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The chapter opens inside the head of the manacled Charred in the cab of Elegy's ship — the body that once belonged to Rebeke's sister, still being called Elegy by these people, sitting in chains and turning the name over. She watched the killer fight on the deck through the open door, leaning to see past the two people at the controls and through the cracked windshield. She wanted what she had seen. She decides she cannot be the old Elegy — she will never be that person — but she likes the name. A song for the dead. She is dead. She will be Elegy again, a different one. Two strangers, after all, sometimes share a name.

The killer steps in from the deck soaking wet, bare-chested. She thinks it is wrong that no cinderheart is glowing in him; nobody fights like that without a stone in the chest. He had told her, before this run, to choose something to live for. Now she has. The Charred she has known are bludgeons; he is a spear. Her own anger and need to move and act and kill is a bludgeon too. She means to learn to be a spear.

Rebeke enters the cab and goes carefully to the killer, as if he is a bonfire, hands clasped in her gloves. *That was incredible*, she whispers. *And terrible*. He answers that the spear is both an art and a butcher's tool — he knows — and tells Zeal to raise the city on the radio now that they are out of the Cinder King's jamming bubble. Rebeke tends to the four prospectors who are only now waking from the heat; they are weaker than this new Elegy, so Rebeke does not bother with her.

Confidence comes through on the radio with naked relief. Zeal tells her five sunhearts are on the seat beside him. She asks how long. He asks back, scared of the answer, how they are; she tells him the sun continues to advance and the window keeps narrowing. There is a corridor of darkness where the peaks of the mountains touch the shadow, and it is closing. Two ships are beyond repair; they have crowded everyone onto the remaining eight; some have to ride the decks. They are waiting. Half an hour, Zeal says, and he will have the sunhearts divided before they land. May you outrun the sun. The new Elegy listens to all of this with her head tilted back, learning to listen, learning to hold still under the heat that wants to make her move. She admits, to herself, that she lied to the killer about being free of the Cinder King — she can no longer hear his voice, but she can still feel him, and just now he was afraid.

Rebeke takes out a knife to divide the sunhearts and the killer asks her if he can have one whole. She measures him against the numbers Beacon will need, meets his eyes, hands one over. He sits with it near his face; the light fades from the stone and his eyes glow briefly. So he does have a cinderheart of his own, the new Elegy decides. It just lives inside.

She makes her ask. *I watched you fight. I want that.* He thinks before answering, sounding tired. He had hoped that her time with her sister and these people would teach her to want the things they have. The old Elegy — *I am not her*, she cuts in. The old Elegy is gone and she will not pretend otherwise. She wants what he has. She wants to learn battle the way he does it. He answers that she will need control, and she tells him she has already worked that out: she knows it. How did he learn? *Slowly. Step by step.* When he was first given a spear he did not know how to hold it or stand. Each sparring round he had to spend all his attention on standing right; the more he did it, the more it became automatic, until his body stood properly on its own and his mind was free to think about the grip. The grip went the same way and freed him to think about the thrust. Each piece becomes instinct; each frees him to learn the next. *Deliberate practice*, he calls it.

He had a huge advantage, he adds. Not teachers. He could survive his mistakes. He got Invested the way she did — through some oaths he made and a bond to a being of pure Investiture, like the rock at her core but with a worse sense of humour. (She thinks she catches a different voice in the air around him here, dry and amused; she sometimes does.) His Investiture let him take wounds he should not have taken and live to learn from them, where ordinarily a soldier dies and the lesson dies with him. He kept growing until he became what she now sees: a mess of a man with battle instincts honed over decades.

*I want it*, she whispers.

He allows that this will do, and reaches up as if to take her last manacle off. The heat in her cinderheart spreads at the prospect; she feels the thirst rising in her. *No*, she forces herself to say. He stops, asks why. If you set me free, she says, I will attack you. All of you. I feel it. But there is something underneath the heat now, something else, and she catches at it: that she could *say so* is itself progress, isn't it. He accepts the warning gratefully and leans away from the manacle. She protests that she can fight with the heat in her. He shakes his head. The other Charred could be left in a pit to fight each other for centuries and barely learn anything; she has to choose to practice, to learn, to control it.

She settles back to think about that. The ship flies on. They draw near to the place where Beacon's ships crashed, and the world outside grows alarmingly bright.