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It was cool for May, as if spring was unwilling to loosen its grip on the city. Not quite raining, but still damp from the fog that had rolled in from the east up the Thames and settled in its ancestral floodplains that now made up central London in 1919. There was no wind but the chilled air crept up the sleeves of Deryn’s waxed canvas coat.
Alek and Deryn were at no risk of getting lost on their daily walk to work but the thick blanket of fog obstructed everyone's view and made even crossing the road risky business. Deryn yanked Alek back to the edge of the street as a car with no lights rattled past. He swore loudly.
‘Clankers,’ he muttered, which made Deryn laugh. With the war over, clanker technologies had become fashionable in England. Likewise, many formerly clanker states, especially the newly formed ones, had begun to adopt Darwinism in an attempt to stake out their differences from their predecessors.
Further down the street Deryn almost tripped over a man's legs - or at least what remained of them. One leg had been amputated above the knee and the calf on the other looked wasted and shriveled, though at least that foot was still attached. He sat with his back against a lamppost with his legs stretched out in front of him. His military issue wool coat would have once been warm enough for this weather, but now it was threadbare and full of holes.
‘Sorry mate. Didn't see you in the fog,’ Deryn said as she righted herself. She dug a coin out of her coat pocket and tossed it to the man, which he caught with a grim nod.
Deryn had seen some ex-military men like herself salute these poor bums who had lost their limbs or faces and certainly their nerves and sanity to the war, but she never did. Salutes wouldn't buy supper, and it felt insulting to only acknowledge these men for the short term job they'd taken that had ensured they'd never hold down another job again.
The Zoological Society of London’s Research Centre gradually emerged from the fog like a mountain looming over them. Alek removed Bovril from his interior pocket before they hung their coats in the common room closet. Deryn checked her mailbox while Alek rifled through the many foreign newspapers that the Zoo subscribed to. Dr Barlow had left a note asking Deryn to come by her office around nine o'clock, which didn't leave Deryn with enough time to get much else done beforehand. She joined Alek around the newspapers, alongside the other engineers and fabricators who started their days with international news over tea.
‘Did you see anything in my mailbox, Dylan?’ Alek asked without taking his eyes off the paper in his hand.
‘Can’t say I did. You’re not very popular today,’ she said. Alek nodded vaguely and flipped the page.
Alek still took the news very seriously in a way that Deryn had never quite been able to muster even after Eddie Malone had almost published a hit piece on her. Of course, she'd never been anything but an oddity to the news cycle whereas Alek and his entire family had been regular inhabitants of the worldwide royal pillory.
She'd thought he might relax the pace at which he read the news after the war had ended last year, but if anything he'd only increased in intensity. Austria-Hungary had splintered into several countries, some entirely new, some that had existed before Austria-Hungary, and some joining other established states. Konopiště, the castle where Alek had grown up, wasn’t even in Austria anymore, but in the Czechoslovak Republic. Every single Habsburg had been exiled from Austria.
All of these developments had dragged Alek further down a seemingly unending existential quest for identity. Was he Austrian if the landscape he remembered as home was no longer in Austria? Did the Habsburg ban at Austria’s borders include him, or was his disownment of the family enough to grant him access? He didn’t think of himself as a Habsburg anymore and neither did the British government, but did they? And if they did, who was right?
He’d come a long way, and if he ever regretted his disownment of the Habsburgs, Deryn had never heard of it. But that didn’t mean that the two of them didn’t spend many evenings flipping through history books and atlases, arranging chess pieces on maps, moving furniture around their flat to examine all angles in Alek’s pursuit of making heads or tails of his place on the global stage. Or, at least, the global stage in his mind, since he’d largely tried to stay out of the papers since moving to London.
The papers today were reporting on the civil war raging in Russia and the inevitable dissolution of an attempted communist state in Bavaria. Alek’s brow was furrowed and Deryn knew he was disappointed that the Bavarian Soviet Republic had been doomed. Alek had read nearly Marx’s entire body of work a couple of years ago, while Deryn wasn’t sure she was totally on-board with it all, she understood what he saw in it. He’d been excited to see a new social structure in action.
Dr Barlow was also reading about the Bavarian Soviet Republic when Deryn walked into her office, but she put the newspaper down when Deryn arrived. Tazza nuzzled her hand and Dr Barlow motioned for her to close the door. The noise of the hallway died down, revealing the chirping and singing of the many insects that made their home in Dr Barlow’s vivarium shelves in the window. It was an impressive vertical ecosystem that took up most of the floor-to-ceiling window with irrigation systems for each row of plants. The species were swapped out occasionally, as part of Dr Barlow’s long term observation of the symbiotic relationships amongst the plants and insects. It was more for inspiration than data collection, Deryn had learned after cautiously questioning the scientific integrity and rigour of an experiment that took place next to Dr Barlow’s lunch.
