Note: Aaaaand with this chapter we're at the halfway mark... but we haven't hit the nadir yet. Mwhaha.
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Remember what we've said and done and felt
About each other
Oh babe, have mercy
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The split second before disaster is the worst.
You have time enough to be aware of what's going to happen, and to know, as well, that there's nothing left to be done about preventing it. Like a misstep in a Stormwalker – that heartbeat of pure vertigo as control slips away from you.
After that, the impact is almost welcome. At least it's done with.
Alek stares at his friend, shadowed in the darkness. He gives a laugh that's more disbelief than amusement. "You – what? You can't be."
"I think I'd bloody know if I'm a girl or not," Dylan says.
"But I've seen –" He stops himself, because he hasn't. He's never seen Dylan getting dressed, never without his shirt... even at the tailor's in Istanbul – that wasn't fussiness, that was protecting a secret – and (a sudden jolt of memory) Dylan had refused a bath at the Swiss castle, just like Dr. Barlow – and Volger! That's what the count had threatened Dylan with! – and that damned loris, always going on about Mr. Sharp.
It all makes a horrible, impossible sort of sense.
"God's wounds," Alek says, stunned. His voice sounds hollow to himself. "You are."
"My name's Deryn," he – she – says. "I had to be a boy to join the Service, and I had to join the Service to fly. That's all it was meant to be. I didn't know I'd meet you –"
A girl. His friend is a girl.
"Stop," he says, and puts his head between his hands until the shocked ringing leaves his ears. This is worse than vertigo; this is almost – though at the same time not nearly – as bad as his parents' deaths. He was expecting... He can't remember what he was expecting, if he ever really knew; but he was most certainly not expecting this. "Stop, please."
She does, for a moment, but then says softly, voice catching: "You promised."
"I know that," he says, rather more harshly than he would ordinarily speak to a girl, or to Dylan, for that matter. She flinches, but his shock is giving way to anger, and he tells himself that he doesn't care. "Forgive me if I'd prefer to take the news in small portions."
She says nothing. He can feel the heat of her body beside him. Hears the faint, shallow rasp of her breath.
His only friend is a girl.
After a moment he dredges up some remnant of courtesy and asks, "You said that your name was -?"
"Deryn."
"Deryn," he repeats, testing out the word, and she nods. It's not a bad name… for a girl. Betrayal twists at him anew, sharp and sick and cold. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I wanted to. I nearly did, right at the beginning – d'you remember, the lady boffin walked in and tossed me out on my bum."
"But after that," he says, biting off each word, somehow remembering to keep his voice down. "For heaven's sake, we were in Istanbul for a month – you never said a word!"
Her mumbled response is too quiet for him to catch.
"What?"
"I'm common. And you're a barking archduke. You said yourself you'd have to run a mile if…" Her voice falters and she wipes at her face with her jacket sleeve. "As long as I was Dylan, I thought I could at least go on being your friend."
He stares at her incredulously. "I certainly can't be your friend now! We shouldn't even be alone in the same room! And what do you mean, I said I'd have to run a mile?"
"It's what you said about Lilit. If you'd liked her."
The exact details of the conversation in the hotel room come back to him, and he gives a scornful laugh. "You actually think –"
She slaps her hand over his mouth before he can say the rest, and his initial reaction – to fight back – is stopped by feel of her skin against his and the sudden rush of…
God's wounds.
"Aye," she says fiercely. "I do."
He pushes her hand down, scowling because she's right. I ought to be relieved, he thinks, that Dylan has turned out to be Deryn; instead he's angry, betrayed, and full of a peculiar grief for the friend he'll never see again.
"That's optimistic of you," he says, with an acidity that Volger would be proud of.
"Clanker bastard," she says. It lacks heat. In fact, she sounds suddenly exhausted. He halfway expects her to leave, but she stays exactly where she is, and, bound by his promise to hear her out to the end, he stays as well.
Or so he tells himself.
Eventually she sighs. "Everything else is true. About my da, and all that. I only lied to you about being a boy."
He's shaking his head, because that's the one part that he can't comprehend. "You had to be a boy? There was no other way?"
