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gasp.
    "There," said Mum gruffly. She seemed almost as shocked as Wren. She reached out to touch Wren's face, gently this time, but Wren whirled away from her and ran along the beach and into the cool shadows under Anchorage, running beneath the old city and out into the pastures behind, with her mother's voice somewhere behind her shouting
    furiously, "Wren! Come back! Get back here!" She kept to the woods so the pickers in the orchards wouldn't see her, and ran and ran, barely thinking about where she was running to, until she arrived tearful and out of breath among the crags at the top of the island, and there was Gargle, waiting for her.
    5 news from the Sea
    ***
    HE WAS ALL KINDNESS and concern, sitting her down on a mossy stone, taking off his neckerchief to wipe her face, holding her hand until she was calm enough to speak. "What is it, Wren? What's wrong?"
    "Nothing. Nothing really. My mum. That's all. I hate her."
    "Now, I'm certain that isn't true." Gargle knelt down beside her. She didn't think that he had looked anywhere but at her face since she'd found him, and his eyes, behind the smoked blue glasses that he wore, were a friend's eyes, kind and worried. "You're lucky to have a mum," he said. "We Lost Boys, we're just kidnapped when we're little. We none of us know who our mums or our dads are, though we dream about them sometimes, and think how sweet it would be if we could meet them. If your mum's hard on you, I think it's just a sign that she's worried about you."
    "You don't know her' said Wren, and held her breath to stop hiccuping. When she had finished, she said, "I saw the book."
    "The Tin Book?" Gargle sounded surprised, as if he'd been so worried about Wren that he'd forgotten the thing that had brought him to Vineland in the first place. "Thank you ' ." he said. "You've done in a morning what might have taken a limpet crew a week or more. Where is it?"
    "I don't know," said Wren. "I mean, I don't know if I should tell you. Not unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but ... why would anybody want it? What's it for?"
    Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the pines. Wren thought he looked angry and was afraid that she'd offended him, but when he turned to her again, he just seemed sad.
    "We're in trouble, Wren," he said. "You've heard of Professor Pennyroyal?"
    "Of course," said Wren. "He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to ruin. He stole Mum and Dad's airship and flew off in her...."
    "Well, he wrote a book about it," Gargle said. "It's called Predator's Gold, and in it he talks about what he calls 'parasite-pirates' who come up from under the ice to burgle cities. It's mostly rubbish, but it sold like hotcakes among the cities we used to live off of: the North Atlantic raft towns and the ice runners. They all started installing Old Tech burglar alarms and checking their undersides for parasites once a day, which makes it kind of hard to attach a limpet to them."
    Wren thought about Professor Pennyroyal. All her life
    she'd been hearing stories of that wicked man. She'd seen the long, L-shaped scar on Dad's chest where Mrs. Scabious had opened him up to fetch the bullet out. And now it turned out that the Lost Boys were Pennyroyal's victims too!
    "But I still don't see why you need the Tin Book," she said.
    "We've had to send our limpets farther and farther south," Gargle explained. "Right down into the Middle Sea and the Southern Ocean, where the raft cities don't bother to keep watch for us. At least they never used to. This past summer, we've started losing limpets. Three went south and never returned. No word, no distress signal, nothing. I think maybe one of those cities has got hold of some kind of device that lets them see us coming, and they've been sinking our limpets, or capturing them. And if some of our people are captured, and tortured, and talk ..."
    "They might come looking for Grimsby?"
    "Exactly." Gargle looked thoughtfully