Mortal Engines Read Online Free PDF Page A

their heads. He plunged through deep shadows and warm, blinding clouds of steam with the girl always a few feet ahead. A low duct caught her head-scarf and ripped it off. Her long hair was coppery in the dim glow of the furnaces, but Tom still couldn’t see her face. He wondered if she was pretty; a beautiful assassin from the Anti-Traction League.
    He ducked past the dangling head-scarf and ran on, gasping for breath, fumbling his collar open. Down a giddy spiral of iron stairs and out on to the floor of the Digestion Yards, flashing through the shadows of conveyor belts and huge spherical gas-tanks. A gang of convict labourers looked up in amazement as the girl raced by. “Stop her!” yelled Tom. They just stood gawping as he passed, but when he looked back he saw that one of the Apprentice Engineers who had been supervising them had broken off his work to join the chase. Tom immediately regretted shouting out. He wasn’t going to give up his victory to some stupid Engineer! He put on an extra spurt of speed, so that he should be the one who caught her.
    Ahead, the way was barred by a circular hole in the deckplate, ringed by rusty handrails – a waste chute, scorched and blackened where clinker from the furnaces had been tipped down. The girl broke her pace for a moment, wondering which way to turn. When she wenton, Tom had narrowed her lead. His outstretched fingers grabbed her pack; the strap broke and she stopped and spun to face him, lit by the red glare of the smelters.
    She was no older than Tom, and she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump and her single eye stared at him out of the wreckage, as grey and chill as a winter sea.
    “Why didn’t you let me kill him?” she hissed.
    He was so shocked that he couldn’t move or speak, could only stand there as the girl reached down for her fallen pack and turned to run on. But behind him police whistles were blowing, and crossbow darts came sparking against the metal deck-plates and the overhead ducts. The girl dropped the pack and fell sideways, gasping a filthy curse. Tom hadn’t even imagined that girls
knew
such words. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled, waving towards the policemen. They were lumbering down the spiral stair beyond the gas-tanks, shooting as they came, as if they didn’t much care that Tom was in the way. “Don’t shoot!”
    The girl scrambled up, and he saw that a crossbow-dart had gone through her leg just above the knee. She clutched at it, blood welling out between her fingers. Her breath came in sobs as she backed up against the handrail, lifting herself awkwardly over it. Behind her, the waste-chute gaped like an open mouth.
    “NO!” shouted Tom, seeing what she meant to do. He didn’t feel like a hero any more – he just felt sorry for this poor, hideous girl, and guilty at being the one who had trapped her here. He held out his hand to her,willing her not to jump. “I couldn’t let you hurt Mr Valentine!” he said, shouting to make her hear him above the din of the Gut. “He’s a good man, a kind, brave, wonderful…”
    The girl lunged forward, shoving her awful noseless face towards him. “Look at me!” she said, her voice all twisted by her twisted mouth. “Look what your brave, kind Valentine did to me!”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”
    The police were closer now; Tom could feel their footsteps drumming on the deck. The girl glanced past him, then heaved her wounded leg over the handrail, crying out at the pain. “No!” pleaded Tom again, but too late. Her ragged greatcoat snapped and fluttered and she was gone. He flung himself forward and peered down the shadowed chute. A cool blast of air came up at him, mingled with the smell of mud and crushed vegetation; the smell of