Leviathan

Jaspert gave her a nudge, and Deryn remembered the letter of recommendation. She pulled it from her jacket and offered it to Flight Lieutenant Cook. He pretended to study it, which was silly because he’d written it himself as a favor to Jaspert, but even boffins had to follow Royal Navy form.

“This seems to be in order.” His eyes drifted up from the letter and traveled across Deryn’s borrowed outfit, looking troubled for a moment by what he saw.

She stood stiffly under his gaze, wondering what she’d done wrong. Was it her hair? Her voice? Had the handshake somehow gone amiss?

“Bit spindly, aren’t you?” the boffin finally said.

“Aye, sir. I suppose so.”

His face broke into a smile. “Well, we had to fatten up your cousin too. Mr. Sharp, please join the line!”

FOUR

The sun was just starting to creep above the tree line when the proper military men arrived. They rolled across the field in an all-terrain carriage drawn by two lupine tigeresques, pulling up smartly before the line of recruits. The beasts’ muscles bulged under the leather straps of the carriage rig, and when one shook itself like a monstrous house cat, sweat flew in all directions.

In the corners of her vision Deryn saw the boys around her stiffen. Then the carriage driver set the tigers growling with a snap of his whip, and a nervous murmur traveled down the line.

A man in a flight captain’s uniform stood in the open carriage, a riding crop under one arm. “Gentlemen, welcome to Wormwood Scrubs. I trust none of you is frightened by the fabrications of natural philosophy?”

“ADDRESSING THE APPLICANTS.”

No one answered. Fabricated beasts were everywhere in London, of course, but nothing so magnificent as these half-wolf tigers, all sinews and claws, a crafty intelligence lurking in their eyes.

Deryn kept her eyes forward, though she was dying to take a closer look at the tigeresques. Before today she’d seen military fabs only in the zoo.

“Barking spiders!” the young boy next to her whispered. He was nearly as tall as her, and his short blond hair stuck straight up into the air. “I’d hate to see those two get loose.”

Deryn resisted the urge to explain that lupines were the tamest of the fabs. Wolves were really just a kind of dog, and could be trained almost as easily. Airbeasts came from trickier stock, of course.

When no one stepped forward to admit their fear, the flight captain said, “Excellent. Then you won’t mind a closer look.”

The driver’s whip snapped again, and the carriage rumbled across the broken field, the nearest tiger passing within arm’s reach of the volunteers. The snarling beasts were too much for three boys at the other end of the line. They broke ranks and ran shrieking back toward the open gates of the Scrubs.

Deryn kept her eyes focused directly ahead as the tigers passed, but a whiff of them—a mix of wet dog and raw meat—sent shivers down her spine.

“Not bad, not bad,” the flight captain said. “I’m glad to see so few of our young men succumbing to common superstition.”

Deryn snorted. A few people—Monkey Luddites, they were called—were afraid of Darwinist beasties on principle. They thought that crossbreeding natural creatures was more blasphemy than science, even if fabs had been the backbone of the British Empire for the last fifty years.

She wondered for a moment if these tigers were the secret test Jaspert had warned her about, and smirked. If so, it had been a pure dawdle.

“But your nerves of steel may not last the day, gentlemen,” the flight captain said. “Before moving on we’d like to discover if you have a head for heights. Coxswain?”

“About-face!” shouted an airman. With a muddled bit of shuffling, the line of boys turned itself about to face the hangar tent. Deryn saw that Jaspert was still here, hanging off to one side with the boffins. They were all wearing clart-snaffling grins.

Then the hangar’s tent flaps split apart, and Deryn’s jaw dropped open… .

An airbeast was inside: a Huxley ascender, its tentacles in the grips of a dozen ground men. The beast pulsed and trembled as they drew it gently out, setting its translucent gasbag shimmering with the red light of the rising sun.

“A medusa,” gasped the boy next to her.

Deryn nodded. This was the first hydrogen breather ever fabricated, nothing like the giant living airships of today, with their gondolas, engines, and observation decks.

The Huxley was made from the life chains of medusae— jellyfish and other venomous sea creatures—and was practically as dangerous. One wrong puff of wind could spook a Huxley, sending it diving for the ground like a bird headed for worms. The creatures’ fishy guts could survive almost any fall, but their human passengers were rarely so lucky.

Then Deryn saw a pilot’s rig hanging from the airbeast, and her eyes widened still farther.

Was this the test of “air sense” Jaspert had been hinting at? And he’d let her believe he’d only been kidding! That bum-rag.

“You lucky young gents will be taking a ride this morning,” the flight captain said from behind them. “Not a long one: only up a thousand feet or so and then back down … after ten minutes lofting in the air. Believe me, you’ll see London as you never have before!”

Deryn felt a smile creeping across her lips. Finally, a chance to see the world from on high again, just like in one of Da’s balloons.

“To those of you who’d prefer not to,” the flight captain finished, “we bid fond farewells.”

“Any of you little blighters want out?” shouted the coxswain from the end of the line. “Then get out now! Otherwise, it’s skyward with you!”

After a short pause another dozen boys departed. They didn’t run screaming this time, just slunk toward the gates in a huddled pack, a few pale and frightened faces glancing back at the pulsing, hovering monster. Deryn realized with pride that almost half the volunteers were gone.

“Right, then.” The flight captain stepped in front of the line. “Now that the Monkey Luddites have been cleared out, who’d like to go first?”

Without hesitation, without a thought of what Jaspert had said about not drawing attention, and with the last squick of nerves in her belly gone, Deryn Sharp took one step forward.

“Please, sir. I’d like to fly.”

The pilot’s rig held her snugly, the contraption swaying gently under the medusa’s body. Leather straps passed under her arms and around her waist, then were clipped to the curved seat that she perched on like a horseman riding sidesaddle. Deryn had worried that the coxswain would discover her secret as he buckled her in, but Jaspert had been right about one thing: There wasn’t much to give her away.

“Just ride it up, laddie,” the man said quietly. “Enjoy the view and wait for us to pull you down. Most of all, don’t do anything to upset the beastie.”

“Aye, sir.” She swallowed.

“If you start to panic, or if you think something’s gone wrong, just throw this.” He pressed a thick roll of yellow cloth into her hand, then tied one end around her wrist. “And we’ll wind you down steady and fast.”

Deryn clutched it tightly. “Don’t worry. I won’t panic.”

“That’s what they all say.” He smiled, and pressed into her other hand a cord leading to a pair of water bags harnessed to the creature’s tentacles. “But if by any chance you do anything completely stupid, the Huxley may go into a dive. If the ground’s coming up too fast, just give this a tug.”