Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines Read Online Free PDF Page A

smell of the speeding earth beneath the city.
    “No!”
    She had jumped! She had jumped right out of the city to her death!
Hester Shaw.
He would have to remember that name, and say a prayer for her to one of London’s many gods.
    Shapes loomed out of the drifting smoke. The policemen were advancing cautiously, like watchful crabs, and Valentine was with them, running ahead. In the shadows under a gas-tank Tom saw the young Engineer looking on, shocked. Tom tried to smile at him, but his face felt frozen, and the next moment another thick swag of smoke had folded over him, blotting out everything.
    “Tom! Are you all right?” Valentine ran up, barely winded by the long chase. “Where is she? Where is the girl?”
    “Dead,” Tom said lamely.
    Valentine stood beside him at the handrail and peered over. The shadows of the drifting smoke moved over his face like cobwebs. There was a strange light in his eyes, and his face was tight and white and frightened. “Did you see her, Tom? Did she have a scar?”
    “Yes,” said Tom, wondering how Valentine could know that. “It was horrible! Her eye was gone, and her nose…” Then he remembered the terrible thing the girl had told him. “And she said…” But he wasn’t sure if he should tell Mr Valentine what she had said—it was a lie, insane. “She said her name was Hester Shaw.”
    “Great Quirke!” hissed Valentine, and Tom flinched backwards, wishing he had never mentioned it. But when he looked up again Valentine was smiling kindly at him, his eyes full of sorrow. “Don’t worry, Tom,” he said. “I’m sorry. …”
    Tom felt a big, gentle hand on his shoulder and then -he was never sure quite how it happened—a twist, a shove, and he was pitching over the handrail and falling, just as Hester Shaw had fallen, flailing wildly for a hold on the smooth metal at the brim of the waste chute.
He pushed me!
he thought, and it was more amazement that he felt than fear as the black throat swallowed him down into the dark.

4. THE OUT-COUNTRY
    Silence. Silence. He couldn’t understand it. Even when London wasn’t moving there was usually some sort of noise in the dormitory; the whirr of ventilators, the hum and rattle of distant elevator shafts, the snores of other apprentices in the neighbouring bunks. But now—silence. His head ached. In fact, all of him ached. His bunk felt strange, too, and when he moved his hands there was something cold and slimy that oozed between his fingers like…
    MUD! He sat up, gasping. He wasn’t in the Third Class dormitory at all. He was lying on a great humpbacked mound of mud, on the edge of a deep trench, and in the thin, pearl-grey light of dawn he could see the girl with the ruined face sitting nearby. His horrible dream of sliding down that fire-blackened chute had been true: he had fallen out of London, and he was alone with Hester Shaw on the bare earth!
    He moaned in terror, and the girl glanced quickly round at him and then away. “You’re alive, then,” she said. “I thought you’d died.” She sounded as if she didn’t much care either way.
    Tom scrambled up on to all fours, so that only his knees and his toes and the palms of his hands were touching the mud. His arms were bare, and when he looked down he saw that his bruised body was naked to the waist. His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn’t find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg.
    “Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!”
    “So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.”
    He pulled his tunic on. It was tattered and filthy from his fall down the waste-chute, full of rents that let the chill Out-Country air through. He hugged himself, shivering.
Valentine pushed me! He pushed me and I fell down the shaft into the Out-Country! He pushed me… No, he can’t have done. It must have