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Wayne lets Wax's hand fall. He wants to sit and become nothing, like the seated dead around him. Only one man had ever believed in him; the rest of the world could burn. He hates them all. He hates Wax too, for leaving him. He loves him more than the hatred. He pulls the shotgun free of Wax's belt and his hands start shaking; he hisses at them to stop, *we're done with that*, and goes hunting a way out of the tomb.

Out in the snow, Marasi turns the puzzle inside out. The whole temple is a decoy — those traps would never have stopped the Lord Ruler, who built the place; he would only have needed to recognise the relic, not navigate past it. So you would leave it where the returning Lord Ruler would walk straight to it and any thief would miss: on the doorstep, under the sign of the Sovereign himself, in his own hand. She turns to where the guard dropped the palm-sized aluminum wedge Wax had dismissed; up close she sees what he hadn't — different metals woven in folded layers, like the workings of a sword blade. Not aluminum. A metalmind, holding more power than they have ever seen.

Wax walks beside Harmony in mist. Harmony is tall and serene, His face long and oval, a cloak of timelessness dragging weather and seasons and the V-pattern of Terris strata behind Him; His voice is a forgotten friend's. *I'm dead, then.* Yes — body, mind, soul are coming apart. Wax demands to know why a god who walks with the dead does not save more of the living, and why this one let her die; Harmony pushes back on the line: where would He stop? They round a planet bright in the dark and beyond it a red haze presses in, held off by a thin shell of light; the haze frightens Harmony too, and He does not know what it is. The conversation circles to Lessie. *Would you have asked someone else to pull that trigger? Would you have left her in a prison of madness?* No. Then perhaps the hatred is misplaced.

Marasi taps the spearhead and burns everything. Snowflakes hang in midair around her; she lifts vials from the captors' belts, drinks them all, slows back to time and Pushes. The guards fly. Suit and Telsin stare in horror; Marasi flings them both aside by the spikes inside them. She lifts herself off the stone on traces of metal in the rock and hangs in the sky, mist trailing off her — the Ascendant Warrior, in this moment, in everything that meant. She could eclipse Wax; she could bring justice to peoples. Holding it she finally tells herself the truth: *this isn't what I want*. She lets her childhood dream go, and throws herself back toward the temple to find him.

Steris watches her sister fly away. *Unexpected,* she says aloud — and here she had thought she had prepared for anything. Allik mumbles something in his language, trying to send her running while the soldiers are still scattered. *Yes, that would be wise; I don't plan to leave yet.* She walks over and retrieves her notebook from the snow; turns it sideways and shows him the rear pages, hollowed out with Wax's knife on the skimmer flight south, an extra warming medallion from the emergency store nested inside. *I gave myself a seven out of a hundred for usefulness on this expedition. I do have my uses.* She presses it into Allik's hand; the blue cold goes out of his skin. Now, she says, his earlier suggestion has merit. They run.

Harmony proffers both hands. The right is freedom — soaring on blue lines into the unknown, the lure of it humming through him, *what he had always wanted*. The left holds a voice from below — Marasi's voice, frantic: *Wax, you have to tap the metalmind*. Wax names the left hand *duty*; Harmony gently corrects him. It is not duty. It is *a different adventure*. *You were always the one who made the right choice. So you resent it.* Wax reaches for the left; Harmony pulls it back. *Are you certain?* Then perhaps, He says, Wax should stop hating that this is who he is. Wax asks one thing first — did she come here, when she died? *She asked me to look after you.*

He takes the hand. Heat tears him back into his body. The stone goes flying off him as he heaves it on a Steelpush; bones reknit; he comes to his feet by Pushing on trace metals in the ground, the bracer-spike clutched in his left hand. Marasi is right there, tearstained and smiling. *You found it.* Just a little detective work. He could level cities with this; he could build them up. Suit and Telsin are outside; she left the others there. Wax holds the Bands out and asks why she didn't simply use them herself. *I couldn't,* she says. *It isn't me.* She hands him a vial of metals and tells him to do what he does best. *Which is what — break things?* *Break things,* she says, *with style.*