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Rebeke makes a point of not looking at the corpse. Nomad weighs the brutal pedagogy of making her, and decides it is not his job to train her. He gives the body a quick search — finds a treasured child's drawing in a pocket and slips it carefully back without mentioning it. Rebeke is at the wreckage of the scout's cycle, already pulling out a tow cable. They will salvage it; whatever is left is easier to use than the iron fields north of here, where molten metal coats the surface each rotation and they sneak in to pry up sheets between the Cinder King's sweeps. He asks how the planet's raw materials get worked into something like a cycle; she answers, plainly, the Chorus does — the spirits that follow people, like the one that follows him, fabricate what is needed. Aux purrs in his head that that sounds interesting. Nomad refuses the bait and asks her about the blinking light on the scout's dash. She curses softly. It is an incoming radio call. The speaker is busted, but it confirms what they had hoped was not the case: they were out of range of Beacon's jammers before the scout went down. He almost certainly called home first.

Rebeke runs through the possibilities aloud — more troops, Charred, the whole city. Nomad just dusts his hands and starts back to his cycle. The display of erupting earth has subsided into a pocked plain of black lava rock. She calls after him: she does not want this. To be a killer. To be like him. He turns. The glib answer is already on his tongue when Aux, gently, asks for empathy instead. He looks at her — towline still in her hands, eyes anywhere but the corpse — and lets the other line go. I know, he tells her. Keep that in mind. It might help.

He walks to his own cycle and radios Contemplation. They got the scout, he tells her, but the man almost certainly radioed in before he died; Beacon may have company on the way. How is the hunt going. Terribly, she says. There is nothing on the prospectors here, though by celestial navigation they are unambiguously in the right corridor. She begins to lecture him about navigation and stars; he interrupts, smiling, that he knows what a star is. She replies dryly that one never can be sure with him, and goes back to the practical: this is the longitude where the Cinder King has stopped each time to test his key, several of her people have seen the opening at it, the opening is real — and the prospectors cannot find it. The door must be buried deep this time. He asks what she wants them to do. She asks whether he is taking orders from her now; he says that depends on how stupid they are. She offers a sensible one anyway: stay there a while and see if anyone arrives to check on the scout. With luck they will send a small team to investigate.

He floats the worse case — that the Cinder King may have read the heist correctly and sussed out the key-swap; that means a full military force. She tells him, drily, to please warn them if so, at his pleasure. He likes Contemplation. He likes that she sees through him. The scout had no sunheart in his vehicle — running on battery — which Contemplation mourns aloud; they could have used that. The conversation pivots one more time, to the part that has been weighing on her: Beacon decided not to make new sunhearts for this venture, and is now low on power. She was to go next, she tells him, as were her sisters in the Greater Good; three others were to take their place. The guilt of not having gone in her time is on her. But if they do not find the door this rotation, they will not have enough power for another.

He tells her, simply, that she had better find it. Rebeke finishes stowing the towline and climbs onto her cycle. They take off, then immediately tuck behind a natural merlon at the crater's lip. Far to Nomad's left, the sky has begun to grow faintly bright with predawn. Not yet what he would have called twilight on a normal world; but no twilight has ever felt so ominous as this one. They power down to conserve battery and keep watch. The rocks at the rim are dark and glassy, like obsidian. They remind him of another world, another set of volcanic outcrops, where he had met Aux.

Rebeke makes them a bland sandwich of bread and oily-herb sausage and offers him half. They eat with gloves on, which he finds odd. She tells him she thinks Contemplation is wrong about him: he is not from a strange underground place, but somewhere more normal — and her chin lifts toward the stars. He asks whether another world counts as more normal. They came from another world, she answers — chased here by an ancient force their Chorus names the Evil. He confirms, for her, that the Evil is still on her homeworld; he has seen its manifestations himself, wild Investiture come alive with its own will, mountain- sized figures with unnerving features and unknowable motives. Threnody, he allows privately, is not a place one visits to relax. Rebeke almost drops her sandwich at the matter-of-fact confirmation. The Chorus does not, in their version of the exodus, name the Evil as the reason they left — but the strife that broke out among their people, the infighting more pernicious than the Evil. Her ancestors had followed the preaching of a man, the servant of Adonalsium and the first Lodestar, to a new land. They chose this.

He takes a bite of the sandwich. He could use chili powder. He could use any spice. Half the planets he visits eat like this and even his homeworld's bread is more interesting than the sausage on this one. Still he forces it down; Investiture can sustain him but at barely ten percent Skip capacity he would rather not burn it on metabolism. Rebeke goes on, watching the horizon. They were supposed to be free here, she says — free of each other. She wonders aloud whether the first Lodestar brought them to this world to keep them running, to give them something outside themselves to focus on; whether the sun, like the Evil, kept them too busy fleeing to turn on one another. Until now. Until the Cinder King's innovation: trained killers.

Aux finds them either naive or impressive and cannot decide. Nomad answers, also privately, that it is not human nature to kill — one has to be trained to do it well. He turns the ethnography over in his head: maybe fifty groups on this planet running parallel in these corridors, enough population to avoid inbreeding, exactly the geography to invite a tyrant. The surprise is not that one came but that it took so long. His master had pushed ethnography on him too; he had preferred engineering and Investiture. Still, the stories these people tell will be remarkable, and part of him wishes he could stay and learn them.

But the chase is on him, always — predator at the heels of a once-placid flock. He cannot linger. He has to get away. So he watches the horizon hard, instead of asking for more. And it is well that he does. A single vessel comes out of the distance toward the fallen scout — larger than most, about the size of a small bus, its ornamented sides glowing golden in the ringlight. Rebeke gasps as he points it out. That, she breathes, is the Cinder King's own ship.