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The first prototype explodes. Nomad has installed the freshly fabricated parts on a small hovercycle engine and used a second hovercycle to fly it out a safe distance from the city; from Beacon's edge, after a warning shout, the group watches a flare of orange and yellow wash over them as the boiler housing gives out. He had worried it was too thin. Compassion, seated beside the rail, declares aloud that this is the death of Beacon. Nomad waves it off — he told them it would explode. The first one is supposed to fail, he says. They iterate. Build another, better, and watch what happens to that one. Contemplation, lit only by the city's running lights and looking spectral for it, folds her arms and asks how long "and so forth" is supposed to take.

It is a fair question. He has already eaten more than three of their ten hours on this work. He admits to himself, without bothering to disclaim, that a real engineer could have done it faster. Most of what he has comes from a few years of his exile he had spent with scholars; he had been thrust onto a soldier's path and chose to stay on it instead. Fortunately he has Solemnity Divine, Beacon's head of repairs and engineering — tan-skinned, long black-haired, who could almost have been Alethi if not for her sharply Threnodite name — and her huddle of engineers, who have his schematics and are already making notes. He squats down at the edge of the deck beside her. The design, she tells him, is genius. He thinks the boiler housing was too thin. Dirge agrees with him; Solemnity thinks the problem is the seals; either way, with tweaks, she thinks it will fly.

A second engineer raises the propellant problem: their three large agricultural water tanks are nowhere near enough to lift the entire city. Nomad asks the necessary question. If they shrink Beacon down to only the most essential vessels, can it work. The engineers trade looks. Maybe; even so they would have, perhaps, two hours of flight time — long enough, he tells them, to crest the peaks and start coming down the far side. Should be, Solemnity says. Should be. It will be close.

He pivots and asks for the other half of the plan: while her best people work on the engines, he needs the rest of her crews making the largest living spaces airtight. The engineers frown — for all their experience flying, they did not know what was coming up there. He explains. Above the mountains the atmosphere thins almost to nothing; no air, no breathing. The metal hulls can hold pressure if they are sealed properly. They will pick the ten ships with the most interior air-volume, divide the hundred-and-thirty-five-person population among them, lock them together, and he himself will fly the lot of them across the gap. He does not need to breathe. It is, he says, a quirk of his heritage. He likes breathing — it lets him talk, it feels normal — but he does not strictly need it, and he can stand vacuum without much trouble, and has been doing both for decades. Solemnity blinks. The engineers around her mutter about the powers of the Sunlit Man, and he lets the assumption stand without correction. She accepts the plan, on one condition: that Nomad himself be the one to break the news to the Greater Good that they will have to leave most of Beacon behind.

He gives her a tight-lipped nod and goes to find them. Compassion, Confidence and Contemplation, with Zeal at their elbow and a hovering Rebeke at the perimeter, brace as he approaches; they already know. He says it anyway. Ten largest ships by air volume. Everything else dumped. Compassion bows her head over the city of Elegy's vision being devoured by the sun. Contemplation asks how, without the prospector fleet, they are supposed to find the opening to the Refuge. Take one prospector with them, Nomad suggests, just in case. They can leave the farming gear, the metal-gatherers; what they bring are meeting halls and dining rooms and cargo holds and places of worship, and if they cannot find the door they are doomed. Confidence shrugs that they were doomed anyway, and looks at Nomad: he had better find that door, then. He promises he will. They are relying on him for an awful lot, she observes. He agrees that he would not want to rely on himself this much either. But their options are all terrible right now, so here they are. Aux mutters that Nomad is supposed to be good with people; Nomad disagrees, privately, that the man is reading the room. These are a stern people in a stark hour, and they have no use for sugar.

The Greater Good nod and send someone to confirm to the engineers that they are agreed. Nomad turns to go and Confidence stops him. He should know, she says, that he is appreciated. They know that the Cinder King will have offered him a deal — it is the man's way — and that he refused. They know he could have thrown in. He did not. He broke his oath, Nomad says shortly. Even so. If they crest those mountains and find the Refuge, she will be the first to put her palm to his in thanks. Real gratitude cuts through his exhaustion in a way he had not expected.

He does not, he tells her, need the warmth. But there is something she could tell him. Rebeke had mentioned a way to give heat to a sunheart, the way one would to a person. Yes, Contemplation says, and it is useless — barely charges a sunheart at all, would only hold a ship in the air briefly. He needs to know how anyway. Was the sunheart drained, Contemplation asks. Yes. That, she tells him, is the problem. One cannot give one's soul to a corpse. He smacks his forehead — of course. A charged sunheart. Sunhearts are reckoned alive by the standards of Investiture, at least while they are still charged. He needs to try the experiment again with Elegy.