Mortal Engines Read Online Free PDF Page B

been a mistake. I slipped, and he tried to grab me, that’s what must have happened.
    Hester Shaw finished her bandaging and stood up, grunting at the pain as she pulled her filthy, blood-stiffened breeches on over the wound. Then she threw what was left of Tom’s shirt back at him, a useless rag. “You should have let me kill him,” she said, and turned away, setting off with a kind of furious limp up the long curve of the mud.
    Tom watched her go, too shocked and bewildered to move. It was only when she vanished over the top of the slope that he realized he didn’t want to be left alone here; he would prefer any company, even hers, to the silence.
    He flung the torn shirt away and ran after her, slithering in the thick, clagging mud, stubbing his toes on fragments of rock and torn-up roots. The deep, sheer-walled trench yawned on his left, and as he reached the crest of the rise he realized that it was just one of a hundred identical trenches; the huge track-marks of London stretching ruler-straight into the distance. Far, far ahead he saw his city, dark against the brightening eastern sky, wrapped in the smoke of its own engines. He felt the cold tug of homesickness. Everyone he had ever known was aboard that dwindling mountain, everyone exceptHester, who was stomping angrily after it, dragging her injured leg behind her.
    “Stop!” he shouted, half-running, half-wading to catch her up. “Hester! Miss Shaw!”
    “Leave me alone!” she snapped.
    “But where are you going?”
    “I’ve got to get back into London, haven’t I?” she said. “Two years it took me to find it, trudging across the Out-Country on foot, jumping aboard little townlets in the hope it would be London that scoffed them. And when I finally get there and find Valentine, come down to strut round the yards just like the scavengers told me he would, what happens? Some idiot stops me from cutting his heart out like he deserves.” She stopped walking and turned to face Tom. “If you hadn’t shoved your oar in he’d be dead, and I’d have fallen down and died beside him and I’d be at peace by now!”
    Tom stared at her, and before he could stop himself his eyes filled with stinging tears. He hated himself for looking like a fool in front of Hester Shaw, but he couldn’t help it; the shock of what had happened to him and the thought of being abandoned out here overwhelmed him, and the hot tears flooded down his face and cut white runnels through the mud on his cheeks.
    Hester, who had been on the point of turning away, stopped and watched, as if she wasn’t sure what was happening to him. “You’re crying!” she said at last, quite gently, sounding surprised.
    “Sorry,” he sniffed.
    “I never cry. I can’t. I didn’t even cry when Valentine murdered my mum and dad.”
    “What?” Tom’s voice was all wobbly from weeping. “Mr Valentine would never do something like that!Katherine said he couldn’t even bring himself to shoot a wolf cub. You’re lying!”
    “How come you’re here, then?” she asked, mocking him. “He shoved you out after me, didn’t he? Just because you’d seen me.”
    “You’re lying!” said Tom again. But he remembered those big hands thrusting him forward; remembered falling, and the strange light that had shone in the archaeologist’s eyes.
    “Well?” asked Hester.
    “He pushed me!” murmured Tom, amazed.
    Hester Shaw just shrugged, as if to say,
See? See what he’s really like?
Then she turned away and started walking again.
    Tom hurried along at her side. “I’ll come with you! I’ve got to get back to London, too! I’ll help you!”
    “You?” She gave a hissing laugh and spat on the mud at his feet. “I thought you were Valentine’s man. Now you want to help me kill him?”
    Tom shook his head. He didn’t know what he wanted. Part of him still clung to the hope that it was all a misunderstanding and Valentine was good and kind and brave. He certainly didn’t want to see him