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Marasi settles with Wayne and Steris in the temple's vestibule, watching distant lanterns slog up the snow toward them and trying not to nurse her annoyance at being assigned to *babysit Wayne*. She turns ReLuur's spike over in her fingers — a sliver of pewter so clean it ought to be slippery with the blood of the person who was killed to make it — and thinks about Harmony's hands and the Lord Ruler in one breath: a monster who created this thing by murder, then somehow crossed the world and saved Allik's civilisation. Wax seeks justice; Marasi wants to build a world that doesn't need lawmen at all. That, perhaps, is why she finds him so frustrating lately.

She drifts over to Steris, who has propped open her brainstorming notebook backward — onto a page where she has graphed the relative usefulness of every member of the expedition and marked herself well under the threshold below which a person's contribution stops outweighing their drag on the mission. (Wax and MeLaan: 100. Wayne: 75. Marasi: 83, which she had not expected. Steris is debating whether she herself is a 7 or a 10.) Marasi thinks she finally has something the two of them can commiserate over and starts to share her own irritation at being treated as a tool to be put back on the shelf — but Steris clarifies. She doesn't mind. She is stating facts.

Marasi asks why, then, Steris is here at all. *I assumed I would be of help at the party, and I was; I had assumed this would be primarily a political enterprise.* And then, softly: she came along because of *the way it feels*. The way the rules go slack around him. The way she gets to be the spheres falling. She has seen the hunger and the fire in Wax's eyes, and found it now in herself — she loves him, Marasi forces her to say it, and she says it — and Marasi hugs her sister with one arm and is, for the first time in this book, simply happy for her.

Steris returns the question. *And you? When will you find someone to make you happy?* It isn't about finding someone, Marasi says, and goes back to Wayne at the doorway without finishing the thought. Wayne, who is contemplative, asks her whether sisters ever really get sexy with one another for a fellow to watch or whether that only happens in pub songs. *Thank you for restoring my ability to trust my judgment, Wayne.* But he isn't looking at the distant lanterns; he is looking past them, into the nearer shadows, and he tells her quietly that if he were the one out there, with his approach already spotted, he would leave his lights behind and come in dark. Marasi looks, and there in the swirling snow there really is shape moving on the rock. A flag of parley.

Meanwhile Wax hauls MeLaan out of one of the pit traps on a rope. She has compacted her fatty curves to taut muscle, taken off her hair and stowed it in Allik's pack, and has a snapped humerus splinted with stretched ligament; she cannot remake bone, only fuse what is broken. Her left hand is crushed past repair, the fingers permanently shut. Wax presses to find a way around — break through a wall, drop through the roof. MeLaan shrugs him off. *And wouldn't it be silly to come all this way, then ruin the Bands of Mourning because of our impatience?*

Wax starts reading the floor stones. Pressure plate under the second stone right — darts. Two ahead — a dropped log. Last one a pit, by the slight rise of the stones. He calls each trap before MeLaan sets it, until the last lifts the ceiling and drops a block of strangely-coloured ice, oily-wet and half-frozen, that wasn't supposed to be there. Acid, Wax guesses, separated and partly frozen over centuries; MeLaan stares at it longer than she should.

They reach a stone door at the end of the corridor — no handle, the surrounding wall the same thick stone. Symbols inlaid in silver in carved circles. Allik swaps to translate. *I don't recognise any of those. If they're writing, it's not a language I understand.* Wax turns back for Marasi — and finds Wayne coming up the corridor toward him to say Edwarn is on the temple doorstep with Marasi's gun at his head, asking under a flag of parley to talk.

As they walk back, Telsin falls in beside her brother. *I'm an adult — greying hair, over half my life behind me. Shouldn't I have a clue what this is all about?* She is keen on the Bands because at least they will *push society forward, even if it leaves us behind*. Wax grunts agreement; it is good, he tells himself, to hear her speak of something other than her hatred of their uncle. He notices, walking back, how perfectly the temple matches what he would have expected the place to look like. Perhaps that is the problem.