“Mr. Fing, please,” Zanna said. “You really have to help us get out of here.”
Obaday Fing looked miserable.
“I simply don’t know how,” he said at last. “I don’t know how you got here. I don’t know where you live. There are plenty of people who don’t believe in Lonn Donn at all. I’m truly sorry, Shwazzy…Zanna. All I can do is take you to those who can help. As fast as we can. Believe me, I want you to…get started ASAP.”
“Get started?” said Zanna.
“With what?” said Deeba.
“The Propheseers’ll explain,” Obaday said.
“No,” shouted Zanna. “Get started with what?”
“Well,” said Obaday hurriedly, “with everything. We have to get you out of here. There are those working against you. Working for your enemy.”
“My enemy?” said Zanna. “Who’s my enemy?”
Before Obaday could respond, the curtain was pulled back and there stood Skool, the figure in the diving suit, tapping its wrist urgently.
“Now?” Obaday said. “Already? Right, right, we’re coming, off we go.” He grabbed a few more things, hauled his bag over his shoulder, and ushered everyone out.
“Who?” Zanna said.
“What? Oh, honestly, Shwazzy, it’s really best you let those who know these things explain…”
“What enemy?” The two girls stared at Obaday, and he faltered, and was momentarily still.
“Smog,” he whispered. Then he cleared his throat and walked hurriedly on.
10. Perspective
“What did you mean smog, Obaday?” Zanna said.
The topic obviously made him very uncomfortable. Zanna and Deeba could make very little sense of what he said. “Hold your breath,” he said, and, “We shouldn’t talk about it,” and, “You got it once before, you can help us get it again.” “The Propheseers…” he said, and Deeba finished for him.
“They’ll explain,” she said. “Right.” She and Zanna exchanged exasperated glances. It was obvious they would get nothing useful from Obaday, nor from the silent Skool.
They passed people standing in front of walls, avidly reading graffiti.
“They’re checking the headlines,” Obaday said.
Most people looked human (if in an unusual range of colors), but a sizeable proportion did not. Deeba and Zanna saw bubble-eyes, and gills, and several different kinds of tails. The two girls stared when a bramble-bush walked past, squeezed into a suit, a tangle of blackberries, thorns, and leaves bursting out of its collar.
There were no cars, but there were plenty of other vehicles. Some were carts tugged by unlikely animals, and many were pedal-powered. Not bicycles, though: the travelers perched on jerkily walking stilts, or at the front of long carriages like tin centipedes. One goggled rider traveled by in a machine like a herd of nine wheels.
“Out of the way!” the driver yelled. “Noncycle coming through!”
They passed curbside cafés, and open-fronted rooms full of old and odd-looking equipment.
“There’s loads of empty houses,” said Zanna.
“A few,” Obaday said. “Most aren’t empty, though: they’re emptish. Open access. For travelers, tribes, and mendicants. Temporary inhabitants. Now we’re in Varmin Way. This is Turpentine Road. This is Shatterjack Lane.” They were going too fast for Zanna and Deeba to do more than gain a few impressions.
The streets were mostly red brick, like London terraces, but considerably more ramshackle, spindly and convoluted. Houses leaned into each other, and stories piled up at complicated angles. Slate roofs lurched in all directions.
Here and there where a house should be was something else instead.
There was a fat, low tree, with open-fronted bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens perched in its branches. People were clearly visible in each chamber, brushing their teeth or kicking back their covers. Obaday took them past a house-sized fist, carved out of stone, with windows in its knuckles; and then the shell of a huge turtle, with a door in the neck hole, and a chimney poking out of its mottled top.
Zanna and Deeba stopped to stare at a building with oddly bulging walls, in a patchwork of black, white, and gray bricks of varying sizes.
“Oh gosh,” said Deeba. “It’s junk.”
The entire three-floor building was mortared-together rubbish. There were fridges, a dishwasher or two, and hundreds of record players, old-fashioned cameras, telephones, and typewriters, with thick cement between them.
There were four round windows like a ship’s portholes. Someone inside threw one open: they were the fronts of washing machines, embedded in the facade.
“Shwazzy!” Obaday called. “Shwazzy…I mean, Zanna. You’ll have time to stare at moil houses later.” The girls followed him, and the milk carton followed them.
“How long will it take to get there?” Zanna said. “Is it dangerous?”
“Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define ‘dangerous.’ Is a knife ‘dangerous’? Is Russian roulette ‘dangerous’? Is arsenic ‘dangerous’?” He did the little finger-thing to show quotation marks, tickling the air. “It depends on your perspective.”
The girls looked at each other in alarm.
“Uh…” said Zanna.
“I don’t think it does depend on perspective,” said Deeba. “I think that’s all definitely dangerous. I don’t think you need none of this…” She did the quote motion.
“If we planned ahead, sent a few messages,” Obaday went on, “maybe got a gnostechnician to check the travel reports on the undernet, stayed each night with friends in safe places in whatever borough we reached…then it would be perfectly safe. Well…reasonably safe. Safe-esque. But, yes, it would be ‘dangerous’ if we didn’t think ahead, and we took a wrong turning into Wraithtown, or met some scratchmonkeys or a building with house-rabies, or, lord help us, if we ran into the giraffes…”
He shivered, reached up absently, and touched his fingertips on the ends of his pins and needles. “But we’re not walking. We’re going to get there today. This is…well, a ‘special occasion’ doesn’t cover it, really, does it? We have to get you to the Propheseers one, as quickly as possible, and two, as safely as possible.”
They turned into a cul-de-sac of brick homes, houses on stilts, and a windmill made of a helicopter on its side. Skool pointed. He, or she, beckoned them to a shelter with a very familiar logo.
“Now,” said Obaday, “we have only to wait.”
Zanna and Deeba stopped. The milk carton bumped into Deeba’s foot and squeaked.
Zanna said, “We’re getting a bus?”
11. Public Transport
“I know!” said Obaday. “Hard to believe. But yes. I think we need to.”
Zanna and Deeba looked at each other. They didn’t speak, but messages went between them in a series of looks and raised eyebrows: What’s the big deal with a bus? Don’t know…
“I’ve got the fare,” Obaday said. “They never turn anyone away, but it’s traditional to pay what you can.”
They were joined at the stop by an elderly woman in a coastguard’s uniform, and a hulking figure in a dress at whom Zanna and Deeba had to force themselves not to stare. It was a lobster, waddling on two stubby legs, clacking her pincers.
Obaday looked at his watch, leaned against the pole, and began to read his sleeve. The girls watched the sky. A sliver of the hoop-sun was visible over the roofs. Troupes of starlings, pigeons, and crows crisscrossed in front of the clouds, in rather more organized fashion than they ever seemed to manage in London.
“Look,” said Zanna, pointing. There were other birds among them, half-familiar from pictures, like herons and vultures. There was at least one thing in the air that didn’t look like a bird at all, something that cawed enormously as it disappeared.