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They give Nomad a small room near the centre of Beacon — a workbench, a wall to pin notes on, a pull-out cot — which he finds comfortably lived in. A small engine, melon-sized, comes in from one of the hovercycles. After it, Elegy: six men drag her chained into the workshop and bolt her to the wall, several of them earning bruises in the process. Even in chains she is dangerous, the Investiture under her skin keeping her from tearing herself apart against the manacles. Nomad studies her from the desk — late thirties, silvery-black hair cut short, the same light green eyes as Rebeke, one ember-mark glowing on her left cheek and the great one in the cavity of her chest.

Contemplation arrives in the doorway and tells him the room used to be hers; she had hoped it might shake something loose. He doubts that, and so does she. Why does he want her, she asks. He needs to understand the sunhearts, he says — and Elegy carries one in her core. Will the tests hurt her. He cannot promise; he does not expect them to. Contemplation tells him that those who knew Elegy will mind very much if anything bad happens to her body, but that she herself will not. She had voted to name Elegy Lodestar of Beacon — not merely the appointed route-planner but the city's heart, the one whose vision the Greater Good followed. That woman, she says, is already dead.

Then she ungloves a hand and offers it palm forward. Hesitant, he raises his to meet it without touching. Contemplation explains: among her people, an offer of drawn heat is an act of thanks — a deliberate display of vulnerability and trust. He presses his palm to hers and tries a Command to see whether he can draw, knowing he cannot; the ceremony matters to her even so. She tells him, voice gone teary, that she knew he was a Sunlit Man of their old stories the moment he came through the cabin window — and again when he gave the council something to hope for. He demurs and tells her he is not, really, what she thinks; but right now if it keeps them moving she may call him anything she likes. She is glad, she says, to have seen him, and leaves him alone with the glowing woman and his half- functional conscience.

He settles down at the desk and walks Aux through what he is going to try, partly to think it out himself. Beacon already has the hardest part: a compact, renewable, portable energy source. Engines have always been a question of power supply, and theirs is solved. The problem above the mountains is not the engines failing — they keep right on releasing energy. The problem is that there is nothing for that energy to push on. Conventional travel from jet engines to horse carts is all about Newton's laws; a sunheart-powered jet engine throws superheated air out the back to give thrust forward, and at altitude there is no air to throw. Aux asks how spacecraft do it. By bringing their own propellant, Nomad tells him — fuel and oxidiser ejected behind. Aux suggests they do that. Nomad asks how much liquid oxygen and kerosene Aux has on him; how much zephyr aether there is on this planet. None. They will not be building a rocket in ten hours.

But there is something they have plenty of: water. The rain is pounding on the roof at this very moment. And their compact, energy-rich fuel will boil water without needing oxygen. Steam jets out the bottom. Aux marvels: high-atmosphere flight with a steam engine. Nomad shrugs that he would call it that rather than proper space flight, and that more modern energy sources rely on the same principle than people usually realise — but that the historic problem with steam, the bulk and weight of the fuel, is exactly what a sunheart solves.

Aux asks, hesitantly, what about when they used to fly together. Nomad freezes. He admits he had misspoken; not all motion comes from propellant — there are forces of attraction too, things that bind matter together at the level of the axon. That was different. Aux says, quietly, that he used to love it. Before. Nomad squeezes his eyes shut. It was not your fault, Aux tells him. Nomad answers that he said yes to Hoid and bonded Auxiliary, and let the Dawnshard consume them. Aux says he did not know what either would do, and that he salvaged the last fragment of his own soul. It had been Wit's fault as much as Nomad's — done, ostensibly, to protect the cosmere. Wit had asked him to carry a Dawnshard, a well of unimaginable Investiture designed as a weapon. He had not known what bonding Auxiliary would mean; the Dawnshard, in a moment of need, had reached for any source of energy it could find, and what it found was Aux. It had turned his substance into fuel before Nomad could stop it. He had only barely stopped at all.

Aux brings him back: this is not the time for regret. He is right. Nomad fishes the spent sunheart out of his pocket — a cylindrical eight-inch lump of smokestone, ridged like cooled wax, with a section he could swear looks like a screaming face — and turns it in his fingers. Rebeke said this thing had powered a ship for months. That kind of energy is not part of even a Threnodite soul; something else must be happening, the soul acting as a seed for power drawn from somewhere else. So why was the offworlder's sunheart so small? Why had that one not seeded? He stares at his blank notebooks and feels the old barbed dread of the failures he has been running from since before the chase ever started. But the alternative is crawling to the Cinder King. He accepts the job and starts drawing schematics.