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Wax comes to at the bottom of the pit in darkness, bleeding from collar and gut, his broken leg numb beneath him. He drinks a vial off his belt to refill his metals, and an old image surfaces: a candle in a black room. The dais up above was a candle in the dark — the glass display case had been too large to fit on that pedestal in the first place. The real Bands are somewhere else. He blinks the dark away and finds the pit has spilled him into a low-ceilinged chamber lit by one soft blue lamp, with shapes seated in concentric rings around the light.

He crawls toward it, dragging the broken leg, praying to Harmony and getting nothing back. The shapes resolve into frozen corpses in warm clothing, masks in their laps — the people who built the temple, sat down to wait out their last metalmind warmth. Past them, on a small white pedestal under another blue lamp, sits a set of metal bracers.

Light floods the chamber from the pit behind him. Suit calls his name — *quite the trail of blood you're leaving* — and follows it through the dead. Wax huddles among the corpses imitating their stooped posture, but his uncle stops short of a pressure plate, looks up, and grins: *trying to goad me into stepping onto the trap?* He admits the man's only sibling recruited *him*, not the other way around. Wax sets a bullet on his palm and offers a duel; Suit shakes his head, and steps on the plate anyway.

Outside on the plateau, Telsin marches Marasi, Steris and Allik into the Set's camp. She rips each of their warming medallions off in turn; Marasi gasps as the cold descends on her like a swarm of biting insects, her dress suddenly nothing at all; one of the guards cracks Allik's mask with a backhand. Across the camp, Allik's surviving crewmates are being herded under guard toward a tent. A red-uniformed officer climbs the temple steps, addresses Telsin as *Lady Sequence*, and reports they've found their real prize — not the Bands but the Hunters' airship, intact, the bomb that never went off. Telsin turns drolly to Marasi: yes, Irich will be disappointed, but they didn't come here for the Bands. She has the captives frisked thoroughly and warns the guards to be careful — there's still Wayne out there, somewhere, *extremely dangerous, particularly if he has another vial of bendalloy*.

Below, the ceiling drops. Wax dives for the pedestal and Suit Pushes himself clear; stone breaks Wax's body down beneath it. He cannot move anything but his face. Suit climbs out of rubble, healing a cut on his arm, and lectures the dying man: Hemalurgy is weakened gift, limited to three boons before Harmony starts to *interfere* — but the Bands, unbound by that, would be something else entirely. He takes the bracers off the pedestal, holds them up, *behold me, today I become a god* — and nothing happens. He puts them on; nothing still. *Drained,* he mutters with disgust; he'll bring them to Irich's scientists to puzzle out. He brings the aluminum gun to Wax's head.

Something slams into Suit from the dark. A scuffle, the pistol going off, footsteps; then Wayne scrambles into Wax's view, horrified. He fell down a pit too — *that one ended in spikes, I'm afraid* — and healed up, climbed out, and slipped in here once the soldiers passed. Wax croaks at him to find Marasi and Steris and get them out. Wayne shakes his head, eyes wide, and sits back; he can't move the stone, and he won't leave.

Outside, Marasi huddles with Steris and the blueing Allik and tries not to compare herself to Wax. *Stop comparing yourself to him,* she thinks. *It's no wonder you stand in his shadow when that's all you can see yourself doing.* The guard with her purse upends it onto the cold stone and tumbles out the palm-sized aluminum wedge Wayne had swapped into her bag for ReLuur's spike. The guards laugh: dull, useless. Suit drops from the air a moment later with the decoy bracers in hand; Telsin takes them, puts them on, drinks a metal vial — and nothing happens. A decoy, Marasi realises. A second layer of falsehood. So where are the real Bands?

Below, Wax sees the truth too — the bracers were too perfect, just like the stories, just like the painted symbols of an old adversary on a Roughs mansion door, meant to distract. This place was built for the Lord Ruler; those stupid traps would never have stopped him; the whole thing has to be a decoy. The Bands aren't somewhere else. He would have wanted to recognise them. They're *here*. Wax tries to gasp the words; he cannot make his lips move; Wayne grips his hand. The darkness arrives, and he dies.