"Maybe there was," she says, voice small. "Aye, I'm certain there was, and I was just too daft to see it. But… I have to fly, Alek. It'll kill me if I can't, I know it."
He feels himself wavering, feels sympathy for his friend… except that this is not his friend. This is a stranger. A liar. He told her everything, and she told him nothing. And then she made him think – made him want -
"How dare you," he says, furious.
"Alek –"
He cuts her off, but he's too angry to make much sense: "How dare you do that – when I thought – and you aren't even – you're - I don't even know what you are!"
He realizes that his fists are clenched so tightly that it hurts, and for a heartbeat he wants nothing more than for his friend to try to push past him again. This time he would give her a real fight, for all that she's taller.
And there's another injury to his pride: a girl shouldn't be taller than he is. She is unnatural through and through - no more a proper female than the Leviathan is a proper whale.
"I'm your friend," she says, voice shocked and hollow. "I've always been your friend."
"Are you finished?" he demands.
She opens and closes her mouth, then says, "Aye, but… Alek, you don't – I mean, I don't – I didn't do it to hurt you! Any of it!"
He doesn't want to hear that. It would make things more complicated, and right at this moment he needs pure, simple anger.
"I won't tell anyone," he says, crossing to the door. "But I don't want to speak with you again."
"Alek!" she says, but he's already leaving.
He can't bear to spend another second in Dylan – Deryn's – presence. There are, however, only so many places you can run to on an airship. Instead of wandering aimlessly, he decides to get some answers.
He goes to Volger's stateroom and raps on the door, pushing it open before there's a response.
The count is still awake, sitting at the table he uses as a desk and writing industriously, papers in a tidy spread around him.
"Yes, Your Highness?" Volger asks without glancing up.
Alek shuts the door behind him and says, "You knew."
Volger doesn't blink – or stop writing. "Most likely."
Alek puts his hands on the table, wide apart, and leans over. "You knew about Deryn."
The count sets his pen down and shuffles some of the papers together. "Is that her name? Rather masculine. You'd almost think her parents wanted this outcome."
Alek pulls away from the table as if it's burned him. Betrayed by his tutor as well as his friend; God's wounds, of all the silly things, he has the urge to cry. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Volger folds his hands on top of the table and meets Alek's eyes at last. His own expression is hard. "And what would that have accomplished? Secrets are valuable currency, Aleksandar, and you are prone to giving them away."
It's the truth, and perhaps that's why it cuts so deeply.
"I suppose she told you," Volger adds. "It would be too much to hope that you uncovered the deception on your own."
Alek stands where he is, anger and humilation and sadness warring within him, and says nothing. He, too, is exhausted. He just wants this to be over. He just wants things to return to the way they were. He wants his friend back. He wants that clarity of purpose he felt in Istanbul. He wants…
Lord help him, he wants his mother and father.
But the count isn't finished: "She seems to have aspirations of developing a more intimate relationship with you. Ludicrous, of course, but you will need to be on your guard. No doubt that's why she's brought you into her confidence now. I had expected this sooner, truthfully, based on her behavior in Istanbul. Pathetic."
Alek takes a breath that's halfway to a sob, and might have degraded himself further but for a knock on the stateroom door.
He's closest, so, rank be damned, he opens it. Deryn is on the other side, breathing rushed, as if she's run after him. He looks at her and can't imagine how he ever saw a boy.
How he ever saw someone he trusted.
Desperately, she says, "Alek, please, I know I bollixed it all up, but…"
"I thought I made myself clear," he says, cold, quite aware of Count Volger's attention on his back. "Stay away, from me and my men. Or I will tell Captain Hobbes."
The desperation on her face gives way to a sudden and fathomless pain.
"Don't you have somewhere to be, Miss Sharp?" Volger says behind him, putting a cruelly mocking emphasis on her correct title.
Her eyes dart to the count, then refocus on Alek. He does his best to meet her gaze without any emotion - to be imperiously removed - but she has no such compunction.
Quietly, sincerely, she says, "I'm sorry I ever barking met you, Aleksandar Ferdinand."
And then she's gone.