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Wit dusts off the blue uniform the rain cannot touch and asks whether a master cannot drop in on a favourite student now and then. He glows softly, his substance rippling at every raindrop's interference like a reflection on a puddle. Nomad rounds on Aux inside his head: did he reinforce the Connection to Wit when he was rummaging around in his soul earlier? Aux, being dead, points out he doesn't have to care whether Nomad is angry at him. That is what has happened. The Connection budget the ember power cell bought them was enough to let Wit reach across the dark and stand on the rim of Beacon. Wit, meanwhile, notes the outfit. Nomad tells him what an arena spear, a flash of sunline, and being dragged behind a hovercycle half an hour will do to a wardrobe. Wit calls it chic.

Then it goes where these conversations always go. The Night Brigade is hunting Nomad because of what Wit did to him. Wit answers that he may have saved the cosmere. Nomad throws a pebble through his head and corrects him: he may have saved Wit. If they catch him, the link from the Dawnshard back to Wit will hold; that is the leash by which Wit's enemies will find him. Wit clasps his hands behind his back — the old trick he taught Nomad to look as if he were thinking — and says nothing for a long beat. Then he calls him apprentice and asks whether he has had a hard time of it lately.

Nomad refuses the title. He refuses, too, the implication that Wit cares now. He throws the old grievance back across the rim: Wit did nothing when his friends and he were dying to arrows years ago in Alethkar, sat around playing a flute while Nomad walked into Damnation. Wit lived in the same city afterward for years and never came by. Wit looks down at the words. Two things he is usually too good at sidestepping, Nomad notes with private satisfaction: familiarity, and truth.

Wit changes his approach. There was a boy once, he begins, who looked up at the stars and wondered what they were. Nomad has heard the story shapes too many times and turns to leave. Wit calls after him: I was that boy. On Yolen. Before God died and worlds started ending. Nomad freezes. Wit does not often speak of his past — that land of dragons and bone-white trees he claims to remember so little of. Is it a hook? Nomad asks. Wit says no, no lies right now, and goes on: rooftop, town philosophers arguing themselves hoarse, the conviction he would never have the answers — and yet millennia later here he is, walking between the stars, learning each one. Nomad asks dryly whether his Torment is supposed to be a blessing, then. Every Torment is, Wit says. Even mine.

The argument finishes Wit's older theme — it is the questions, not the answers. Nomad has heard this too. Wit's projection is fading as the Connection drains. He pushes the argument one step further: sometimes asking is enough because it has to be enough; sometimes that is all there is. Nomad cuts in that his oaths ended and he learned that destinations really do matter. Wit doesn't dispute the point. He says only that he was wrong — that he did the best he could with the situation he had, hoping to head off a calamity, and in doing so ruined Nomad's life. He is sorry. Sincere, completely sincere. Nomad turns to go and waits, out of habit, for Wit's final word; this time Wit just gives him a wan smile and fades to nothing. Aux stays silent. He generally does when Wit is around; he knows Nomad feels double-teamed when both of them are talking at once.

Nomad swears under his breath. They need to get off this planet, and now he knows how. He stalks back inside, picks out the half-open council door by the trail of water he left, and bursts in. Rebeke and the others stumble back from the table; not one of them reaches for a weapon. They are doomed. But their goals may align with his. He grabs the access disc off the table, holds it up, and addresses them — for the first time, in Beacon's own tongue, fluent and unaccented. He knows what it is. He knows it opens a metal door buried somewhere, with similar writing on it. He is going there too. Maybe, he proposes, they can help each other.