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Nomad rides up the mountainside alone on his hovercycle, floodlight throwing a cone across barren, gas-pocked rock. The surfaces are smooth, the edges razor-sharp, unweathered. It is, he realises, the first time since he arrived on Canticle that he has been completely by himself; even at the workshop Elegy had been in the room. Now it is him, Auxiliary, and the dark of the shadow side of an entire planet. He climbs into snow, then into thinning air, his body's old protections quietly warming him from the inside before he notices the cold.

Aux raises the question they have been ignoring. Even if the new engine works and Beacon makes the climb, how do they find the hidden Refuge? Nomad has the answer. Cities here fly at relatively fixed latitudes; he confirmed it with the navigators. Union flies a straight ring around the planet. The Cinder King has been obsessed with the door for years and yet never made special outings to study it — somebody would have noticed him peeling away — so he must be studying it on Union's normal route, during the regular crop-growing landings. The entrance therefore lies somewhere on the line Union already flies, in places he can land and study with his closest officers while the rest of the city is out planting. That narrows the search dramatically. And even that work, Nomad says, can be foisted on the Cinder King himself, who already knows the exact spot. Finding the door and opening it are not the hard parts. The hard part is what Beacon's people find when it opens — not a paradise hidden under stone, but a small offworlder research facility. He swore to get the leadership through the door, not to fix Canticle or topple its tyrant. He gave them his warning. They are committed anyway. It is not his problem. Aux is sorrowful. Once, Aux would have lectured him; today the sorrow comes alone. Nomad has no answer for that.

The air gives out. He stops trying to breathe and lets his body wrap him in the old, instinctive bubble of pressure, a leftover from older powers — a small Investiture drain but nothing he cannot afford. Beneath him the conventional engine labours and his climb slows to a crawl. He engages the modified jet. A column of superheated steam shoots downward and he leaps ten clean feet over the slope. He is above the perpetual cloud cover now, the stars finally visible, the rings overhead at their odd non-equatorial tilt — another thing about this planet that does not quite add up. He glances toward the place where Taln's Scar should be and cannot find it from this angle. Then he forces himself to stop thinking about how close the Brigade ship is and keep climbing.

At the summit he cuts the jet and lands without sound — no air to carry it. The mountain proper is not high by Rosharan standards, perhaps a thousand feet, but the back slope drops off impossibly fast: there has been no weathering, because the slopes only need to last one rotation before the sun remakes them. There is no lower pass; the city will have to climb the whole face. Aux teases him about the day he first realised the Night Brigade was hunting him, and Nomad's own memory fills in the rest. He had passed the Dawnshard on; he had assumed that was enough; he had walked right up to the Brigade to clear up the misunderstanding. He had been a fool. They had told him, with their twisted craft, that they could kill him and spike his soul into a thing that would point at whoever now held the Shard he had given away. To them he is a chain-link; he is far more useful dead.

Aux confesses something. He does not miss either of who they used to be, before this. Growth is what life is about, he says, and his own kind — the highspren — were too static for too long. Sometimes Nomad talks as if he believes himself to be an entirely different person now. But he isn't, Aux tells him; he is still the man he was on Roshar, only the capacity for what he has become was always there. If that sounds depressing Aux does not mean it so. The alternative — that we turn into a different being each day — is worse, because then nothing about us would ever truly change. He says he is glad to be there, on the mountaintop, watching the view with his friend, even at the price. The remark twists Nomad up. Aux is a fragment of what he once was, brilliance burned away to almost nothing — what kind of damaged creature is glad to have lived through that? Storms, Nomad thinks. He cannot be proud of who he has become. He cannot ever go home — not because of the army hunting him, but because he could not face his old friends as this man. Aux had always been the perceptive one, Nomad reflects. He is also frequently wrong about people. He is wrong here.

Nomad fires the jet again, turns the cycle down off the summit, and rides back into atmosphere. By the time he docks at Beacon the chosen ships are stripped, the boilers are in place, and a hundred and thirty-five people are waiting for him not to doom them.