The Pacific Ocean was nearly half the world, as Mr. Rigby liked to say. It certainly looked vast now, spread out beneath the ship like a rippling sheet of silver. The Japanese home islands were less than a day behind them, but already the very notion of land seemed distant and obscure.

The Leviathan was at full-ahead, making airspeed of sixty miles an hour. The wind blew down the spine at whole gale force, thrumming along the ship’s surface like a surging river.

“Is it always like this?” Alek shouted over the wind.

“Aye,” Deryn replied. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

Alek just scowled at her. His gloved hands clutched the ratlines in a death grip, and Hoffman’s eyes were wide with fear behind his goggles. The two Clankers had been at full-ahead in their engine pods before, but never out here on the open spine.

“This is real flying!” Deryn leaned closer. “But if you’re afraid, your princeliness, you can go back down.”

Alek shook his head. “Hoffman needs a translator.”

“My German’s good enough,” Deryn said. “I had a whole month of your Clanker jabbering in Istanbul!”

“Weißt du, was ein Kondensator ist?”

“That’s easy. You asked me if I know what a Kondensator is!”

“Well, do you?”

Deryn frowned. “Well, it’s some sort of . . . condenser. Obviously.”

“No,” Alek said. “A capacitor. You just blew up the ship, Dummkopf.”

She rolled her eyes. It seemed a bit unfair, expecting her to know German words for contraptions she’d never seen before. But she couldn’t argue the point. Hoffman was the engineer best able to follow Tesla’s orders, and only Alek could translate Clanker technical jargon into English.

This whole trip topside was at the bidding of the great inventor. He wanted a radio antenna stretching the length of the Leviathan, but he didn’t want the ship slowing down. The captain had little choice but to obey—the Admiralty’s orders were to cooperate with Tesla, and to get him to America as quickly as practical.

Working on the spine at top speed wasn’t impossible, after all, just a bit tricky. And also dead good fun.

“Take the wire to the bow, Sharp!” Mr. Rigby shouted above the wind. “And before you head back, make sure that end is secure.”

“I’ll go along,” Alek said.

“No you won’t, boy!” Mr. Rigby shouted. “It’s too dangerous for princes up there.”

Alek scowled, but didn’t argue. Up here on the spine, the bosun was the only royalty.

Deryn waved for Hoffman, then began to make her way toward the great airbeast’s head. Reattaching her safety clip every yard or so made progress slow, and the spool of wire was barking heavy. But the trickiest thing was crawling into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind.

Hoffman followed, carrying his tools and a small device that Mr. Tesla had been tinkering with all day. He claimed that with a thousand-foot-long antenna at this altitude, he could detect radio signals from anywhere in the world—even beyond.

“So he can talk to bloody martians,” Deryn cried. “That’s what we’re up here for!”

Hoffman didn’t understand, or chose not to comment.

At full-ahead the bow was bare of life. The fléchette bats were all hidden away in their nooks and crannies, the birds safe in the rookery. Soon the last set of ratlines disappeared, and Deryn crawled still more slowly, lying flat, her palms spread across the rough, hard surface of the airbeast’s bowhead.

She was glad for the weight of the spool now. At least with sixty pounds of wire strapped to her back, the wind was less likely to blow her into the ocean. She yelled at Hoffman to keep himself flat. At this speed, rushing air could find a grip in any space between a crewman’s body and the airbeast’s skin, like a knife prying up a barnacle, and fling him off into the sea.

At last Deryn reached the mooring yoke, the heavy harness at the extreme bow of the airship. She snapped her safety clip to it and sighed with relief. Hoffman joined her there, and together they began to secure one end of the wire.

As they worked in the relentless wind, Deryn found herself wondering if Hoffman knew what she really was. She doubted Volger would have told anyone; the man always kept secrets for his own uses. But what about Alek? He’d promised not to tell anyone that she was a girl, but did that include hiding the truth from his own men?

When the wire was tied fast and Tesla’s device attached, Hoffman clapped Deryn on the shoulder, muttering a few choice German curses into the wind. She smiled, suddenly certain that he didn’t know.

Alek might be a Dummkopf sometimes, but he was always true to his word.

The two started back, unspooling wire as they went, securing it to the ratlines every few yards, to keep it from flapping about. Crawling was much quicker with the wind at their backs, and they soon reached Alek and Mr. Rigby again. Together the four of them headed aft.

The journey grew easier as they neared the tail. The roar of the Clanker engines lessened with distance, and past the airbeast’s middle its body narrowed, the great hump sheltering them from the wind. When the first spool emptied, they halted. Mr. Rigby and Hoffman spliced it to another five-hundred-foot wire.

While they waited, Alek turned to Deryn. “Are you excited about seeing America?”

“A bit,” she said. “But it sounds like an odd place.”

The United States was another half-Darwinist, half-Clanker country. But unlike Japan, the technologies weren’t happily combined there. The two halves of America had been fighting a vicious civil war when old Darwin had announced his discoveries. The South had adopted Darwinist agricultural techniques, while the industrial North had stayed loyal to the machine. Even fifty years later the nation remained split in two.

“Isn’t that why people join the Air Service?” Alek asked. “To see the world?”

Deryn shrugged. “Me, I just wanted to fly.”

“I’m beginning to see the appeal,” Alek said, smiling. He stood up halfway, the airflow thrashing at his hair and flight suit, and he leaned forward at a precarious angle, letting the force of the wind keep him upright.

“Blazes, Alek. Sit yourself down!”

The boy just laughed, splaying his hands like a bird’s wings. Deryn leaned forward to grab the safety harness of his flight suit.

The bosun looked up from his work. “Quit that skylarking!”

“Sorry, sir!” Deryn pulled at Alek’s harness. “Come on, you dafty. Sit down!”

Alek stopped laughing, dropping to one knee. He pointed ahead. “Is that what I think it is?”

Deryn turned to face the wind. The Leviathan’s nose was tipping down a bit, and the great hill of the whale’s hump seemed to descend before them, revealing the sky ahead.

“Mr. Rigby!” Deryn called, pointing at the bow. “You should see this, sir.”

A moment later the bosun swore, and Hoffman let out a low whistle. Ahead of the airship was a towering mass of thunderclouds, framed by a dark wall that stretched across the horizon. It was a huge storm, right in the Leviathan’s path.