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Three hours after Contemplation's parting jab, Nomad and Rebeke burst out of the cloud cover into the soft, ring-lit dark. Compared with the storm he has just come out of, the rings' ambient light feels almost like a moonlit night. He is back on Rebeke's quadcycle, and the others have taken Contemplation at her word — the woman who rescued him gets to nursemaid him. Rebeke has barely spoken since the council let out. She has bedded him down, scrounged him a wardrobe — a long brown duster coat with deep pockets, of the two on offer the one that did not look like a uniform — over sturdy trousers and a light shirt. He is still privately ashamed of how he had snapped at her over the first coat. He notes the swift efficiency of Beacon's seamstresses; a society on the run from the sun does not get to waste daylight.

A small fleet of bumblebee-shaped ships follows the quadcycle out of the cloud — about thirty in all, carrying Beacon's full complement of roughly a hundred and fifty people. The whole city disassembles and reassembles on command. He tells himself, after many planets, that he should be too jaded to marvel at each new trick, and concedes that he is not; if he indulged the impulse to linger and study any of them, the Night Brigade would catch up and his curiosity would be repaid in viscera.

He turns from that to the landscape. The mud underfoot — the storm's leavings — has already carved itself into rivers and shallow ring-lit lakes; the terrain runs to hills and valleys rather than the flat salt-pan he had expected. Among them rise craggy, pocked stone formations, like a sculpture garden made by a lunatic. He works out, then asks Rebeke, whether they are solidified eruptions — magma forced up by the passage of the Sky Tyrant and locked in place by the rains that follow. She confirms it: nothing on this world is the same twice. Some general features persist — highlands to the south — but no individual landmark survives a rotation. The Chorus tells of a homeworld of quietude, where the landscape slept; that place was also Hell. He answers, in her language, that he has been there and the food is good but the ghosts a problem. She tells him not to lie. Inside himself he allows that he has been through plenty of varieties of hell, only one of which is named Threnody.

Aux pulls him into Alethi to ask how he had worked out the volcanic story. No erosion on the formations, Nomad explains — fits a planet under extreme forces. Like a primordial world, still forming. He turns it over privately: what does it do to a people to live where you cannot make a map, where nothing lasts but what you carry with you? He sees why one would want to dig a cavern; but the same forces that would carve the cavern would also collapse it. Whatever the Refuge is, it is not that. And — nagging at him — the physics does not quite add up. Investiture- loaded light might make stone flow at the surface, but eruptions mean heat from below. Yet Scadrians have been here, and starship travel through a heavily Invested system should not be possible. Something does not square.

Rebeke explains the search. Round-bottomed prospector ships sweep the terrain in formation, sensing energy sources beneath the soil; not every band of refugees has a Seeker to spare. The Cinder King has hit the doorway often enough, in regular sweeps, to be obsessed; that obsession sharpened when he obtained the key from a stranger who had died in a mudslide and been picked up by one of his outriders. They were the Cinder King's subjects in everything but heart for as long as Rebeke can remember — small towns absorbed into Union by force or paperwork, a few officials and a few Charred posted in to enforce — until his rhetoric turned to forced unification under one city, and Beacon broke away into the dark. As she speaks, Rebeke glances toward the ship carrying her sister — improvised prison; they have no real one — and admits she had hoped Beacon could do something for Elegy. When she locked her up, Elegy had shouted at her in her own voice, but the eyes had nothing of her in them at all. Nomad recognises the slump for what it is: a girl who needs sleep and time to mourn, and is getting another mission instead.

He keeps her on the practical thread. The Cinder King will be looking for them. Zeal swapped the real key for a forgery, so for the moment the Cinder King does not know what they have done, only that someone hit him — patrols will be the regular ones. They have been lucky: the region holding the door is one he rarely sweeps, because his own city, Union, will pass through it anyway after the next harvest, so why look there. The corridor to the north is his all the way to the deadband where food does not grow. The southern corridor used to be habitable, but a mountain range has sprung up there over the last few years and refuses to subside; ships cannot fly over it, cannot reliably go around without dying in a canyon, and the displaced people had to crowd northward, handing the Cinder King more leverage. Nomad files that — ships limited in altitude — alongside the rest of the cataloguing.

The conversation comes to the question of tax. Aux, in Alethi, wonders aloud whether life under the Cinder King could really have been worse than running into the dark. Nomad answers, to himself, with what he has learned across worlds: revolt does not come when life is utterly terrible; it comes when life has improved just enough to give people room to imagine differently. He asks Rebeke about the Cinder King's tax. Badly, she says. There was a lottery, once a rotation. He braces for the worst based on what he saw in Union, and asks if it was a lottery of people. She nods, then frowns when his next question — what did he do with them — proves he genuinely does not know. She turns to him, slow with the realisation: somewhere out there, then, is a place that does not use sunhearts. He blinks at the word. He raps the cycle's housing — the power source? Then his mind finishes the equation Aux's tally has just been holding open for him. Lottery. Sunhearts. He asks, soft and appalled, if these power sources used to be people. Rebeke rests her gloved hand on the housing. This one, she tells him, was her mother. Two weeks ago. They had left her out for the sun, and recovered the sunheart on the next rotation — her body vaporised by the heat, her soul condensed into this stone.