As the bus swung in position, Deeba looked up and made a little startled noise.
“What is it?” said Zanna.
“I thought I saw something,” said Deeba, pointing up. “Like…a crab. Moving on the ceiling.”
“Well…” Zanna looked around. “It’s gone now. This place is full of weird things.”
The basket dangled between a bus on stilts and another on what looked like giant ice skates. The three passengers got out. At the last moment a man wearing a toga ran and caught the basket; said good-bye to a companion, who hurried off; and got in.
He was big and heavy to haul. When he stepped onto the platform, there was a hissing. The milk carton was huddled behind Deeba, exhaling aggressively.
“Curdle,” Zanna muttered. “Deeba, keep your manky[12] pet under control.”
The new passenger stared huffily at Curdle from behind his beard.
“See that?” Deeba whispered.
“That bloke does not like us.”
They went much higher this time, midway between the roofs and the strangely lit sky. UnLondon sprawled to the horizon. A few animal-footed buses crawled carefully over and around houses. Light from the empty sun gleamed on a million surfaces. It was a ragged and jagged landscape. Low clouds buzzed below their wheels, obscuring neighborhoods, moving in various directions purposefully.
“That?” Jones pointed at what looked like a shirt, racing madly through the air. “When washing blows away in London, if it stays in the air long enough, it blows all the way here. Then it’s free. Never has to come down.”
They passed a stepped pyramid, a corkscrew-shaped minaret, a building like an enormous U.
“I wish my mum was here,” Deeba whispered. She couldn’t even look up as the thought took her. “And my dad. Even my brother Hass.”
“Me too,” said Zanna.
“’Course you do,” said Jones gently. The sadness and homesickness that filled the two girls was sudden, but it didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. It had been there many hours, underneath everything, and now that things were calmer, with the beautiful view below them, it sort of ambushed them.
“My mum must have the police and everything,” Deeba said.
“Actually, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said Jones.
“What do you mean?” said Zanna.
“Difficult to explain. The Propheseers’ll tell you.” The girls shook their heads in exasperation. “Just…I wouldn’t worry yet.”
Deeba and Zanna were quiet. Sensing their mood, Curdle snuffled up to Deeba’s foot. She picked up the little carton and, ignoring its sour smell, stroked it.
“Yet?” Zanna said. Conductor Jones looked evasive, and started muttering something about air currents and tacking and the directions. “You said,” Zanna insisted, “don’t worry yet?”
“Well,” he said grudgingly. “Londoners can get out of the habit of thinking about some things. Things that come here. But I wouldn’t worry yet.”
13. Encounters on a Bus
Obaday and Skool could tell Zanna was upset. Obaday offered to read to her from his jacket. “Although,” he added doubtfully, eyeing his lapels, “I confess this story isn’t quite the alpine romance I was expecting…” When she declined his offer, he opened his bag and handed Zanna and Deeba what looked like two tiles and cement. They stared at them dubiously, but they were both starving, and the strange sandwiches had a surprising— and surprisingly enticing— aroma.
They bit experimentally. The tiles tasted like crusty bread— the cement like cream cheese.
Below them was the Smeath, the great river of UnLondon, drawing an amazingly straight line across the abcity. A few spirals, curlicues, and straight lines— tributaries and canals— poked off from it in various directions, into the streets. Bridges crossed it, some familiar in shape, some not, some static, some moving.
“Look at that!” Deeba cried out. Far off, there was a bridge like two huge crocodile heads, snout-to-snout.
Deeba started humming a tune, and Zanna snorted with laughter and joined in: it was the theme song to the program EastEnders, which started with an aerial shot of the Thames.
“Dum dum dum dum dum, deee dum,” they sang, looking down at the water. The passengers looked at them as if they were mad.
A few birds and intelligent-seeming clouds examined the bus curiously. “Here comes a highfish,” said Jones, and the girls jerked back in horror at the approaching jackknifing body, its ferocious teeth and unmistakable shark fin. It glided with a faint burring sound. Where its ocean cousins’ side fins were, it grew dragonfly wings.
Jones leaned out and banged the side of the bus. “Get out of it, you dustbin!” he shouted, and the big fish darted off in alarm.
“What is that?” said Zanna. They were approaching a truly enormous wheel. Its base dipped into the river, and its highest point arced hundreds of meters up, almost to the bus.
“The UnLondon-I,” Jones said. “It’s what gave them the idea for that big wheel in London. I saw some photos. Ideas seep both ways, you know. Like clothes— Londoners copy so many UnLondon fashions, and for some reason they always seem to make them uniforms. And the I? Well, if an abnaut didn’t actually come here and see it, then some dream of it floated from here into their heads. But what’s the point making it a damn fool thing for spinning people round and round? The UnLondon-I has a purpose.”
He pointed. What had looked at first like compartments were scoops, pushed around by the river. The UnLondon-I was a waterwheel.
“The dynamos attached to that keep a lot of things going,” Jones said. Above the wheel was the ring of sunshine. The two circles echoed each other.
“Some people say,” Jones said, “that the bit missing from the middle of the UnSun was what became the sun of London. That what lights your days got plucked out of what lights ours.”
Zanna held out her thumb. The hole in the UnSun’s center was about the same size as the sun from their usual life.
“Every morning it rises in a different place,” Jones said.
The UnSun glowed. Strange shapes flew around it, the air-dwellers of UnLondon. There were chimneys all over the abcity, but very few were venting smoke. A dark shape approached over the miles of sky.
“Conductor Jones,” Zanna said, and pointed at the incoming smudge. “What’s that?”
He pulled a telescope from his pocket and stared into it for a long time.
“It’s a grossbottle,” he muttered. “But why’s it so high? It should be down feeding on dead buildings…” Suddenly he yanked the telescope to its full extent. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Trouble.”
The shape was close enough to see clearly now. It raced towards them. It was at least the size of the bus. All the passengers were crowding the windows, alerted by the drone of its approach.
The grossbottle was a fly.
“It would never normally come for us,” Jones said. “But look— see the howdah?”
On the creature’s huge thorax was a platform full of figures. “It’s being driven,” he said. “Airwaymen. Thieves. But I don’t understand. They go for solo balloons, maybe deep-sky trawlers. They know buses are defended. Why risk it?
“Time to go to work.” He unhooked his bow from the cabinet. “Rosa,” he shouted. “Aerobatics!”
The grossbottle fly careered towards them. The airwaymen whipped it, prodded it with barbs, and readied weapons. Obaday and Skool were staring at it, aghast.
Deeba saw motion above her again. She nudged Zanna. There were two little moving presences, but they weren’t crabs. They were hands, poking through the ceiling, fingers scuttling, emerging from the metal— then they were gone.