London

Out in the corridor all the argon lamps were dancing too, spilling their light up the metal walls. Two black-robed Guildsmen hurried past, and Tom heard the reedy voice of old Dr Arkengarth whine, “Vibrations! Vibrations! It’s playing merry hell with my 35th Century ceramics…” He waited until they had vanished around a bend in the corridor, then slipped quickly out and down the nearest stairway. He cut through the 21st Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America. He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War. Two minutes later he slipped out through a side entrance into the noise and bustle of the Tottenham Court Road.

Chapter 1: The Great Hunting Ground, Mortal Engines, pg 2

“Stop!” said Fever. The whispering ceased. The Stalkers watched her. She said, “You bred people here? Is that what it was for, this
place?”

One of the Stalkers said, “The survival of Homo sapiens is unlikely. The exchange of nuclear and particle-energy weaponry between the United States and greater China resulted in the loss of all major cities. It is believed that slow bombs will begin to arrive over the next ten to twelve years.”

“Stop!” said Fever. “What’s a Slow Bomb?”

One of the other Stalkers said, “Slow bombs are a revenge weapon of the Barefoot States. They are small asteroids boosted onto Earth-impact trajectories. It is assumed that a number were triggered remotely during the final minutes of the recent nuclear/particle-energy exchange.

“No, no, no,” said Fever. “They’ve been and gone; this war you’re talking about, it must have been thousands of years ago.”

But the Stalkers did not seem to understand her; they knew of only one time: after the war, before the arrival of the Slow Bombs.

pg 234/355, Scriverner's Moon, Fever Crumb Prequel Series, Chapter 24: In the Upper Room