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Marasi hauls the captured Soother along by the collar to the edge of the crowd, gun in her other hand, Reddi limping alongside. The crowd is throwing things at the stage now; MeLaan, deviated further off-script in her own annoyance, has just shouted *fine, burn the city, see how you feel in the morning without homes to live in* and lost what was left of them. Marasi closes her eyes and groans at how tired she is. They have lost. It is time to grab Wayne and MeLaan and leave.

Then Aradel climbs onto the stage and points his pistol at *the governor*.

Marasi spins to the Soother on the spot, promises immunity for the night's offences by the Survivor's spear in exchange for one solid Soothe across the whole crowd, and gets it. The crowd hushes. Aradel arrests *Replar Innate* by name and by the authority of his new station as lord high constable for gross corruption and perjury of his oaths, then orders his thin line of constables to turn round — to face him, putting their backs to the crowd. Reddi mutters; Marasi tells him *something brilliant is happening*. Aradel addresses the crowd: tonight the governor declared martial law and so put the constables in charge with him at the head. The governor has turned out to be a corrupt liar. *He's no longer in charge. Best I can figure, you are.* He will not stand for rioting or looting and will fight them up to his last breath if they try. But he has letters on the seven worst house lords in the city and intends to bring them in by morning. He could use an army if anyone is willing. The crowd roars yes. Aradel looks faintly stunned by what he has just done and shoves *the governor* into a pair of dumbstruck corporals. Reddi worries this becomes a lynch mob. Marasi tells him a river is easier to channel than to stop. She releases the Soother — *get out of here, and tell Suit he might want an extended vacation* — and watches the city turn itself, for one night, into something usable.

Across the city Wax crosses the bridge limping with one hand on his bleeding leg and his gun trained on Bleeder until he has swept her own pistol away from her. He rolls her over. Tears are running from her eyes, mixing with the trickle of blood from the forehead wound. *He's in my head again, Wax,* she whispers. *I won't go back to him. I will be me, at the end.* Her body starts to spasm. He demands to know what she is doing. *Dying. We decided it. We won't fall again. We found a way out.* It is the kandra self-termination TenSoon and the elders worked out a century after the Catacendre, used now to keep Harmony out of her at the cost of herself.

He picks her up. Let her die in someone's arms, he thinks, even after everything she has done — it is right. She turns her head to him through the spasms and tells him, in Lessie's voice, that he is *as surprising as a dancing donkey, Mister Cravat*. He goes cold. *Where did you hear that?* She tells him she had loved him on the day he hired her. *Lawman for hire. So ridiculous, but so earnest.* He demands to know who told her. *Ask Harmony,* she says. *Ask him why he sent a kandra to watch over you, all those years ago. Ask him if he knew I would come to love you.* *Lessie?* he whispers. It is her. She tells him she had refused to manipulate him back into the city — he had loved it out there in the Roughs — and goes still in his lap.

He stares at the body. It keeps Lessie's shape. He howls into the mist — a low, ragged shout from deep inside — and it seems to drive the mist back.

An hour later he is still kneeling there with the body in his lap and his heat in it, when TenSoon lopes out of the mist on four legs with the wolfhound head bowed. *Tell me, kandra.* And TenSoon tells him. The woman Wax knew as Lessie was always one of them. Harmony worried about him in the Roughs and sent Paalm — the one kandra who had shown the willingness to break their sacred prohibitions — to be his bodyguard there, in the hope that the two of them would be good for one another. TenSoon himself was forbidden to say so, and only learned of it a few days ago; MeLaan never knew. *Harmony foresaw a disaster if you were told whom you hunted.* — *And this isn't a disaster, kandra?* TenSoon turns away.

They sit there on the empty bridge in the pockets of electric lights, with a dead woman in Wax's lap. *I killed her,* he says with his eyes closed. *I killed her again.*