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Marasi watches Moonlight take in the jar of pure Investiture differently than TwinSoul did — not sipped slowly through her aether but pulled in all at once, hand sunk into the light. Her hair shrinks to a luminous bob. Her skin somehow outshines that hair, glowing from within with a clean white fire that has nothing to do with anything earthly. Power swirls around her and she rises off the floor — not really; she is just on her toes, but the impression is hard to shake. She sighs in deep satisfaction. She is, briefly, every painting of a divinity Marasi has ever seen.

The glow ebbs almost at once, but Moonlight — no longer quite Moonlight — kneels and begins drawing on the stone with her finger. She consults the map and the numbers Marasi reads back to her. She nods, and light blooms from her hand, leaving a traced figure on the floor: a rough sketch of the Basin with a strange aon at its centre. The drawing complete, her glow settles and steadies. She stands in the middle of the circle.

*Ah!* she says, and her voice is pitched higher than Marasi knows it. *A mortal! How are you, child?* She looks around the room without waiting for the answer. *I seem to be in an unexpected location.* Marasi tries, gently: *You're in Bilming. Underground.* No recognition. *The Elendel Basin?* A blank stare. Marasi points to the diagram on the floor — *You just drew a map of it.* The being looks down at her own feet, surprised. *Oh. So I did. How curious.* She clasps her hands behind her back and hums to herself, and Marasi finally understands the trade Moonlight just made.

The trackers and soldiers are pounding on the front door, cracks running through the wood. Marasi points and starts to explain. *Bother,* the being says, and traces a complex network of glowing lines in the air with both hands. The lines fall into the wall and the wall stops giving. The pounding continues, futile. The being asks who the attackers are — *Nasties from the Rose Empire? Some other faithful of Wyrn come to waste their time fighting their betters?* Marasi tries again. *They're just bad people. We had a plan to —* *We?* *You and I. Before you changed.* *I have always been Shay-I,* she says, *blessed of the Shay-ode.* Marasi revises her approach.

*O blessed one,* she begins, and the persona perks up immediately at the politeness. *Your power is incredible, and your being divine. Please, will you grant me a boon?* *Why, of course! So polite. A rare quality in mortals.* Marasi explains the plan. She is to escape through the soulstamped door in the back wall, the door is to vanish, and the soldiers must believe she left with Shay-I — who can vanish, Marasi understands? *Vanish? Aon Tye-A,* Shay-I says, as if naming a familiar tool. *But that is quite the blessing you ask. I'd need distance and inclination —* and Marasi feeds her the prepared numbers, twenty-seven sixty-three, inclination twelve degrees. Yes, fine, fine. Then, with the air of someone correcting a poorly-thought-out child: *But if you flee through that door, they'll find only me in here. An imperfect solution.*

Shay-I taps Marasi on the forehead, sketches a few symbols, and a duplicate of Marasi simply appears beside her — moving, opaque, but ungrounded enough that Marasi's fingers pass through it when she tries to touch it. *Scoot along, scoot along,* Shay-I tells her, and reminds her to be properly pious about her *magnanimously gifted* blessing. Marasi promises to be very pious. She pauses on her way out, slings the rucksack — and the last jar of light still in it — over her shoulder, but presses the burned notebook and the leather folio of stamps back into Shay-I's hands as *very important; please keep them safe.* Shay-I waves her off impatiently — *hurry, they are almost through.*

Marasi regrets the rifle she has to leave behind (a pistol in the rucksack will have to do) and the lab coat (her delivery-driver clothes blend better with the Community). She pushes the new door open. As she closes it she catches one last glimpse of Shay-I standing beside the Marasi doppelganger, hands moving in the air drawing light, as the front wall finally buckles. Then Marasi ducks below the line of the false-checkerboard windows and slips out into the painted streets of the Community, trusting that whatever wears Moonlight's body will hold to the plan.