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Wax descends the iron-walled shaft hidden between the inner walls of the Silver House, passing the first floor and emerging in a small bunker stocked with rations and water jugs. The shelves and the door scrapes on the floor mark it as a bolt-hole, but the door — when Wax persuades it open — turns out to face the wrong way: not a panic room at all, but a covert exit into Bilming's storm drain system. The grates above leak daylight; the muddy tire tracks ahead leak intent. A motorised cart sits in the tunnel, the kind a man would use to come and go from a place he visited every day without being seen.

A breath. Wax is briefly somewhere else — a mine adit, golden light from above, the cult-like *artwork* of a terrible mind. *Someone else moves us.* The phantoms have not gone, but they have shrunk into something more like echoes than ghosts; he can let them pass and keep walking. He climbs a service ladder to the street to collect Wayne, hoping he isn't on fire.

Wayne is only mildly singed, waiting at a bar because of course he is. He had pivoted off the unavailable *Grandma's Been at the Vodka* to his fallback — Flaming Bunny — which requires a stray cat, a hurled cat, a *very* large fire, and the public's eagerness to rescue a non-existent rabbit. The Silver House is by now fully ablaze behind them, a column of black smoke standing over Bilming like the Deepness itself. Wax briefly objects, briefly hopes the cat is alive, and learns that Wayne thinks cats always land in trees if thrown hard enough — a thing he believes he learned at West's Haven, the evil damn school he himself once burned down. The mansion has likely also lost the rug under which Wax could not replace the trapdoor; the Set will know they found the tunnel.

Underground, Wayne inspects the storm drain and concedes it doesn't actually stink. He squints up through a grate at the slanting sunlight and remarks, almost to himself, that it looks like a narrow canyon. The remark is a thread he keeps tugging at as they walk — *Ma's last story*, the one about the canyon and the hero and the monster called Barm. *You're the hero, Wax, and you got a mission*, he says, and then quietly mentions there are usually snakes in canyons too.

Wax only half listens, because he is rereading Gave's calendar and the two letters, and something has stopped fitting. The appointment book is densely scheduled with visits to *the lab*, fifteen-minute travel windows on either side — close — and then nothing at all after today, beside the note *they arrive.* The deadline is *now.* And the incriminating letter from Vennis Hasting, when he looks at it again with old habits, is wrong. He had authenticated Vennis's real hand with three separate analysts during the bribery case he and Steris had built; the strokes here don't turn the way they should. *It's a forgery.*

Saying it out loud unlocks the rest. Telsin's real problem was never just blowing up Elendel; it was the fact that no Basin city would follow a conqueror who openly did. The frame-up solves it: forged letters in Vennis's hand, built from Gave's carefully harvested *cordial* correspondence, will pin the bomb on Elendel's own senators — they developed it; they mistakenly detonated it. Bilming then *reluctantly* recovers the technology to defend the Basin from the Malwish and inherits the planet by acclamation. *Hell,* Wayne says admiringly. *That would work.*

They walk on along the drain, Wayne working his way through a meandering interrogation of Wax about whether he farted in Gave's desk chair (no), whether he might have done so in Wax's own study chair (alarmingly evasive), and how *concentrated essence of Wayne* might interact with fine leather. The graffiti underfoot starts looking like Terris V-shapes, the kind of pattern children paint. Wayne takes another look up at the grates and at his canyon, and warns again about snakes.

The first gunshot pops chips off the concrete inches from Wax's head. They duck to opposite walls. Around the bend, half-lit at the curve of the tunnel, are the two figures already designed to kill them: the same Set Coinshot Wax tangled with before, and beside him a shorter woman in a bowler hat. *Bad guys and snakes,* Wayne says approvingly. *Both at the same time.*