Mortal Engines

Katherine meets with Crome to ask about Hester and MEDUSA. Crome claims to know nothing about Hester, and the moment she mentions MEDUSA, he flies into a rage. Crome sends her away with the warning to “leave grown-up matters to those who understand them” (133). Angry and embarrassed, Katherine goes. On her way home, she remembers a white-faced Engineer hurrying away from where Tom fell out of the city. She’s sure that Engineer will have the answers and she’ll find out what happened “without any help from wicked old Magnus Crome” (135).

Tom and Hester walk through the night and into the morning. The land is softer and full of vegetation, and by the red color, Tom guesses they’re in the Rustwater Marshes, so called because of the red rust color from sunken towns. On the second night, they hear Grike’s airship overhead, and while they hide beneath the plants, Grike spots them using his infrared sensors. When he lands, Hester demands to know how he came to work for Crome. Grike explains that he went to London to look for her and that the Engineers experimented on him. He tells Hester that Crome promised him his heart’s desire, but “first you must die” (142).

Before Grike can attack, a town barrels through the marsh. Tom and Hester dive out of the way and come up to find Grike and his airship gone. Tom wonders what the town was running from just as a larger town bears down on them. They manage to leap onto a maintenance platform and sneak up through hatches to the main part of the town, where a skull-and-crossbones flag hangs over the town hall. With a jolt, Tom realizes that this is a pirate suburb, and as if thinking it calls them, shabbily dressed people “carrying the biggest guns that he had ever seen” (148) surround him and Hester.

Meanwhile, the pirate suburb’s momentum pulls Grike out of the marsh. He’s a mess of wires and loose parts, but he’s determined to find Hester.

A week after her unsuccessful meeting with Crome, Katherine has tracked down the Engineer, named Bevis Pod, and goes to the Gut to talk with him. Bevis has been transferred to the “turd tanks,” or plumbing area. Katherine rides down in an elevator that lets her out into a hall that smells like “a wall of wet sewage” (154). Convicts work at huge tanks of human waste, and the terrible conditions make Katherine angry. She finds Bevis and asks what happened the night her father was almost killed. Not meeting her eyes, he says he saw nothing. Nearby, a worker is rescued after falling in the tanks, only to die moments later. As Katherine leaves, Bevis says he’s sorry, but she’s not sure if he’s sorry he couldn’t help or because she’d “learned the truth of what life was like under London” (162).