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Marasi and Moonlight finish up in the Sentinel of Truth basement — Moonlight takes one last set of rubbings of the wall plates and tucks them into her case — and climb back to the main floor, where they find Maraga standing in the cluttered office gripping an overstuffed travel bag. Dawnshot told her on his way out to go to family in the countryside; her family is in Bilming or in Elendel. The first will be hunted by the Set within hours; the second sits under a bomb. Neither is a good answer.

Marasi pushes Moonlight to do something for the woman who handed them the evidence. Moonlight thinks it through, then slides a small card from her sleeve marked with the interlocking-diamond sigil and gives Maraga an address in the Knightbridge district — Thirty-Third and Finete, number one eighty-seven. Show the card, say Moonlight sent you, ask for asylum as recompense; even the Set will have trouble breaking into that house. She promises to send someone for Maraga's research and tells her to leave the moment she has fetched her sister. Maraga hesitates over what she is leaving behind, then hurries out.

What about them, Moonlight asks. Marasi wants maps of Set movements and lists of properties they may own — anything that can be cross-referenced against the rubbings to find a way down to the cavern under Bilming. Moonlight does not have those on her and floats the records office; Marasi proposes something riskier and faster, and leads them out to flag down a motorcab. She notes in passing how quickly the Bilming coachmen have swapped horse-drawn carriages for these clattering machines.

The cabbie is a dark-haired woman in a ponytail. Marasi gives the address — Thirty-Third and Finete, Knightbridge — and Moonlight catches up at once: Marasi guessed the safehouse from the way she had said her maps were *not on her*. When Marasi starts to argue, Moonlight addresses the cabbie by name — Darkwater — and asks for privacy, and the partition between the front and back of the cab slides shut. Marasi gapes; Moonlight only shrugs.

*What kind of game do you think we're playing*, Marasi asks — if Moonlight's whole purpose is protecting this planet, why is she still acting like she might lock Marasi out of the safehouse with the information they need? Moonlight settles into her seat and answers carefully. Her organisation was created to protect and advance the needs of the planet — *not my homeland*, she stresses, but one she is committed to keeping stable. Terrible forces are moving in the wider cosmere; her people are going to need allies. So why the resistance, then? Because she is worried they are being played. Autonomy is good at false leads and half-truths; the talk of restarting the ashfalls feels *outrageous*, a shade too red to be natural, and Moonlight cannot quite believe it.

*Stop toying with me*, Marasi tells her. Moonlight is not toying — this, she says, is an *audition*. Until a little while ago she had thought she had months to unpick the Set's plan; now she does not, and she has to weigh whether Marasi is worth taking inside. The rubbings peek out of her bag; her fingernail taps the armrest. For the first time Marasi reads her not as alien and all-knowing but simply uncertain — fighting it, but human.

Moonlight decides: Marasi is in, and she will *deal with the ramifications later* if it proves to be another of Autonomy's shadow games. She cannot give Marasi everything — they do not have the Bilming caverns mapped — but they do watch the Set's agents, and the rubbings list the explosion coordinates. Cross-referencing where blasts have happened with where agents appear and vanish should narrow down an entry point. Marasi recognises the shape of the work — it is how she located the cavern under Elendel.

Moonlight softens. She remembers when *her* world expanded — when even squabbles that decided the fate of empires suddenly looked small — and tells Marasi she is taking it well. Marasi shrugs: long stretches of quiet humdrum punctuated by sudden explosions, usually literal, is the shape of her job. They trade a thought about Harmony — *like a powerful referee who only sometimes pays attention to your fight*, Moonlight offers; *or an observer who you're sure could do more*, Marasi adds — and Moonlight concedes the point. The cab pulls up to the safehouse. *Hopefully the Survivor hasn't returned unexpectedly*, she says — her mentor is not always reasonable about people he sees as Harmony's agents.