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It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring,
The night was moist. 😝
He cut through the Twenty-First Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America. He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War.
It was natural that cities ate towns, just as the towns ate smaller towns, and smaller towns snapped up the miserable static settlements. That was Municipal Darwinism, and it was the way the world had worked for a thousand years, ever since the great engineer Nikolas Quirke had turned London into the first Traction City.
giddy
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 gray and chill as a winter sea.
her voice all twisted by her twisted mouth.
rents
“My mum used to say Traction Cities are stupid. She said there was a reason for them a thousand years ago when there were all those earthquakes and volcanoes and the glaciers pushing south. Now they just keep rolling around and eating each other ’cos people are too stupid to stop them.”
Dunroamin’.
He glanced
Past tense
Magnus Crome hears them
Present tense
Katherine shivered. “But there must be some other solution,” she protested. “Can’t we talk to the Lord Mayors of other cities and work something out?” He laughed gently. “I’m afraid Municipal Darwinism doesn’t work like that, Kate. It’s a town-eat-town world.
Beefburgers.”
“Beefeaters,”
Because that was the worst thing about the Stalkers: They had been human once, and somewhere beneath that iron cowl a human brain was trapped.
Something was trickling down his legs, as hot as spilled tea, and he realized that he had wet himself.
Soon Airhaven was a doughnut of darkness falling away behind them and below, and Shrike was just a speck, his green eyes glowing as he stalked out along the strut to watch them go.
Europe. It was they who had built the Stalkers, dragging dead warriors off the battlefields and bringing them back to a sort of life by wiring weird old-tech machines into their nervous systems.
scudded
Why he bothered to rescue her Hester never did discover.
needs comma
Did she remind him of the wounds that he had suffered on the battlefields of forgotten wars, when he had still been human?
tetchy
Then there were only the night and the cold wind, and rags of moonlight prowling the broken hills.
He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile but had read a book on how to do it.
She remembered how, as she ran toward the waste chutes on the night Tom fell, she had passed someone heading in the other direction: a young Apprentice Engineer, looking so white and shocked that she was sure he must have witnessed what happened.
Here they had to keep making detours around bogs and pools of brackish water, and although they sometimes stumbled into the deep, weed-choked scars of old town-tracks it was clear that no town had been this way for many years.
I feel as though this should have been two sentences. It felt clunky to me.
He was recalling the huge map of the Hunting Ground that hung in the lobby of the London Museum, and the great sweep of marsh-country that stretched all the way from the central mountains to the shores of the Sea of Khazak, mile after mile of reedbeds and thin blue creeks and all of it marked, Unsuitable for Town or City.
This mega-sentence feels as though it should have been broken up into smaller sentences. It was kinda clunky.
Rustwater Marshes.
These marshes would be the bogs, I'm thinking, so they would be in gander themselves of being swallowed by the bog and I get no sense of tension from that being a possibility.
He wished Shrike had gotten her and it was Miss Fang or Khora whom he had escaped with. They would have let him rest his aching feet….
Once-born?
The Stalker was moving carefully over the wet ground.
In a marsh or bog, would a heavy android not sink down into the soft ground? If a person could sink in a masrsh or bog why not a Stalker much easier sink? How heavy is a Stalker?
but she knew that she had do what she had come here for,
“Meals on wheels!” the pirates howled.
“Oh, great Quirke!” Tom whispered. “This is horrible! They’re breaking every rule of Municipal Darwinism….”
“What did you expect? They strip their prey as quickly as they can and make the captives slaves in their engine rooms. They don’t waste food and space on people who are too weak to work. It’s not really so different from what your precious London gets up to. At least this lot have the honesty to call themselves pirates.”
Wait and sea, ha ha ha ha!” And he slapped Tom on the back and swigged his tea, his little finger delicately raised.
slurry-pit stink of Section 60.
All she could think of were the thousands of Londoners who were toiling and dying in misery so that a few lucky, wealthy people like herself could live in comfort.
“But that’s horrible!” protested Katherine. “London would be a city of the dead!” Bevis Pod shrugged. “Down in the Deep Gut it feels like that already. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.
There is a certain quality of London that represents a heaven, hell, purgatory dynamic. The lower tiers aren't quite hell, but they aren't the upper tier either. Eat the Rich!
Hands clutched at the sides of the raft and Mungo and Peavey beat them away. Frantic figures came splashing through the swell toward them, and Janny Maggs stood up and fired her machine gun, churning up red water all around the raft.
The sounds of the gulls and the wind fade, replaced by the dim hiss of the underneath of the sea.
Box! Fish, Plankton, Protien from the sea!
Anyway, I thought you realized she was a spy.” “She didn’t look like one.” “Well, spies don’t, generally. You can’t expect them to wear a big sandwich board with
SPY on it, or a special spying hat.”
The lands beyond it, with all their huge static cities, their crops and forests, their untapped mineral wealth, will become London’s new hunting ground!”
And if you had seen your family slave to death aboard a ruthless city, might you not have decided to help the League in its fight against Municipal Darwinism?”
Tom was amazed. Could the Lord Mayor really have found a way to breach the League’s borders? If so, it was the best news for years! As for going to Shan Guo, that was the heart of the Anti-Traction League, the last place in the world a decent Londoner should go. “I won’t do anything to help you harm London,” he told her. “It’s still my home.”
Valentine! Tom felt a strange mix of pride and fear at the thought of the Head Historian on the loose here in the very heart of Shan Guo.
Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected, like an Apprentice Engineer?
Tom didn’t know what to feel. He was frightened, of course, to be so close to the man who had tried to murder him, but at the same time he was thrilled by Valentine’s daring. What courage it must have taken, to sneak into the great stronghold of the League, under the very noses of London’s enemies! It was the sort of adventure that Valentine had written about, in books that Tom had read again and again, huddled under the blankets in the Third Class Apprentices’ dorm with a flashlight, long after lights-out.
The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.
