Traction Cities. An army of them, grinding their way across the marshes. The sight of them stirred faint memories in Grike. He remembered cities like that. At least he remembered the idea of them. Whether he had ever been aboard one, and what he had done there, he did not recall.
As his rescuers hurried him toward the waiting airship, he saw for just an instant a girl’s broken face look up trustingly at him, awaiting something he had promised her.
But who she was, and what her face was doing in his mind, he no longer knew.
Chapter 2
At Anchorage in-Vineland
Several months later, and half a world away, Wren Natsworthy lay in bed and watched a sliver of moonlight move slowly across the ceiling of her room. It was past midnight, and she could hear nothing but the sounds of her own body and the soft, occasional creaks as the old house settled. She doubted that there was anywhere in the world as quiet as the place she lived in—Anchorage-in-Vineland, a derelict ice city dug into the rocky southern shore of an unknown island, on a lost lake, in a forgotten corner of the Dead Continent.
But quiet as it was, she could not sleep. She turned on her side and tried to get comfortable, the hot sheets tangling round her. She had had another row with Mum at supper-time. It had been one of those rows that started with a tiny seed of disagreement (about Wren wanting to go out with Tildy Smew and the Sastrugi boys instead of washing up) and grew quickly into a terrible battle, with tears and accusations, and age-old grudges being dredged up and lobbed about the house like hand grenades, while poor Dad stood on the sidelines, saying helplessly, “Wren, calm down,” and “Hester, please!”