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Marasi walks the Sentinel of Truth's basement in something like awe. The space used to be storage — piles of old equipment and stacked training mats shoved against the walls — and the walls themselves are now covered in sheets of tin that Maraga has scratched with a pen, often crossing things out and rewriting them. She had imagined the Words of Founding's metal plates as thick chiseled tablets; these are frenzied but organised, a journalist's shorthand notes connecting ideas and building a story.

Maraga slumps on the bottom step and tells them how it began. She did not believe Tobal at first — crackpot, she thought, but crackpots tend to have good stories — and then he started bringing her evidence stolen back from his employers, sneaking in to lift ledgers and scraps. He would never let her help; he didn't want her too involved. Almost four years of it. *As if this weren't already enough to get me killed,* she says, looking around at the walls. Marasi moves to comfort her and she flinches — fatalistic, like a woman who has thrown the dice and is waiting to see how they land. Wax needles her about *whimsical what-ifs* and lies; she retorts that she did her journeymanship at the Elendel *Times*, where the casual fabrication scandalised her, and that at least her readers know what they are buying. Past a point, Tobal had warned her that one night he would not show up, and that when that happened she should run; two weeks ago he stopped showing up.

Moonlight spots the first real thread — *trajectory estimations?* — and Maraga stands up to it. One set of arcs are the Bilming navy's bragging-release figures for their new guns, which imply they can shell Elendel from twenty miles out but in fact won't reach. The other set comes from Tobal's real job — chemical propellants for a self-propelled shell, a rocket that flies miles, perhaps hundreds of miles, before detonating. Marasi walks the room: another plate covers the Bilming subway-survey project. The official line is that the surveys map cavern routes for new train lines; Maraga's notes say they are looking for caverns stable enough to live in long-term. *They're preparing bunkers,* Marasi realises — that is what the stockpiled supplies have been for. Just as people once hid in caves before the world ended and the land was remade by Harmony's Ascension.

Wax joins her. None of this adds up, he says: Harmony told him his sister is trying to prove she can rule the planet. If she destroys it, what does that prove? Why build bunkers — does she really think saving a sliver of the population and annihilating the rest will read as competence? Marasi points at the next plate over: ashfalls. The years of ash gave the Lord Ruler near-universal power in the north; maybe Telsin thinks ash would work again. *Read the next one,* Maraga tells them. They step over and find a list of names — Dupon Melstrom, Vennis Hasting, Mari Hammondess — some of the most powerful sitting Elendel senators. *They're in on it.* All of them? Maraga digs out a year-old letter from Vennis Hasting talking about building a weapon of incredible power; it implicates the rest. Wax knows these people. Vennis is a rat, sure, but Lady Yomen is as close to a friend as he has in the Senate. He flatly rejects the conclusion: these are posturers, not conspirators; if Vennis Hasting actually knew there was a bomb, he'd already be lobbying for strategic tests to prove its power. Something larger and uglier is going on; the plates haven't named it yet.

Moonlight calls them over to another plate — a list of underground disturbances labelled *Underground weapon tests, tracked using seismograph*. Maraga connects the dots aloud: under the city sits a Set base — Lord Mayor Entrone is probably one of its leaders, with rooms there — and some of the caverns are weapon-test sites. The tests recently stopped. *They know it works,* Maraga says quietly. *They're well past their go date.* Marasi goes cold. The stolen memos lay out a target detonation date two weeks ago; the Set killed Tobal the day before that, and Maraga has been sitting in this basement ever since waiting for ash to fall. *I'm a coward,* she says into her hands. Wax cuts her off — past failure is past — there is still time to stop this. Marasi makes the necessary statement out loud: they have a bomb and they mean to drop it on Elendel; they have not done it already because they cannot yet *deliver* it. Maraga confirms: the rocket is having difficulties, fuel most likely, which is what Tobal was working on before he understood what it was for.

She steels herself for one more piece of evidence. *The crowning jewel — the above-the-fold image for the story I'll never write.* From a box she produces an evanotype photograph in colour — stark orange sky, falling ash, the smouldering tops of broken buildings and ruined walls in what looks unmistakably like Elendel. Marasi gasps. Wax, looking closely, notes evanotypes did not exist in the Survivor's day — did someone paint over an old photograph? Maraga does not know. It looks like a picture of what is going to happen. After Tobal found it he barely came; he mostly huddled in his rooms, like she has been doing. The basement goes silent. The picture turns the bomb from abstraction to a concrete image of *what they want to do* — rubble and ash where everything Marasi loves used to be. Stakes larger than any investigation she has run.

A door opens upstairs. Maraga's chained-and-padlocked door, which apparently did not stop the visitor at all. A single set of footsteps crosses the wooden floor. Wayne scrabbles up to his canes; Wax draws and aims at the head of the steps. A dark-haired woman in slacks, white shirt, jacket, and cravat descends — small nose and prim lips at odds with the rugged build. Telsin — Wax's sister, leader of the Set — unarmed in any visible way, completely unbothered by the pistol pointed at her head. *An address,* she says, exasperated. *The number on the back of the envelope was a rusting address? Do you have any idea how many hours we wasted tearing into lockers at train stations?*