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The largest ship in Beacon is the cylindrical hub around which the rest of the city assembles, and Nomad — accompanied by Rebeke and by Zeal, who has the Greater Good's permission to bring him into hallowed space — discovers when he steps inside it that it is not the meeting hall he had assumed. It is an enclosure for the dead. The central feature is a glass drum, twenty feet tall and forty across, filled with a luminous, shifting mist that he silently thinks of as leaking souls; a rack on the far wall holds a row of depleted sunhearts. He asks whether they have ever tried leaving those drained sunhearts back out in the sun, and Rebeke confirms it: of course they have, and the stones never recharge.

He stands at the glass, hands in his coat pockets, watching the mist. The drum has a name. They call it the Reliquary. He decides the name is wrong; relics are what is left after a soul leaves, and this is the reverse. Then a face presses up against the inside of the glass — gaunt, slack-jawed, eyes burning red, smoke-hands striking the barrier — and he startles in spite of himself. He has seen these things before. On Threnody they were lethal, and Threnodite society contorted itself to keep them placated; here in Beacon they are kept like a pet exhibit. The shade speaks, in a voice like rustling paper, while others gather behind it. They fled the Evil, then they fled Threnody, and they came to the land of the twilight rings to make their own world. They are not shades, they say. They are the Chorus of the people. They remember.

Nomad asks whether they are self-aware. Zeal allows that he is uncertain. They will answer questions sometimes; other times they only recite. Rebeke adds that their answers nearly all concern lore and history, almost never themselves; each member is more or less interchangeable, like living history books rather than individual people. Zeal mildly amends "living." Even so, Nomad notes, it is far more than the shades of Threnody. The Chorus volunteers more: they were, they claim, the first who died on Canticle, the first to live in this place and to design flight, working from the ships that brought them across. But then another voice argues they are not shades, will not be called shades, and adds that those who die unsunburnt must be given back to the sun, because this is the sun's land — and if they are not, shades will rise instead and overrun so small a world. As we would, another adds. To taste the flesh of the living. To drink their heat. So sweet, the first agrees. Zeal admits, uncomfortably, that they talk like that sometimes.

Then Rebeke points: there, that one, it is him. Zeal says softly that she cannot really know that. Nomad understands after a moment: her brother. She thinks she saw his face in the mist. Zeal explains, gently, what the people of Beacon have come to believe: a Beaconite who is not given to the sun is drawn instead to the Chorus, and mist often gathers and moves to the Reliquary in the hours after such a death. Rebeke says again that it was him. He spoke like the others, she admits, as if he had been there from the beginning, but it was him. Nomad has no good reason to take a side and lets it stand. He has come here for something else.

Show them the schematics, Zeal tells him. Nomad presses his seven pages flat against the glass, and the red eyes crowd in around the prints, mouths moving silently as they read. Then they fade back into the mist. Zeal nods to the worker on duty, who operates an overhead crane: a wide, flat slab of unrefined iron — still with dirt set into the underside, as though it had pooled on the ground and hardened — is lowered into the drum from above. There is no lid. Other lumps follow: copper, pieces of other metals. The mist brightens and churns and grows quiet. Aux pieces it together — they are doing what he does when he manifests a tool, taking raw stock and reshaping it. Nomad concedes the principle; it is in fact more reasonable than Aux's own trick of pulling form out of nothing.

Zeal tells him that whenever a new settlement is founded they take a portion of the mist with them in a special containment device, and that the current Reliquary holds, in part, mist absorbed from Union together with an older unit acquired from a smaller community that joined them. Fabrication of something like Nomad's design takes, he says, under an hour; the Chorus is faster on jobs it has done before. Zeal goes off to fetch food. The spicier the better, Nomad says; Zeal does not know the word, and is sent off to bring back whatever there is.

While they wait, Rebeke asks why Nomad winced when Zeal called him Sunlit, when he had told Contemplation it was fine to call him that. He explains: anyone Invested to his level could have survived the sunlight for a few seconds. He has not really earned the title, and he prefers to earn his titles. But sometimes, he says, a name is not about a person individually — it is about a symbol, and you adopt it because people need it. He has seen it happen; he had not thought it would happen to him. About forty-five minutes later the glow in the drum fades. The crane lifts out his schematics made real: the parts to convert Beacon's engines to steam. Now what, Rebeke asks. Now, he says, they install one and watch it explode.