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Days after MeLaan's visit, TenSoon cannot get her words out of his head. *You come, deliver dread news, then leave us to fix it ourselves.* He had planned the rest of his life around being condemned — quietly accept the punishment he deserved, finish the long honourable thing — and only now does it occur to him that being imprisoned forever, while the world above tears itself apart, would make him exactly the First Generation he despises: locked away, untroubled, telling himself the outside is no longer his to worry about.

The earthquakes the Homeland has been feeling are still distant; the others ignore them. TenSoon does not. If the end is approaching, then Vin needs to know everything the kandra are: their origin, their beliefs, the Trust itself if it comes to that. Telling her would be a deeper betrayal than anything he has yet done. But all of his sins so far have been impulsive and only later defended; if he breaks himself out of this cage, the choice will be deliberate, willed. Sitting cross-legged in the meshed iron and steel that holds him, with the Blessing of Presence turning every cold hour into something he must consciously endure, he tries to convince himself it is still better to face the consequences. He is, after all, of kandra. He broke Contract. There is honour in the consequence.

There is also, when he runs the numbers, no plausible escape: he cannot dissolve through the wire mesh, his mass is too low to fight, and the Fifth Generation guards outside all wear the Blessing of Potency he no longer has. He could not outpace them; he could not overpower them; he could not pass the dozens of small caverns between the prison cage and the upper paths. He is, in any meaningful sense, beyond escape — and a part of him is relieved to find it so.

Then VarSell arrives with several other large Fifths, their quartzite True Bodies ominous and their faces unreadable, dragging a heavy sack between them. It is not yet time for the sentencing; TenSoon's Blessing of Presence is sure of it. The sack lands in his cage with a familiar clink. *You are to wear those to the trial,* VarSell says. *Orders of the Second Generation.* He explains, smiling, that they intend to break TenSoon's bones in public — a kind of execution from which the prisoner is forced to live, a corrective spectacle for the younger generations. TenSoon pulls a leg bone out of the sack. It is not human. It is a wolfhound's. It is the body he had worn back to the Homeland from Luthadel a year ago and abandoned in shame.

A week earlier, knowing the Seconds' spies would carry his words back to their masters, TenSoon had said in MeLaan's hearing how much he loathed those bones. The orthodox Seconds would have found nothing more degrading than to make him wear a dog. The trap had been the loudest thing in the cavern, and they had walked straight into it. *You'll look good wearing that,* VarSell tells him, slamming the door and laughing as he leaves. *Everyone will see you for what you really are. No kandra would break his Contract.* TenSoon turns the thighbone over in his fingers, listening to the Fifth's laughter fade down the corridor, and lets the moment settle. VarSell has no idea what he has just delivered into TenSoon's hands.