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Solemnity Divine's engineering team turns out to be the overachieving kind. They have not built one prototype off Nomad's schematics but three small modified engines, and Nomad watches the demonstration with a crowd of evacuees gathered for the spectacle. Two of the three units detonate. The third blows itself straight up into the night, a single blinking light dwindling toward the rings, and a recovery crew on a quadcycle nets it on the way back down. The crowd is awed; the engineers cluster around him like children waiting for a teacher's mark. He produces the trained answer — excellent work, you just saved this city — and pretends not to find the moment as awkward as he does. Aux comments dryly on how fortunate it was that one of the three flew.

Solemnity Divine flags the next problem: the three big water-carrier ships at the outside of the chosen ring will need to be insulated and heated so the propellant does not freeze once Beacon climbs past atmosphere. Nomad has to walk her through Khriss's second law of thermodynamics in plainer language. In vacuum there is no air to wick warmth away — heat leaves a ship only by ejected matter or by infrared radiation, both slow. The danger of the climb is not cold, it is dumping enough heat to keep the engines from cooking themselves; her boilers need heat sinks and exposed fins, not insulation. She takes him at his word and goes back to the drafting table.

The clouds break for a moment and ringlight finds them. The city is passing across high country torn into raw stone, rainwater running down a thousand fresh waterfalls. Aux is, briefly, moved by it. Out at the edge of the city, a stripped outer ship is unlatched and drops away, smashing on the slopes below; a recovery crew moves on to the next. Then the next. Each one is a hulk of inanimate metal, and yet falling like that they seem to Nomad like gravestones for the city Beacon is ceasing to be.

Contemplation joins him on the deck, walking on her cane, hair wet despite a wide-brimmed hat pinned to it, eyes shaded against even ringlight. She notes — drily, because everything she says is dry — that the mountains are coming up uncomfortably fast. He answers with a request: do a test run with a single ship before they commit, take it up high, make sure the new engine works under load. She offers him the ship assigned to him as his quarters — Elegy's old vessel, the Dawnchaser. Elegy had it reinforced so she could try to drive into the great maelstrom at the edge of the sun and recover sunhearts from the ground before the Cinder King's crews could. It had been impossible: even a ship that could survive the maelstrom had no way to put someone on the surface to fetch the stones. Nomad says the more he hears about Elegy the more he likes her, and means it. The two of them watch another outer ship cut free and fall.

To distract from the dismantling, he tells Contemplation a story. He delivers it in the local tongue, framed as a fable of his homeland: giants out of the east in armour of the deepest metal, the Tagarut, the breakers, who came every generation like a storm. In his telling the Tagarut eventually grew tired of breaking on his ancestors' lines and decided to conquer the sun itself, built scaffolding up the highest mountain, hauled their war machines and Shardbearers up after them, and found at the summit a treasure of gemstones so bright they could not bear to carry them. The light bleached the giants' eyes and tamed their natures, and that — he says — is why one can finally have a conversation with an Alethi lighteyes today instead of just running away. Contemplation smiles. She asks what the moral is and he tells her there isn't one. He says his master prefers stories with a point, but he himself has come to prefer the ones that are just stories. Contemplation says she would like to live somewhere whimsical enough that her people could afford to tell them. The two of them are forced to step back from the edge of the deck as that quadrant of the city is jettisoned next.

A child standing nearby — Deborah-James, her mother calls her — points at the sky and announces a new star. They study the sky in school, she explains primly, so they know where they are. Nomad turns. He picks it out immediately, up and to the right of the rings, bright with reflected sunlight. Contemplation thinks it might be Adonalsium's blessing on the journey. Nomad tells her, flatly, that it is not a new star and it is not a piece of the rings. It is a warship of the Night Brigade in low orbit. Distant cousins of her own people. Here to kill him.