Goliath (21 page)

“Quite beautiful, considering,” Alek said.

“Considering what?”

“That the same culture fabricated those horrid kappa.”

“Less horrid than a phosphorous shell, if you ask me.”

Alek shrugged, not in the mood to revisit the argument he’d had with Tesla. “You’re right. Killing is ugly, whatever shape it takes. That’s why we have to stop this war.”

“It isn’t up to you to fix the world, Alek. Maybe your parents’ murder set it off, but the world was ready enough with war machines and beasties!” She stared into her bowl, twirling noodles onto her chopsticks. “A fight would have happened one way or another.”

“None of that changes the fact that my family started it.”

Deryn turned to face him. “You can’t blame a match for a house made of straw, Alek.”

“A nice turn of phrase.” All that was left of Alek’s meal was broth. The other customers seemed to think nothing of drinking from their bowls, so he lifted his with both hands. “But it doesn’t change what I have to do.”

Deryn watched him drink, then said simply, “What if you can’t stop it?”

“You saw what we did in Istanbul. Our revolution kept them out of the war!”

“It was
their
revolution, Alek. We just helped a bit.”

“Of course, but Mr. Tesla can do much more. Destiny
brought me to Siberia to meet him, so clearly his plan
has
to work
!”

Deryn sighed. “What if destiny doesn’t care?”

“Why can’t you admit that providence has guided my course at every turn?” Alek counted the points on his fingers. “My father prepared a refuge for me in the Alps, in the very same valley where the
Leviathan
crashed! Then, after I escaped, I wound up back on your ship—just as it was headed for the siege of Tsingtao. And that brought me to the wastes of Siberia in time to meet Tesla. All those connections have to
mean
something!”

Deryn opened her mouth to argue, then hesitated, a half smile crossing her face. “So you must think that we’re meant to be together.”

Alek blinked. “What?”

“I told you how I wound up on the
Leviathan
. If a freak storm hadn’t carried me halfway across Britain, I’d be serving on the
Minotaur
with Jaspert. Never would have met you, then.”

“Well, I suppose not.”

“And when we crashed, and you came to help us on those silly snowshoes, you walked straight up to where I was lying in the snow.” Her smile grew broader. “You saved me, first thing.”

“Only from a frostbitten bum.” Alek stared into the empty bowl before him; a fish egg was stuck to one side.
He picked it up with his chopsticks and regarded it.

“And when you jumped ship in Istanbul, you thought you’d got away from me.” Deryn gave a snort. “Not likely.”

“You do have a habit of showing up.”

“Must be rough for you. Having your destiny mixed up with a barking commoner’s!” She shoveled in her last mouthful of noodles, chuckling to herself.

Alek frowned. In two days of brooding it somehow hadn’t crossed his mind that without Deryn Sharp the Ottoman Revolution might have failed, and Alek certainly would never have come back aboard the
Leviathan
. Thus he wouldn’t have met Tesla, and would be no closer to stopping the war.

Deryn had been there every step of the way.

“We are connected, aren’t we?”

“Aye,” she said, still chewing. “And for us to meet at all, I had to pretend to be a boy. Fancy that.”

“Barking destiny,” Bovril said, then burped.

Alek put his hands up in surrender. There were worse things than being connected to Deryn Sharp. In fact, the simple fact that she was smiling sent a wave of relief through him—she was his ally again, his friend. Providence seemed to be saying that she always would be.

All at once a fist around his heart loosened its grip.

“It was awful, being at war with you.”

Deryn laughed. “I missed you, too, daft prince.” She started to say more, but then cast a look over her shoulder at the two marine guards, and sighed. “We should go fetch our clothes. Tesla will be starting in a few hours.”

Alek nodded. “It should be quite a show.”

The theater of the Imperial Hotel was filling up; there
were at least a hundred in the audience already. Deryn wondered if the Clanker boffin had invited them all, or if the British embassy had, or whether the news was spreading on its own across Tokyo.

The British ambassador was easy to spot, a man in a posh civilian suit surrounded by admirals and commodores. Not far away a dozen Japanese naval officers wore black tunics and hats with red piping. Deryn recognized other uniforms—French, Russian, even a handful of Italians, though Darwinist Italy had yet to join the war. A gaggle of boffins, European and Japanese, stood about in bowlers, some with recording frogs perched on their shoulders.

Of everyone there, only Deryn was alone. Dr. Barlow had abandoned her for the other boffins, and Bovril was
sneaking beneath the chairs, listening for new snippets of language.

Most of the audience seemed to be reporters, some already snapping photos of the stage. All sorts of electrical apparatus waited there, metal spheres and glass tubes, coils of wire, a generator the size of a smokehouse, and a large glass bulb hanging from the ceiling. How Tesla had put all these contraptions together so quickly was beyond Deryn. The
Leviathan
had made good speed and had landed just before midnight, and the man had left in a whirlwind shortly after. He must have spent the whole night and morning hunting for electrical parts.

Deryn spotted Master Klopp off to one side, working on a tangle of wires. Hoffman stood beside him, tools at the ready. Alek had put his men at the disposal of the great inventor, of course. And at the moment, Alek himself was busy chatting to a group of officers in unfamiliar blue uniforms. Americans, perhaps.

