"She isn't an assassin," Alek said.
The doctor stared up at him.
"She," Bovril said.
"Deryn is a girl. That's why she's bound like that." Alek ignored the look of despair on her face. "See for yourself."
"THE DOCTOR'S SUSPICIONS."
With the scissors still at her throat, Dr. Azuela felt her again. Deryn flinched, and his eyes widened as he yanked his hand away.
"¡Lo siento, senorita!"
Deryn opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her fists clenched, and she began to shake. Alek knelt beside her, gently opening one of her hands to hold it.
"Please don't tell anyone, sir," he said.
The doctor shook his head. "But why?"
"She wants to serve - to fly." Alek reached into his inner pocket, the one the pope's letter always occupied. Beside the scroll case his fingers found a small cloth bag and pulled it free.
"Here." Alek handed it to the man. "For your silence."
Dr. Azuela opened the bag, and found the sliver of gold - all that remained of the quarter ton that Alek's father had left him. He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. "I have to tell Pancho."
"Please," Deryn said softly.
"He is our commander." He turned to Deryn. "But only him, I promise."
Dr. Azuela called in one of the rebels from outside and gave an order in rapid-fire Spanish. Then he set to work, cleaning the wound with a rag and liquid from a small silver flask, sterilizing a needle and thread, then handing the flask to Deryn. As she drank, he drew the needle through the skin of her arm, pulling the wound closed stitch by stitch.
Alek watched, keeping his hand in Deryn's. She squeezed hard, her nails cutting half moons into his flesh.
"It'll be all right," he said. "Don't worry."
After all, why should a great rebel leader care if a girl had hidden herself in the British Air Service?
Before Azuela had finished, a gust of air from outside sent the canvas around them swaying. It was one of the great bulls snorting, like an exhalation of steam from a freight train.
The tarps parted, and General Villa stepped inside. "¿Esta muriendo?"
"No, he will mend." The doctor's eyes didn't leave his work. "But he has an interesting secret to tell you. You may wish to sit down."
Villa sighed, settling cross-legged next to Alek. On horseback he had seemed quite graceful, but now he looked a bit thick about the middle. He move deliberately, perhaps with a touch of rheumatism.
"Tell him," Dr. Azuela said.
Deryn looked exhausted, but her voice was firm. "I'm Deryn Sharp, decorated officer in His Majesty's Air Service. But I'm not a man."
"Ah." Villa's eyebrows rose a little as he looked her up and down. "Forgive me, Senorita Sharp. I didn't know the British use women for their glider troops. Because you are small, yes?"
"That's not it, sir," Deryn said. "This is a secret."
"Deryn's father was an airman," Alek explained. "Her brother is too. She dresses as a boy because it's the only way she can fly."
General Villa stared at Deryn for a moment, then a snort of laughter rippled through his body. "¡Que engano!"
"Please don't tell anyone," Alek said. "At least not for a few hours, until we've gone. It's nothing to you, whether you turn her in. But to her it's everything."
The man shook his head in wonder, then raised an eyebrow at Alek. "And what is your part in this joke, little prince?"
"He's my friend," Deryn said. Her face was still pale, but her voice sounded stronger now. She offered Villa the flask.
He waved it away. "Only a friend?"
Deryn didn't answer, staring down at the fresh stitches in her arm. Alek opened his mouth, but Bovril spoke first: "Ally."
General Villa gave the loris a curious look. "What is this beast?"
"A perspicacious loris." Deryn reached up and stroked its head. "It repeats things, a bit like a message lizard."
"It does not only repeat," Dr. Azuela said. "It told me I was wrong."
Alek frowned - he'd noticed that as well. As the weeks had passed, the lorises' memories had grown longer. They sometimes parroted things from days before, or that they'd heard only from each other. It wasn't always clear now where a word or phrase had come from.
"That's because it's perspicacious," Deryn said. "In other words, it's clever."
"Dead clever," Bovril said, and Villa stared at it again, his brown eyes marveling.
"Tienen oro," Dr. Azuela said into the silence.
Alek's Italian was sufficient for him to understand the word for "gold." He pulled out the small bag again. "It's not much, but we can pay for your silence."
General Villa took the bag and opened it, then laughed. "The richest man in California sends me guns! And you tempt me with this gold toothpick?"
"Then, what do you wanp>
The man's eyes narrowed on Alek. "Senor Hearst says you are a nephew of the old emperor, Maximilian."
"A grandnephew, but yes."
"Emperors are vain and useless things. We did not need one, so we shot him."
"Yes, I know the story." Alek swallowed. "Perhaps it was a bit presumptuous, putting an Austrian on the throne of Mexico."
"It was an insult to the people. But your uncle was brave at the end. In front of the firing squad, he wished that his blood should be the last to flow for freedom." General Villa looked at the red-stained rag in Dr. Azuela's hand. "Sadly, it was not."
"Indeed," Alek said. "That was fifty years ago, wasn't it?"
"Si. Too much blood since then." Villa tossed the bag back to Alek and turned to Deryn. "Keep your secret, little sister. But be more careful the next time you jump off your ship."
"Aye, I'll try."
