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Marasi works by candlelight in the octant constabulary headquarters — there is a primordial pleasure to the open flame after years of electric lamps, a contained little fury that could destroy everything if she let it. Two weeks of interviews and files spread across her desk, worked alongside Constable-General Reddi, whose hostility from her first months has somehow turned into close collaboration. Suit himself has not broken, but a good many of his men have, and what they describe is alarming: dissident young men recruited out of the outer cities on stories of the Survivor and imperial overreach, trained in compounds at Rashekin and Bilming far from central rule, an organisation more extensive than anyone in Elendel had imagined. Aradel and the politicians are focused on troops, timetables, and technology — including the long-distance speaking device Waxillium stole from Lady Kelesina's mansion — gearing up for war while still talking peace. They are scared, Marasi grants, and legitimately so. She leaves all of it to politicians. She is following something else: half-mentions in the prisoner statements, glances aside, whispers of men with red eyes who came at night. She files them with months of research on Trell — the ancient god whose name surfaces again and again, whose spike corrupted Paalm. She still feels she knows nothing. She intends to know.

Suit has been kept two weeks in a common cell in the prison's lower levels — bucket, blanket, stone slab — and finds his captors' austerity laughable. *Anything could be an advantage.* He is therefore not surprised when the corridor door clicks one night and a stranger walks in: a beggar's body, ragged beard, wild hair — but the gait is wrong, fast and purposeful, the gait of a tradesman not a beggar. The softly glowing red eyes finish the picture. The Set has Faceless Immortals of its own — servants of Trell that Waxillium and his fools have no idea to look for. Suit stands, smooths his prisoner's jumpsuit, and remarks that two weeks was longer than he had expected. *Our timeline is not yours,* the Immortal tells him. It commends him for not breaking and tells him the timeline will be accelerated as he has been requesting. He is pleased exactly one sentence. From its pocket the creature draws a small wired package — one of Irich's early bomb attempts, barely better than dynamite when the Set had wanted something that could end cities — and explains. Recent advances on this sphere have made civilization here too dangerous. Allowing it to continue risks further advances. They are not going to rule any longer; they are going to remove life from the world entirely. *Thank you for your service. You will be allowed to serve in another Realm.* Suit protests — and is blown to oblivion.

Wax wakes in the penthouse suite thinking he has heard an explosion. The bedroom is quiet. Steris sleeps beside him in the starlight, still holding lightly to his arm even unconscious, as if she is afraid to let go and lose all of this. He is shocked again by the depth of his affection for her — the same astonishment he used to feel mornings beside Lessie. The thought does not worry him. They have stayed at the tower through the honeymoon rather than going home to the mansion; he is starting to think he may move here permanently. This is no longer an age of drawing rooms and smoking conversations. It is an age of skyscrapers and downtown politics, and he is a new person again, perhaps for the hundredth time. He crosses to the balcony in his shirtsleeves; the mists drift past but the tower is tall enough that he can pick out stars and the Red Rip above them. Before he opens the door he notices Drewton has laid out a tidy row on the dressing table — everything carried home from New Seran — a wrinkled cravat, a monogrammed party napkin, a bottle cap to Push on if he needed, and, on its own small square of cloth as if it were the most important thing in the world, the beggar's coin.

Two metals. Silvery (nicrosil?) and copper. The pattern is different and the coin smaller, but it is not unlike one of the southern medallions. As soon as Wax thinks of it the metalmind opens — he can feel a reserve inside him that wasn't there before. A coppermind; memory storage. He taps it.

He is in another body, crossing a barren waste under blowing dust, half his vision split into the blue lines of a man spiked through one eye. Half-tended fields rot in the wind. A town stripped to its foundations for firewood. Bodies in the street with their clothes burned off them for the warmth of the rags. A bunker-like stone hall ahead, even its door burned. Inside, people huddled in blankets without fire, even their masks burned. He moves among them; some stir, most stare dully waiting to die. He finds the elders at the centre in cloth masks, the only thing left. An ancient woman lifts her mask. He lays a hand on her shoulder, kneels, and whispers a single word. The arm doing it is laid with scars layered atop one another, as if scraped time and again. Wax comes out of the memory with a jolt and drops the coin. It rings against the balcony stone. *That arm.* The word the traveller had spoken still echoing in his head.

*Survive.*