“What sort of thing?” Deeba asked. Her mind was racing.
“The Smog of 1952, he said. What was in it, how much damage it did, that sort of thing. And what was done about it. What was it he was particularly interested in? Wait: I remember.
“It was the Klinneract.”
“The what?” Deeba said.
“From 1956,” Lipster said. “That was the law that really sorted out the problems of the smog.” She repeated herself slowly. “The Clean Air Act.”
“Oh,” said Deeba slowly. “Oh.”
“What else would you like to know?” Lipster said.
“Actually,” Deeba said, “that’s more than I expected to find out.” Lipster was saying something else when Deeba disconnected.
That night, to her father’s surprise, Deeba went outside in a light shower of rain. She wanted to think in the fresh cold air.
“You splashing around?” her father said. “Don’t go far. Stupid thing.” He pointed at her umbrella, with its canopy of red fabric printed with lizards. “I don’t think moisture in the air is reason enough—”
“Yeah yeah, Dad, to overturn society’s taboo against spiked clubs, blah blah.” She kissed him and went out.
She twirled her umbrella, watched it spin off the water in tiny droplets, remembered how Brokkenbroll’s broken umbrellas had protected her.
Deeba went through what she’d found out.
Unstible had been about to meet Rawley the Environment secretary— who might know better than most about dangerous climate and how to fight it— and he had been stopped. By something that stank. Of chemicals. His colleagues at RMetS thought he was dead.
The Smog had found him. He hadn’t managed to hide from it, as he’d told her.
Deeba thought about Elizabeth Rawley, the MP in charge of the environment. Maybe, Deeba thought, she could work out why the Smog had been so anxious to stop Unstible from meeting Rawley. Unstible had obviously thought she could help.
Deeba thought back to when she had last heard anything from Rawley on the news. I can’t remember exactly when, she thought, but I’m sure it wasn’t long ago. Wasn’t Dad saying something about her last night? He likes her, says she’s the only one doing her job. Wasn’t she in the paper? Yes, I’m sure she was…Anyway it doesn’t matter. Why am I worrying about Rawley? I’ll hear something about her soon, surely…
“Oh my gosh,” said Deeba suddenly. She froze her umbrella in midtwirl. She knew why it was hard for her to even think about when she’d last seen Elizabeth Rawley.
“I’ve got the phlegm effect,” she said. “And that means…Rawley’s been in UnLondon.”
There was no Klinneract. Long ago, a few UnLondoners must have mis-heard what had stopped the Smog in London, and spread the inadvertently invented word, and eventually the whole abcity believed in a nonexistent magic weapon. That was how legends started. Then Deeba had been suckered into believing in it. By Unstible.
But if the people at RMetS were right, and Unstible had been killed by the Smog, then it wasn’t Unstible in UnLondon.
So who was it Deeba had met?
And what was that imposter doing?
Something was happening in UnLondon. Something was happening to UnLondon. And none of the UnLondoners knew it.
36. Concern in Code
They’ll be fine, Deeba told herself. She told herself that again and again.
UnLondon’ll get through. The Propheseers’ll work out what’s going on. Whatever it is. Maybe I’m the one with the wrong idea. Maybe everything’s fine. Anyway, the Propheseers’ll see to it, one way or the other.
Whenever she thought that, though, Deeba could not help remembering all the confusion about the Shwazzy and the prophecies. She couldn’t forget quite how wrong the end of the stick was that the Propheseers had got hold of there.
Still, she thought, they’ll have learnt their lesson. They’ll be keeping more of an eye out.
UnLondon would have to look after itself. She wasn’t the Shwazzy. She was just someone. How could just someone be any help, whatever was going on?
It’ll be fine, Deeba thought. You saw how Brokkenbroll and Jones and the binja got on.
But she was never a hundred percent convinced.
Besides…she found herself starting to think. She got ashamed of herself then. Because the thought that had been creeping out was Besides, even if something terrible does happen, you don’t need to know about it.
“Zanna,” Deeba said. “I need to ask you something.
“What if you knew something bad was going on somewhere, but the people there didn’t know, and they thought something good was happening, but you knew it wasn’t, and you didn’t know for a hundred percent certain but you did know really, and you didn’t know how to get a message to them, and you never hear from them so you wouldn’t know if they were able to do anything if you did get a message to them…”
Deeba faltered and came to a stop. It had all seemed clearer in her head.
“Deebs,” Zanna said. “I’ve got no idea what you’re on about.”
She walked away, glancing back at Deeba with confusion. And, Deeba realized, fear.
That was when she decided. Even though things were alright now for her and her friends, she couldn’t ignore the fact that something might be very not-alright in UnLondon. She had to try to get word to the abcity. She could only imagine how hard that might be.
Deeba considered dropping messages in bottles down into the sewers. She wondered what she could write on an envelope that would ensure a letter’s passage across the Odd. But whatever she tried, she’d never know whether the message had got through, and she had to be sure.
When she came to that conclusion, Deeba was surprised to realize that what she felt wasn’t foreboding so much as excitement. Despite the possibility that something was badly wrong in UnLondon, she was excited by what she’d found out, and by what it meant for her: she had to get back.
So the question became how to return to UnLondon.
Deeba told herself repeatedly that she didn’t want to go, even if she could. She didn’t convince herself.
After several attempts, Deeba found her way back to the basement deep in the estate. But this time when she turned the big valve, London didn’t ebb away. So she went looking for other ways into the abcity.
Deeba walked over several bridges, always trying to concentrate on somewhere else at the other end— somewhere in UnLondon. It didn’t work.
She looked for hidden doors. She closed her eyes and wished hard. She clicked her heels together. She pushed at the back of her parents’ wardrobe. Nothing worked.
What’s going on over there? she thought.
In despair, Deeba wrote to the only other person she could think of in contact with UnLondon: Minister Elizabeth Rawley at the House of Commons.
She realized the letter would have to go through many secretaries and assistants, so she camouflaged her message.
Dear Minister Rawley,
You do not need to know my name. I know that you have gone somewhere quite like London but in other ways quite UNlike it. I think you know what I mean and you can see I know what I am talking about. I am writing to you because it is maybe more easy for you to go to that place than me, and I think that maybe that place is in trouble. You might know there is a plan for a fight against someone who SMOKES a lot— you know who I am talking about— and I think the man who is supposed to help is maybe not who he says he is and is actually an enemy working for that enemy. You know the man I mean, the one who is UNSTABLE. [Deeba was particularly proud of this pun.]