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John, staff lowered, hands raised, recognises Quinn standing in the doorway of Wealdsig's hall and understands two things in the same breath. The first is that the dark-haired woman Wealdsig sent away had been a runner sent to fetch Quinn. The second is that the trap she was sent to spring wasn't set for him. It was set for Ryan, and he has walked into it for free. The book's wizard pitch, the thunder, the flame on the forearms — all of it irrelevant in front of Quinn, who is in tactical camo, drinking Wealdsig's ale, and laughing.

Quinn, in good humour, sets about taking him apart. The cartel had locked this dimension off the moment Ryan entered it; the boss won't tolerate the risk; the supposed kidnappings, the rumours, the missing children — all of it was bait, run on the assumption that Ryan cannot leave a kidnapping alone. The tracker had flagged a warp-in to the north a week ago. They had assumed it was backup. It had, in fact, been John. He is welcome to grovel to the boss; the boss might or might not throw him off a cliff. Lately, says Quinn, he's been moody.

John barely hears him. With every gibe his memory clicks back into focus and the kindly cop-with-a-broken-brain story he had been telling himself this whole time falls apart. He was never a cop. He washed out of the academy after six months. The dimension code in his pocket wasn't department-issue; it was one of Ulric's stashed escape codes, and he had stolen it after Jen's death and run for the bolt-hole he assumed Ulric wouldn't miss. He had spent the last few years standing at a cartel door letting men laugh at him as they walked in.

Quinn calls it: the lost title bout against him in the EFL was a dive Ulric had ordered, with John's chest and skull platings secretly compromised so the fall would look real. Years afterwards, John had asked Ulric to bring the augments back online. Ulric had laughed at him then, and laughed at him for years since. Slumped against a table beside the wall, mind dull, John remembers the rest. He hates them. He had always hated them. And he had run away from them, the way he runs from everything.

Then he remembers what is happening *outside* the hall — Ealstan and Sefawynn are about to walk straight into the trap Quinn just described — and the panic of it shoves him upright. He is, he reminds himself, a coward. He is also a very, very good liar. He shuffles, bites his lip, blurts that he saw Ryan when he first arrived. Quinn perks up. John hurries over to the table where Quinn's cartel phone is and palms a berry next to it. *Please*, he whispers. *Please what?* says Quinn, reaching for the phone — which falls apart between his fingers, screws and motherboard and shell shaking out into separate parts. The reeve hoots. Wealdsig points at the heap with his good hand and tells the outlander the wights don't like him.

Quinn, swearing at the wreckage, declares he is going to ride to Maelport on his bike to deliver the news in person. He owes John one, he says, for the thing with Tacy — a name John doesn't recognise and nods at anyway — and offers a piece of free advice: run for the continent, the boss is unlikely to find him there. Then Quinn is gone, leaving John alone with Wealdsig, his two hearthmen, and one of the cartel's working phones now disassembled on the table.

John picks up his staff and asks the reeve to take him to the changeling prisoner. Wealdsig, moderately drunk and amused at the prospect of a feeble outlander when the dangerous ones are about, declines — sorry, harmless one — and then frowns, tilts his head, and stands. The reeve has heard something John has missed. John, who turned his amped hearing down too far during the show, raises it again and catches Ealstan's voice shouting outside in the courtyard. Whatever the rescue plan was, it is now in pieces.