost every step now; her face was the colour of old snow and fresh blood was soaking through her bandages and running down into her boot. Tom cursed himself for throwing those rags of shirt away, and for making Hester lose her pack, and her first-aid kit…
    In the middle of the morning, through shifting veils of rain, they saw something ahead of them. A pile of slag and clinker lay spilled across the track-marks, where London had vented it the day before. Drawn up beside it was a strange little town, and as they got closer Hester and Tom could see that people were scrambling up and down the spoil-heap, sifting out collops of melted metal and fragments of unburnt fuel.
    The sight gave them hope and they pressed forward faster. By early afternoon they were walking under the shadow of the townlet’s huge wheels, and Tom was staring up in amazement at its single tier. It was smaller than a lot of the houses in London, and it appeared to have been built out of wood by somebody whose idea of good carpentry was to bang a couple of nails in and hope for the best. Behind the shed-like town hall rose the huge, crooked chimneys of an experimental engine array.
    “Welcome!” shouted a tall, white-bearded man, picking his way down the clinker-heap, grubby brown robes flapping. “Welcome to Speedwell. I am Orme Wreyland, Mayor. Do you speak Anglish?”
    Hester hung back suspiciously, but Tom thought the old man looked friendly enough. He stepped forward and