her pencil aside. Her last watch of the day had just ended - four nervous hours of keeping an eye out for German aircraft - but Dr. Barlow never seemed to sleep. She looked well spruced in traveling coat and bowler hat, and Tazza bounced at the boffin's side, always happy to be exploring the ship.
"My bees, ma'am?"
"Don't be tiresome, Mr. Sharp. I meant, of course, the Leviathan's bee colonies. Do you always draw while shaving?"
Deryn glanced at her straight razor in its mug, remembering that half her face was covered in lather. She'd been waiting for someone to pass the open cabin door and witness the deception. But after a few minutes she'd given up posing by the mirror. Even copying sketches from the Manual of Aeronautics's chapter on thermal inversions was more interesting than pretending to shave.
She wiped her face with a towel. "That's the life of a middy, ma'am. Always studying ... and giving tours to visiting boffins, of course."
"Of course," Dr. Barlow said sweetly. In her two days aboard she'd toured practically every inch of the airship, dragging Newkirk and Deryn from deck to deck, onto the topside, even to the Huxley rookeries in the gut of the whale. There was no fobbing the duty off. Only two middies remained aboard, thanks to the weight of Dr. Barlow's pet thylacine, her numerous outfits, and the mysterious cargo secured in the machine room.
Deryn missed having the others about, if only to share the work of altitude readings and feeding the fléchette bats. The only brilliant thing - besides that bum-rag Fitzroy being gone - was that Deryn and Newkirk each had a private cabin now. Of course, Dr. Barlow's boffin studies didn't seem to have covered the subject of privacy.
"Come on, Tazza," Deryn muttered, taking the beastie's leash as she slipped into the corridor.
She led Dr. Barlow up the aft stairs to the top deck of the gondola. The riggers and sailmakers slept up here, though Deryn couldn't see how they managed. The airbeast's gastric channel filled the air with a smell like rotten onions and cow farts.
The off-duty watch swung in hammocks on either side of the corridor, some of them curled up with their hydrogen sniffers for warmth. The airship was cruising at eight thousand feet, hopefully too high for the German aeroplanes that had been stalking them all day, and the air up here was as cold as a brass monkey's bum.
None of the riggers glanced at Dr. Barlow or the thylacine as they passed. The ship's officers had announced that anyone making a fuss over the lady passenger would be put on report. This was no time for navy superstitions, after all. Germany had declared war on France yesterday and had gone after Belgium today. The rumor was that Britain would be in it tomorrow unless the kaiser put a stop to the whole mess by midnight.
And nobody thought that very likely.
At the gut hatch Deryn took Tazza into her arms and climbed up and out. In the cold, narrow gap between airbeast and gondola, the ventral camouflage cells shone a dull silver, taking on the color of the snowy moonlit peaks below. The Swiss Alps were rising beneath them. The Leviathan was a third of the way to the Ottoman Empire, Deryn reckoned.
Tazza scrambled out of her arms and up, curious to explore the strange mix of smells: clart from the gastric channel, the bitter almond of leaking hydrogen, and the salty scent of the airbeast's skin.
Deryn followed the beastie up into the gut, then knelt to lend Dr. Barlow a hand. They paused for a moment in the warm darkness, their eyes adjusting to the dim green light of glowworms.
"I'll take this opportunity to remind you not to smoke, Doctor."
"Very amusing, Mr. Sharp."
Deryn smiled and scratched Tazza's head. Open flames weren't allowed anywhere on the Leviathan. Matches and firearms were kept under lock and key, and the airmen's boots had rubber soles to prevent sparks of static. But according to regulations, passengers were to be reminded of the smoking rules whenever the crew thought necessary.
Even if they were fancy-pants boffins and being reminded of the barking obvious happened to annoy them.
Walking forward, Tazza slunk closer to the ground, always a little twitchy inside the whale. The walkway underfoot was aluminum, but the walls of the gastric channel were alive - warm and pulsing with digestion, aglow with worms. The hydrogen bladders overhead were taut and translucent, the whole ship swelling in