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Steris runs the evacuation from the central Elendel station, ticking districts off her notebook as cargo trains pull out under cover of the official cover story — gas leaks, mysterious smells. By her reckoning the broadsheets have already noticed something larger; people are fleeing by car in numbers that fall within her projections, which is in itself a small comfort. Another train chugs away as she writes.

TenSoon prowls up in the borrowed body of the dead senate-chamber constable and reports that Lord Mayor Daal and the senators have fled the city, and that word of their absence is now spreading. Steris judges that troubling but secondary. TenSoon is not so easy on himself: he says he should never have brought the Bands out, never let them be handed over, never failed to notice they had already been drained. He has been away from human politics, he says, too long. He does not, anymore, do *human* very well. Steris tells him they will deal with the Bands if they live to.

Governor Varlance walks up, his white face makeup nearly sweated off, and asks how many they think they can save. *It depends entirely on how much time we have,* Steris tells him. He answers that they have just heard from intelligence in Bilming: something has happened. Not an artillery launch — a warship, one of the Bilming Navy's Pewternauts, running at full speed for Elendel.

She waves Reddi over. Reddi, accustomed to thinking in terms of navies and broadsides, reaches for the obvious answer — a single warship without a navy of its own to oppose is a manageable problem — and the governor agrees. Steris does not. The shape of it is clear to her in a heartbeat: a single ship at full speed, dispatched the moment the rocket proved insufficient, can only be one thing. *The ship is the bomb,* she tells them. Reddi whispers a prayer to Preservation and asks if they can shell it. *And detonate the bomb?* Steris answers. They wouldn't have chosen this delivery mechanism if shelling stopped it.

The governor slumps against a pillar and pronounces Wax failed and Elendel lost. Reddi estimates: at full steam from Bilming, hours at most, very probably less. Varlance urges that they have time enough to get themselves on the next train if they leave now — that they have to. Steris stands numb in the noise of the station, very aware that the other senators have already done exactly that. They will rant for weeks that she was wrong; at the first whiff of real smoke they bolted.

She slaps her hand down on her notebook hard enough to make herself jump. *That ship,* she tells the governor, *will not reach this city. Because my husband Wax will prevent it.* She flips through pages of disaster scenarios — earthquakes offshore, what historically happens to harbour districts when a large wave hits them — and identifies the bayside sectors that need to be evacuated next on the off chance the best Wax can manage is to detonate the bomb early. She takes the governor by the arm. She does not want him to leave. She tells him to stay and be a hero — to be Varlance the hero — and not Varlance the man who fled.

He stares at her, half a step toward the platform. Last call sounds; a train hisses. *How do you know?* he asks again. She answers softly: there are things in a life one cannot plan for. She has struggled to learn it. But one thing she has learned and now believes to be true: no matter what else happens, Wax will somehow get wherever he needs to be.