Near the beginning of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, Hester Shaw attempts to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine for killing her parents, willing to give up her own life for a chance to end his. This commitment to her ideals—even at the expense of her own life—defines Hester’s character, and it similarly motivates other heroic characters in the story, like Bevis Pod, Miss Fang, and Katherine. Each of these characters dies in the process of sacrificing themselves, either for a cause or to save another person’s life. By spending time with Hester and the others, Tom too learns the value of sacrifice over the course of the book, putting his own life at risk to rescue Hester from burning London, even after she tells him to let her die.
But while sacrifice is often a heroic gesture, it can also be morally ambiguous. Shrike, for example, voluntarily submits to painful experiments by the Engineers, all so that he can make Hester Resurrected like him. Although he cares for Hester, he doesn’t consider whether she even wants to be Resurrected (which involves dying first), making his sacrifice selfish. Similarly, Valentine dedicates himself to serving Crome so that people will treat his daughter Katherine like a lady, but this causes him to abandon his own morals, murdering Pandora Shaw and helping Crome get his hands on the deadly weapon MEDUSA. In the end, Valentine feels so guilty for his decisions that he stays in London as MEDUSA destroys it, sacrificing his own life but accomplishing nothing in the process. Mortal Engines portrays how true heroes will sacrifice themselves for a greater cause when necessary, but it also suggests that not all sacrifices are heroic, especially when those sacrifices have selfish goals or allow people to escape the consequences of their actions.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Sacrifice ThemeTracker
Sacrifice Quotes in Mortal Engines
“Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”
“Yes, I know, and I’m terribly sorry about it, but what can I do?” said Wreyland sadly. “Times are hard, you know.”
“I WORK FOR THE LORD MAYOR OF LONDON NOW,” said Shrike. “HE HAS SENT ME TO KILL YOU.”
Tom whimpered again. Hester gave a brittle little laugh. “But ... you won’t do it, will you, Shrike? You wouldn’t kill me?”
“YES,” said Shrike flatly, still staring down at her.
“What does she mean, K Division?” asked Katherine.
“I may be no better than Valentine,” she went on, “but there is a difference between us. Valentine tried to kill you, and I want to keep you alive. So, will you come with me?”
“I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”
And light burst down from above; the harsh beam of an airship’s searchlight raking across the snow. The aviatrix reeled blindly backwards, and Valentine leaped up, snatching his sword, pulling her hard against him as he drove it home. For a moment the two of them stumbled together like drunken dancers at the end of a party, close enough to Tom’s hiding place for him to see the bright blade push out through the back of Miss Fang’s neck and hear her desperate, choking whisper: “Hester Shaw will find you. She will find you and—”
He said, “You must understand, Kate, I did it for you...”
She had come to think of Bevis Pod as a sweet, clumsy, rather useless person, someone who needed her to look after him, and she suspected that that was how the Historians all thought of him as well. But that afternoon she had begun to understand that he was really much cleverer than her.
“I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom,” she said. “Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me.”
“I’ll circle back...”
“I’ll be dead.”
“I’ll circle back anyway...”
Hester was stumbling backwards, lifting her bound hands to ward off Father’s blow, and Katherine flung herself between them so that suddenly it was she who was in his path, and his sword slid easily through her and she felt the hilt jar hard against her ribs.
He gently moves a stray strand which has blown into her mouth, and holds her close, and waits—and the storm-light breaks over them and they are a knot of fire, a rush of blazing gas, and gone: the shadows of their bones scattering into the brilliant sky.
“But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”
