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mind whirling faster than one of the tumble-dryers in the London Museum’s Hall of Ancient Technology.
    Back in her room she sat down to wonder about the things she had heard. She had hoped to solve a mystery, but instead it had grown deeper. All she was sure of was that Father had a secret. He had never kept anything from her before. He always told her everything, and asked her opinion, and wanted her advice, but now he was whispering with the Lord Mayor about the girl being “
a ghost from his past”
and some agent being sent back to look for her and do… what? Could Tom and the assassin really still be alive? And why was the Lord Mayor packing Father off on a reconnaissance flight amid such secrecy? And why didn’t he want to say where London was going? And what, what on earth was
MEDUSA?

6. SPEEDWELL
    All that day they struggled onwards, trudging along in the scar that London had clawed through the soft earth of the Hunting Ground. The city was never out of their sight, but it grew smaller and smaller, more and more distant, pulling away from them towards the east, and Tom realized that it might soon be lost for ever beyond the horizon. Loneliness wrenched at him. He had never much enjoyed his life as an Apprentice Historian (Third Class), but now his years in the Museum felt like a beautiful, golden dream. He found himself missing fussy old Dr Arkengarth and pompous Chudleigh Pomeroy. He missed his bunk in the draughty dormitory and the long hours of work, and he missed Katherine Valentine, although he had known her for only a few minutes. Sometimes, if he closed his eyes, he could see her face quite clearly, her kind grey eyes and her lovely smile. He was sure that she didn’t know what sort of man her father was…
    “Watch where you’re going!” snapped Hester Shaw, and he opened his eyes and realized that he had almost led her over the brink of one of the gaping track-marks. On they went, and on, and Tom started to think that what he missed most about his city was the food. It had never been up to much, the stuff they served in the Guild canteen, but it was better than nothing, and nothing was what he had now. When he asked Hester Shaw what they were supposed to live on out here she just said, “I bet you wish you hadn’t lost my pack for me now, London boy. I had some good dried dog meat in my pack.”
    In the early afternoon they came across a few dull, greyish bushes that London’s tracks had not quite buried, and Hester tore some leaves off and mashed them to a pulp between two stones. “They’d be better cooked,” she said, as they ate the horrid vegetable goo. “I had the makings of a fire in my pack.”
    Later, she caught a frog in one of the deep pools that were already forming in the chevroned track-prints. She didn’t offer Tom any, and he tried not to watch while she ate it.
    He still did not know what to make of her. She was silent mostly, and glared so fiercely at him when he tried to talk to her that he quickly learned to walk in silence too. But sometimes, quite suddenly, she would start talking. “The land’s rising,” she might say. “That means London’11 go slower. It would waste fuel, going full speed on an uphill stretch.” Then, an hour or two later, “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.”
    Tom liked it when she talked, even though he did think that her mum sounded like a dangerous Anti-Tractionist. But when he tried to keep the conversation going she would go quiet again, and her hand would go up to hide her face. It was as if there were two Hesters sharing the same thin body; one a grim avenger who thought only of killing Valentine, the other a quick, clever, likeable girl whom he sometimes sensed peeking out at him from