On the other side of Europe, Deryn Sharp's sparkly blue eyes flutter open. Beams of shiny gold sunlight zoom across her angelic face. She awakes with an "ahhhhh," of a sigh and gets up, and her dazzling forget-me-not eyes sweep flourishingly around the decrepit hovel of her home in Glasgow, England.
"Mama!" she calls, her voice like heavenly wind chimes in the breeze, like a symphony of angelic chorus. "I say, Mama? Oh, wherefore art thou?"
"Deryn!" comes the answering shriek and in bursts Madame Sharp in her lowly peasant dress. At the sight of her heavenly daughter she gasps and clutches her withered hands to her throat and collapses into the slimy earth of the hovel's floor. "Och, ma wee chook! Thou shalt not away to London!"
"Barking spiders!" she cries dramatically, gathering her mother up and placing her on her feet. "But dearest mother, I fear we have but no other choice than for me to leave all that I know and love here in darling bonny Glasgow, disguise myself as a boy and journey to the great city, to seek my fortune!"
"Och, that would nae do! I fear thou shalt become a Sapphist! Nae, you shalt remain hither and to keep us in money I shall become a woman of the night!" Madame Sharp wailed.
"Never, Mama!" young Deryn swooned. "We may be as poor as the lowly church mouse, but I shalt never forsake thy honour!"
"Aye, all right then. Get your things, take our dearest steed Dobbin and get thee to London afore midday!"
Later that day, young Miss Deryn arrives in London on her noble steed, dressed in her brother's garments. Darwinist beasts are everywhere - monstrous crossbred draft animals stroll the streets and every so often an innocent pedestrian is snapped up by its slathering jaws and mangled to death, their shrieks echoing through the streets! Deryn, a Darwinist, is used to such things however and doesn't give a sod. She wanders the streets and wonders where a young lady - ahem, lad - should seek work in the great city. And suddenly...
"War!" someone cries.
She looks around, crying in a most ladylike fashion, "Where?" But it is merely someone brandishing a newspaper so she puts away her bayonet and listens to what the young cove is saying.
"Just yesternight, lad! The villainous archduke of Austria - enemy of fair Mother England, no less - has been killed! All jolly lovely, I'm sure you would say, yet we are on the verge of a war! I say, laddie, art thou ready to get down to business to defeat the Huns?"
"Aye-aye, sir!" she cried lustily, before awaying to the nearest recruitment station. "I shall fly, like my dearest late Papa! What's more, I shall serve aboard a great hydrogen breather, nip over to the continent and show old Jerry what for!"