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Marasi has hours to think on the southward leg. The trip will take about two of them — Allik had expected an airship to be faster, but Wilg is slower than a train, mostly gliding while he hunts winds he doesn't know how to predict, using devices Marasi doesn't recognize and startlingly accurate maps of the lower Basin. How often have his people prowled these skies?

Most of the others sleep, comfortably tapping warmth as Allik has taught them. Marasi cannot — every time she closes her eyes she sees herself falling out one of the open doorways. Wayne slips her something for her side that he won't identify, and she settles in the stool beside Allik at the front of the craft to talk.

He lifts his mask voluntarily for the conversation, the second time she has seen him do it. He tells her about home — far south across the Southern Roughs and the wastelands beyond, where the oceans once boiled — and about his people the Malwish, who change masks the way a Basin lady might change her hairstyle. There are others. The Hunters are one-mask-for-life people who *grow into* the thing in childhood. The Fallen are an old kingly people who wear plain unpainted masks and earn ornament back compliment by compliment, after offending the Jaggenmire — Herr and his sister-wife Frue, who run the world the way Ruin and Preservation once did in the north. *They were always one*, Allik says. *And always apart.*

He works the wrong way through his subjects until Marasi guesses he is being a deckhand and corrects herself in time to learn that skimmer pilots are *gentlemen and ladies*, that he is twenty-two, that the crew of Brunstell once dangled a man over the side for not knowing the cistern three-step. Then his name for one of those crewmates catches in his throat and he goes quiet, the friend's mask still on the wall in Dulsing. She lifts his mask herself, hesitantly, and finds him weeping. *I'm never going to see them again*, he says. *I'm never going to see home, am I?*

She presses him on fuel. Allomancy Pushes the impellers; the metal that supports the ship is ettmetal — a stone-like thing that burns with pure-white light in a casing under the dash, beside Wayne's primer cube. Wilg has enough for a day or two of flight without an Allomancer Pushing full time. Brunstell carried much more; the Set has most of it now. *At first*, Allik grins, *the evil ones didn't know how to care for it. Got some wet. That was a good day.* Ettmetal, it turns out, explodes in water.

Marasi turns the translator medallion over in her fingers — iron for weight, duralumin for Connection, nicrosil to grant the temporary Investiture — and tries swapping with Allik so he can keep the warm one on. The ship lurches as she changes; Wax is on his feet with a gun half-drawn before she gets it stable, and he sits back smiling once he sees what she has done. But the medallion doesn't translate for her. Allik explains: it is *Blank Connection*, stored to no place, and because Connection can't be Connection to nothing it reaches out and ties the wearer to wherever they are. Her tap connects her to the land she is already standing in — does nothing. His ties him to the same place, and his soul comes to think it was raised here, and his language obediently changes. The medallion always works on the visitor. His persistent accent is his soul still knowing his parents were Malwish from Wiestlow.

Marasi asks why his people came north. The Hunters sent the first big ship — six years ago — and they came carrying ettmetal bombs intended to destroy the Bands outright, because they believed the Sovereign had left them as a test his people should fail. *They did not succeed, it is said. But anything could have happened.* It is possible, he warns, that they will find nothing at the temple but destruction.

Then Wax is at the dash pointing at a taller line of peaks ahead, and at a single glimmer of light against the black where there should be no light at all. The Seran Range is uninhabited — too cold, too many storms. *Suit has left on his expedition*, Wax says. *Time to wake the others.*