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Wayne paces the alleys around the Sentinel of Truth looking for Set watchers and turning a thought over. He once read a story about a fellow who travelled back in time by throwing too many electrical switches at the same moment, came home, and discovered his father now ate butter on his sandwiches and the city had been taken over by sapient lions. Nod once told him about another one in which the time machine was a toilet and a too-large flush, and the change of one bagel on the protagonist's way home meant nobody wore shirts anymore. The shirts thing was an improvement on the original; the bothered feeling was the same. The stories all treated changing the future as something rare and frightening. But everyone alive does it every day. Nobody worries enough about the futures they are quietly producing right now — angrier, sadder people, instead of talking lions — by eating bagels and breaking twigs. Maybe stories about people quietly making things better are too dull to write. Probably the protagonists would need to also have no shirts.

He trades a beggar a stack of cash for a dirty handkerchief with a little bunny sewn into the corner, unbeknownst to the beggar, and is mid-thought when a hand wraps around his mouth from behind. He nearly kills the fellow — except it smells like Wax. It is. Wax eases him back into the alleyway, presses him down behind some rubbish while Telsin passes on the street searching, annoyed, and only then lets go.

*You let her go?* Wayne whispers. *Call me crazy*, Wax says — *it feels more like I escaped.* Wayne suggests there are friendlier ways to get his attention than a kidnapping, generally involving safewords and stretchy ropes; this leads naturally into him praising MeLaan's flexibility and reframing his old relationship with her as a kind of churchgoing on the grounds that she is a divine being chosen by Harmony. Wax groans, then in spite of himself grins and shakes his head. Wayne notes that Wax has been too uptight what with parenthood, the Senate, and the periodic obligation to save the entire city.

Hoid has pulled up in the car as arranged to fetch them, but Telsin is still lurking; rather than risk the pickup, Wax and Wayne slip out a different way and lose themselves in a busy Bilming street. Wayne tries his line about Bilming being full of idiots, concedes that this is unfair to the visitors who travel to Bilming specifically to gawk at the idiots, and asks if Wax got anything out of Telsin. *Maybe.* He has, of course, a lead of his own — *a shining good pub three streets over*, sworn to by no fewer than two bums.

The glare he earns is worth it. Wax tells him the real lead is the lord mayor; Telsin flinched when Gave Entrone's name came up, which means Wax cannot break his sister but he can break the coward. They stop on the street and get a wide berth; nobody in Bilming wears guns, and a mistcoat with two holsters reads loudly. Wayne tells him so. Wax insists mistcoats are comfy. Wayne is privately convinced the things are secretly made of mist and that Harmony keeps Wax from tripping in his because Harmony likes Wax better, which is unfair, and partial explanation for why Wayne drinks.

They duck into the mouth of an alley to plan. Wax worries the Set will spot him before long; Wayne worries that shaking down Entrone himself would draw too much heat. Then he points up the road to a silvery-white building at its end — the mayor's mansion — not as tall as the central spire of the city, which is the tallest by a lot and still being added to at the top, but carrying its own polished menace. They do not need Entrone in person; he is the type to have his secrets written down, probably in a safe, probably in his own house.

Wax notes that Wayne has just been arguing that shaking Entrone down would draw attention, and is now proposing they ransack his mansion. Wayne rephrases — affecting an upper-class Fifth Octant drawl — as an evening turn-down service: mints on the pillow, towels folded in the shape of a monkey, and the most delicate, mannerly despoiling of his intimate affairs. A *courteous looting.* He clarifies that they will of course still break everything and steal the secrets; he just will not fart on the chair on the way out, *to keep things classy.* Wax takes a deep breath and agrees this walks the line. *Let's do it.* But he will do the ransacking; Wayne handles the distraction.