(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

They lift off the mud of the ruined city in under ten minutes — long enough to unlock Elegy's Dawnchaser and round up Zeal's four-person prospecting team. The crew are rougher and more profane than the Beaconites Nomad has spent time with so far, dressed in heavy gloves and leathers and overlong coats; he reminds himself that even one society always contains its kinds. Rebeke takes the controls. They skim away from the mountain shadow where Beacon's remains squat helplessly under the climbing sunline, and Nomad wishes the Dawnchaser were a little less bug-shaped and a little more nimble.

In the cab the team's heavyset prospector, Hardy, narrates their situation back at Zeal in the cadence of a man who knows exactly what he is being asked to do: fly into the blessed maelstrom, get out of the ship inside it, dig blessed sunhearts up by hand because they have dumped the harvesting gear. Zeal cheerfully assigns the digging to the team and the tea cakes to himself, and the knight is briefly fascinated by hearing "blessed" deployed as a swearword in a conservative religious society. Nomad tells the team, in their own language, that he will be the one going outside; they nod and accept it on the strength of Zeal's say-so alone. In the corner Elegy stirs awake, glares wildly at the crowded cabin, then settles when she finds Nomad among them.

He moves up to copilot beside Rebeke and the two of them talk. Aux needles him about how much the Beacon crew now trusts him; Nomad is unwilling to indulge the conversation. Rebeke thanks him for letting her come along — the others always treat her as a figurehead, or as the dead sister's little shadow — and then asks if Nomad can teach her to be a killer. She has watched him resist; she knows he is one. He tells her that fighting and killing are different things, and that combat training is mostly the work of teaching a body to act before its conscience can catch it. It horrifies her. He tells her she does not need to be a killer to be respected; she should keep doing what her gut tells her needs doing, and accept that leadership is a heavier burden than she is currently picturing. *Is that what happened to you?* she asks. He tells her, dryly, that leadership did not agree with him; the knight in his head silently disagrees, and he sidesteps that too. He notes that Elegy seems less feral than before — something he said to her on the climb may have landed.

On the dash beside Rebeke is a finger-sized sliver of sunheart — what Solemnity Divine cut off the main core of Rebeke's mother's soul for her to keep close on this run. Rebeke admits she is starting to wonder whether she fixates too much on the dead. Nomad asks if he can have the fragment; she gives it over. Sitting with it, he works the puzzle aloud and inside his head: the sunhearts could be made to do work for Elegy because all native souls of this world are Connected to each other and recognise one another as the same — they share heat between living and dead. But the same souls refuse to accept his. Linguistic Connection is not enough; he could pull power out of one of these stones if he had to, but he cannot put anything back into one as a way of lancing the boil on his own soul. The hope he had been quietly nursing — that he might find a way out of the Torment inside Beacon's culture — runs into a wall.

Back in the main cabin the prospecting team are eating rations and laughing in spite of everything. Aux wonders how they manage it on the edge of destruction; Nomad tells him they have always lived on that edge and have learned to take their moments between disasters as their own. *Then why can't you?* Aux asks, without malice. It still cuts. Elegy speaks up softly from where she sits chained against the wall: the others keep looking at her for some spark of who she used to be, and the words to describe what she now feels about that are no longer in her head. Nomad tells her she can use her past as scaffolding even if she cannot be that person again — the old Elegy was the one who got these people free, and the community she built can be trusted on its own terms. She admits the voice in her head may yet return; she can feel it pressing back in. He gives her the sliver of sunheart and teaches her the simple phrase she should speak if the voice gathers — *bold one on the threshold of death, give this sunheart my heat that it may bless those who still live* — which will siphon a smidge of her soul into the stone. Not enough to power anything; enough, he hopes, to bleed off the worst of what the voice keeps trying to make her. He unlocks one of her manacles, pointedly leaves the other locked, and trusts the rest to her. He walks away from her with a low pulse of dread he sets aside, because thunder is rolling outside the cab.

He returns to the copilot's seat just as the great maelstrom breaks the darkness ahead of them. It is on fire.