Zanna frowned with concentration. She opened her mouth and nothing came out, and a look of great alarm, even fear, crossed her face, and she began to cough violently. She doesn’t want to remember, Deeba realized, patting her friend’s back. It’s too scary.
Of course it was frustrating, sometimes incredibly frustrating, not to be able to tell her best friends about the extraordinary, unbelievable things that had happened. To the two of them. But when she was with Zanna on the back of a bus and they were laughing or joking around, even though Deeba could hardly believe that all those events were gone from Zanna’s head, she told herself it was worth it, and she tried not to think about the more unusual bus she and Zanna had recently taken.
Sometimes at night, Deeba would sit on her bed and look out onto the moonlit estate, and imagine UnLondon under the loonlight. She hoped everyone there was well and happy, and that the battle against the Smog was going according to plan.
It would be hard, but under the guidance of the Unbrellissimo, and Unstible, and with the secret Armets’ techniques, maybe UnLondon could win. Deeba read and reread the mysterious words on the paper glove that she believed was hers, by now, and wished the UnLondoners luck.
When she was there, she had wanted desperately to come home. Now, even though she was truly happy to be back, she was wistful that she could never say anything about the most amazing place she had ever been.
Deeba was certain that she would never see UnLondon again.
33. The Powerful Resurgence of the Everyday
Of course she was wrong.
34. Curiosity and Its Fruits
For a while, Deeba tried not to think about UnLondon, because it made her miss it. She soon realized, however, that she couldn’t stop herself.
In the streets, she would eye passersby and wonder if they knew of the abcity’s existence. She was a member of an exclusive group.
Deeba wanted to know about the UnLondoners, and UnLondon, and the Smog, and the secret war. That war with the Smog, in particular, fascinated her. The idea that something like that had once gone on in her own city made all the impossibility she had seen feel closer to home.
There must be UnLondoners who’ve moved to London, as well as the other way round, she realized. Maybe there’s a secret group I can join, or something. Friends of UnLondon.
After all, she knew now that there were real secret societies.
On the computer in her living room, Deeba went searching on the internet for information, while her mother and father watched television.
There were quite a few websites that said UnLondon, but she checked them all laboriously, and none of them were about the abcity. There can’t be nothing, she thought, but there was.
All the references to Unstible were irrelevant spelling mistakes. All the listings for Armets were about the old helmets, from which the secret defenders had taken their name. Deeba tried countless different spellings of Klinneract and came up with nothing.
She tried to think of new strategies to research the hidden histories. She looked up how to toughen fabric. She looked up weatherwitches, and got loads of pages, but mostly ridiculous foolishness, and nothing at all helpful.
“Mum,” she said. “What’s it called when you study about the weather?”
“Meteorology, sweetheart,” her mother said, and spelt it for her. “You doing homework?”
Deeba didn’t answer. She typed meteorology into the search engine, and sighed as more than fourteen million hits came up. She combined meteorology with the words smog, society, and London. She still got lists of hundreds or thousands of websites.
She was amazed by the numbers of people studying the British weather. The Met office, meteorology departments in universities, departments of London’s mayor’s office, the Royal Meteorological Society. She clicked on them randomly, and skimmed articles about the London Smog of 1952.
And then suddenly, Deeba saw the web address of one of the sites she was reading: rmets.org.
The Royal Meteorological Society, it said at the top of the page, next to a logo that read RMETS.
Deeba stared, her eyes and mouth opening wide.
She’d found the society of so-called weatherwitches with whom Unstible said he’d studied. She’d found the Armets, and they weren’t named after helmets at all.
It’s got garbled over the years, she thought. The name. People here saying RMetS, and UnLondoners mishearing, and thinking Armets. It’s just a mistake.
Deeba’s delight at having worked this out was tempered by growing unease.
So…what was Unstible talking about, saying he’d studied magic with the Armets? There is no Armets. No weatherwitches. No magic. There’s no secret society. It’s all a misunderstanding.
So…
So Unstible must have been lying.
35. Conversation and Revelation
Maybe it’s me getting it wrong, Deeba thought. Maybe he was saying he worked with RMetS and I got the wrong idea.
She dialed RMetS’s number four times, always losing her nerve and disconnecting. The fifth time, she let it ring. When a man answered, Deeba was pleased to hear herself sound quite calm.
“Can I speak to Professor Lipster please?” She had written down a list of names from the website.
“What’s it regarding?”
“I need some personal information about someone who worked…who I think worked at the society.”
“I can’t possibly—” he said in a bored voice.
“The name’s Unstible,” Deeba said, and to her surprise the man shut up.
“Hold on,” he said, and there were a series of clicks.
“Hello?” a woman said. “This is Rebecca Lipster. I understand you wanted to know about Benjamin Unstible?”
“Yes,” said Deeba. “I want to know what he was working on, please. It’s quite important. I’m trying to find out as much as I can—”
“Look,” Professor Lipster interrupted, very suspiciously. “I can’t discuss this sort of thing. Who am I talking to?”
“I’m his daughter,” Deeba said.
There was a silence. Deeba held her breath. She knew there was a big risk that Lipster would know she was lying. But Deeba had decided that if they’d even heard of Unstible, this was the best chance she had of persuading the meteorologists to hand over any notes he’d left. She got all her lies ready. My dad says he forgot some of his papers. Can I come and pick them up…?
Then something completely unexpected happened.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Professor Lipster said. “Of course I can understand you wanting to know. I’ll tell you whatever I can…and I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Deeba’s eyes widened.
“You should be proud of your father, young lady,” Lipster said. “He was working very hard. On the day he…of the accident…Ms. Rawley the Environment minister was coming on an official visit, and your father was very excited to be here. He was always saying what an excellent job she was doing, and he’d been wanting to meet her for weeks. He said he had some questions for her. And she said she was looking forward to meeting him, too.
“Then…well the visit had to be canceled of course, when we found him.”
“What happened?” Deeba said.
Lipster hesitated.
“I’m sure you’ve been told…It was a heart attack, we think. At first we thought there might have been a chemical accident, there was such a strong smell of fumes in the room. But he wasn’t doing anything like that. Just historical research.”