Or perhaps he was simply in one of his moods. When Alek had told his men to make new lives here in America, only Volger had resisted. The man had vowed to work for Alek's elevation to the throne of Austria-Hungary, whether Alek wanted him to or not.
But when Dr. Barlow went to the wildcount, his expression softened, and soon they were talking intently together in the privacy of the corner.
"Perhaps I'm speaking out of turn, sir," Hoffman said, looking at them. "But they are an odd pair, aren't they?"
Klopp snorted a laugh. "Quite suited to each other."
"You know what I've always thought, sir?" Bauer said. "That this war's been as good as over since they wound up on the same side!"
"Plotters," Bovril whispered into Alek's ear.
It took another hour for Alek to extract himself from all the well-wishers and interview-seekers, and to maneuver out of the cargo bay and into a smaller storeroom he'd seen Deryn make a quiet exit toward. She was still there waiting, sitting on a barrel of honey from the Leviathan's fabricated bees.
It was the first time Alek and Bovril had seen her since they'd said good-bye at the Serbian consulate, and the beastie practically threw itself into her arms. Alek wished he could as well, but the crowded cargo bay was on the other side of an unlocked hatch. Instead he only nodded, wondering how to start.
He had expected it to be years before they met again, but even three weeks had seemed so long. He couldn't say any of that, though, not yet.
She was staring at his medal as she stroked Bovril's head. It was, of course, the same decoration that Deryn wore on her own dress uniform, and that her father had earned for saving her life.
"A bit daft," she finally said. "Getting a medal for falling down."
He swallowed. "I don't really deserve it, do I?"
"You deserve a stack of medals, Alek! For saving the ship back in the Alps, and in Istanbul, and again when you shut down Tesla's machine!" She paused a moment. "Not that the Admiralty would ever give you that last one, seeing as how you saved Berlin."
"You were there for all of those, Deryn, and I don't see medals filling up your . . ." He cleared his throat and glanced away.
"Chest!" Bovril said.
Deryn laughed aloud at that, but Alek didn't join her.
"I'm happy with just the one, thanks," she said. "And I wasn't beside you when you stopped Goliath."
"In a way you were," he said softly, staring at the floor. Only the fact that he'd been saving her had made pulling that trigger possible.
Deryn smiled and shook her head. "You never did recover from that knock to your head, did you?"
"A bit daft!" said Bovril.
"Maybe not. A lot of things have been a bit fuzzy since then." Alek looked up at her. "Of course, other things have gotten clearer."
Bovril chuckled at this, but Deryn looked away. A silence stretched out, and Alek wondered if it would always be like this between them now, halting and uncertain.
"There's something I should tell you," he said. "A secret about Tesla."
Deryn's eyes widened. "Blisters."
"Somewhere more private," Alek said, then wondered if he were only stalling. But suddenly he knew where he wanted to go. "I know I'm not serving on this ship, Mr. Sharp, but do you suppose they'd let me go topside one last time?"
"If you're escorted by a decorated officer, maybe." A grin spread across Deryn's face. "And I suppose it's time for me to try the ratlines."
"Your knee's still hurt? But your cane . . ." The first time he'd spotted her in the crowd, Alek had noticed she wasn't carrying it.
"It's much better, thank you. I'm still resting it, is all, and I'm forgetting all my knots!" She shrugged. "But if you don't mind climbing in your fancy clothes, I'm game to give it a try."
Chapter Forty-Three
The Leviathan was keeping station over the East River, making a show of patrolling for any German water-walkers that might attack Manhattan, unlikely as that seemed. The ocean breeze blew from the south, keeping the view of the city spires steady. Deryn wondered what the airbeast thought of the huge, uncanny skyscrapers - almost its own size, but planted in the ground sideways and pointing straight into the air.
Her knee hurt as they climbed the ratlines together, of course, but the burning was an old friend now. The feelof rope in her hands and the tremble of the airbeast beneath her weight overwhelmed everything else. And by the time they reached the spine, the muscles in her arms hurt worse than her injury.
"Barking spiders, I've gotten soft!"
"Hardly," Alek said, loosening the buttons on his formal jacket.
The U-boat spotters worked from the gondola, and half the crew had been to Alek's ceremony, so there was hardly anyone topside now. Deryn led Alek forward, away from the few riggers at work amidships. As they passed through the colony of flechette bats, Bovril twitched on her shoulder, imitating the beasties' soft clicking sounds.
The bowhead was empty, but Deryn hesitated a moment before speaking. It was enough, just standing here with Alek in the salt breeze. And she suspected that his secret about Tesla concerned a certain bit of meteor, and talking about that would only make things sour.
But they couldn't stand here forever, however much she wished for it.
"All right, your princeliness. What's this secret?"
Alek turned away to face the darkening sky, in the direction of Tesla's ruined machine fifty miles away.
"The Germans didn't kill him," he said simply. "I did."
It took a moment for Deryn's mind to grasp the words.
"That's not what I . . . ," she began. "Oh."
"There was no other way to stop him." Alek looked down at his hands. "I killed him with his own walking stick."
