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

murdered and poor Katherine left without a father… But he
had
to catch up with London somehow, and he couldn’t do it alone. And anyway, he felt responsible for Hester Shaw. It was his fault that she had been wounded, after all. “I’ll help you walk,” he said. “You’re injured. You need me.”
    “I don’t need anybody,” she said fiercely.
    “We’ll go after London together,” Tom promised. “I’m a member of the Guild of Historians. They’ll listen to me. I’ll tell Mr Pomeroy. If Valentine really did the things you said then the law will deal with him!”
    “The
law!”
she scoffed. “Valentine is the law in London. Isn’t he the Lord Mayor’s favourite? Isn’t he the Head Historian? No, he’ll kill me unless I kill him first. Kill you too, probably.
Ssshinnng!”
She mimed drawing a sword and driving it through Tom’s chest.
    The sun was rising, lifting wreaths of steam from the wet mud. London was still moving, visibly smaller since the last time he looked. The city usually stopped for a few days when it had eaten, and some part of Tom’s brain that was not quite numb wondered idly, Where on earth is it going?
    But just then the girl stumbled and fell, her bad leg crumpling under her. Tom scrambled to help her up. She didn’t thank him, but she didn’t push him away either. He pulled her arm around his shoulders and hauled her up, and they set off together along the mud ridge, following London’s tracks into the east.

5. THE LORD MAYOR
    A hundred miles ahead the sunrise shone on Circle Park, the elegant loop of lawns and flower-beds that encircled Tier One. It gleamed in ornamental lakes and on pathways glistening with dew, and it glittered on the white metal spires of Clio House, Valentine’s villa, which stood among dark cedars at the park’s edge like some gigantic conch shell abandoned by a freak high tide.
    In her bedroom on the top floor Katherine awoke and lay watching the sunbeams filter through the tortoise-shell shutters on her window. She knew she was unhappy, but at first she did not know why.
    Then she remembered the previous evening; the attack in the Gut and how that poor, sweet, young apprentice had chased after the assassin and got himself killed. She had gone running after Father, but by the time she reached the waste-chute it was all over; a young Apprentice Engineer was stumbling away, his shocked face as white as his rubber coat, and beyond him she found Father, looking pale and angry, surrounded by policemen. She had never seen him look like that before, nor heard the harsh, unnatural voice in which he snapped at her to go straight home.
    Part of her just wanted to curl up and go back to sleep, but she had to see him and make sure he was all right. She flung back the quilt and got up, pulling on the clothes from last night that lay all crumpled on the floor, still smelling of furnaces.
    Outside her bedroom door a hallway sloped gently downward, round-roofed, curling about on itself like the inside of an ammonite. She hurried down it, pausing to pay her respects before the statue of Clio, goddess of History, who stood in a niche outside the door to the dining room. In other niches lay treasures that her father had brought back from his expeditions; potsherds, fragments of computer keyboards and the rusting metal skulls of Stalkers, those strange, half-mechanical soldiers from a forgotten war. Their cracked glass eyes stared balefully at Katherine as she hurried by.
    Father was drinking coffee in the atrium, the big open space at the centre of the house. He was still in his dressing-gown, his long face serious as he paced up and down between the potted ferns. A glance at his eyes was enough to tell Katherine that he had not slept at all. “Father?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
    “Oh, Kate!” He came and hugged her tight. “What a night!”
    “That poor boy,” Katherine whispered. “Poor Tom! I suppose they didn’t…
find
anything?”
    Valentine shook