At the same time, Deryn has fallen to earth in a secret sabotage mission that has gone pear-shaped, and her only way out is through a furious and deadly battle that tests all her courage, loyalty, and strength. He also obtains a new grandmother and the friendship of a beautiful female warrior. Uncomfortable in his role as a freedom fighter (given that he is first in line for the throne of a vast empire), Alek nevertheless contributes the last of his Archduke father’s hoard of gold and a genius for driving walking battle machines to the cause of keeping the Ottomans out of the war. Things get out of hand before you can say, “Barking spiders!” Alek makes a reluctant escape from the Leviathans, only to get caught up in a popular revolution. And now their friendship and loyalties are put to the test in a diplomatic disaster over the Ottoman Empire’s capital Istanbul, where the Clankers have all but sealed the deal on the Turks entering the war on their side, and where a lady boffin (i.e., scientist) is hatching a genetic surprise that may tilt the balance of power. Meanwhile, Dylan hasn’t yet figured out how to tell Alek that he is really a girl named Deryn, who posed as a boy in order to get into the air service and who now carries a hopeless torch for a young prince who can never, ever get romantically entangled with a commoner. Now he is at best a prisoner of war if his secret gets out, he may even be forced into the role of traitor to his people.
But Alek is caught in a tricky situation when Austria enters the war on the Clanker side.
For one thing, Alek lets Dylan in on the secret that he is the rightful Archduke of Austria, heir to the elderly Emperor, and if he can hang on until the Emperor dies, he may be in a position to stop the war. In Book 2 of the Leviathan trilogy, an alternate-history version of World War I continues to play out between two great powers of Europe: the Clankers, whose war machines have advanced at an accelerated rate to include walking tanks and helicopter drones, as well as planes, submarines, and battleships and the Darwinists, who have replaced mechanical technology with bio-engineered monstrosities such as the whale-sized, hydrogen-breathing airbeast Leviathan, known to our protagonists as home.īut the friendship between Alek and Dylan has become increasingly complicated.
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