(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Marasi waits in the wrecked ship and is rewarded: Irich limps out of one of the side rooms and tells the guards to *send to Mister Suit*. The hope is that he has stashed the cube in the same place as the spike. MeLaan leads her down the gangway and across the warehouse floor at an excruciating pace, walking *like you belong* — the first rule of impersonation. One of the carpenters glances at them, but no shout follows. The hallway door opens. Through it.

The corridor is bare and smells of sawdust, a single light overhead, the inner door locked. MeLaan kneels and grows a set of picks out of the skin of her forearm to work the knob. *Handy*, Marasi says. *Pun intended?* MeLaan has been alive *pushing seven hundred years*, she tells Marasi while she works, and there are no jokes left she has not heard. She also dismisses Marasi's hopeful suggestion that her perspective on social trends could shape policy — the world right after the Catacendre was no different from this one, the Originators were big-city people who squabbled like children and never cared for settlements outside Elendel. *People are people. Hell, even kandra act the same.* Her cognitive system, she lets slip, sits in a metal compartment in her thigh, not her head — *people aim for the head.*

The door opens onto a tidy study: desk, two plush chairs bolted to the floor, decorative plants, books on a shelf, a faint smell of cigar smoke. MeLaan sweeps the bookcase first — *it's always behind the books* — until Marasi points her to the large safe in the corner. MeLaan presses her hand against it; her fingers and palm go translucent and the flesh squeezes into the joints, leaving exposed crystalline bones, while Marasi holds the lamp and tries not to look. She rummages Irich's desk and finds his notebook of sketches about the strange ship, written in a shaky hand, along with a map of the area; she pockets the book. She also notices the room is built for fumbling — bolted chairs, oversized desk-drawer handles, a bolted floor lamp — accommodations for a man who tends to stumble.

She then cracks the back door of the study and is hit with a slum's stench. The shadowed room beyond has bare tables, a stack of boxes, and three large animal cages with four-foot bars. A bundle of *blankets and pillows* in one cage moves and lurches against the bars. Marasi gasps. The dim light catches a too-flat face of red and black, dark pits of eyes — the nightmare faces in ReLuur's sketches. A shockingly human hand reaches between the bars, and the figure whispers a single word in Marasi's language: *please.*

On the warehouse floor, Wayne tunes his saunter to a scramble and tries to *become* the engineer whose coat he is wearing. Something feels wrong — he is an engineer, not a soldier, and he hates being in this place full of guns — until he finds the charcoal pencil in the vest pocket and slips it behind his ear. Then he is an engineer. He walks up to the guard at Telsin's chamber, false nose and mustache and fattened cheeks and a perpetual right-eye squint. *The lattice supports of the apricity are completely liminal!* he announces. The guard blinks. *Can't you see that the forebode malefactors are starting to bow? We could have a full-blown bannock on our hands at any minute!* He pushes the man aside and goes in.

Inside are Telsin — older now, almost a Roughs woman from the evanotypes — and tweaked-leg and the thick-necked Coinshot from the train. *The caronals are completely nepheligenous out there. We are about to have a full-blown case of ximelolagnia if somebody doesn't do something.* Irich looks at him, blinks once, then *of course we will, you idiot. But what do we do about it?* Within moments Wayne has both men out at the ship pressing against a pontoon while Irich *supervises*, with a few guards joining in for good measure. The smarter the man, Wayne reflects, the more likely he is to pretend he knows more than he does — like the drunkest fellow at the pub being the one most sure he can handle another pint.

Back in the cage room, Marasi looks again. That polished red face is not a face but a wooden mask; the *fur* is blankets; behind the eyeholes are brown irises. A young man. She unlocks his cage with keys she has taken from the open safe — second try — and he throws the door open. He cannot stand straight; he has been kept folded in there for some time. He drags himself into the next room and slaps a wall switch. Operating tables, a floor stained red, and a dozen red wooden masks hung on the far wall: the place his shipmates were brought, tortured, and killed. He kneels before the wall, lifts his mask back onto the top of his head, and weeps. *Please*, he whispers in Marasi's language, the only word he knows of it.

MeLaan joins her. *By the Father and the First Contract.* The safe is open. Marasi takes ReLuur's spike — slim, less than three inches, not the lurid spike of Death's eyes — and tries to hand it off; MeLaan refuses, stern; kandra do not handle another's spike. Marasi remembers the stories. The implied exception (the Guardian) MeLaan will only acknowledge with a *yes*. She also pockets the recovered cube and one of the small coinlike discs with cloth ties that fills the top shelf — relics in the same unknown script as on the cube — and leaves the banknotes because taking those would feel more like robbing. The masked man limps to the open safe, takes one of the same discs, shucks off his blankets, and straps it against bare skin under a rolled-up sleeve, sighing in relief; underneath the blankets he is dressed in tight knee-length trousers, white socks, and a snug double-buttoned red vest. He stands a foot taller for it.

They have just realised the masked man is from somewhere distant and alien — proof that life persists past the Roughs — and Marasi is wondering how to sneak him out, when a series of gunshots rings out in the warehouse beyond.

Up in Telsin's chamber, Wax steps in alone. Telsin freezes, then throws herself sobbing into his chest. He hands her one of his Sterrions — *fast learner*, she promises — and is trying to get her moving when the door slams open. The Coinshot brute stands there gaping. Telsin shoots him.