‘Mr Sharp, I believe a change of name is in order for you,’ she said with no preamble. Deryn was used to her way of speaking at this point, and knew she would have to catch up on the other half of this conversation that Dr Barlow had already had with herself.
‘Alright. Who am I going to be this time and where are you sending me?’ Deryn asked.
Dr Barlow smiled.
‘Deryn Sharp. And you don’t have to go far, just around the building to reintroduce yourself to your colleagues.’
Deryn sat in silence while Dr Barlow looked at her with satisfaction. Deryn couldn’t think of anything to say for a long time. Every time she tried to grasp a thought it seemed to evaporate.
Finally, she said, ‘Why?’
‘The war is over,’ Dr Barlow said briskly, having apparently anticipated this question. ‘You’re not in the air force any more and haven’t been for several years. Your former position there is no longer at risk of humiliating Britain in the midst of a global crisis. You have an established career at the Zoological Society, an institute which employs both men and women, so your position won’t be at risk. Women can vote now, though you’re still a few years away from that. You don’t have to hide your identity or relationship with Alek anymore.’
These were all good reasons, Deryn thought, but none of them really moved her. She tried to imagine dancing with Alek in public the way they did in their living room, but the fantasy ended with a fist fight with other patrons in the bar, probably because Deryn was still wearing a suit and had short hair in the image she’d conjured up.
‘I’ll have to think it over.’ Deryn watched a drop of condensation slide down the inside of the vivarium window. The glass was perpetually fogged up, even in the summer.
Dr Barlow smiled.
‘Of course. It will be quite a change to drop your disguise after so many years. I won’t do anything just yet, but one word from you and I’ll have all your paperwork changed.’
Deryn spent the rest of the morning catching parasitic wasps in the Ichneumon laboratory and documenting accent changes in message lizards. At lunch Bovril ate too many candied cherries and threw up into Deryn’s soup. In the afternoon she moved the wasps into the moth larvae cages, retrieved six escaped perspicacious lorises (the fabricators had not successfully bred the lock-picking tendency out of the lorises without also removing their perspicacious intuition) and then got called on to assist with an elephantine birth. She managed to cram in some summaries of reports on British promotion of Darwinism in Bulgaria before the end of the day. When she got home, Alek had moved all the furniture around again. An armchair was on its side and Alek stood on it, gazing at the collection of maps that papered the largest wall in the living room. After a philosophical discussion about the changing borders of Alsace-Lorraine and yet more analysis of Alek’s cousin Karl’s cautiously worded technically-not-an-abdication of the Austro-Hungarian throne last year, Deryn passed out cold in bed and was completely caught off guard the next morning in the break room when Dr Barlow asked her if she’d made a decision.
‘About what?’ Deryn asked with genuine confusion through a mouthful of toast. Dr Barlow disliked that Deryn’s table manners had never really improved after leaving the Leviathan.
‘About your future, Mr Sharp,’ Dr Barlow said pointedly, testily, and the conversation from the day before came back to Deryn.
‘Oh, that,’ Deryn said. She reached across the table to pull Bovril away from a bowl of dried apricots.
‘And?’
‘I haven’t decided,’ Deryn said.
‘Well, take your time. But please let me know once you do.’ Dr Barlow found company amongst some of the other scientists on break and left Deryn to the curious looks of the others at her table.
‘New assignment?’ one of the botany students asked.
‘Something like that,’ Deryn muttered. Alek was trying to catch her eye across the table and she stubbornly refused to be caught. Dr Barlow’s offer did stay in her mind for the rest of the day. She rotated it to look at it from all angles, like how Alek rearranged the furniture, as if seeing a different layout of the room would tell him who he was and how he was supposed to feel about the collapse of the Habsburgs. As if dreaming up enough scenarios about Deryn Sharp’s happy life in London would make them a reality that Deryn wanted.
Deryn got home from work before Alek that day and pushed all the furniture back into a logical set up - radio in the corner, dining table near the kitchen, coffee table between the chairs. She didn’t envy their downstairs neighbours.
Alek frowned when he came in.
‘Dylan,’ he said with put-upon petulance. ‘You changed it. I liked having all the chairs over there.’ He hung his jacket and hat on the coat tree which, thanks to Deryn, was next to the entrance now instead of blocking the door to the kitchen.
