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Marasi and Moonlight move through the blasted-out tunnel in fits, balancing the need for speed with the danger of barrelling into a Set patrol — and now with something else, audible behind them at the edge of the lamplight: a soft scrape of claws on stone and the occasional unnatural growl. Whatever is following them is creeping, not rushing. Possibly hiding too.

This section of the complex is far more built up than the working tunnels behind them. Drywall rooms line the passages; some are occupied. They have to find scant cover several times as groups go past — not soldiers but workers and scientists, hurrying under what their muttered conversation reveals as an order from Entrone for everyone to retire to their quarters. There is a single-minded anxiety to the people, which works for Marasi and Moonlight — no one stops to look at strangers. Moonlight ducks into an empty room and emerges with two lab coats, and from then on they move openly down the corridor as if they belonged.

A speaker mounted along the hall crackles to life with Gave Entrone's voice — calm reassurance, his presence in the Community making preparations for *new arrivals*, the order to settle in and wait. *We are ready.* Marasi's last sliver of hope that Gave would balk at letting Autonomy through dies on hearing him. The whole complex around her is a bunker — supplies, layout, all of it — built so Entrone's favourites could survive what is coming. And the bomb above is only half of it. She has to trust Wax and Wayne for that half. Her half is the men of gold and red.

The tunnel opens into a vast cavern, but the far end of it is a tall wooden wall — floor to ceiling, plainly built later — that bisects the space. Dark rooms line the wall on this side; emergency lights only. They have entered between shifts, between alarms, between everything. Marasi and Moonlight stop just inside the cavern mouth — and then the scraping sound returns behind them. Marasi pulls Moonlight between two of the wall-side buildings and they crouch in the shadow as something steps into the cavern.

It walks on four elongated legs and has an unnervingly long neck. The head is not quite canine: a dog's snout, but forward-set human eyes. No fur, no clothing, two spikes jutting from its shoulders. Marasi has seen something like it described in the book Death gave her — a Hemalurgic monstrosity, the line of work the Set is most monstrously good at. The Lord Ruler had used the art with the precision of a god to make kandra and koloss; any approximation by a lesser hand killed the subject or warped them into something half-formed. The Set, it seems, has finally found a permutation that survives. The thing pauses at the spot where they had stood thirty yards back, sniffs the air, then hoots — and across the cavern dozens of other voices hoot back.

Moonlight palms a stamp and silently opens a fresh door in the side of the building beside them. They slip into a dim room built up against the wooden bisecting wall, with two windows looking through it. The door behind them closes back into wall; a moment later there is scratching at where it had been. Then silence, then a heavy thumping at the room's actual door. It holds.

The windows look into a different world. Neat rows of small houses on painted streets, lit from above by floodlights, with painted flowers and grass on the floor and sculpted foliage along the sides. People in everyday clothes — skirts, trousers, day dresses — walk those streets. No horses, no cars. No alarm. They have not heard the order to quarters. They have not heard the gunfire. Marasi realises she is looking at the Community itself, the bunker Entrone built so his people could ride out the destruction above. The previous theory — ashfall — she now sets aside; the bomb and the invasion are real. Moonlight notes the tint of the glass: one-way. The townsfolk cannot see the working tunnels at all.

Behind them the trackers go quiet, which is not reassuring. Shouts converge in the corridor: troops arriving. Moonlight tells Marasi flatly that the strain can track like a hound and think nearly like a person. She is not, by trade, a soldier. Marasi asks about the other stamp — the one Moonlight had mentioned could transform her. Moonlight admits, reluctantly, that the Essence Mark she is carrying would make her someone with the skills to fight or vanish. But that someone would not be her. The mark will not wear off the way the others do; it stays in force until she chooses to drop it, and while she is under it she does not think as herself. One of these days she will go under and not come back. She has wanted to try this specific transformation for years and never had the Investiture to power it; today, with the jar from the lab shack, she finally does.

Marasi proposes a plan suited to the trackers' noses: Moonlight makes her a door through the bisecting wall, Marasi slips into the Community, and Moonlight then puts on a loud fight with the soldiers and vanishes — leaving the dogs unable to figure out where the second scent went. Moonlight approves, but flags that she is not sure she will remember Marasi or this whole conversation afterwards: her soul will believe her parents moved to a different kingdom on her homeworld and that she was born and raised there. *I wrote it all out,* she says, *but you are never quite sure how a mark behaves until you press it.* She reads a string of numbers off a little device — *distance twenty-seven sixty-three, inclination twelve degrees* — and asks Marasi to feed them back to her, with a notebook map, on cue. She stamps the wall behind Marasi into a door first, the Investiture giving it enough hold to wait a moment. Then she sets the second stamp to her wrist and presses.

She begins to transform.