Her head is aching.
Not just aching; throbbing. It feels like someone's cut the top off of her skull and danced a hornpipe on her brain.
Deryn cracks an eye open. The light hurts, too, and her poor battered brain realizes she ought to hold very, very still or risk losing her last meal.
Carefully, slowly, she gets her bearings. She's flat on her back in her cabin, bandages itching around her head and one of her forearms. The painful light is only the dim glow of a wormlamp. She stares at it foggily for a long moment, trying to figure how she got here.
"How are you feeling?" a quiet voice asks her. She blinks and turns her head - carefully - to the side. When the vertigo settles, she sees it's Dr. Barlow.
"Terrible," she mumbles, surprised at how exhausted she is, considering she only just woke up. "Alive."
"Everyone else is all right," the lady boffin says. She lays a cool and gentle hand across Deryn's forehead - to soothe or to check her temperature, Deryn's not sure. "Thanks to you."
"What happened?"
"You received a rather nasty blow to the head. You don't remember?"
She thinks as hard as she dares, but there's only a blank, fuzzy black expanse. The aching in her skull is suddenly accompanied by a sick feeling in her stomach. "N-no."
Dr. Barlow looks at her with an expression Deryn's never seen on the lady boffin before: pity. "Perhaps that's for the best."
Her addled, abused brain starts racing faster out of fear. "But everyone's all right? The ship and everyone? That's what you said, right?"
"Yes," Dr. Barlow says. Gentle. Sad. Pitying.
Dr. Barlow is never gentle.
It all slips into place. Dread cuts through the fog with sudden icy clarity, leaving her at once shivering and even more exhausted than before. Deryn knows what's coming next.
She should've pieced it together already, but she can't think straight for more than half a second at a time. She closes her eyes again and tells herself that she won't cry.
The cabin is silent for a long, long minute. She can feel the thrum of the ship's engines vibrating through the bedframe, and the voices of men in the corridor.
Softly, Dr. Barlow asks, "What is your name, dear?"
A tear, hot and wet against her skin, slides out from beneath her eyelid despite her best efforts. She opens her eyes and blinks hard to shoo the rest away. "Deryn," she whispers.
Dr. Barlow moves her chair closer and takes Deryn's hand in both of hers. Deryn would tear away if she had the energy - the lady boffin would never comfort a boy like this; and anyway she's not going to shatter if she doesn't have someone to hold her hand.
"There was some question about where you were injured," Dr. Barlow says, or starts to say, because Deryn gives the smallest shake of her head and the doctor falls silent.
"Does everybody know?" she whispers, hating the way her voice wavers.
Quietly, but definitively, she gets the answer: "Yes."
"I suppose I'm well and truly stuffed, then," she says, summoning up a flicker of a smile that must be terribly unconvincing, judging from the lady boffin's face.
"I'm sorry," Dr. Barlow says. "I argued quite strongly on your behalf with Captain Hobbes, once we learned. But he says the rules are clear."
"Aye," she says. There are a million questions she ought to be asking (will I be tried? are they going to see me home, or dump me in the next port? what'll become of Jaspert?), but it seems like too much work, just at the present. She settles for echoing herself: "Aye, they are."
"Now that you're awake, I'm afraid I must notify the captain. He has questions for you – a great many, and none of them friendly. As a girl," Dr. Barlow adds, with a touch of her usual smug cleverness, "you shall be in need of a lady to sit with you during the interview. Of course I volunteered."
It's a small kindness. Too small to make any real difference. But it's one less worry for Deryn, who is sinking back into an exhausted fog. "Thank you."
"I could do no less for the Leviathan's finest midshipman." Dr. Barlow releases her hand and stands in a rustle of skirts - deafening, to Deryn's cracked skull. She puts her own hand on her forehead in an effort to stave off the nausea.
"Deryn," Dr. Barlow says softly from the door. "Aleksandar has been... anxious to see you, as well. And it may take me some time to fetch Captain Hobbes. Are you able to speak with him now?"
Alek.
Shame and need war within her muddled thoughts and her aching heart. Another freshet of tears threatens, and she moves the hand on her forehead to cover her eyes.
Coward, she says to herself.
"No," she says to Dr. Barlow. "No, I'm not."
The lady boffin says, "I understand," and then she's gone, leaving Deryn all alone.
Crying, as it turns out, makes her head feel even worse.
