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Zellion rolls across the deck of Union with his face bloodied and his ribs giving, driven all the way back to where the brawl began by a Cinder King he has not been able to lay a second hand on. He is up, half-blind, and laughing — because the absurdity has finally caught him. He has spent months on this world unable to fight back; his Torment has been training him for exactly this kind of fight, the kind one wins by refusing to lose. He dismisses the thought as superstition almost before he finishes it. The longer he stays on Canticle the more every coincidence will start looking like a plan written for him.

The Cinder King steps in for another easy hit. This time Zellion does not block or dodge: he falls into the swing, grabs the man's clothing in both hands, and refuses to let go. *Grappling*, his opponent sneers — *the coward's art*. Zellion thinks of a few people who would disagree. The Cinder King palms his face and starts pulling his heat directly — and is briefly startled to find the trick working again, when it had not before. People still have a little faith in him, Zellion tells him, and thanks him sincerely for turning the crowd back around. Then he heaves the larger man over his own centre of gravity, makes himself a deadweight at four times normal mass, and pitches both of them off the edge of the city into the mud below.

The fall does what falls do. The Cinder King cushions it for him, swears, and shoves him off into the muck. Zellion cannot answer; he has no breath. He gets up anyway. *I expected a better show*, his opponent says, knocking him down again. He gets up. He is tripped, kicked in the broken ribs, called anticlimactic, kicked again. He keeps getting up, because that is the only weapon he has left, and he keeps hoping it will be enough.

Above, Rebeke explains the geography of Union to Elegy on the way to the command bridge: most cities on this world have a central command room from which the locked-together hovercity can be steered, but on Union no ship is permitted to undock without the Cinder King's say-so. Five Charred guarding the bridge door step aside without lifting a hand against them. Inside, white-coated officers are crowded around monitors watching the brawl from a tracking camera. Several reach for sidearms. Elegy is willing to fight all of them — she just probably will not win.

Rebeke tries to hand the room to Elegy: *speak. Persuade them.* Elegy cannot. She is not the person who used to live in that body, and saying the right words is not a thing she has back yet. She tells Rebeke to do it instead — to say what she cannot. Rebeke turns to the room with shaking hands raised. She is not here to hurt them, she says. She wants them to listen. She points at the screen: did the offworlder knock the Cinder King off the city? Yes. She points again, this time at the lopsided beating in progress, and asks the question the operators already know the answer to: *the Cinder King is cheating, isn't he?* He always does, an officer admits. He stages it. Weakens his Charred before sparring them. *Everyone knows. It's obvious.*

Then Rebeke gives them the choice nobody on this world has been allowed to make. Steer the city away. Leave him behind. The Charred who would have stopped them just let them in the door. The sun is rising; he cannot outrun it. As for what comes after — she has news. *We have learned how to recharge sunhearts.* No more lotteries. No more burning of parents. The room rocks slightly under that. She tells them she left her own mother to the sun, watched her brother die to the Cinder King's own weapon, watched her sister be taken into the Hall of Burning. Asks whether they have not all sacrificed enough.

Then she parts the remains of her shirt and shows them the cinderheart embedded in her chest, the ashen burn radiating up her neck — and names herself. *I am the Sunlit One. I control the Charred now. I have come to bring you freedom. I offer this; I do not demand it. Today we make choices. Please.* The weapons come down. The officer who had spoken first walks to the controls without ceremony. Nobody stops her. The city lifts and turns and carries them away from its king, and the bridge crew watch the footage of his face when he sees it happen.

That leaves the one problem Zellion left them. They cannot send a ship back for him. The Cinder King's paranoid one-hour lockdown is a hard one; only he can release it, and the timer has not run. And the Dawnchaser — the one craft still down there on the ground beside the two men — is visible on the monitor as a smouldering wreck, never to fly again. The sun is climbing. The two struggling figures recede to specks. Elegy holds Rebeke as she weeps and says farewell to the offworlder in her own register: *thank you, killer, for giving me someone to fight with. Not merely someone to fight beside.*