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From the Dawnchaser Nomad slaps the master release that pops every sealed cabin in Beacon — the cabins could be opened from inside, but in their condition many of the occupants are likely unconscious from oxygen loss, and people who have been panicking eat through air faster. He then crouches over Elegy: her cinderheart is still glowing, she is breathing, no heartbeat because she has no heart. He is not sure how an Invested body like hers keeps its cells alive. Heading for the door, he registers belatedly the other danger — the entire Dawnchaser was sitting on top of the Reliquary, a containment vessel for some of the most dangerous Invested entities in the cosmere, and he has just slam-landed it and then unlocked every door without a second thought. He waits on the threshold to see whether the shades are coming for him with red eyes. They are not. Looking down through the hub he sees the Reliquary's enclosure is uncracked — built, wisely, out of Beacon's strongest stuff.

He drops down into the city. Survivors are stumbling out onto decks. Two of the ten sealed cabins leaked badly during the depressurisation, and the people inside fared worse than the rest — broken limbs and unconsciousness — but at his suggestion the Greater Good had been split across three separate cabins and all four members have come through intact. Rebeke helps an older man Nomad doesn't know out onto the deck; the man stares up at the stars, weeping, and begins a prayer of thanks. Rebeke crosses to Nomad, still dazed, and admits she had not believed the plan would work. He tells her she is smart for doubting — it was a crazy plan. *It was your plan*, she points out. *I know how crazy mine get,* he says. The knight in his head observes that this is exactly the kind of thing Nomad says all the time and does not understand why Rebeke is glaring. They go to find the engineers.

The whole leadership team — Solemnity Divine, Jeffrey Jeffrey, Zeal, Rebeke, and the four members of the Greater Good — convenes around the Chorus's mist-filled cage, which has somehow remained intact. Compassion sits on the floor wrapped in a blanket. Solemnity Divine lays out the damage with brutal honesty: six engines locked, all the down-jets packed with mud, smashed intakes and broken clasping mounts, and from now on Beacon's ships will have to fly separately because she cannot vouch for the cohesion of the whole. Her engineers can fix all of it before sunrise. Contemplation confirms that the mountain shadow buys them time; Zeal puts it at roughly two and a half of Beacon's hours before the sunline finds them. Nomad is again struck by the tiny scale of this planet, on which "two and a half hours" can correspond to a useful amount of shadow on the lee side of a tall enough range. As parts are being fabricated by the Chorus — Nomad hears whispered echoes of Solemnity Divine's words while she speaks, which the others apparently take for granted — she names the problem the engineers cannot fix on their own. Beacon is out of power. The engines burned hotter and less cleanly than they had hoped, and only four of ten fired during the crash because the others had already drained their sunhearts. Repaired or not, the city will not fly again without more.

Nomad floats the obvious option — the Cinder King has just produced a fresh batch of sunhearts by feeding the Beaconite captives to the sun the previous cycle. As soon as Rebeke hears him refer to "the first time" he stood in sunlight he realises he has let something slip and lampshades it: up on Beacon's deck the sunline struck him without hurting him, and the city did not melt either. He cannot yet explain why. The room takes this with the same hush they reserve for the Sunlit Man legend, as if he had been shielding the entire city from above, and Aux needles him in his head about the legends he keeps starting. Nomad presses past it: the Cinder King always collects sunhearts at the line where the great maelstrom dies and the shadow begins, and they know the longitude. He asks Compassion to walk him through what the maelstrom actually is — and learns from her and Contemplation that it is a tempest that chases sunset around the planet, far more violent than the storm he has already survived in the dark, and that no one goes inside it because no one goes inside it.

The council debates a raid. Confidence and Contemplation argue the Cinder King cannot now be caught flat-footed; Zeal counters that the king must believe Beacon dead after that ascent, and pitches stealing a Union scout ship to slip in among the collectors. Contemplation grants the logic but rejects the timeline — they had weeks to plan the previous raid and were saved by Zeal's bracer exploit. Then Nomad proposes something else. The Dawnchaser is a prospector Elegy had reinforced specifically for entering the great maelstrom — what if they did not wait for the Cinder King to come collect the sunhearts at the trailing edge, and instead flew ahead of the storm to dig them out of the new ground while it was still on top of them? The whole room gapes. Solemnity Divine objects that Elegy never actually flew the Dawnchaser fully into the storm — her own instruments always warned her she would die. Rebeke adds, dryly, that her sister was not insane. Nomad gestures at the city around them, which has just climbed a mountain it was never built for, and says it is a day for insanity. The silence finally breaks when Zeal grins and signs on: let us go steal from the sun itself.