Deryn Sharp gritted her teeth, resolving that no one would see through her disguise.
There couldn't be that much trick to it, being a stupid boy.
The line of recruits on the ascension field weren't impressive. Most looked barely sixteen, sent off by their families to find fortune and advancement. A few older boys were mixed in with the others, probably middies coming over from the navy.
Looking at their anxious faces, Deryn was glad to have had a father who'd taken her up in hot-air balloons. She'd seen the ground from on high plenty of times. But that didn't keep her nerves from playing up. She almost reached for Jaspert's hand before realizing how that would look.
"All right, Dylan," he said quietly as they neared the desk. "Just remember what I told you."
Deryn snorted. Last night Jaspert had demonstrated how a proper boy checked his fingernails - looking at his palm, fingers bent, whereas girls looked at the backs of their hands, fingers splayed.
"Aye, Jaspert," she said. "But if they ask me to do my nails, don't you think the jig's up already?"
He didn't laugh. "Just don't draw attention to yourself, right?"
Deryn said nothing more, following him to the long table set up outside a white hangar tent. Three officers sat behind it, accepting letters of introduction from the recruits.
"Ah, Coxswain Sharp!" one said. He wore the uniform of a flight lieutenant, but also the curve-brimmed bowler hat of a boffin.
Jaspert saluted him smartly. "Lieutenant Cook, may I present my cousin Dylan."
When Cook held out his hand to Deryn, she felt the moment of British pride that boffins always gave her. Here was a man who'd reached into the very chains of life and worked them to suit his purposes.
She gave his hand the firmest shake she could. "Nice to meet you, sir."
"Always a pleasure to meet a Sharp fellow," the boffin said, then chuckled at his own joke. "Your cousin speaks highly of your comprehension of aeronautics and aerology."
Deryn cleared her throat, using the soft, low voice she'd been practicing for weeks. "My da - that is, my uncle - taught us all about ballooning."
"Ah, yes, a brave man." He shook his head. "A tragedy he isn't here to see the triumphs of living flight."
"Aye, he would've loved it, sir." Da had gone up in only hot-air balloons, not hydrogen breathers like the Service used.
Jaspert gave her a nudge, and Deryn remembered the letter of recommendation. She pulled it from her jacket and offered it to Flight Lieutenant Cook. He pretended to study it, which was silly because he'd written it himself as a favor to Jaspert, but even boffins had to follow Royal Navy form.
"This seems to be in order." His eyes drifted up from the letter and traveled across Deryn's borrowed outfit, looking troubled for a moment by what he saw.
She stood stiffly under his gaze, wondering what she'd done wrong. Was it her hair? Her voice? Had the handshake somehow gone amiss?
"Bit spindly, aren't you?" the boffin finally said.
"Aye, sir. I suppose so."
His face broke into a smile. "Well, we had to fatten up your cousin too. Mr. Sharp, please join the line!"
FOUR
The sun was just starting to creep above the tree line when the proper military men arrived. They rolled across the field in an all-terrain carriage drawn by two lupine tigeresques, pulling up smartly before the line of recruits. The beasts' muscles bulged under the leather straps of the carriage rig, and when one shook itself like a monstrous house cat, sweat flew in all directions.
In the corners of her vision Deryn saw the boys around her stiffen. Then the carriage driver set the tigers growling with a snap of his whip, and a nervous murmur traveled down the line.
A man in a flight captain's uniform stood in the open carriage, a riding crop under one arm. "Gentlemen, welcome to Wormwood Scrubs. I trust none of you is frightened by the fabrications of natural philosophy?"
"ADDRESSING THE APPLICANTS."
No one answered. Fabricated beasts were everywhere in London, of course, but nothing so magnificent as these half-wolf tigers, all sinews and claws, a crafty intelligence lurking in their eyes.
Deryn kept her eyes forward, though she was dying to take a closer look at the tigeresques. Before today she'd seen military fabs only in the zoo.
Chapter 3
"Barking spiders!" the young boy next to her whispered. He was nearly as tall as her, and his short blond hair stuck straight up into the air. "I'd hate to see those two get loose."
Deryn resisted the urge to explain that lupines were the tamest of the fabs. Wolves were really just a kind of dog, and could be trained almost as easily. Airbeasts came from trickier stock, of course.
When no one stepped forward to admit their fear, the flight captain said, "Excellent. Then you won't mind a closer look."
The driver's whip snapped again, and the carriage rumbled across the broken field, the nearest tiger passing within arm's reach of the volunteers. The snarling beasts were too much for three boys at the other end of the line. They broke ranks and ran shrieking back toward the open gates of the Scrubs.
Deryn kept her eyes focused directly ahead as the tigers passed, but a whiff of them - a mix of wet dog and raw meat - sent shivers down her spine.
"Not bad, not bad," the flight captain said. "I'm glad to see so few of our young men succumbing to common superstition."
Deryn snorted. A few people - Monkey Luddites, they were called - were afraid of Darwinist beasties on principle. They thought that crossbreeding natural creatures was more blasphemy than science, even if fabs had been the backbone of the British Empire for the last fifty years.
She wondered for a moment if these tigers were the secret test Jaspert had warned her about, and smirked. If so, it had been a pure dawdle.
"But your nerves of steel may not last the day, gentlemen," the flight captain said. "Before moving on we'd like to discover if you have a head for heights. Coxswain?"
"About-face!" shouted an airman. With a muddled bit of shuffling, the line of boys turned itself about to face the hangar tent. Deryn saw that Jaspert was still here, hanging off to one side with the boffins. They were all wearing clart-snaffling grins.
Then the hangar's tent flaps split apart, and Deryn's jaw dropped open... .
An airbeast was inside: a Huxley ascender, its tentacles in the grips of a dozen ground men. The beast pulsed and trembled as they drew it gently out, setting its translucent gasbag shimmering with the red light of the rising sun.