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Back at the camp the Merry Men are turning in, and Thokk suggests Sefawynn share the tool shack John was put in to sleep off the blackout grenade. John's nanites are back up and tell him he doesn't need to sleep, which leaves him standing awkwardly at the fire across from Ryan, who is at his laptop. They both agree to skip the emotional cleanup and plan the assault on Maelport instead — a coping mechanism, John notes drily, that they have always shared.

Ryan has done his homework. He turns the laptop around and walks John through a detailed map of the port — guard routes in green, the earl's mansion in 3D, the earl himself held in a pit *because these people have no concept of proper incarceration techniques.* He highlights the meeting hall beside the mansion: Ulric's saferoom and tech depot, the only building inside the walls with modern security, and the likely location of the backup beacon unless Ulric carries it on him. The perimeter is a micromotion field that pings on anything augmented; Ryan outlines his best guess of its line in blue. It is what gave him away the first time. He cannot cut the power because the depot runs on its own fusion reactor.

The window is tight. Ulric's prearranged check-in team will arrive on Wodensday, so they have to disable that backup beacon before the team locks on. Ryan sketches a two-pronged dawn assault. He has an inside contact in Maelport — not Quinn — who can let him in a back entrance, though they cannot bring down the perimeter alarm itself. John and the Merry Men will trigger the alarm at the front door as bait, drawing Ulric's attention while Ryan slips in to find and kill the beacon. John protests being the diversion — *can't I do that part?* — and Ryan kindly itemises why no: the beacon identification, the readouts, the augment package. *I can't afford to have you screw this up,* his body language says, and they both know it. Ryan hands him a black diamond-shaped device — his own beacon, to activate the moment they kill Ulric's. He admits he is poorly equipped; he came as a scout with two guns, a flak vest, the laptop, and a radiophone. John confesses to having arrived with a cloak, a near-empty ballpoint pen, and a handbook that was ninety percent marketing.

Ryan gently needles his rating habit. *Throw away that notebook, Johnny. Nothing's ever good enough for you.* John hadn't realised it looked that way from outside. He explains, finally and out loud, what the scoring was. It had begun when he was failing out of the academy — a list of likes and dislikes, kept as a backstop, because everyone else seemed to *know* what they were. The list never gave him an answer. But he had liked making it. He had kept making it because it was fun. Five stars. *This is me,* he thinks, and doesn't bother to make Ryan understand.

Ryan feeds the fire. Among the new logs John notices small offerings the Merry Men have set out — a shoe needing repair, a knife to be sharpened. Thokk told them the party travels with a wight of its own. Ryan has been trying, fruitlessly, to talk them out of *superstition*; he still thinks the local probability oddities are an unbalanced quantum effect — the room of oxygen all bouncing one way at once, but commoner — and that shoes mending themselves overnight will eventually fit inside that frame. John tells him there's a simpler explanation: people make deals with the wights. Ryan shrugs.

He digs out the marshmallows he had been saving and tosses them, and a stick, to John. They roast them over the coals the way they used to when Ryan's father took them camping; John burns his and Ryan swaps him a perfect one, the way he always did. *When did it go so wrong, Ryan?* John asks. Ryan gives the easy answer — *when you signed up with criminals* — and John tells him, softly, that the academy kicked him out for *attitude*, that he didn't quit. He works through it: the missed test from a faulty nanite update; Ryan's lucky networking with Venessa's father; the small pebble that starts the avalanche. Life is not the craps table, where every roll is independent. A few losses make you doubt yourself, you tighten, you lose more, it compounds. Ryan grants him the point and grants himself a corollary: maybe his own confidence has been propped up by things going his way, and he has wanted losers to deserve their losses because it lets him pretend he could never be one.

They drift to Jen, who John still believes he killed by driving her into the Europe trip that ended in the accident. Ryan tells him, simply and meaning it, that he has never blamed him. *Loving Jen was one of the most relatable things you ever did, Johnny.* And then: come tomorrow they will bring down Ulric together, and John will have done something truly special — *gotten out from under that avalanche. Escaped.*