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Wayne sits in the cab of the convoy's lead truck as it inches up to the Bilming Grand Motorway, finishing a long monologue on pickling vegetables at his driver, the Ladrian family coachman Hoid. Hoid asks for his harmonica back. Wayne insists they traded fair and produces the trade from the glove box: a live white rat with a long bare tail, Sir Squeekins, who has escaped his cage for the seventeenth time and ought to be passed to someone responsible. Hoid declares him a uniquely bizarre individual and accepts the rat.

A feeling sits on Wayne today — that something is happening. He asks Hoid whether he ever wishes life worked like the stories his mother told, the kind where people *meant* something and the ending was good. The last story she ever told him was about a lawman who was a hero; he himself, Wayne points out, became a lawman who was once a villain. Hoid answers that everyone lives stories every day and shapes them like clay, and that in most of the stories it is the villain who knows the hero best. Wayne chews on that and watches the cars stream past like a river of stone and steel — wishing, in a corner of his mind, that the hero had not stayed behind in Elendel.

In a lull, Hoid guns the truck across to three honks and the rest of the convoy follows them into a dim warehouse with windows set high in the walls — illegal-goods architecture, Wayne decides. He climbs out, pulls on a worn wool cap stolen from a thug named Franis, settles into Franis's squint and weathered swagger over his wig and rubber chin, and goes to work. VenDell joins him wearing the body of the local Cycle Granks, cleanly enough that even Wayne notices the accent. They cross the warehouse floor toward two handoff men, watched by about forty armed locals.

VenDell refuses to leave the trucks unmoved without speaking to the Sequence — the constables need a senior Set officer for the sting to be worth the risk. The handoff goes prickly fast. Wayne takes the stouter man aside, gambles that he is Embrier (because no one would put a man named *Dip* in charge of anything), and weathers a question about Franis's sister — Franis would not have wanted Embrier anywhere near her — before reeling things back with a story about a friend who admired the koloss-blooded Yulip. He plants a different tale: the Cycle is jumpy because he thinks a dark-haired lady conner has been sniffing around their base, and is fool enough to want to report it himself and draw *you-know-who's* attention. Embrier goes pale at the implication of Trell and goes to fetch the Sequence.

Internally Wayne lays out the ladder of the Set for the first time on-page — muscle, Cycles, Suits, a small handful of Sequences, and a single Key above them all — and is happy to stand in the *muscle* role himself. Franis only wants his wages. VenDell, breaking character to marvel, complains that it is unfair a mortal can match one of the Bearers of the Contract at imitation. Wayne tells him to yank a stick or two out of his posterior and stay in character.

Two figures in nicer clothing finally step out of a back room: the Sequence and his deputy. Perfect. The waiting constables can move now —

Then the outer doors slam open and brown-uniformed figures pour in shouting *drop your weapons*. Wayne slips for his gun, VenDell catches his arm in time. The flood keeps coming — at least a hundred constables, far more than they brought, all wearing the shield-and-tortoise of Bilming city. Marasi's sting has just been stung by the locals.