Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
Carmen looked up at the tempus on Parliament Tower. It was twenty to three. "We're not going to make it," she said.
"It's mostly downhill now," Slops said. "Come on." He threw his weight behind the wheelchair and Grandmere squawked like a happy baby. At the sound Grim turned to look back at them. He had kept always half a block ahead of them, as if impatient to get there.
Carmen's house couldn't have been further from the Derricks. Because it lay at the opposite corner of the city, and the streets were laid out in a grid, they had to head south to the Wharflands before turning east and making for the river.
Just getting Grandmere downstairs had taken a good twenty minutes. Carmen and Slops had walked Grandmere down the stairs, her arms slung over their shoulders. Halfway down the staircase they had come close to overbalancing. Carmen wondered what she would tell her parents if they dropped the old bird and she tumbled downstairs and broke her neck; this was followed by a sickening swoop in her stomach as she realised she might never speak to them again. Grandmere didn't seem to have noticed how close she had come to cartwheeling down the stairs. She was clearly excited, having breathless conversations with invisible people, her speech peppered with nonsense words. Carmen was relieved when they put her on a sofa and returned upstairs for the wheelchair. The old woman's chatter was creepy.
The wheelchair Joe Carmichael had built for his mere was made of solid timber. The wheels had been pillaged from a broken street cart and were rimmed with iron. The chair weighed more than Grandmere herself.
"How in Eden did they get it up here?" Carmen said.
"Maybe your pere built it here?"
Neither of them was prepared for the chair's weight: three steps down it lurched free like a bolting horse. Carmen watched in horror as it bounced down the stairs, gathering speed. It hit the ground at a terrific pace, shooting past Grandmere, who laughed out loud and clapped her hands. "Cookies!" she cawed as the wheelchair flew down the hall and crashed out the back door.
They found it upside down in the yard, one of its wheels spinning lazily. They righted it and swept the broken glass off the seat. It was remarkably undamaged.
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Writing tip: If the plot begins to flag, introduce a wheelchair.
