• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Sometimes rubbish collectors have taken it, but often as not it ends up here, where people find other uses for it. It seeps into UnLondon. You might see residue: maybe a dried-up puddle on a wall. That’s where moil dripped through. And here, it sprouts like mushrooms on the streets.

“The money your friend has? All the out-of-date and foreign coins and notes Londoners throw away. A few years ago when Europe got rid of its old money and you were all left with loads of useless old bits and bobs, so much found its way down here we had too much, and that meant terrible inflation. We had to feed loads of it to the moolaphage…Anyway. That’s sort of how things get down here.

“You could say I was a bit like that,” he said thoughtfully. “Obsolete, they said. If you find just the right manhole you can get here. The hard part wasn’t coming through, it was getting the bus through.

“I always worked on the buses, back in London. You probably grown up paying the driver, right? Or travelcards? Didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that most of the buses in London had a driver and conductor.

“I’d take the money and give the tickets.” He patted the machine he wore. “It was quicker, because the driver didn’t have to deal with everyone. And it was safer. Two of us there, all the time. But they decided they could save money if they got rid of half of us. Of course it messed things up. But them who made the decision were people who never took buses, so they didn’t care.

“We knew what we did was important. Look in the dictionary. ‘Conduct: verb. To lead, control, or guide.’ Some of us weren’t prepared to stop being guides. We look after travelers. It’s…” Conductor Jones looked down, suddenly shy. “Some people say it’s a sacred duty.”

“UnLondon…Well, sometimes, it can be a dangerous place. We had to be really ready to conduct.” He tapped the weapon on his belt, pointed into the cabinet beside him, at a bow and arrow, and coils of wire. “The drivers who came down swore to get the passengers from where they are to where they want to go. And to protect them.”

“Protect them from what?” Zanna said.

“There’s the occasional skymugger,” Jones said. “Airsquid, though mostly they hunt high, where the deep-sky fisherfolk go. And there are other things. Conductors on other routes, if they’re real unlucky, sometimes get attacked by giraffes.”

The girls stared at each other.

“You’re the second person to say that,” Deeba said.

“I’ve seen giraffes,” Zanna said.

“They’re so not scary…” Deeba said.

“Ha!” The whole bus looked up at Jones’s laugh. “They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves! Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course.

“There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots. You’ll find pigs, dogs, frogs, everything else getting through to here, though. There’s a lot of traffic back and forth. They know when things are happening. They pass messages.”

“Zann,” said Deeba. “That makes sense. All those animals, they knew you were…whatever you are.”

“The Shwazzy,” said Zanna.

“But no cats,” Jones went on. “Too busy trying to look cool. Anyway. You know what the main danger is down here. And it’s a danger that’s been growing. For years.”

“The Smo—” Zanna said, and he put his finger quickly to his lips.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

“But what is it?” she said. “What does it want?”

“Can’t talk about it here,” Jones whispered. “Better safe than. You know what I mean. The Propheseers’ll explain.

“Next stop,” he yelled. “Manifest Station.”

They passed an enormous building like a cathedral, within a few meters of its windows, and people peered at them out of offices. The edifice was perforated in several places with what looked like random holes, and bursting