- It's time to switch gears, in a manner of speaking. This chapter opens in England, where Deryn Sharp has fallen asleep on her aeronautics manual. Falling asleep on textbooks: we can relate.
- Her elder brother, Jaspert, wakes her up, and they bicker about the airman middy's test she'll be taking that day.
- Deryn tries on the clothes she'll be wearing for the test—and if all goes well, for a long time afterward.
- They're boy's clothes because Deryn is planning to pass as Dylan and get into the British Air Service. Hey, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.
- Deryn and Jaspert take an omnibus drawn by a hippoesque (which we assume means something like a hippo) to the Wormwood Scrubs airship field.
- Deryn reflects on how unfair it is that she was born a girl and has to lie to fly, when she's so much better at it than so many boys. Ugh—for real.
- The new recruits line up on the ascension field, where officers try to intimidate them. Hey, some things never change, even in alternate universes.
- Jaspert gets her past Lieutenant Cook, who tells her to get in another line—he also notes that she's really skinny, but he doesn't seem to suspect anything.