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Elegy helps the Cinder King's engineers wrestle one of Beacon's captured guns into place on Union's rim. They wedge it against a wall, pile cushioning behind it, and power it with a sunheart. She is hoping it will throw the Cinder King overboard when it fires; instead it shoots cleanly, throws a ball of energy into the dome over Beacon, and bounces harmlessly off — confirming the system works. The Cinder King swings it toward Zellion's incoming ship.

Elegy moves while everyone else is watching the gun. She slips the sliver of sunheart from her waistband and presses it against the cinderheart of the Charred holding Rebeke, speaks Zellion's incantation, and watches the link break — the man stumbles back, the colour of his cinderheart fades, and the first thing he does with his returned will is attack the next Charred in line. She frees a second, then a third, before the Cinder King realises what is happening and pulls his own bodyguards off her to defend himself. He fires anyway; Zellion's ship dodges and his shots strike behind it. *Kill that one*, he orders, pointing at her.

She fights well, for a Charred. She has been learning to think, and that turns out to be the real advantage in a frenzy. She backs around the gun, vaults across it, gets one of her pursuers alone and breaks his leg. Then she hears the Cinder King's voice — *does it hurt you to know I'll do this?* — and turns to see him bare-handed on Rebeke's neck, leeching her heat. It hurts. She had not known it would. It also angers her, which surprises her more. She lunges and is tackled, her sunheart sliver bouncing out of reach. He tells her he will make Rebeke into one of his perfect killers next, with all the love between them replaced by orders to murder Elegy on sight, and asks if that hurts. It does. He hands a half-drained Rebeke to an official, switches plans on Zellion (*we'll need to go back to the old plan*), orders the city into lockdown with no ships permitted to leave, and walks off with his retinue. The Charred close in on Elegy to finish her.

She does not let them finish her. She has the new advantage, which is that she can plan now, and what she plans is to live. She throws aside the one pinning her, breaks free of two more, and runs — full-strength sprinting along Union's rim, vaulting up onto a low rooftop and from there bounding across streets the way the Charred below cannot, because they keep tangling with each other in the chase. She loops back to where she started, scoops her sunheart sliver off the deck, and runs across two streets to an open patch of metal she had picked out earlier as a landing zone.

The approaching Charred force her back to the very edge. Then the city shakes from below and Zellion vaults up over the rim in his ember-coloured armour and lands beside her, sparks flying off the deck. He asks if she is all right. She answers that she planned. He nods. He has no weapon, he tells her — Aux is the dome over Beacon now, and summoning the body would kill them. She tells him the Cinder King has Rebeke. He goes. The Charred try to close on them and he holds up a hand: *stand back and enjoy this. I'll make us a path.*

He demolishes the line. He punches the first one bare-fisted and lifts him off the deck into the next street over; he picks up the next two as weapons against each other. Elegy follows behind him and cleanses cinderhearts one by one, leaving freed Charred to set on their former colleagues and turn the street into self-consuming chaos. The armour begins to crack under repeated hits — small lines like glass — and then a shoulder piece bursts in a spray of glowing metal chips. Zellion keeps fighting. When the supply of attackers finally runs dry he is breathing heavily inside his helmet, and the armour dissolves off him in seconds, leaving him exposed with a fallen Charred's machete.

He cannot bring the armour back. He does not know yet how the relationship stands between him and it. He looks around at what he has just done and says, quietly, that they were poor souls forced into this; Elegy assures him, in her own way, that some of the Charred enjoyed the fight. She points down the side alleys where the ones she freed have run off looking for civilians to attack — and reads in his frown, with effort, that this might in fact be a bad thing.

They move together through the suddenly silent city to where Rebeke will be. Near Union's centre stands the Reliquary, which holds the Chorus, and beside it the Hall of Burning, where the Cinder King makes his Charred — where, Elegy notes, she herself was made. They burst out into the open square between the two buildings and the Cinder King is there, hands on hips, waiting, well out of earshot. Zellion takes the fight himself and tells her to go for Rebeke. She wants to kill the Cinder King. *I know*, he says. *But is that what you need?* She admits she could push through whatever trap he is setting; he asks whether she should. The right path right now, he tells her, is the one toward her sister. She does not feel it, but she believes it. As they part he thanks her: for being someone worth fighting alongside, and for reminding him which path his own should be on. He hefts the machete and walks toward the Cinder King.