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Nomad apologises to Elegy on his way to the door — opening it will dump most of the Dawnchaser's air, and he will try to slam it shut fast. She wants to know why he cares about her at all. He tells her: human beings have a natural sense of decency, and hers being burned away does not change the rest of theirs. She presses — was that why he used to live for his friends? — and he tells her that and so much more. He warns Aux he will not be able to speak out in the vacuum; Aux will have to read his emotions. Their bond used to let Nomad speak straight back into Aux's head, but that capacity vanished when most of Auxiliary did. He throws the door open. The cabin decompresses violently around him; he jumps out with his coat snapping in the rush and slams the door shut on its lock behind him.

He runs to the side of the city-ship and finds the stuck water-carrier hanging tipped over, deadweight. The diagnosis is immediate: ice. The deck is crusted with the snow they had passed through earlier, and the latches were never designed for this kind of cold. He summons Aux as a crowbar, throws his weight against the frozen mechanisms, and pries the deck-side locks open one by one. The ship does not fall. Which means the locks underneath Beacon — the ones holding the carrier ship to the main body — are also frozen, and he is going to have to deal with them from the outside of the city's hull while the city flies. He dismisses Aux and runs back to his cycle. They never refilled its water; the new engine is dead weight. Damnation.

He digs out the reinforced metallic towline he had seen Rebeke use, slings it over his shoulder, reforms Aux as a hook and chain, and steps to the edge of Beacon. He stands on a piece of the deck that does not belong to the carrier ship, in case the carrier ship lets go. He swings over the side, finds a handhold, locks Aux into a gap as a wider knob he cannot pull free, then climbs the rest of the way down until he hangs just beneath the city. Below, the underside of Beacon is a wide flat plate with eight identical jets spaced equidistantly around the central engine. The tenth ship's jet is tilted up and firing toward the horizon for lateral motion. Past the brilliant red-orange engine columns spitting steam in geyser-like fountains, he can see the balancing of forces that keeps the city level even as its shape shifts — and remembers Zeal saying the Chorus help somehow. He wonders, briefly, if the shades are functioning as a rudimentary Awakened difference engine doing the maths in real time. Then he shakes himself out of it. If he does not get that jammed ship off, Beacon slams into the slope and they all bake when the sun reaches them.

He works his way along the bottom of the city, swinging on Aux as a hooked chain — fuzz the end to indeterminacy, swing, reform, lock into the next indentation. He has to pass uncomfortably close to one of the engine jets; the near-vacuum insulates him from most of the heat, but he can still feel it as infrared on his skin — which is a measure of just how much energy is coming out of it. He rounds the jet and reaches the deadweight ship's mounting point. Then his right-hand hook slips. The chain jolts taut, slips along the steel, catches, and he ends up hanging by his fingertips from the very end of the chain, sweat boiling off his skin in the low pressure. Beneath him is the slope, getting closer. Behind, on the horizon, false dawn.

Aux speaks, hesitantly. There is one option left. He has strength enough that Nomad could fly again — only a little, but maybe enough. No. Absolutely not. Nomad refuses the offer wordlessly, fiercely. They both know what it means: in the past, on Roshar, in a moment of power Nomad's body had reached for any energy it could find, and his friend — pure Investiture — had been the most convenient source. Aux has existed as the brilliant fragment of himself ever since. The personality and the mind survived; the rest was burned away. Aux is, in this moment, offering the rest of himself as fuel. Never, Nomad thinks. I can't let you die, Aux answers, I can't let the city crash. In response Nomad starts climbing the chain, hand over hand, feverish, hands cracked and dry, the very memory of having burned Auxiliary once making him shake. He reaches the bottom of the city and slams the loose end of the chain into a more secure position. Thank you, Aux says quietly, for caring.

He ties himself to the underside of Beacon with the towline, hanging four feet beneath the hull, and reforms Aux into a long flat-ended pole. He wedges it into the jammed lock and heaves with his full weight. Aux's substance is literally divine — it does not bend or break — but the angle is wrong, the latch holds, and the deadweight ship's own angle is putting friction onto the locks from above. The mountain creeps closer. He suspects there are other clamps he cannot see, beyond just these latches. He tries another angle. Nothing. He needs a better tool. He cannot, he tells himself, he cannot make a weapon. Not a weapon, Aux seems to murmur. Just another tool. To protect the city. The end of the crowbar sharpens. For a beat Nomad holds something he has not held in a very long time — a symbol from his past, the implement of a warrior, practised in secret and once displayed in grandeur, sharp enough to slice through metal. He rams it up through the gap and slashes free the lock and a bar above it. The ship lurches, tumbles away, and tears along the mountain. Beacon's primary engine roars; she rises faster. Heart pounding, Nomad unhooks himself and climbs back onto the deck. The right side of the city grinds against stone, and he falls to his knees looking west at the building light. The grinding stops. The city, just barely, crests the pass.

We did it, Aux says — but we're still rising. Nomad turns and runs for the control building, terrified now of going too high. Sunlight bathes him as Beacon leaves the planet's shadow. It is calm. It is warm. It is ordinary. He stands suspended over the summit and nothing happens. He had noticed before that the Brigade ship hangs in orbit without its shields buckling; now he stands in the same light himself and it does not burn. What is going on? He hates working without data. If the day-side sunlight were really intense enough to do what it does on the ground, it should have stripped the atmosphere off the planet already. Why are there always mountains at the poles? Why not a perfect sphere, constantly melted and remade? Or is the planet naturally an oblate spheroid, the atmosphere pulled to its equator, and what he has been calling polar mountains are just the edges of the oval sticking up out of the air? He has no time to work it out. Beacon's vibration ceases — the engines have cut. They are out of water. With a sickening lurch in his core he feels the entire city begin to fall down the back side of the mountains, with no thrust left to slow her.