Behemoth

doing?”

The man swung at him, yelling, “Got to make this convincing!”

The wrench whistled over Alek’s head. He ducked and fell back onto one knee again, cursing. Had Klopp gone mad?

Mr. Hirst reached into a pocket and pulled out a compressed air pistol.

“No!” Alek cried, leaping for the gun. As his fingers wrapped around Hirst’s wrist, the pistol exploded with a deafening crack. The shot missed Klopp, but the bullet rang like an alarm bell as it ricocheted around the engine pod.

Something kicked Alek in the ribs, hard, and searing pain blossomed in his side.

He fell backward, his fingers slipping from Hirst’s wrist, but the man didn’t raise the gun again. Hirst and Klopp both gaped, dumbstruck, at the Leviathan’s flank.

Alek blinked away pain and followed their stares. The cilia were in furious motion, rippling like leaves in a storm. The airbeast’s vast length was bending, twisting harder than he’d ever seen. The great harness groaned around them as it stretched, joined by the pop of ropes snapping in the ratlines.

“The beast knows it’s in danger,” Klopp said.

Alek watched in wonder as the airship seemed to curl around them in the air. The stars spun overhead, and soon the huge animal had turned itself entirely around.

“Back to full …,” Alek began, but it hurt too much to speak. Every word was another kick in the ribs. He looked down at his hand pressed against his left side, and saw blood between the fingers.

Klopp was already working, reversing the engine once more. Mr. Hirst clutched his pistol tight, still staring in wonder at the airbeast’s flank.

“Get out of the pod, young master,” Klopp yelled as the propeller’s gears caught again. “It’s metal. The lightning will jump to it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Klopp turned. “What … ?”

“I’m shot.”

The old man dropped the controls and bent beside him, eyes wide. “I’ll lift you.”

“Mind your engine, man!” Alek managed.

“Young master—,” Klopp began, but his words were drowned out by a crackling in the air.

With a painful heave Alek pulled himself up to look backward. The Goeben was falling behind them, but the Tesla cannon was blindingly bright. It flickered like a welding lamp, sending jittering shadows across the dark sea.

Beside him the airship’s cilia still seethed and billowed, pushing at the air like a million tiny oars.

Faster, Alek prayed to the giant airbeast.

A great fireball formed at the tower’s base, then swiftly rose, dancing and shimmering as it climbed. When it reached the top, a thunderous boom rang out.

Fingers of lightning, jagged and colossal, shot up from the Tesla cannon. They stretched across the whole sky at first, a tree of white fire, then leapt toward the Leviathan as if drawn by scent. The lightning spread a fiery web across the airbeast’s skin, a dazzling wave that surged down its length. In an instant the electricity flowed three hundred meters from tail to head, leaping eagerly across the metal struts that supported the engine pod.

The whole pod began to crackle, the gears and pistons flinging out radiant spokes of fire. Alek was seized by an invisible force; every muscle in his body tightened. For a long moment the lightning squeezed the breath from him. Finally its power wilted, and he slipped back to the metal deck.

The engine sputtered to a halt again.

Alek smelled smoke, and felt an awful pounding in his chest. His ribs ached with every heartbeat.

“Young master? Can you hear me?”

Alek forced his eyes open. “I’m all right, Klopp.”

“No, you aren’t,” the man said. “I’ll get you to the gondola.”

Klopp wrapped one big arm around Alek and pulled him up, sending a wave of fresh agony through him.

“God’s wounds, man! That hurts!”

Alek wavered on his feet, dumbstruck by the pain. Mr. Hirst didn’t lend a hand, his nervous eyes scanning the length of the Leviathan beside them.

Somehow, the airship was not aflame.

“The engine?” Alek asked Klopp.

The man sniffed the air and shook his head. “All the electrikals are cooked, and the starboard side is silent as well.”

Alek turned to Hirst and said, “We’ve lost the engines. Perhaps you could put that gun away.”

The chief engineer stared at the air pistol in his hand, then slipped it into his pocket and pulled out a whistle. “I’ll call a surgeon for you. Tell your mutinous friend to set you down.”

“My ‘mutinous friend’ just saved your—,” Alek started, but a fresh wave of dizziness passed over him. “Let me sit,” he muttered to Klopp. “He says he can get a doctor up here.”

“But he’s the one who shot you!”

“Yes, but he was aiming at you. Now please put me down.”

With an unkindly look at Hirst, Klopp leaned Alek gently against the controls. As Alek caught his breath, he glanced up at the airship’s flank. The cilia were still rippling like windblown grass. Even without the engines to motivate it, the great beast was still headed away from the ironclads.

Alek looked sternward through the motionless propeller. The ironclads were steaming away.

“That’s odd,” he said. “They don’t seem to want to finish us off.”

Klopp nodded. “They’ve gone back to their north-northeast heading. They must be expected somewhere.”

“North-northeast,” Alek repeated. He knew that was significant somehow. He also knew that he should be worried that the Leviathan was now drifting southward, away from Constantinople.

But breathing was worry enough.

FOUR

Deryn stood up slowly, blinking away spots from her eyes.

A barking lightning bolt! That was what had fizzled up from the Clanker warship and leapt across the sky, dancing on every squick of metal on the Leviathan’s topside. The Huxley winch had thrown out a blinding flock of white sparks, knocking her half silly in the process.

Deryn looked in all directions, terrified that she would see fires bursting willy-nilly from the membrane. But it was all dark except for the jaggy shimmers burned into her vision. The sniffers must have done their jobs brilliantly before the battle. Not a squick of hydrogen had been leaking from the skin.

Then she remembered—the Leviathan had spun around just in time, the whole airship twisting like a dog chasing its own tail.

Hydrogen …

She looked up into the dark sky, and her jaw dropped.

There was Newkirk, his arms waving madly, the Huxley blazing over his head like a giant Christmas pudding soaked with brandy.

Deryn felt sick, the way she had in a hundred nightmares replaying Da’s accident, so close to the awful sight above her. The Huxley tugged at its cable, carried higher by the heat of the flames, spinning the winch’s crank.

But a moment later, its hydrogen expended, the airbeast began to drop.