‘So that we could look at the maps instead of facing each other?’
‘Exactly. I already know what you look like.’ He sat down next to her on the sofa. ‘What was Dr Barlow talking about this morning?’
Deryn delayed, examining her nails with her fingers curled and palm up as Jaspert had told her to do five years earlier.
‘She asked if I wanted to reintroduce myself to everyone at the Zoo as Deryn,’ she said finally, and braced for impact.
To her relief, Alek only said, ‘Do you?’
‘I’m not sure. I haven’t worked it out yet.’
Although surely, surely it meant something that she was so relieved that Alek hadn’t jumped for joy and told her they could finally have a wedding and cuddle up in the booths of grimy bars now and actually dance together at every social dance, not just when there were more men than women - which had only happened once or twice while the war was on.
‘What haven’t you worked out?’ Alek asked.
‘I don’t really know. I mean, it would be easier for us, wouldn’t it? Except I wouldn’t want to go back to wearing skirts and having long hair, so we’d still look like two boys.’
‘Probably.’
‘And I wouldn’t be allowed to vote for another ten years, even though right now I’m going to be able to vote next year.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘And even though there are some women who work at the Zoo… well, you’ve heard how the men talk about them, even Dr Barlow.’
‘You could be the one who changes their mind,’ Alek suggested.
‘But I wouldn’t be. I’d just be an outlier, like I am to Volger.’
‘That's likely,’ he conceded without resistance.
‘I think at some point I was supposed to learn how to sit and walk and hold myself like a lady, but I sort of skipped over all that stuff.’
‘That’s true. You’ve been Dylan since you were fifteen.’
‘And it wasn’t like I was good at being a girl before that.’
‘So you’ve said.’
‘I’d probably just look like a panto dame.’
Alek raised an eyebrow.
‘I have to disagree with that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a panto dame as good looking.’
Deryn shrugged.
‘I’m sure the dresses girls are wearing right now would suit me better than the ones from before, but I would have to wear a girdle and brassiere and hose with them, and all that’s not more comfortable than this.’ Deryn pulled at the collar of her undershirt, a tight-fitting knitted garment that she had nearly perfected after much trial and error that flattened her already small chest out of existence. She knew, realistically, that she wouldn't be able to keep her current attire and appearance as Deryn. It would be confusing and off-putting, and she would be ostracized for so openly cross dressing.
‘Probably not. And climbing buildings and airships is more difficult in a dress.’
‘Not that I climb a lot of airships these days.’
‘But wouldn't it be a shame if the opportunity presented itself and you couldn't?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So why not stay Dylan?’
Deryn paused. Surely he knew why not. It had always been his hang up, not hers.
‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t have to lie to everyone all the time. I could go swimming,’ she said.
‘You don’t even like swimming.’
‘I can swim!’
‘But you don’t like to.’
‘I haven’t done it in ages. Maybe I would now. I guess things would be easier.’
‘What would be easier? Besides swimming. It doesn’t sound like much else would be easier.’
‘Maybe I could change at least some people’s minds about what women can do.’
‘Satisfying, I’m sure, but not easier.’
‘We could get married. Which you want to do.’ Deryn stared him down and Alek had the grace to look a bit uncomfortable.
It was an argument they’d had a few times, in which Deryn had pointed out the reality that two men couldn’t get married and Alek had pointed out that in his ideal world it wouldn’t matter and everyone would understand Deryn completely and they would get married and then she would keep living as Dylan or whatever, he wasn’t really certain about the finer details, and Deryn suggested that maybe he should be more concerned with with finer details, such as the world they actually lived in.
‘It’s not - I’m not really that set on - ‘ he sighed. ‘I’m sorry, I know I’ve told you that I want to get married, but I also know that’s not really possible right now without having to sacrifice almost everything you've done since you were fifteen. I haven’t figured out exactly how to make it happen yet. It’s just - it’s not that I’m not happy as we are now, it’s just that everything we do ends up being so complicated. I haven’t figured out how to make a lot of things that I want happen.’
‘Really?’ Deryn said with fake surprise. ‘I hadn’t noticed. And I’ll bet our neighbours haven’t noticed either. And they probably haven’t complained to the concierge about it.’
Alek rolled his eyes.
‘What I don’t want is for you to feel like a panto dame when we get married,’ he said. ‘I would rather you not feel like a panto dame than get married.’
Deryn laughed and some of the tension in her shoulders loosened.
‘How long did you expect to be Dylan when you first joined the air force? What was your plan?’ Alek asked. He leaned back against the arm of the sofa.