"And be careful of young princes. The first man I ever shot was as rich as a prince, and it was for my sister's honor." General Villa laughed again. "But you are a soldier, Senorita Sharp - you can shoot men for yourself, can't you?"
Deryn gave a one-shouldered shrug. "It's crossed my mind, once or twice. But pardon me, sir. If you don't like emperors, where did you get those German walkers?"
"The kaiser sells us arms." General Villa patted the Mauser pistol on his belt. "Sometimes he gives us arms, so we are his friends when the Yankees join the war, I think. But we will never bow to him."
"Aye, emperors are a bit pointless, aren't they?" Deryn sat up straighter and held out her right hand. "Thank you for not telling."
"Your secret is safe, hermanita." General Villa shook her hand, then rose to his feet, but suddenly his eyes narrowed and his hand went to his gun. A shadow loomed against the tarp.
Villa reached up and flung the canvas aside, pointing his pistol into the beaming unshaven face of Eddie Malone.
"Dylan Sharp, Deryn Sharp . . . of course! Well, I can't say I had a clue, but it sure explains a lot." The man rubbed his hands together and then thrust one at Pancho Villa. "Eddie Malone, reporter for the New York World."
Chapter Thirty
The cut on Deryn's arm wasn't much in the end, just eleven neat stitches that hardly itched at all. But she was going to feel her injured knee for a long time.
Most often the ache was simple and honest, as if she'd bashed it on the corner of an iron bed frame. Other times the whole leg throbbed, like her growing pains back when she'd been only twelve and already taller than half the boys in Glasgow. But the worst agony came at night, when her kneecap buzzed and thrummed like a bottle full of bees.
The buzzing was probably thanks to Dr. Busk's compress. It wasn't mustard seed and oats like her aunties favored, but a wee fabricated beastie of some kind. It had attached itself to her skin like a barnacle, its tendrils creeping inside to heal the ligaments torn in the crash. The surgeon hadn't said what life threads the compress was fabricated from, but it lived on sugar water and a bit of sunlight every day - half plant and half animal, most likely.
Whatever the beastie was, it got annoyed when Deryn moved. Even a squick of weight on the leg was punished with an hour of angry bees. Walking was a nightmare and dressing was tricky, and of course she could hardly ask for help with that.
If it hadn't been for Alek, the whole crew would've learned her secret that first day. It was Alek who'd persuaded General Villa to stay silent, and had convinced the officers that Deryn could stay in her own cabin, not the sick bay, even though it meant Alek had to fetch meals from the galley himself. It was Alek who half carried her to the heads in the dark gastric channel several times a day, standing guard at a gentlemanly distance while she went. And it was Alek who kept her company so she didn't go stark raving mad.
He'd done so much, just to make sure that her last few days aboard the Leviathan were spent as a proper airman and not as some mad girl shunned by the officers and crew.
That bum-rag Eddie Malone hadn't told anyone, not yet. After Mr. Hearst's treachery, the reporters weren't allowed near Tesla's radio or the messenger birds, and Malone was too worried that Adela Rogers would steal his story. But New York was only two days away. Two more days in uniform, and then her secret would be revealed to the world. There was no escaping the fact that this was Deryn Sharp's last journey aboard the Leviathan.
It was like awaiting execution, every second slow and sharp-edged, but sometimes at night she was grateful to the bees for keeping her awake. At least she could spend a few more hours feeling the vibrations of the ship and listening to the whispers of airflow around the gondola.
Most of the time, though, Deryn wondered what she would do next. She'd have to make up some new lies, of course, to keep her brother Jaspert out of trouble for sneaking her into the Service. But her notoriety would eventually fade, and she'd have to find proper work.
Deryn still knew her aeronautics, even if the Service took away her uniform. And whether or not her knee healed completely, she'd grown strong enough to work alongside most men. Alek said she should stay in America, where, according to him, women who could handle hydrogen balloons were all the rage.
He'd explained about Pauline and her perils. The girl was nothing but a moving-picture character, a flicker of shadows on a screen, but she'd crawled inside Alek's daft attic somehow.
"She stands to ineight a lot of money," he was explaining the second day out of General Villa's airfield. "Millions of American dollars, I suppose. But here's the twist: She doesn't get a penny till she marries."
Deryn leaned back into her pillows and stared up. The Gulf of Mexico lay sparkling beneath the Leviathan, casting shimmers on the ceiling. Alek sat at the foot of Deryn's bed while Bovril perched on the head, waving its wee arms as if practicing semaphore signals.
"Poor girl," Deryn said. "Except for the millions of dollars part."
Alek laughed. "It's a melodrama, not a tragedy."
"Melodrama," Bovril said in the slow, clear way the lorises did when they learned new words.
"But instead of getting married," Alek went on, "she goes off to have adventures. And no one stops her, even though she's a girl!"
Deryn frowned. It didn't sound likely, though if you had a few millions in the bank, perhaps people treated you a bit more like a man. "Besides that palaver with the hydrogen balloon, what sort of adventures?"
"Well, I saw only the first episode. It didn't have a proper ending, just what they call a cliff-hanger." Alek thought a moment. "Though I think Mr. Hearst mentioned something about runaway walkers and being tied to train tracks."