Fever Crumb

Extract

'Fever was the youngest member of the Order of Engineers, and the only female. Engineers did not have wives or children. But one evening fourteen years before, Dr Crumb had been called out to a dig on the Brick Marsh by an archaeologist named Chigley Unthank who wanted an opinion on some Ancient artefacts which he’d unearthed, and on his way back he had heard crying coming from an old weed-grown pit close to the road. There, among the bramble bushes, he had found a baby in a basket, with an old blanket laid over her and a label tied around her wrist upon which someone had written just four words:

HER NAME IS FEVER.

He had told Fever the story often and often when she was little. (Dr Crumb did not believe in telling lies, not even white lies, not even to little girls. He had not wanted her to grow up thinking she was his.) She knew how he had stood there in the twilight staring down at the baby in the basket and how finally, not knowing what else to do, he had carried her back with him to Godshawk’s Head.

In earlier years he might have taken her to the civic orphanage, but that was the summer of the Skinners’ Riots, and the orphanage had been wrecked and looted,
along with much of the rest of the city. In London’s rougher boroughs, like Limehouse and St Kylie, the skins of murdered Scriven still flapped like speckled flags from poles which the Skinners had set up at street corners. The collection of merchants and lawyers who called themselves the New Council had not yet completely restored order.

Dr Crumb made up a little bed for the foundling in a spare drawer of his plan-chest and fed her watered-down milk through a laboratory pipette. Looking into her eyes, he noticed that they were different colours; the left dark brown, the right soft lichen grey. Was that why she had been abandoned? Had her mother been afraid that her neighbours would take that small oddity for a sign that the child was a Scriven or some other sort of misshape, and kill her? There was a small wound on the back of her head; a thin cut not quite healed. Dr Crumb, who had seen for himself the savagery of the Skinners, imagined some crazed Londoner slashing at her with a knife. . .

The other Engineers, gathering round him to peer at the tiny refugee, had all agreed with him; the child must not go back to live among those savage, superstitious Londoners. She would stay with the Order, in Godshawk’s Head, and Dr Crumb would act as her guardian. Girls had never been admitted to the Order before, since it was well known that female minds were not capable of rational thought. But if little Fever were to be brought up in the ways of the Order from infancy, was there not a chance that she might make a useful Engineer?

So here she lay, fourteen summers later, in the sunshine on the Head’s roof. She had grown into an odd-looking girl, and her clothes made her look odder still. Only someone who had spent fourteen years being told that appearances don’t matter would dress in clothes like those. Big digger’s boots, skinny black trousers, an old grey shirt, a white canvas coat with metal buttons. Then there was her hair, or rather, her lack of hair. The Order were keen to hurry humankind into the future, and they believed that hair was unnecessary. Fever shaved her head every other morning, and had done so for so long that she didn’t remember what colour her hair would be if she were to let it grow. And below the bald dome of her head she had a curious face, with a short, sudden nose and a wide mouth, thick fair eyebrows and, oddest of all, those large eyes that didn’t match. Yet somehow it all worked. It was one of those rare faces which bypassed pretty and went straight to beautiful.

Of course, that would never have occurred to Fever. She attached no importance to her looks. But she was beautiful, all the same, as she lay there watching the city and waiting for the paper boys to dry and idly tracing the raised line of that old scar that she could feel but never see; a slender silvery thread which curved along the base of her skull.'