SHATTERED SKIES

Part One of the Interlude Trilogy

A Mortal Engines Story

Mortal Enginesby Philip Reeve

Written by thefoodfoodfood

Beta Reading by Gamemaker97

Part One

Chapter 1

Second Sun

A new sun was rising. Every lookout in the Great Hunting Ground could spot it from the marsh-running cities of Bucharest and Sarajevo alongside the Rustwater Marshes to the six pristine tiers of Paris in the Gallic Plain. Even the raft cities of Genoa and Don Laoghaire, both in the Middle Sea, glimpsed a pale glow beyond the horizon. To the east, past the Shield Wall of Batmunkh Gompa, the phenomenon was more curious still. Anti-Tractionists from Batmunkh Tsaka to Tienjing were woken in the dead of night by an early dawn as a sickly blue sunrise appeared from the west.

North of the plains of Italia, where the majestic Alps once stood, serrated ridges of much younger, more jagged mountains were twice bathed by the twin suns of east and west. As the familiar afternoon star sank lower towards the horizon, a ghostly copy rose on the opposite border of the sky. The long shadows cast by the Shatterhorn Mountains, fangs of darkness reflecting the sharp border of the Shatterlands, disappeared under the glow of the new beacon.

Only a few roving towns and hamlets experienced this strange blend of dawn and dusk. Small caravanserais and mining rigs that traversed the Shatterhorn peaks, each one carrying no more than a few dozen permanent inhabitants, would remember it as the day of the Second Sun, a day that either marked the dawn of a new age, or the dusk of their own. For one observer, forgotten among the slopes of a downtrodden ridge, it was a rather unexpected birthday.

Half-buried in dry mud among the rocky incline near the apex of the ridge, two blank holes stared at the rising sun to the East. The empty eye sockets, long since bereft of life, had observed many mornings over the years, but never was it so pale, or in the late afternoon. A jolt of movement brushed off the dirt and grime covering what appeared to be a long-forgotten corpse, or at least parts of one. It was propped up at an odd angle along a sharp rock sheared from the ground by the motions of a long-since passed city, with a right leg buried in the dirt and a left one that ended at the shin. Its long, spindly arm, the right one, was twisted horribly and missing a hand, while the other one simply didn't exist. The torso was barely recognizable as a huge gash, wide enough to show the earth behind it, extended from the right shoulder almost to the waist. The head was barely held on by what was left of the spine, tendons, and other cords connected to the base of the skull.

Despite the wreckage, the carcass moved again, shivering under the pale light of the afternoon sunrise. The arm seemed to grope for its missing hand while the legs danced an incoherent jig in a futile attempt to move. The eyes, dimmed long ago, now sparked, flickered, and gleamed once more. Two green orbs stared out at the world for the first time in decades, burnt out suns that, under the blue glow of this evening dawn, burnt with a new flame of a sickly hue. It was no longer a corpse, but a husk, an empty ruin revived under the strange radiations of the Second Sun. Garbled thoughts flowed through the machinations of its brain, with circuits and synapses firing for the first time in what felt like millennia. It wasn't alive, but it was no longer quite dead.

The thing, a combination of preserved flesh and strange machinery, attempted to turn its head away from the eastern sky, which was fast dimming as this new sun's short life reached its autumn. It wanted to see its body, assess the damage. As it tried to work the servos and muscle that remained, the head twisted at an unnatural angle as if it would fall to the earth, the skull's cheek resting upon the torn chest of the once lifeless cadaver. Its ancient brain, twice deceased and twice reborn, was bereft of any thoughts as to who it once was, where it currently lay, how it came to be in this state, or what that strange star, now a pale blue dot on the horizon, could be. One thought, one directive made itself clear, and with a voice not spoken in almost 30 years came two words that ground like two steel beams rubbed together.

"MUST REPAIR"

And so the husk set about this task, with the single mindedness of a machine and the errant twitches of reanimated tissue. It propped its head back atop the stump of its neck and, with effort, raised its buried leg from the ground, exposing a limb wrapped in pale flesh with metal and bone exposed at odd places. Now that that was done, it tried, unsuccessfully, to stand. It clawed at the ground with its limbs and managed to drop itself face-down in the dirt. Face-down, that is, if its head had stayed atop its perch. It lay on the ground connected to the ruined torso by only a few wires, and the green eyes spotted the missing pieces of its body strewn about the rocky slope.

As the Second Sun faded and died, the green-eyed creature set about the long, grueling process of putting itself back together. It would take months, years even, until it could wander the Great Hunting Ground again. Twice the Stalker was Resurrected, and the second time was harder than the first.