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Rebeke screams as the Charred shoves the desk aside and lunges for Nomad's throat. He catches her wrists in time but the momentum takes them both to the floor in a writhing heap. He has trained in grappling for years; she fights with raw unskilled frenzy. It should have been easy. It is not. Every time he gets close to a hold she breaks it with a burst of supernatural strength, knees him, bites at him as they roll. He tries to backhand her across the face to stun her — and his body locks up on him at the attempt and he involuntarily lets go. She seizes the sides of his head and slams it against the steel floor until he sees stars.

He recovers by feel rather than sight, healing fast enough to keep moving. While she is busy battering him senseless he summons Auxiliary as cuffs and a chain and snaps them shut on her. Rebeke belatedly tries to intervene; in the distraction he rolls free, has Aux shorten the chain, and scrambles out of reach for good. Then he just lies there on the floor, groaning, vision swimming. Aux notes in his quiet machine-voice that they are at just over eight percent Skip capacity. Nomad hates hearing it numbered — life felt more vibrant when he just had a vague sense of how much he had left, instead of being a measured power source.

He sits up against the wall. Rebeke kneels beside him, horrified. Elegy is only manacled at the wrists now, with maybe two feet of slack; she is not using it, crouched on her toes against the wall like a feral thing, glaring. Rebeke whispers an apology — she had thought her sister was recovering — and Nomad rasps that next time she does something that insane she could give him a head start so he can run. Aux, voice carefully flat, asks if he is all right. Yeah, Nomad says. He thinks.

Rebeke turns on Elegy and demands to know why. You have me chained, Elegy hisses. We were unchaining you, Rebeke says. I fight, Elegy says simply. It is what I do. Rebeke implores her — sister, this man helped save you, you are home. Elegy does not answer. Rebeke spins back to Nomad: do what you did before, only more of it. He tells her plainly that it will not help. More of it might kill her. He has drawn off the part that let the Cinder King control her; what is in front of them now is everything left of her sister.

He cuts the sliver of sunheart back out of his now-healed forearm at the desk and wipes the blood off it. The process did not work on him; the grapple-lockup was proof. He sits with that for a moment, then — because he works better switching between problems — picks up a new notebook and starts sketching how to deal with the Cinder King's forces once Beacon crests the mountains. He sends Rebeke off to fetch Zeal, who has the controls for the freeze-bracers Elegy still wears.

Elegy speaks again from behind him. Is she really my sister? He glances back. She has settled into a sitting position, arms above her head, looking tired in a way he recognises. Yes, he says. She had a brother too; he died rescuing her. From what, she asks. From the voice in her head: the Cinder King, who took her, put the cinderheart in her chest, and burned away her previous life. Why should I believe you. Why shouldn't you. Maybe you want to control me. You already let that voice do that, he says, so why care if we control you. She is quiet. Then: I don't belong here. That other one wants something from me. I'm not the person she sees. What person are you, he asks. One on fire, she says. Burning with the fight. She cannot explain it. He explains it for her: a body alert, tense, on the edge of panic, an inner storm pushing her into motion, agony to sit still. Yes. He meets her eyes. She is right, he says: she is not the person Rebeke is looking for; she probably cannot ever be that person again. Both of them will have to find a new way. Let me free. Will you attack me again. Probably, she admits, but you feel it too — we could fight, struggle, move, be alive. Not interested. Thanks. Charming, Aux comments.

Rebeke returns with Zeal. They knock Elegy unconscious with the device and reset her chains the way they were before. Zeal, watching Nomad dismiss Auxiliary, asks how he controls the shade — surely it should try to kill him. Auxiliary, Nomad says, is different from Beacon's shades; he attacks with sarcasm instead of glowing eyes, which is far more painful. Aux states for the record, voice not the least bit sarcastic, that he merely states facts; how others take them is up to them.

Zeal offers to take Elegy back to the city prison. Rebeke explains — He is helping her, Zeal, she spoke to us. Zeal admits he has never heard a Charred do that, leaves the bracer-controller on the desk, and glances at the sketch Nomad has been doing. He whistles at the scale of it. Guns. On the ships. Nomad nods: he has more experience with weapons than boilers. Rebeke asks if they really need to be that big. Yes. The chosen ten ships are the bulkiest in the fleet because they must carry the people; the moment Beacon emerges from the dark above the mountains and tries to open the way to the Refuge, they will be easy prey for the Cinder King — unless, Zeal puts in, unless they bring serious firepower and hit him with something he has not seen before. If the Chorus really can fabricate anything from raw stock and a schematic, there is no reason not to go big. The guns should run on sunhearts. They are irrelevant for now, though. Unless they crest those mountains, nothing else matters.

What are the chances, if Nomad had to guess. He has no idea, he says. Better than zero, which is what they will have if they stop moving.

A horn sounds through the city — unusual, since Beacon normally keeps itself silent. Zeal reads the pattern: it is the call-to-gather. The population has already been warned to keep one bag of essentials and leave the rest behind; this is the final notice. The surplus ships are going to start being dumped to save power. Already, Nomad says. Aux promptly rolls eyes Nomad killed long ago and asks whether people whose lives consist of outracing the sun might in fact move quickly when told to. Nomad sighs that Aux goes a little far on the sarcasm. Aux maintains he does not have a valet who likes to stab himself with bits of unknown power source, so the bar is necessarily high. Nomad pockets his notebook and tells Rebeke they are going. He wants to check on the engineers and watch the new prototype explode.