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Marasi leads the strike team into the warren under the elevated tracks — cramped tenements pressed against factories and warehouses in the urban twilight, all in the literal shadow of Bilming's futuristic rail. She reflects, as they slip from alley to alley, on how easily progress stratifies the people it claims to lift: a high-speed train is a fine thing, but only for the people who can afford to live within reach of it. The thought stings. She knows that the day-to-day grind of detective work has crowded her old ambitions of reform onto the back burner; the big problems were too big, the small ones too urgent, and somewhere along the way the woman who came to the constabulary to *change things* started solving cases instead. Thoughts for another time. They are one street short of the tire factory, and TwinSoul — octogenarian and elegant — has kept up only because they have not yet had to hurry.

Moonlight halts them. A bulbous black motorcar with tinted windows is pulling up to the factory's bay, and out climbs Gave Entrone himself, flanked by hard-faced bodyguards, shouting at the trucks still loading and waving them out. Marasi is almost certain she hears Dawnshot's name in the man's mouth. TwinSoul murmurs that the lord mayor probably doesn't care for having his home burned down. The arrival doubles as proof: this is the right factory.

They circle the long way to the back wall, ducking briefly out of the railway's shade and then back in. The wall has an old window boarded on both sides, which spoils Marasi's hope of peeking through, so TwinSoul sets his palm to the bricks and lets crystal creep out along the mortar — *they really should have sealed this with pitch* — and waits to hear back from his aether. Silajana senses through the contact: a small storage room, cluttered with shelves, no one inside, with a clear wall to the right of the window. He breaks the crystals off; the fragments crumble to powder and burn away into rose mist.

Moonlight opens the leather wallet of her three stamps, picks the door-stamp, dampens its head with glowing red ink, and presses it half an inch into the brick. When she pulls it back the seal stays glowing on the wall in intricate red script — and the bricks themselves groan, pop, and grind sideways, *as if the wall has been unzipped*, resolving in seconds into a worn yellow-paint wooden door. Marasi ducks through first into a small chamber lit by a single red bulb so dim it barely does anything; washbasins line a counter beside jugs of unidentified liquid. A janitorial closet, she assumes. TwinSoul follows, then Moonlight — and behind them the door is *consumed* back into bricks, as if the rewrite were merely on loan. *That is the most unnatural thing I've ever seen*, Marasi whispers. Moonlight reminds her, not unkindly, that she has a friend who flies.

They listen at the inner door, hear nothing, and slip through into a pitch-black chamber that turns out to hold a *strange* number of chairs, arranged in rows. Marasi gropes along the far wall for a doorway and finds instead a bank of light switches. She flicks one — and a streak of light leaps from one wall and paints the opposite wall with a brilliant, moving image: a ruined city under a brilliant red sky, ash falling on the smouldering wreckage, accompanied by the clattering mechanical sound of whatever is throwing the light from behind them. The image moves.