‘There wasn't a plan beyond joining the air force. I was fifteen. The air force was the whole plan. I figured I'd just keep at it until I got caught. Jaspert thought I'd quit after a week.’ Deryn shrugged.
‘He didn't think you could keep up?’
‘More that he thought I wouldn't like hanging around with lads in the air force. That I wouldn't like how they talk when they think there're no girls around. We both knew I'd be pretty good at all the actual midshipman work, and at flying, but he didn't think I'd be all that good at being a boy, especially not with the hazing middies get. Pissing competitions and all that.’
‘But then you were. I thought you were exactly what a boy should be when we first met.’
‘Aye, well, I may have overcompensated a squick. And now it's been five years, and I just sort of got used to being a man.’
‘Then stay a man.’
She sat back and crossed her arms, not really sure what to say to that suggestion he kept coming back to. If he wanted to get married - eventually, as he had specified - why was he also trying to convince her to remain a boy?
Being a man had been part of her job until yesterday, whether she wanted it or not anymore. Everyone knew that Dylan was a man, and no one expected that to change. That was simply the route she was on. But now that there was the chance for her to not be a man it suddenly mattered what she wanted. Or rather…
‘Is that what you want?’ she asked. She'd meant for the question to sound confrontational and challenging of Alek’s annoyingly pacifist attitude towards her dilemma. Instead it came out shaky and uncertain.
Alek smiled at her.
‘I want you to be happy,’ he said, which Deryn wasn't satisfied with.
‘No, is that what you want? Do you want me to stay as Dylan forever? It's what you signed up for isn't it?’
Alek made a non-committal noise and shifted his weight forward.
‘It's not the first time you could have become a girl publicly again. You've always been a very charming boy and I'm sure you'd also be a charming young woman. So I made peace with both possibilities a while ago. I can start calling you Deryn again if you'd like, but I don't mind calling you Dylan either.’
Alek paused to gauge her reaction, which amounted to her uncrossing one arm and chewing on her nail. He continued.
‘I like you, not your name. I'm sure I can make it work either way, and I don’t mind adapting. I mean, I haven't called you Deryn in ages in case someone overhears.’
This caught Deryn off guard, but he was right: she couldn’t think of the last time he’d called her Deryn. She hadn't asked him to stop, but some time in the last five years he’d started referring to her only as Dylan, even when they were the only people in the room, even when they were visiting her Ma who still exclusively, pointedly called her Deryn. He'd said he didn't like the tone that her mother used to turn the name into a threat, to hold it over Deryn’s head that she had power over her daughter and that she wouldn't acknowledge Deryn’s career or accomplishments, but he’d never explained all the other times he called her Dylan.
He called her Dylan when they were having supper alone in their flat. He'd called her Dylan back when they'd lived in rented rooms in different houses and she was sneaking out of his window at four in the morning. He called her Dylan in front of Dr Barlow, Volger, and Lilit. He called her Dylan at times when, if someone had overheard, it would have been far more compromising for her to be Dylan rather than Deryn.
She didn't know when Alek had made this decision or how deliberate it had been - maybe only after a few years he’d realized that he'd slipped into the habit of calling her Dylan. What struck her was that despite his constant existential woes about who he was and what that meant and where he fit into the world, she had become a static presence in the ever-changing personal and political debris that orbited Alek. For all his uncertainty, he was very, very certain about her, regardless of whatever shape she took.
‘Do you want me to want you to be Dylan?’ Alek asked.
Deryn hesitated.
‘We can try moving the furniture around the flat and see if that helps,’ he suggested and she grinned at him.
‘It just seems a shame to make you get used to calling me another name again,’ she said. ‘I'd hate to cut into your brooding time.’
‘It’s not brooding, it's philosophical,’ Alek sniffed.
‘And it would be very inconvenient of me to make everyone else learn a new name after all this time. Even if I kept wearing trousers, I'd have to get so many other new clothes to not confuse everyone.’
‘That would be expensive and time consuming,’ Alek agreed.
‘Not everyone at the Zoo might take it well. For the fabricators of progress, some of them have some dead backwards views about their wives.’
‘You might lose some friendships. Speaking from experience, of course.’
‘I wouldn’t be taken as seriously at work.’
‘And probably even less so by anyone you'd have to work with outside the Zoo,’ Alek added.
‘Right. Dr Barlow and I would have a much harder time travelling and doing diplomacy. She’d have to hire another lad to come along. Really, I’m being considerate of her time and money.’
