Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve Page B

breeches, and said, “I thought they all died hundreds of years ago! I thought they were all destroyed in battles, or went mad and tore themselves apart…”
    “Not Shrike,” said Hester.
    “And he knew you!”
    “Of course he did,” she said. “We’re old friends, Shrike and me.”
     
    * * *
     
    She had met him the morning after her parents died, the morning when she woke up on the shores of the Hunting Ground in the whispering rain. She had no idea how she came to be there, and the pain in her head was so bad that she could barely move or think.
    Drawn up nearby was the smallest, filthiest town that she had ever seen. People with big wicker baskets on their backs were coming down out of it on ladders and gangplanks and sifting through the flotsam on the tide-line before returning with their baskets full of scrap and driftwood. A few were carrying her father’s rowing boat away, and it wasn’t long before some of them discovered Hester. Two men came and looked down at her. One was a typical scavenger, small and filthy, with bits of an old bug piled in his basket. After he had peered at her for a while he stepped back and said to his companion, “Sorry, Mr Shrike—I thought she might be one for your collection, but she’s flesh and blood all right. …”
    He turned and stumped away across the steaming garbage, losing all interest in Hester. He only wanted stuff he could he could sell, and there was no value in a half-dead child. Old bug tyres, now—
those
were worth something…
    The other man stayed where he was, looking down at Hester. It was only when he reached down and touched her face and she felt the cold, hard iron beneath his gloves that she realized he was not really a man at all. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a wire brush being scraped across a blackboard. “YOU CAN’T STAY HERE, CHILD,” he said, and picked her up and slung her over his shoulder and took her aboard the town.
    It was called Strole, and it was home to fifty tough, dust-hardened scavengers who robbed Old-Tech sites when they could find them and scrounged salvage from the leavings of larger towns when they could not. Shrike lived with them, but he was no scavenger. When criminals from one of the great Traction Cities escaped into the Out-Country, Shrike would track them and cut off their heads, which he carefully preserved. When he crossed that city’s path again he would take the head to the authorities, and collect his reward.
    Why he bothered to rescue her Hester never did discover. It could not have been out of pity, for he had none. The only sign of tenderness she ever saw in him was when he busied himself with his collection. He was fascinated by old automata and mechanical toys, and he would buy any that passing scavengers brought to him. His ramshackle quarters in Strole were full of them: animals, knights in armour, clockwork soldiers with keys in their backs, even a life-size Angel of Death pulled from some elaborate clock. But his favourites were all women or children: beautiful ladies in moth-eaten gowns and pretty girls and boys with porcelain faces. All night long Shrike would patiently dismantle and repair them, exploring the intricate escapements of their hearts as if searching for some clue to the workings of his own.
    Sometimes it seemed to Hester that she too was part of his collection. Did she remind him of the wounds that he had suffered on the battlefields of forgotten wars, when he had still been human?
    She shared his home for five long years, while her face healed badly into a permanent ruined scowl and her memories came slowly back to her. Some were startl-ingly clear, the waves on the shores of Oak Island, her mum’s voice, the moor-wind with its smells of wet grass and the dung of animals. Others were murky and hard to understand; they flashed into her mind just as she was falling asleep, or caught her unawares while she wandered amongst the silent mechanical figures in Shrike’s house. Blood