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Wax climbs into the back of the wrecked truck he has just stopped with a single Steelpush and finds three corpses and a scatter of papers and lab equipment. He checks each body — these are people who have already once feigned death today, and he will not be fooled twice. The last of them is a bloodied woman who is still breathing, and when her eyes slip open they carry a faint red glow.

She speaks. The voice that comes out of her is the body's, but the content is not. She calls him *good at this,* compliments his *drive,* his *individualism,* and laments that Harmony reached him first. He backs out of the truck with Vindication up. She tells him this body will soon expire and he need not worry about her. He asks what she is. *You know what I am,* she says. He guesses Trell — and she corrects him with the day's largest reveal: Telsin is not Trell yet. *Trell* is the name and the mythology Autonomy has prepared for her to grow into. The voice in front of him belongs to Autonomy herself, *pierced by my metal, soul open to my touch* — speaking directly through one of her spiked servants the way she rarely speaks to anyone at all.

Wax is *Sword of Harmony*, she tells him, and she will not intervene against him or his efforts. His sister does not understand this. Telsin pleads with her to act and cannot see what Autonomy sees: *it is only in the struggle to survive that a person — a people — achieves their potential.* The bomb, the rockets, the army, the city's ruin — all of it is to her credit because it is to the credit of those who strove for it. Telsin's attempts at her sister's Autonomy are still forced and fabricated, she observes, not the true wound. *She will learn. The longer she holds the power, the longer she becomes an avatar of my nature, the more she will see and understand. If she survives.* In the meantime Wax should be proud of her — Telsin has kept this world alive, since Autonomy would otherwise have attacked it long ago.

Wax asks where the bomb is. He gets back something worse: it is not the bomb he should worry about now, it is the destruction Autonomy has sent in its place if it fails. He thinks she is bluffing. *Think what you wish,* she answers — and then she gives him her real argument, which is the one Wax cannot dismiss: a soul finds its capacity only at the edge of death, and so there must always be a consequence, *as final and terrible as death,* for failure. *What must we do,* he asks, *to get you to leave us the hell alone?* She smiles with bloody lips. *Prove you deserve it.* And the body stops breathing.

He stands in the truck a moment longer. He cannot tell whether she was lying, and he cannot afford to assume she was. It rattles him more than the chase did. He turns to the papers anyway — much of it shredded and dumped in buckets of water by the Set crew before Wax caught them — and finds a half-saved notebook of test-launch records. The self-propelled rockets, it turns out, can travel thirty or forty miles. How had they tested those without anyone noticing? The warships — that is what the navy was for. Open ocean, blue-water exercises, a private firing range. The dates of the latest tests line up exactly with Gave's periodic *vacations*. The current rockets do not quite reach Elendel — but the notebook is full of proposals for how to close the gap. He bundles everything potentially useful into a duffel from the corner of the truck.

He climbs back into the street. Onlookers have gathered, including the proprietor of a small liquor store whose front window now contains the runaway wheel of Wax's truck. Wax should be moving. He stops anyway, walks over, presses a wad of cash into the man's hand and apologises — *trying to prevent a catastrophe* — and as the man is staring at the money, Wax spots something through the smashed window. *Is that a case of Logshine?*

A short time later he touches down at the laboratory he left behind. Wayne has dealt with the stragglers, even bound a few, and is now sitting with someone else's monogrammed handkerchief pressed to his nose, looking utterly miserable from the cost of frantic health-storing. Wax has never had to store health, but he can imagine how it feels. He himself, with the thrill of the chase gone, is suddenly aware of his age and his missed sleep. He walks over and raises two bottles of Logshine — the Roughs-brewed beer Wayne has not seen in years. *Rusts, Wax,* Wayne says, and actually tears up. *You really do care about me.*

Wax tells him it is time to take a breather. Wayne asks if they can afford to. Wax tells him they cannot afford another fight on empty — and that he himself needs to sit and read what he found. Half an hour, maybe. *Rusting amazing,* Wayne says.