‘It’s practically altruistic of you. Think of the hours she would waste interviewing candidates.’
‘What if she couldn’t find a lad for the job? What if she did and he turned out to be a twat?’
‘And all so that you could wear a skirt again?’ Alek said. He shook his head in disbelief.
‘Just doesn't seem worth it this late in the game. Especially if you don't mind living in sin for a while longer.’ Deryn was pretty sure she knew how Alek felt about that.
He waved a hand.
‘I'm already a card-carrying Darwinist working for a Darwin,’ he said. ‘What's a few more sins at this point?’
For supper they had a lentil soup with vegetables cooked in pork fat. Deryn drew pictures of Alek with a variety of mustaches that he could grow, whenever he could actually manage to grow a full mustache (which would be very, very soon, he insisted, probably next week). Alek read out another couple of chapters of Moby Dick to Deryn. She could never seem to get a handle on the book when she tried to read it herself, but having Alek read it aloud made the cadence and rhythm of the meandering story fall into place. The furniture stayed in place, at least for now.
Deryn knocked on Dr Barlow’s office door the next morning.
‘Mr Sharp,’ she said. ‘Or is a change of name in order?’
‘No thanks. I'll be sticking to Dylan.’ Deryn closed the door behind her and sat down in the spare chair. Dr Barlow raised an eyebrow.
‘Of course,’ she said, though Deryn knew she was fighting for her life to hide her surprise, because she followed up in a mildly inquisitive tone. ‘I must admit, I am curious how you made your decision.’
Deryn ticked off the reasons on her fingers.
‘My colleagues would all probably be annoyed at the very least. I'd have to get new clothes. We’d have to have a male chaperone to travel internationally. It would just be too much work, ma'am. I've already put so much effort into being Dylan, it seems a shame to waste it all.’
‘I see.’
‘I’ve been at it for five years. Starting over as a woman seems pointless after all that effort.’
Dr Barlow gave her a hard look.
‘Mr Sharp, there is an economic pitfall that even experienced businessmen fall into. One might make a large investment and continue to hold onto that investment even as it underperforms because of the expenses they have already paid into it. A wise businessman discards investments whose profitability has expired, as it will save them money in the long run. Costs that have already been incurred are not relevant to rational decision making in the present. A path will not inherently serve you simply because you have spent many years on it.’
Deryn shrugged but didn't say anything.
‘You're quite sure you want to remain Dylan?’
Dr Barlow seemed more put out by her decision than Deryn had expected. Dr Barlow was disappointed, she realized. In private she'd always called Deryn a credit to the gender, and perhaps she had been looking forward to the day when she could sweep away the illusion of Dylan in a grand argument for gender equality at the institute where they both worked. Being a Darwin shielded Dr Barlow from a lot of the inequalities that women faced there, but not all of them, and perhaps she'd been more eager than Deryn had realized to show off Deryn’s accomplishments.
‘Aye,’ Deryn said. ‘It’s a name that's served me well so far and I… I'm sorry ma'am, I really don't miss being a girl.’
Dr Barlow nodded, with her carefully neutral expression that, five years ago, Deryn would have found unreadable. For all the authority she carried at the Zoological Society, Dr Barlow’s high position was always precarious on the basis of sex.
‘Very well. The offer remains if you ever change your mind,’ she said. Deryn nodded and left the office feeling guiltier than she had expected. By all accounts, she should be in favour of demonstrating the talent British society was losing by relegating women to housework and poorly paid menial jobs. And she was in favour of that. She always liked watching Dr Barlow wipe the smirk off a man’s face who hadn’t expected her to match him intellectually. She liked being a man who pushed back against men who didn't think women should be voting. She just couldn't bring herself to become a target, a posterchild, especially not when she had built such a good life as a boy.
She wasn't much of a girl anyway anymore, not how one imagined a girl to be. Whatever she did next, she would always be a boy who was also sort of a girl. The threads of reasons were all tangled in her attic; resenting the place women held in the world, the wonderful feeling of her hair freshly cut, the fondness she held for the name Dylan and all the good things it had brought her, the sheer inconvenience of changing her identity again, that she was more comfortable moving through the world as Dylan than she had ever been as Deryn because of the clothes or the way people spoke to her or something else she couldn't quite name. Maybe it wasn't really her business, why exactly she didn't want to stop being a boy. It certainly wasn't anyone else's business either.
What was her business was that she and Alek had plans to track down a street vendor who sold candied nuts at lunch. And that the downstairs neighbours had sent another complaint about the noise from all the furniture being moved around again yesterday evening.