Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles, Book 1)
Philip Reeve
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: B00J9E5832
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
London is hunting
The great Traction City lumbers after a small town, eager to strip its prey of all assets and move on. Resources on the Great Hunting Ground that once was Europe are so limited that mobile cities must consume one another to survive, a practice known as Municipal Darwinism.
Tom, an apprentice in the Guild of Historians, saves his hero, Head Historian Thaddeus Valentine, from a murder attempt by the mysterious Hester Shaw -- only to find himself thrown from the city and stranded with Hester in the Out Country. As they struggle to follow the tracks of the city, the sinister plans of London's leaders begin to unfold ...
The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, Book 2)
The Resistance (Declaration, Book 2)
Monarch (War of the Princes, Book 3)
Ancient car and fetched out a stylish hat with trailing ear-flaps which she 109 had bought six weeks before but hadn't got round to wearing yet. She put colour on her lips and soft oblongs of rouge high on her cheekbones and painted a little blue triangle between her eyebrows, a mock Guild-mark like the fashionable ladies wore. She found a notebook and a pencil and slipped them both into one of Father's important-looking black briefcases along with the pass he had given her on her fifteenth.
Mud that almost smashed them against the lumbering metal belly overhead. Hester crouched on the crest of the wave like a surfer and Tom wobbled beside her, expecting at any moment to be swatted out of his life by a passing derrick or hurled under the wheels. Hester was shouting at him again, and pointing. An exhaust duct was rushing past them like a monstrous snake, and by the flare of furnace-light from vents on the town's underside he made out the handrail of a maintenance platform. Hester.
Observation window and staring down into the smoke-filled streets. His monkey jumped up and down on his shoulders, jabbering. "These Mossies are better organized than we gave 'em credit for," he said. "Searchlights, quick!" Two wavering fingers of light rose above the town, feeling their way across the smoke-dappled sky. Where they met, Tom saw a fat rising shape shine briefly red. The suburb's guns swung upward and fired a rippling broadside, and pulses of flame stalked the drifting clouds.
Hang her carcass out for the buzzards! Mungo! Pogo! Maggs! An extra cut of the spoils to whoever shoots down that red airship!" No one did shoot down that red airship; it was long out of range, buzzing back towards the Black Island to warn Airhaven of the approaching danger. But Tom could not have been more filled with grief and anger if he had seen it falling in flames. So that was why Miss Fang had rescued him, and been so kind! All she had wanted was information for the League - and her friend.
Feeling, Stalker-killer?" a voice asked. Miss Fang stood over him, watching him with the gentle smile of an angel in an old picture. Tom said, "Everything hurts." "Well enough to travel? The Jenny Haniver is waiting, and I would like to be away before sundown. You can eat once we're airborne; I've made toad in the hole, with real toad." "Where's Hester?" Tom asked groggily. "Oh, she's coming too." He sat up, wincing at the sharp pain in his chest and the memory of all that had happened. "I'm not.