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Marasi finds a service ladder down into the chasm and up the other side and limps back toward the main cavern, shaken but carrying two trophies — a small book of numbers and shipping dates lifted off the Cycle's body, and four Hemalurgic spikes. The thin rust-flecked one she has wrapped in cloth and kept in a separate pocket, because it actively repels the others when brought close.

She finds the reinforced cavern door and pushes through into a scene of blackened ground, scattered shrapnel and a great many bodies. In the centre of it Wayne, clothes torn, is sitting on the floor playing cards with the fifteen survivors he has tied up. Their hands are bound behind their backs; their hands are laid out face-up on the floor in front of them; he is loudly pretending he cannot see them while a captive frets aloud about whether to lead with his high card. *Otherwise where's the sport in it,* Wayne explains. *Might as well be playin' with myself, and there are much funner ways to do that.* He has used a clean overlap of his bubble against hers to pick them off one at a time, exactly as he proposed. The captives are barefoot because shoelaces, Wayne notes, are an old Roughs trick when you run out of rope.

He takes one look at her bloodied uniform and asks, with concern, whether she has resorted to cannibalism — *one sees a lady covered in blood, the mind goes to a natural place* — and she gives him a flat stare and shows him the spikes instead. *I dug these out of the Cycle's body. He'd have come back to life otherwise.* *That don't work that way,* Wayne objects. She points at the thin red-flecked one. *Trellium. It has to be.* He whistles softly and says they should celebrate. She presses on — the captives are too many to hold on shoelaces forever, sooner or later one of them produces a knife. *Instant Backup,* she suggests. *Rusts, I love that code name,* Wayne says, and goes.

She drops a cadmium bubble over the lot of them and stalls them by reading a notebook list of arrestee rights aloud, on the theory that the lecture will hide the absence of the small visual cues — falling leaves, moving sun, a passing bystander — that ordinarily betray a slowness bubble in the open air. Inside the bubble, for her and them, the minutes pass at full speed; outside, Wayne is jogging to the constabulary in slowed time. She walks a slow loop with the pistol while she thinks, and finds her mind drifting back to the man she killed.

The Cycle's last words have settled into her like a splinter. *One day the men of gold and red, bearers of the final metal, will come to you. And you will be ruled by them.* That was Miles Hundredlives on the gallows. *The ash comes again. The world will fall to it. Your end, either in ash or at the hands of the men of gold and red.* That was the Cycle in the cavern, eyes glowing, voice grating, the words rolled together. She touches the wrapped trellium spike in her pocket. Ash falls are a thing for old stories and dead gods; the Catacendre ended that world. Right?

A blurred figure zips up to the perimeter of the bubble. For an eyeblink — barely enough to count — she sees a slender woman in dark clothing with straight black hair and a thief-style black cloth mask pulled across her face, eyes meeting hers, and then she is gone again. Before Marasi can drop the bubble to give chase a wash of constable-brown blurs floods the cavern and Wayne jumps inside her bubble, sets his own speed bubble overlapping it, and creates a small pocket of normal time around the two of them. They drop the bubbles together. She fields the constables; one of the captives has nearly untied himself in the lapse and is dragged back.

She asks Wayne whether he passed anyone on his way back in. He frowns and says no — and her corpse is exactly where she left it. *There was someone in here a moment ago,* she tells him. *Fifteen minutes ago, normal time. She inspected us and left.* He shrugs the way Wayne shrugs at the unanswerable and asks if she still has the spikes. Three on one side, one on the other. *Ready?* They wave the constables in to gather evidence — the evidence Wayne hasn't already detonated — and Marasi follows him out toward the surface and a bath, carrying with her the Cycle's book, four spikes, an impossible dead man's voice, and the quiet conviction that they need to put all of this in front of Waxillium as soon as possible.