(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Storms. The new context recasts everything Nomad has seen since he arrived. The game of tag at his capture, the way prisoners went to ash on the field — that was not pagan superstition. It was Union's harvest. He had even consumed one of the things himself, the drained ember power cell still in his coat pocket, when he Connected to this planet. He says some of it aloud to Rebeke in Alethi, working through the rest in his head: that there are no Threnodite ghosts here — no smoky shade of the dead — because their souls do not get the chance, the sunlight condenses and consumes them too completely. Aux notes that one soul, even with a shade attached, would not have been enough to give them the better-than-a-thousand BEUs they had absorbed; the sunlight here must itself be Invested, supercharging each soul as it kills. It is the only thing that explains how entire cities can be powered for years without exhausting their population.

Rebeke reads his reaction and confirms, almost shyly, that it seems to be real — that out there somewhere is a place where people do not need to do this. She tells him her city has always used volunteers, from the elderly and the sick; that her mother was dying, that the family had three spent sunhearts already and ships that would not flee. Then she asks the thing she has been turning over: when the Cinder King had grabbed his face in the arena, he had expected something. Nothing had happened. Why? She removes her glove, asks his permission, and lays her hand on his wrist. Nothing. She should have been able to draw heat from him — or, more precisely, a sliver of his soul; that is what their touch does. It is what the bracers had forced. He explains, as best as he can given decades of not thinking about it, that what she had been trying to pull is Investiture; the cooling is a side effect; her people have an interesting type of it because of their heritage, and his is of a different variety that does not yield to a casual touch. The bracers had brute-forced through his protections; her bare hand did not.

She pulls back, blushing, putting her glove back on. Touch like that, she adds, is normally an accident here — or an intimacy. Prayers exist to formalise it. He raises his eyebrows at the implication that lovers freeze each other in bed; she answers, redder, that they pass heat back and forth. He files the biological fact: these people leech Investiture from each other as a baseline, naturally. The Cinder King simply does it unilaterally and at scale — he can drain a person to a husk; Rebeke tells him the man has fed on thousands. Aux warns Nomad, in Alethi, that anyone that heavily Invested is dangerous to cross. Nomad himself is more interested in the implication beyond that. His Torment is spiritual, anchored in Investiture. If these people can move Investiture by touch — even crudely — maybe there is a way, eventually, to lessen what is on him. A plan begins to form.

Then Aux's attention snaps elsewhere: ship at twenty degrees, distant, descending close to the terrain. Nomad spots it. A scout, observing them. He tells Rebeke to call it in; she curses softly, flips a switch, and the side of the quadcycle splits open — her seat unlocks from the central fuselage, panels fold out, and her single-seater hovercycle peels off intact. The quadcycle, he sees, is not so much one machine as a carrier of four smaller ones. He warns her not to fly straight at the scout: the man is probably reporting in over the radio, and a beeline will tip him off. Rebeke counters that Beacon's signal jammers should be cutting that off — possibly, Nomad thinks, not actual radio, more likely some Connection-based comm powered by sunhearts — but agrees that secrecy is better.

She nods at his leg. He turns the matching handle, unlocks his own seat from the cycle's frame, and pulls his single-seater out beside hers. These small craft, she tells him, are battery-only — about an hour of flight before they need to dock and recharge. He turns vaguely toward the scout, fakes the wide loop of a routine perimeter check toward the prospectors, and Rebeke follows. Eager. She asks at the apogee whether now is the time; he says one more loop, a wider one, to sell the routine. He asks dryly whether she is not in trouble already with her leadership for exceeding orders; she answers, sharp and amused, that it is ever her lot. He likes that answer. He likes, more than he wants to admit, the eagerness; he recognises it as the recklessness of someone with too little left to lose, and warns himself not to indulge it.

She turns uncertain just once — what if the scout is one of the Charred? He shrugs: then they kill the bastard before the bastard kills them. He watches her — the hunger to act sitting on top of the day's grief — and concedes, in Alethi, that Aux is right about these people; even Beacon's sharpshooters have a kind of timidity that suggests they are repurposed hunters rather than soldiers. They use the word "killer" like a dividing line, as if some people are made for it and some are not. The scout has taken cover against a frozen lava wave; the distance is still significant. The hovercycle controls are surprisingly intuitive, which makes sense for a society that depends on flight. He leads Rebeke into the second loop, getting just close enough that suspicion would catch them on a third pass. At the right moment, he gives the order: now.