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Marasi sits in a private compartment of the elevated train with Moonlight and TwinSoul, speeding above the city in cushioned comfort with a cool breeze piped in. Each stop is followed by a hard launch into motion, and it strikes her that each lurch is like a Coinshot's Push — that she is crossing Bilming at roughly the speed the Ascendant Warrior travelled on her Flight of Destiny in the Words of Founding. A miracle of scripture made into a commute.

She uses the ride to do the thing she should have done before any of this: inventory their resources. Moonlight, in a Bilming constable's uniform, deflects with art-criticism and wisecracks; TwinSoul, shrouded in a borrowed fisherman's raincloak, deadpans that her wisecracks are themselves extraordinary because he often cannot find the *wise* in them. Pressed, Moonlight gives Marasi the brief. She has three soulstamps with her — two universal stamps and a personal Essence Mark — and she will not have time to carve more before the strike. TwinSoul sketches the trick for Marasi in plain terms: one stamp makes a doorway appear where none was, the other repairs broken or worn objects to looking new. Each stamp can be re-used, but only for a short window per application. Marasi asks if this is *magic*. *Is Allomancy magic?* Moonlight returns. To repair a thing, she says, is simply to convince it that it was kept well and never broke. It still feels magical to Marasi regardless. The third stamp is for emergencies, Moonlight adds; the other two rewrite nonliving objects, but this one rewrites her, and she avoids drawing on it when she can. TwinSoul shakes his head when Marasi tries to follow up. Leave it alone.

TwinSoul's own limits are real. He can only sustain roseite under particular fields of Investiture; this world doesn't naturally supply them, so off the safehouse grounds every roseite creation must remain in contact with him or it crumbles, and each creation is fuelled by water drawn from his own body — hence the backpack tank. His own craftsmanship is also limited: he can make simple tools, but he is not the aetherbound who could make her a gun.

Marasi tries the unfamiliar syllables of his god's name. *Both less and more than a god*, TwinSoul tells her — one of the primal aethers, eternal entities his people hold to predate Adonalsium himself. Moonlight mildly corrects that predating the Shattering is not the same as predating Adonalsium. TwinSoul ignores the correction; the tenet is sacred. The primal aethers grant their devotees a *bud* — and he raises his right palm into the train window's light to show her the web of transparent stone embedded there, the bones visible through it where the flesh has been replaced. The bud, he says, ties him to Silajana, and through Silajana to all of Silajana's other aetherbound; he is Silajana's mortal agent in the cosmere. Marasi simply thanks him for joining the fight.

She turns to logistics. Can the door stamp get them into the enemy base? Depends, Moonlight says — the stamp pretends the wall's builders installed a door, which is hard to sell to natural rock. Marasi proposes they sneak the factory from any direction and look for the cargo elevator down once inside; Moonlight confirms the surveillance of crates and food going in argues against a hidden stairwell — they're after a freight lift. TwinSoul floats hijacking a supply truck; Marasi vetoes it as a thing already tried, badly. The plan settles on the back wall: scout for an empty room with a wall they can cut a fresh door into, while the Set's security looks the wrong direction.

Bilming passes outside the window in clashing colour. People wear what Elendel would never; the train station alone serves up a costumed shop mascot, masked Malwish tourists, and a koloss-blooded woman in a tailored suit. Marasi worries her rifle case will draw eyes; nobody bothers to look. From the platform above the street they pick out the target — an old brown-brick factory with a mottled sign, tucked under the rail tracks among the city's less polished blocks — and find it noisily busy, with half a dozen trucks loading from a side bay door. Their hoped-for quiet moment is gone.

Then Marasi sees it. The trucks are pulling away *toward* the government district, not just leaving. TwinSoul points farther north and a black plume of smoke rises off the hill where the mayor's mansion sits. *They're worried about Wax*, she says — marshalling their forces to put out the fire Dawnshot has very visibly set. She tells the others to be grateful: where Wax goes, fireworks follow, and right now every eye in the Set is on him and not on the back wall of a tire factory. She leads the way down off the platform.