“What if more Drys come?” asked the other Lost Boy, who wasn’t a boy, Wren noticed, but a girl, pretty and sullen-looking. “What if Caul raises the alarm?”
“Caul gave us his promise,” said Gargle. “That’s good enough for me.”
The girl glared at Wren, not convinced. The short black jerkin that she wore hung open, and there was a gun stuffed through her belt. don’t have a choice, thought Wren. I’ll have to trust Gargle. And once she had decided that, it was an easy thing to walk up the ramp into the cold blue belly of the limpet. After all, if Gargle had wanted to murder her, he could have done it just as easily on the beach.
She was taken aft into what she guessed was Gargle’s private cabin, where hangings hid the dull steel walls and there were books and trinkets laid about. A joss stick smoldered, masking the mildew-and-metal smell of the limpet with another smell that made Wren think of sophisticated people and far-off places. She sat down in a chair while Gargle settled himself on the bunk. The girl waited at the bulkhead door, still glaring. The little boy Wren had seen through the window stood behind her, watching Wren with wide, astonished eyes until Gargle said, “Back to your post, Fishcake.”
“But…”
“Now!”
The boy scampered off. Gargle gave Wren a wry smile. “I’m sorry about that. Fishcake’s a newbie, ten years old and fresh from the Burglarium. He’s never seen a Dry before, except on the crab-cam screens. And you such a pretty one too.”
Wren blushed and looked down at the floor, where her boots were leaking muddy water over Gargle’s rich Stamboul rugs. The Burglarium was where the Lost Boys were trained, she remembered. They were kidnapped from the underdecks of raft towns when they were too young to even know it, taken down to the sunken city of Grimsby, and trained in all the arts of thieving. And crab-cams were the robot cameras they used to spy on their victims. Miss Freya had made her pupils do a whole project on the Lost Boys. At the time, Wren had thought it a pointless thing to have to learn about.