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Nomad has to squint as the Dawnchaser's cab fills with light from the great maelstrom — the Beaconites keep everything dim, and his eyes are not ready. The horizon is a churning palette of oranges and yellows; cyclones of flame rise off the ground in standing vortexes and burst against the cloud cover from beneath, painting the sky aflame. He demands of Zeal why a storm is on fire — storms are supposed to be wet, full of wind and rain — and Rebeke reminds him, with reasonable irritation, that this was his plan. He had not put the pieces together: he is looking at the boundary just past sunset, where rock is still hot and venting; he had thought of every culture's hell as a cold place like the Damnation he grew up with, not as the lake of eternal fire the rest of his neighbours described.

He watches the ground cool with implausible speed, and works the deduction aloud as the ship trails the storm. Something is pulling the heat down into the planet — the way Beaconite bodies can pull heat off each other through a sunheart — and the cooling is so brutal it cracks the ground. The cracks vent gas, and his guess for that is methane or something like it: there is no decomposition here, but the sun-blasting of the surface is releasing something flammable, which is what is feeding the cyclones. The core of the planet is far more massive than its diameter has any right to produce, so either it is impossibly dense or it is dense with Investiture — he leans toward the latter, and now suspects that the same core is what is sucking heat out of the new ground every night. Rebeke cuts in: they have ninety-something minutes left before sunlight reaches Beacon, and a choice — duck into the storm now or sit out here long enough to be found by the Cinder King's scouts. The hull armour and cooling may hold; *maybe*, Zeal qualifies. Nomad says take her in. Rebeke raises the blast shield over the windshield and flies on instruments alone.

Nomad had expected something familiar — rain on metal, the comforting heartbeat sound he loves from a Rosharan highstorm — and gets the opposite. The ship is hurled around without a single drop of water. It is a storm that gives no relief, like a breakdown with no tears in it. The two heat dials Zeal points out — hull and cabin — climb steadily. Rebeke makes for the Cinder King's usual corridor on prospecting equipment, planning to sweep the longitude she trusts and hope the ship can stand it long enough to find something. The scent of brimstone fills the cab. Zeal mutters back at Nomad's muttering about hell — *hell is a forest, full of quiet trees and unquiet dead* — a memory of where his people came from. By the time Rebeke reaches the right spot even Nomad is uncomfortable; she is pouring sweat, the others must be in agony, and Aux is the one who hears the prospector ping. Nomad orders her back over the spot. The faintest ping repeats on the dash, almost lost under the tempest and the groaning hull.

He goes out alone. As soon as the door opens the burning sky blinds him and his skin starts to char even through his body's protections; pain spikes and then numbs as the nerves die. He drops to the ground with Auxiliary formed as a spade and hits loamy earth, then looks up to find the ship already vanished — buffeted off into the storm or trying not to cook. Aux reports his Investiture reserves crashing through five percent of Skip capacity, then under three. Nomad gives up on the sunhearts and tries instead to keep himself alive. He digs himself into the cooler ground, forms Aux as a shield over himself, and tells him to stop reporting numbers. Either he lives or he does not.

Wind throws dirt over the shield. Pain fades to numbness as his nerves give out and his body falls back to its old triage: keep the brain and the organs alive, abandon the skin and the eyes. He fights the urge to slide into the warm fuzz of fatigue — the endless tiredness of never sleeping, of always being on the wrong side of his own problems — by forcing his mind to keep working. He can feel something trying to draw his Investiture down into the planet's core. It cannot have his; it tries anyway. That tracks with his earlier deduction. The core feeds on Investiture the way he does. That might be the entire reason this world can have a dark side: the rapid cooling at the boundary is what stills the weather and lets the shadow persist. And it loops him back to the question he keeps not being able to drop — why did the sunline above Beacon's deck not burn him? Is he, in fact, what the Beaconites keep telling him he is?

He shoves the thought down and confronts a harder one. He failed these people by charging in here. The signs had been there — Auxiliary's hesitance, the deference of Rebeke and Zeal to a plan he had not earned, the contrast with the mountain ascent where he had taken the time to test engines, fly scout, gather science. This time he had picked a direction, spoken a sentence, and started running. That is what he is now — the man who runs — and now, walled up in this rock, he cannot run from it. The mantra he tells himself, the one about how the leaders who survived to teach it were the ones who acted decisively in tense moments, has a quiet codicil he kept missing: the ones who survived were also the ones who *made the right call*. He has not always done that. He tries to feel shame at having led the Beaconites to ruin; he just feels numb, as if a piece of him had accepted long ago that this is how his failures finally catch him.

Pain returns to his arms and legs — slow, because there is so little Investiture left for the body to draw on — and he heals. Burns are the kind of wound his particular weave is built to survive: they do not breach the organs or the skeleton, and given time even a near-empty reserve can mend the rest. His master could never have died of this; he is far from that level, but he is not nothing. When the pain finally recedes and he blinks open new eyes in the darkness, he hears rain. Rain. He has rotated out of the storm with the spinning planet, back into the shadow. Aux tells him: about fifteen minutes buried; under ninety minutes until sunrise on Beacon; no Investiture left for healing or enhancement, dregs only. But the Cinder King's collectors will be here soon. They will bring ships he can steal and sunhearts he can take. He shoves up on the shield and breaks out of the ground — healed, naked, and not done running yet.