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Contemplation finally lets her composure slip. A ship that travels the stars, she asks — couldn't they appeal to it for help against the Cinder King, or buy passage out? Nomad has to disabuse her of every part of the idea. The Night Brigade are largely mercenary; their reputation is brutal efficiency; they are the only army he knows that conscripts the dead and makes them keep fighting. They are not interested in local problems. To put it gently. Contemplation asks what to do instead. He tells her: get back under cloud cover, run dark, the way Beacon already does. The Brigade ship will need time to survey the planet from orbit before it can find him; he had hoped it would take longer to reach this system, but they still have a window.

Walking back toward the city's hub she presses him on the timeline. The work is on schedule, he says — about two more hours of fabrication and installation before the chosen ships can fly under the new engines. Doable, because they now have a working prototype and the design is bolted onto Beacon's existing ship structures rather than replacing them. The hardest piece is the boilers, but boilers are simple to make. She is less convinced. Two more hours climbing the slope, she points out, takes them dangerously close to sunrise; the higher they fly, the less of the planet's shadow they can hide behind. He acknowledges it. He privately ignores the part of him that knows something always goes wrong.

He finds the engineers under a tent on the open deck — every interior space is either being packed with evacuees or jettisoned. He tells Solemnity Divine they need to begin fabricating the boilers now. She pushes back: another iteration on the design. He tells her there is no time for iteration; the team will modify what they already know works. He summons Auxiliary as a wireframe model of a ship turned upside down and sketches in where the boiler hangs underneath the existing engine, water lines running down from the city's water-tower vessels at the top, sunhearts superheating the flow, steam injected into the engine and ejected as thrust. Not the most efficient propulsion ever designed, he allows, but the energy density of the power source makes it work. He shows her the patch: a variable inhibitor on the water line, wired into the cab controls, throttles the engine simply by metering the flow. Solemnity Divine smacks her forehead at the simplicity, accepts the design, and starts the build. Another engineer demands at least a stress test — they have no idea whether the rig holds up under load. Nomad commandeers his own hovercycle as the test platform: install the new components, he will fly it up the mountainside himself and find out, and the rest of the team can be installing on the chosen ships in the meantime. He reminds them about lateral thrust capacity; they need to be able to translate forward, not just up.

Back at the railing he finds Contemplation watching the new bright point overhead. He looks at it himself and wonders how the Brigade's shields stand up to this planet's sunlight — by his read of what he has felt down here, the load should be punishing. The numbers do not quite add up; he has been telling himself that about Canticle since he arrived. She asks how dangerous the visitors actually are. He answers: no force he knows of is more dangerous; whole planets have been left desolate. But destroying a planet is work, and work the Brigade is not getting paid for. They should mostly leave Beacon alone — though, he warns her, hopefully they will not develop an interest in her shades. The Brigade has a thing for ghosts.

He gives her his survival brief. If the Brigade come close, he leaves. Tell them everything they ask — every detail about him, every detail about anything. Do not try to hide and do not try to be clever. Comply with every demand. Make it easier for them to leave the locals alive than to kill them. It is the only protocol that works. She is shaken. She blesses his flight in Adonalsium's name and asks the god to grant it. He tells her he will settle for the gods simply not actively obstructing him for once. She finds that statement no comfort at all. Minutes later he is on the modified hovercycle, racing into the dark, away from the falling city and into the high country.