Deryn was still surprised at her own words from that morning, about her and Alek being meant to be together. She still didn’t really believe any of his claptrap about providence. Blethering about destiny was simply a way for Alek to accept her as a girl, by fitting her into his grand plan to save the world. He’d swallowed it, of course, because deep down Alek knew that he was stronger with her than without.

The lights flickered, and the audience began to settle into their seats. Bovril returned to Deryn’s shoulder, and Dr. Barlow made her way back across the room, taking a seat beside her.

“Mr. Sharp, have I mentioned it’s good to see you so well dressed?”

Deryn fingered her shirt, which was made out of a thicker, softer cotton than she was used to. It fit marvelously, despite the tailors never having touched her.

“They take their tailoring seriously here, ma’am.”

“And a good thing too. You are in the presence of greatness.”

Deryn frowned. “I thought you didn’t like this bumrag.”

“Not Mr. Tesla, young man.” She gestured with a white-gloved hand. “There is Sakichi Toyoda, the father of Japanese mechanics. And, beside him, Kokichi Mikimoto, the first fabricator of shaped pearls. Clankers and Darwinists, working together.”

“To-yo-da,” Bovril said softly, separating each syllable.

“Better than fighting each other, I suppose,” Deryn said. “But what’s the point of all this? The Admiralty’s not even here to see it.”

“In a way, they are.” Dr. Barlow nodded her head toward the wings of the stage, where a Royal Navy officer sat at a telegraph key. “Tokyo is connected to London by underwater fiber. According to the ambassador, Lord Churchill himself has awoken early to follow the proceedings.”

Deryn frowned. The underwater fiber system, which stretched from Britain to Australia to Japan, was one of the more uncanny creations of Darwinism. Made from mile-long strands of living nervous tissue, it bound the British Empire together like a single organism, carrying coded messages along the ocean floor.

“But they won’t be able to
see
anything,” Deryn said.

“Mr. Tesla claims otherwise.” Dr. Barlow’s voice
faded as the lights dimmed and a hush settled over the crowd.

A familiar tall figure strode to the center of the darkened stage, holding a long cylinder in one hand. He flourished it in the air, like a swordsman saluting, and then his voice boomed across the theater.

“Time is pressing, so I shall begin without prologue. I hold a glass tube full of incandescent gasses.” Tesla pointed at the ceiling. “And here is a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential. When I touch both . . .”

He took the wire in one hand, and the glass tube suddenly illuminated in the other. There was a slight gasp from the audience, and then a scattering of laughter, as if some of them had known the trick was coming.

Shadows shifted across Tesla’s features as he rested the glowing tube across his shoulder, like a phantasmal walking stick. “This is merely an electric light, of course, except for the novelty of using my body as a conductor. But it reminds us that electricity can travel through more than wires. Through the atmosphere, for example, or the Earth’s crust, and even the ether of interplanetary space.”

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Barlow said softly. “Not
martians
again.”

“Martians,” Bovril said, chuckling, and Deryn raised an eyebrow.

Tesla placed the tube at the edge of the stage, the light extinguishing the moment his fingers left it. He let go of the wire and straightened his jacket.

“In some ways our planet itself is a capacitor, a giant battery.” He reached up to touch the bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a light spread inside it. “In the center of this sphere is another, smaller, globe. Both are filled with luminous gases, and together they can show us the engine of our planet at work.”

The man fell silent then, standing back and saying nothing. The globe stayed lit, but nothing else happened as minutes passed in silence. Deryn shifted in her seat. It was a bit uncanny to see so many important people sitting quietly for this long.

Her mind began to drift, wondering why Dr. Barlow had mentioned martians. Did Tesla believe in them? It was one thing to call the great inventor a nutter, but quite another if he was truly mad.

Alek wanted to stop the war so badly, he was willing to believe any promise of peace. And after all he’d lost—his family, his country, and his home—how would he carry on if this hope were dashed as well? But there was not much she could do, Deryn supposed, except show him that there were other things to life besides saving the world.

A murmur went through the crowd, and she looked
up. The light in the glass sphere had formed a shape, a tiny finger of lightning, just like those inside Tesla’s metal detector. The flicker was moving, sweeping slowly around the globe like the second hand on a clock.

“The rotation is clockwise, as always,” Tesla said. “Though in the Southern Hemisphere it would go in the other direction, I suppose. You see, this finger of light is set in motion by the spinning of our planet.”

Another murmur traveled across the room, a bit unsettled. Deryn frowned. How was that so different from a pendulum or a compass needle?

“But we are not limited to the brute forces of nature.” Tesla took a step closer to the hanging light, a small object in his hand. “With this magnet I can wrest control of this flicker from the earth itself.”

He stepped still closer, and the light stopped spinning. Tesla began to walk around the bulb, and the flicker began to move again, always pointing away from him, no matter how he paused or hurried.

“Strange, isn’t it? To think that one can aim lightning as easily as a pistol.” He pulled out his pocket watch and checked it. “But now it is time for a larger demonstration. Much larger. A few days ago I sent a message from the
Leviathan
to Tokyo by courier eagle. The message was forwarded by underwater fiber to London, and finally by radio waves to my assistants in New York, more than
halfway around the world. There, a few minutes from now, they will follow my instructions.”