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Marasi is still gathering herself after a conversation with Death when Captain Blantach catches them at the bottom of the constabulary steps. Flushed and visibly less certain than an hour before, Blantach warns that Lord Entrone will be sending constables for them the moment shock cedes to embarrassment; the mayor's pride will turn into the conviction that they tricked him. She has had her own illusions shaken hard inside that office. *Something dangerous is going on here.* *Catastrophic,* Marasi corrects her. To deflect Entrone, Blantach proposes a Bilming officer ride with them; she can sell that to the mayor as her own minder. Wax refuses. Blantach gestures, and a slender woman with shoulder-length black hair, oversized spectacles, bright red lipstick, and three ledgers she keeps nearly dropping comes scrambling down the stairs. *She says she knows you,* Blantach says. *Kim is one of our researchers — knows her way around the city.* The woman thrusts out a hand to shake, fumbles it, grins. It is Moonlight. Wax watches Marasi's face and asks how she knows her; Marasi gives the prepared lie about an old research project rather than out Moonlight to Blantach. Wax takes it, half-suspicious. Marsh said anyone with the three-diamond sigil would be on their side. *Kim* salutes Wax. They take her.

The Bilming City Records and Research Building is everything the same offices in Elendel are not — sleek, silvery, more window than wall. Blantach's credentials get them a flock of junior researchers and a glass-walled meeting room with tea while Wax paces. Marasi takes the break to write Allik: don't worry if you hear of casualties on the broadsheets. She pauses, then adds — go visit her father in the country for the day. Stay out of Elendel. Just in case.

She steps out to send the message and is met in the hallway by *Kim*, dropping the act. Moonlight had hoped Marasi would take the cue and slip out alone; she had not. Now her terms come out. She has been given orders by her mentor: she can help, but she is not to reveal herself to Wax or Wayne — her mentor is uncomfortable with their connections to Harmony. Marasi tells her flatly that she will not lie to her companions. Moonlight points out she already has, and presses — does Marasi really believe Wax tells her everything? What did he and Harmony discuss when he died? She makes her case: her organisation has the answers Marasi wants, the resources to protect Scadrial, and a reason to move only in shadows. Beings like Autonomy are too powerful and Harmony too indecisive; Moonlight's mentor speaks of him kindly but accurately. Harmony tossed them into the line of fire and wished them luck. *Doesn't it excite you,* she asks, *to know things he doesn't?* Marasi does not give her the answer she wants — *I don't need to keep secrets to feel special* — and Moonlight smiles and calls it extortion only after Marasi does. *It's just a deal. I have agency.* If Marasi tells, she leaves; she can find Tobal Copper's address on her own. The act snaps back on as Moonlight returns to the meeting-room door, jumpy and embarrassed, almost pushing instead of pulling.

Marasi walks the rest of the corridor uncertain. The conversation has touched something old in her. When she had first dreamed of being a constable, the dream was about the city, not the criminal — about teaching people and neighbourhoods to see themselves differently so that the next generation of crimes never began. Lock a man up and you stop one man; teach a man to respect himself and his community and you stop everyone he might have bullied or recruited. She had wanted to change the world. Whether the day-to-day grind has turned her into something narrower than that is a question she does not have an answer to.

By the time she returns the researchers have spread broadsheets and city records across the table. Wayne is fake-napping with one eye cracked, watching *Kim*; Moonlight sits primly in the corner. Tobal Copper takes shape: aged fifty-three, chemist for Basin Tires, specialised in rubber and manufacturing. Fired five years ago for *erratic behaviour*. The dossier is built mostly from a dismissed lawsuit he filed against the company afterwards, claiming they had refused to listen to his vital discoveries about the end of the world. One police-blotter entry, for banging on doors in his building and shouting that they had almost split harmonium and that when they did it was going to destroy them all. The researchers, packing up, will keep looking but doubt there is more in the archives. Marasi adds one request before they go — any reports of vanishing food shipments, particularly nonperishable. The lead researcher says yes, immediately. It has been happening steadily for two years; Blantach has them watching for it, baffled why the criminal underground wants canned beans.

Marasi turns a sheet from the lawsuit toward Wax. Copper had written there that *someone is building shelters against a cataclysm, maintained by inexplicable technology — the city government is in on it.* And, in the same breath, that the splitting will turn them all into turtles. The turtles part needs work. The rest is too close to what they already know. Wax reads the blotter, reads the addresses. Copper was a head chemist; the apartment is in an expensive part of the city. *They probably killed him,* Wax says quietly, *once the hubbub died down — so it wouldn't look too suspicious.* Possibly, Marasi answers. They may also have grabbed him and put him to work. Marsh said the trail was two weeks cold. They take it anyway. *Kim,* Wax says, *do you know where this apartment address is?*