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Zellion walks toward the Cinder King out in the open of Union's central square and finds, immediately and again, that there is no Aux to call on for cover. *Do you spot snipers?* No answer. It hurts every time he remembers. He pulls up just close enough to call out and offers the Cinder King the duel he wanted — *do you still want it?* The Cinder King is delighted. He proposes hand to hand, one on one, no interference, as if invoking some Azish honour tradition that Zellion mentally corrects to Alethi, and that he expects will be obeyed regardless.

The snipers fire as soon as Zellion moves. Not Invested rounds this time; slug throwers. He dodges toward a wall for cover and a dozen of the Cinder King's white-coated officials kick out of nearby windows and doors and open up with pellets meant only to weaken him. Charred swarm him while he is being battered. One of them locks something around his wrist and ice floods his veins — a Scadrian freeze bracer, the same model Beacon used on him at the arena — and his heat begins to drain. The bracer cuts off again a second later, before he loses consciousness. Something else is clamped onto his leg. The Charred and the officers melt back into the alleys. The Cinder King's voice rolls through the city on a recorded loop announcing the offworlder some are calling the Sunlit Man and inviting Union's population to watch him fall.

The Cinder King walks up slowly to the staged centre of the square. Security cameras track him from every angle. He unlocks the freeze bracer on Zellion's wrist himself and tosses it aside in plain view — a public demonstration that he has *freed* his opponent for the duel — and kicks the fallen machete away. *Now then. That duel of honour. You and me. Shall we?* He raises his fists.

Zellion raises his and finds the world wrong. His arms weigh four times what they should. His fists barely come up to a guard stance. He recognises the device on his ankle from cosmere travel: a Scadrian gravity weight of the kind low-gravity worlders wear for muscle conditioning, except this one has been turned up far past recreational range — he is now fighting under three or four standard gravities. *A gift from our friends in the hidden ship*, the Cinder King says, meaning the Refuge and its TimeTellers. The bracers tend to knock subjects out, he explains; this one is calibrated to leave them alert and merely disadvantaged. He punches Zellion in the face.

The fight, after that, is what it has to be. Zellion lands one good shot that splits the Cinder King's lip — and watches it heal at speed; the man is Invested enough to shrug off surface damage. He himself, without Aux to count, can feel his own reserve fluttering as it runs out. The Cinder King strips his gloves so he can do the same trick with bare hands he did to Rebeke, talks the whole time about *power* and what it really means, and patiently drives Zellion back across the square. Zellion calls him on the cowardice of it: if this is strength, why hide what you're doing from your watching public? The Cinder King answers that the condemned man always sees unfairness in the world; lands another hit; tells him to make a good show of it because people will want to see the Sunlit Man die with flair. Zellion's nose bleeds. He stumbles back farther — and farther — toward what the broadcast cameras have all been pointed at: the line of the rising sun.