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Two hours into the workshop session Nomad has a full set of schematics for a steam-conversion retrofit of Beacon's existing engines — feeding water in, superheating it with a sunheart, and venting the steam for thrust. He does not yet know whether it will work, and there are still pieces of it he wants to revise, but his head has stopped cooperating. He ignores the cot in the corner, washes at the basin, and looks at himself in the hand mirror Rebeke left him. Stubble back, hair grown out to the length it was on the day he first took the Dawnshard from Wit — his body always settles back to that exact form, no matter what is done to it. He tosses the mirror aside, straightens the borrowed shirt, drags his chair across the floor, and sits down opposite Elegy, still chained to the wall.

Aux remarks dryly that, yes, it is in fact bizarre to keep a woman chained up in the workshop. Nomad agrees, and then explains why he wants her. His own condition and hers, he thinks, are versions of the same injury. When he took the Dawnshard from Wit, the sheer mass of Investiture warped his very being, and even after he passed the burden on, the scar remained. The Torment — the way his body locks whenever he tries to harm anyone, but also the Skip, the Investiture-leech, and the strange Connection to all places at once — is that scar tissue. The Dawnshard he carried was, he says, a primal force whose Intent stood diametrically opposed to violence, and it required of its host an absolute prohibition on harm. The scar still enforces that prohibition. Aux notes the irony: the Dawnshards, after all, were used to kill a god. Nomad acknowledges it and moves on. He thinks Elegy's condition is structurally the same — a canker on her soul left by the Cinder King's fire that burned away her memory and personality. Where his scar paralyses him, hers enrages her, and it is the means by which she can be controlled at a distance. He wants to learn to strip that canker off her so he can then strip his own off himself — not all the way, ideally, but enough that he can fight when the Charred come for him, without losing the ability to Skip away when the planet is finally lost.

He takes out the drained sunheart and turns it over in his hand. The locals can move warmth between themselves by touch, and their highly Invested souls become these power sources when the sun has bombarded them long enough. He hopes to siphon a little of his soul into the drained stone and let the worst of the scar tissue go with it. Aux describes it as lancing a boil and observes that everything about mortals is gross. Nomad notes that the soul, like the body, will regrow. Aux also points out — without quite admitting how he knows — that someone is pressed against the door outside listening to all of this, and that this is probably Rebeke.

Nomad tries the experiment on Elegy anyway. He touches the drained sunheart to her arm, then to the ember at her chest, and nothing answers. He tries every Command and incantation he can think of from across the cosmere, including the Nalthian-derived one he had tried palm-to-palm with Contemplation earlier; the failures pile up and tell him he is reaching for the wrong shape of will. The locals do move warmth between themselves; he has seen it. So the question is what local form of Command they use to do it. Not oaths. Then he realises: prayers.

He calls Rebeke in. She comes in sheepish, glancing first at her sister to confirm she is unharmed, then bracing for a scolding that does not come; in her place, Nomad cheerfully admits, he'd have listened in too. He asks her which ritual prayers her people say before sharing or taking heat from another person. There are several, she tells him: between husband and wife before intimacy, at the first touch of a loved one, in thanks for offering heat to one who has protected or served, and — most arrestingly — over the certainly dying, to take their fading warmth on behalf of the living. The dying-prayer invokes Adonalsium by name. Perfect, Nomad thinks: a ritualised forced removal, a Command for taking. He says it word for word over Elegy with the spent sunheart pressed to her arm. Nothing happens.

Rebeke tells him a drained sunheart cannot store enough heat that way to lift a ship; they have tried. He tries a tweaked variant; nothing again. Frustrated, he sets it aside. Time is short — they are several hours closer to the mountains than they were — and he has hit a dead end on souls for the moment. He picks up the engine schematics instead and tells Rebeke he needs them fabricated quickly. She tells him her people cannot fabricate for him. But their ancestors can. He stops. They never could, she clarifies; the work has always been done by the ancestors. She supposes it is time to introduce him to the ghosts.