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Elegy drops off the ship and runs ahead across the dark, muddy ground to the pit the scouts described. Rebeke follows on a small hover-platform, more reserved already — barely a rotation in and she is carrying herself like someone who had always been a leader. The pit is full of Beaconites: adults wading in mud at the bottom, children placed on top of the now-powerless ships for dryness. They have survived a full half-rotation under the sun, sheltered by the dome Zellion left over them.

Elegy grins, practising what she thinks normal feelings ought to look like, then leaps to the platform when it lowers and gets Rebeke muddy on purpose. The three women of the Greater Good — Compassion, Confidence, Contemplation — are hauled up first; they are exhausted and look at Rebeke for cues. Rebeke is wearing a dress cut low so the embedded cinderheart and the ashen scarring around it show plain. Compassion is first to ask: *Sunlit… Woman?* — and Rebeke corrects her softly to *Sunlit One*. Confidence asks after the Cinder King. Dead, Rebeke says. They mean to recover his sunheart from the pit where he fell and use it to power Union for a while; that, she thinks, would be appropriate. It will be the last sunheart anyone ever makes. Contemplation surfaces the recharge knowledge — *there is a way to recharge them* — and Rebeke tells her the offworlder shared it before he *left*. The word hangs in the cab; nobody knows what happened to him, and they may never. Elegy, who is in the process of learning how to hope, prefers to believe the dome stayed up, fell when its work was done, and that the sunheart they will find in the mud will be alone there.

Rebeke uses the climb back up to set the rules of what comes next. Delegations from other corridors have already started reaching out; the recharge knowledge will be given away as it was given to them. No more sacrifices. Confidence gestures at the cinderheart in her chest — surely she would lead now — and Rebeke refuses. The cinderheart lets her steady the Charred; nothing more. No more will be made; the existing ones will be woken slowly and asked to choose their own work. She will not be another tyrant. She will be a beacon, *as my sister taught us*. Elegy, still hoping she will get to fight occasionally, lets that be, and finds the open future ahead of them not boring but interesting.

The chapter cuts down across the planet to a stolen ship hidden among the local craft. Staff Sergeant Truth-Is-Waiting withdraws from a sweep of a hovercity — slouched, dressed-down, pretending to be from another corridor — and slips into the cab to report. The Admiral of the Night Brigade is waiting, standing with her hand on a coiled Continuity Chain at her hip, facing away from the door. *He was here*, Truth-Is-Waiting tells her. The locals say he died about a day ago fighting their king. The Admiral dismisses local accounts as useless; Truth-Is-Waiting adds the find that interests her — an embedded Scadrian research ship, the Refuge, whose crew had Zellion on the planet and somehow forgot to register their presence with the Brigade. Rude, he says. *Very rude*, she agrees, a rare half-smile turning up. They will pay the Refuge a visit and pull recordings — more reliable, she says, than peasant accounts. The unspoken admission underneath is that Zellion is one step ahead of them again, and the Admiral does not like hearing it. As Truth-Is-Waiting leaves, two red-eyed shades — still in the uniforms they died in — peel off the corners to escort him out; a second silent signal sends them away too, and she is left alone.

On the third move, Zellion sits on the wet sand of a featureless atoll on a new world, listening to surf, counting heartbeats, and waiting. He has to time the moment he calls Aux back to himself — too early and the Beaconites under the dome will be burned; too late and they will suffocate as the air goes stale. When he judges the moment is past he calls the body in his hand as a sword, uses it to cut off the gravity bracer at last, and stretches into a thousand pounds lighter. The cost lands on him at the same time: he asks the air whether he got it right — whether Elegy reached Rebeke in time, whether the Greater Good are alive, whether the dome held. Nothing answers. Auxiliary is not just silent — he is gone from the Cognitive Realm entirely. The sword in his hand is a corpse separated from its soul. There is no voice to fill the silence with deadpan, and no conscience to argue with him from the outside. He is alone.

He will likely never know what became of any of them. He cannot afford to look back; any place he visits twice will be marked for the Night Brigade as a place he cares about, and the people there will become targets. He has to hope his stay on Canticle was short enough that nobody noticed how deeply he came to love it. In the distance a boat appears. He stands, shapes Aux into a mirrored shield, catches the sun and turns the boat his way. The crew when they arrive turn out, to his surprise, to be Sho Del — a people he had thought stayed on Yolen. He wades out to meet them. It is time to start running again.