Deryn stepped closer and took Alek's arm. He looked as sad as when he'd first come aboard the Leviathan, back when his parents' deaths still haunted him.
"I'm sorry, Alek."
"When I was helping Tesla, I never faced the truth of what Goliath was." He stared into her eyes. "But with the Germans storming up the beach, it all became real too fast. Suddenly he was standing there, ready to destroy a city, and I couldn't let him."
"You did the right thing, Alek."
"I killed an unarmed man!" he cried; then he shook his head. "But Volger keeps pointing out that Tesla wasn't exactly unarmed. Goliath was a weapon, after all."
"Quite," Bovril said.
Deryn swallowed, realizing that Dr. Barlow had been right. They couldn't tell Alek about the meteor now. He could never learn he'd killed a man to stop a weapon that didn't work.
But she'd promised not to keep secrets from him anymore. . . .
"It was Volger's idea to lie," Alek went on. "We told the truth about shutting down Goliath, because saving Berlin will make me a hero in the Clanker nations. But we can never say exactly how I did it."
"Aye, and he's right!" Deryn took both his hands, remembering the suspicions that Adela Rogers had voiced. "Don't tell anyone you killed him, Alek. They'll think you were in league with the Germans, and they'll blame the rest of the war on you!"
He nodded. "But I had to tell you, Deryn. Because we promised not to keep secrets anymore."
She closed her eyes. "Oh, you daft prince."
There was no way out of it now.
"You're right enough about that." Alek was staring down at his formal boots, which were a little scuffed from climbing. "I thought it was my destiny to stop this war, and in the end all I had to do was step aside and it would've all been over. But instead I kept it going. So it really is my fault from now on."
"No, it isn't!" Deryn cried. "It never was. And you couldn't have stopped it anyway, because Tesla's machine didn't work!"
Alek blinked. He took a step back, but Deryn stopped him, squeezing his hands hard.
Bovril chuckled a bit and said, "Meteoric."
"Remember my bit of Tesla's rock?" Deryn said. "Dr. Barlow sent it to some boffin in London, and it was from a meteor. You know what that is, right?"
"A shooting star?" Alek shrugged. "Then, it's as I thought; it was only a scientific specimen."
"This wasn't just some shooting star!" Deryn tried to remember everything Dr. Barlow had said. "What Tesla found was just a wee bit of it, but the whole thing was huge, maybe miles across. And it was going so barking fast that it exploded when it hit the atmosphere. That's what knocked down those trees, not some Clanker contraption! Tunguska was just an accident, and Tesla was a rooster taking credit for the dawn!"
Alek stared at her, his eyes glittering. "Then, why did he try to fire Goliath?"
"Because he was mad, Alek, out of his mind with wanting to stop the war!"
"Just like you," she didn't say.
"And Dr. Barlow is certain of this."
"Completely. So it's not your fault the war's still going! It would have gone on, year after bloody year, no matter what you did." She flung her arms around him and squeezed hard. "But you didn't know that!"
Alek stood there motionless in her embrace, his muscles tight. At last he pushed her gently away, his voice barely a whisper.
"I'd have done it anyway."
She swallowed. "What do you mean?"
"I would have killed him to save the Leviathan. To save you." He put his hands on her shoulders. "It was the only thing in my mind, when it came time to choose - that I couldn't lose you. That's when I knew."
"Knew what?"
He leaned forward to kiss her. His lips were soft against hers, but they kindled something sharp and hard inside her, something that had waited impatiently all the months since this boy had come aboard.
"Oh," she said after it was over. "That."
"Barking spiders," Bovril added softly.
"When we were topside in the storm, is this what you . . . ," Alek began. "I mean, have I gone mad?"
"Not yet." She pulled him closer, and they kissed again.
Finally she took a step back and looked about, worried for a moment that they might have been seen. But the nearest riggers on the spine were five hundred feet away, huddled around a hydrogen sniffer that had found a tear in the membrane.
"It's a bit tricky, isn't it?" Alek said, following her gaze.
She nodded silently, afraid that one wrong word could ruin everything.
He pulled something from his pocket, and as Deryn stared at it, her heart sank. It was the leather scroll case, the one with the pope's letter inside. She'd forgotten for a single, absurd moment that Alek was an emperor-in-waiting and she was as common as dirt.
"Tricky," Bovril said.
"Of course." Deryn dropped her gaze, stepping back from his embrace. "No one's going to write me a letter to turn me royal, are they? And I'd hardly make a proper princess, even if the pope himself sewed me a dress. This is all ridiculous."
Alek stared at the scroll case. "No, the answer's quite simple."
Deryn clenched her fists against too much hope. "You mean we could keep it all a secret? We'd have to hide ourselves for a bit anyway, given that I'm dressed in trousers. And you're a bit better at lying these days . . ."
"That's not what I mean."
She stared at him - the daft look was in his eyes again. "What, then?"
"We'll keep some secrets, for a while. And you may need your disguise until the world catches up with you." Alek took a slow breath. "But I have no use for this."