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Nomad gapes at the man with the lockpicks who has just sprung the vault from outside. It is Zeal, muddy to the thighs, glancing back over his shoulder like a thief who half expects the door to bite him — and grinning enormously when he sees the sack at Nomad's feet. The knight, in the same monotone he uses for the end of worlds, declares himself happier to see a man breaking and entering than he has ever been. Zeal cannot quite believe Nomad is alive, much less alive with five sunhearts already in hand; he had come thinking he was the city's last chance. They share a brief, embarrassed apology — he is sorry for abandoning Nomad in the storm — and then he flinches at voices outside. They have a little under an hour before sunrise on what remains of Beacon and a forty-five-minute flight back; everything else is for later.

They slip out into the rain. Nearby, two of the Cinder King's officials are arguing over whether the tribute-pile they buried held eleven captives or twelve. Nomad follows Zeal right into the dark and presses for the story he never got: not a stolen scout ship, Zeal confesses, just Elegy's own Dawnchaser flown back by him alone after Rebeke collapsed from the heat and the rest of the team retched themselves into a stupor. He landed dark in the shadow, watched the dig from a distance, and chose to come in on foot with a prayer to Adonalsium and a set of picks. He had doubted Nomad in his heart. He is sorry for that, too.

Aux cuts in: someone is behind them. Nomad turns. Two burning eyes hang in the dark, a smile underneath them, and the Cinder King walks toward him at a calm, hungry pace. Nomad tells Zeal to run, and for once Zeal obeys without arguing. The Cinder King shouts for his Charred to chase, but his own voice is not alarmed; he tells Nomad he had faith the true killer would not die in a city stranded on the slopes. He had come to make sure of it. He wants the duel he was robbed of in the trophy ship.

Nomad stalls — partly because he wants to roll the man through a mud puddle until those eyes go out, mostly because he wants the man talking. He probes: the Cinder King needs to know whether Nomad is stronger than he is. Has he ever actually killed an offworlder, or did he find one already dying? The smile sharpens. The Cinder King admits, with a strange formality, that the first offworlder was found sick and not dead — but he is alive and they are ashes, which makes him the stronger one. He has the offworlder's sunheart in his keeping to prove it.

And there is the word Nomad has been waiting for and the thought he has been too slow to think. The offworlder who left a guidebook and a calling card. The pebble-sized sunheart in the trophy room. A soul of Nomad's own kind, harvested and shelved. He breaks toward the Cinder King as if for the duel, then sprints straight past him. The Cinder King gives chase and is left in the mud — Nomad is still faster. He vaults onto the deck of the flagship, cuts through the cab to the cabinet of trophies, smashes the glass and palms the offworlder's faintly glowing pebble. With this one he shares a Connection that Beacon's native sunhearts refuse him: a kinsman's soul, attuned to his own. He whispers the prayer in Alethi over it — the form he was taught to say for the dead, asking the brave soul beyond death's door to drink his heat as a blessing on those still breathing — and the pebble in his palm goes cold as it begins to drink.

Aux is astonished. It is working. The Cinder King arrives in the doorway, exultant, and Nomad thinks of punching him — and the Torment locks his arm in place. Not yet, then. He gives the king a grin instead, vaults back into the pilot's cab and out through the front windshield they only just replaced from his last escape. The Cinder King roars after him that a coward's death by his Charred will prove the point all the same.

Nomad scrambles back through the mud the way he came and finds the worse problem. Elegy's ship is still on the ground, and there are tens of Charred swarming her — climbing the railings, breaching the bulbous cab at the rear, surging across the deck. He bounds onto the bow and sees through the windshield that Zeal and Rebeke are inside braced shoulder-to-shoulder against the cab door with a press of Charred on the other side. On the deck with him stands a familiar burned face — the Charred with the fire-poker streaks across his cheeks, who once handed Nomad an easy beating. The creature turns from the windshield he has been cracking with his truncheon, sees who has just arrived, and smiles for the rematch.

Nomad closes his fist around the offworlder sunheart and feels it draw heat off him, peeling back the crust on his soul. He is not minded to be rid of the Torment entirely; some of what it has made of him he means to keep. Just a thin skim off the top. The Charred rushes him. Nomad crashes through the numbness that should have stopped his arm and drives his fist into the man's gut, picking him up off the deck and dumping him against the windshield. As one, every Charred on the ship turns toward him, rain sheeting off pale skin, cinderhearts glowing under the lightning. Nomad raises that one usable fist in front of his face — his master's old friend would have approved of the framing — and grins into the storm. Finally.