Infernal Devices (Mortal Engines Quartet, Book3) by Philip Reeve

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I don't know," said Wren. "I mean, I don't know if I should tell you. Not unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but ... why would anybody want it? " Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the pines. Wren thought he looked angry and was afraid that she'd offended him, but when he turned to her again, he just seemed sad. "We're in trouble, Wren," he said. " "Of course," said Wren. "He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to ruin. " "Well, he wrote a book about it," Gargle said.

She imagined telling Nate Sastrugi and asking him to help her, but somehow, now that she knew Gargle, Nate Sastrugi seemed not nearly so handsome: just a boy, rather dull and slow, who didn't know much about anything except fishing. She didn't notice the rowboat nosing in toward the beach until her mother got out of it and shouted, "Wren? What are you doing? " "This" was a poor little deer, stone dead with a hole in its chest, and Mum was dragging it out of the boat and getting ready to take it up to Dog Star Court, where she would butcher it and salt the meat for winter.

Faint shafts of moonlight, slanting through skylights and holes in the deck plates overhead, showed her the bales stacked up between the empty fuel tanks. When Wren was younger, these abandoned levels had been her playground, and she still liked to walk here when she was feeling sad or bored, imagining what fun it must have been to live aboard a city that moved. The grown-ups were always talking about the bad old days, and how frightening it had been to live in constant danger of being swallowed up by some larger, faster city, but Wren would have loved to see the towering Traction Cities, or to fly from one to another aboard an airship, as Mum and Dad had done before she was born.