A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve

Potts!" he murmured.
    "Eh, sir?" The clerk was a little deaf. He cupped one hand to his ear while the other snatched back the photograph. "What's that?"
    "I think her real name is Potts," said Tom.
    The clerk shrugged. "Whatever it is, sir, the Sky Gods must like her. There's not many last eighteen years in the air trade." And to prove his point, he turned the ledger around and showed Tom and Wren the index pages, where, amid a long list of airships, there were many names crossed through in red, with neat little notes beside them saying things like "missing," "crashed," or "exploded at her moorings."
    The clerk thought that Ms. Morchard had bought her ship in the Traction City of Helsinki, and when Tom slipped a golden sovereign under the cover of the ledger, he suddenly recalled that she had purchased her at Unthank's airship yard there. But where she had come from before that, where she had found the money for an airship, and what precisely her business was, he did not know; and, alas, old Mr. Unthank and all his records had been destroyed ten years ago when one of his apprentices lit a cigar inside the envelope of an
    unexpectedly leaky Cosgrove Cloudberry. ("You can still see the scorch marks along the edges of Helsinki air harbor," the clerk said helpfully, as if he hoped it might earn him another sovereign, but it didn't.)
    Outside his little office, the High Street was starting to come to life, and stallholders were rolling up their shutters and laying out trays of vegetables and fruit, flowers, cheeses, and bolts of cloth. Watching them, Tom recalled following Anna Fang past these same stalls on a honey-colored evening twenty years before. It had been his first visit to Airhaven. He remembered how Hester had slunk along beside him, hiding herself from the gaze of passersby behind her upraised hand....
    "Oh, Gods!" said Wren, stepping out of the harbor office behind him and pointing to someone on a nearby quay. "Look who it is!"
    For an instant, confused by his memories, Tom thought that it might be Hester come to find them. He felt strangely disappointed when he saw a shapely aviatrix in a pink leather flying suit.
    Wren was jumping excitedly up and down and calling, "Ms. Twombley! Ms. Twombley!"
    The aviatrix, who had been deep in conversation with some of her comrades, looked around in surprise, then strode gracefully across the quay to find out who was hailing her with such enthusiasm. "It's Orla Twombley," Wren told her father. "She used to work for Brighton." And as the aviatrix drew nearer, her puzzled frown changed into a smile of recognition. She and Wren had not known each other well, but each was glad to find that the other had come safely
    out of the battle on Cloud 9.
    "It's Wren, isn't it?" Ms. Twombley asked, and took Wren's hands in hers. "The little slave girl from the Pavilion? I had imagined you dead, or captured by the Storm. How good to see you safe and well! And this fine gentleman is your husband, I suppose?"
    "Father," said Tom, going bright red. "I'm Wren's father."
    "And wasn't I always thinking Wren was one of those Lost Girls!" cried Ms. Twombley, astonished. "A poor motherless orphan from away out in the western sea somewhere ..."
    "Motherless, but not fatherless," said Wren. "It's a long story. But I am glad to see you so well, Ms. Twombley. I thought you'd been shot down...."
    "That was a bad night, to be sure," the aviatrix admitted, and shook her head at the memory of the dogfights that had raged around Cloud 9. "But it'd take a lot more than a few Stalker birds and poxy old Fox Spirits to bring down my Combat Wombat. I re-formed the Flying Ferrets. We work for Adlai Browne, lord mayor of Manchester. He's bringing his city up to the line, and he sent us ahead as his advance guard."
    Wren nodded. They had passed Manchester a week before, a huge, grimy city lumbering southeastward, bristling with cranes that had been busy fitting shiny new plates of antirocket armor over its upper