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Vivenna sits on the floor of the safehouse cellar in a borrowed long dress, knees drawn up, watching Jewels sew Clod back together. Tonk Fah is out scouting whether the regular house is still safe; Denth is upstairs. Clod's intestines and stomach lie arranged on a sheet beside him, and Jewels works with a curved needle and heavy thread, muttering at the Lifeless for letting himself get hurt for the Idrian princess's sake. Vivenna is still shaking from the alleyway — from how easily her modesty fell away, how quickly her hair, how completely her religion did nothing when the Lifeless closed in.

Clod starts to shuffle to his feet with his insides hanging out; Jewels hisses him back down with a phrase about howl of the sun, and he goes still. Vivenna files the words away. Denth returns with a fresh wineskin of ichor-alcohol for Jewels and sits down beside Vivenna. He tells her, gently, that the person you are in the moments before you think you will die is not who you are; the ones who hold under attack are not the courageous, they are the trained; she did well — she did not freeze, she ran the right way, and he has guarded people who would have stood there and died.

*I want you to teach me Awakening*, she says. She thought she would rather die than use it. That was a lie. In the alley she would have done anything to survive. She is no longer pure and cannot pretend to be; she might as well understand what she has, and use it, even if it damns her, because at least it will keep her alive long enough to bring Hallandren down. Her hair bleeds red and she lets it: she hates the city with its colours and its gods, hates that she was raised to give herself to a man her people called a heretic, hates that they have taken her sister, and she wants them to hurt. The raid today was not a riot put down; it was the Hallandren sending Lifeless in to kill the poor Hallandren made. Denth agrees to change course.

When he asks why she really came south — it was never for Siri, was it? — she admits it was not. She had trained all her life to be sacrificed; when Siri was sent in her place she became nothing, and she had come south to take herself back. He nods and lets it stand. The lesson begins. Awakening, he tells her, is about Commands — *hold things* for a rope, *protect me* for something larger — but the Command has to be imagined in the head, not just spoken; the Breath becomes part of whatever it animates, and the more Breaths she holds when she starts the easier the discipline will be. Jewels finishes the seams, screws a replacement muscle into Clod's side bone, and pumps the ichor-alcohol through a valve at his neck. Tonk Fah returns, says the regular house looks safe, and Jewels whispers something close to Clod's ear that turns him back on. He looks past Vivenna with no recognition. *He's Lifeless, after all*, she reminds herself.

Back at the regular house, Parlin meets them at the door and asks first after Jewels — then, when Vivenna climbs the stairs, after her. She tells him there has been fighting and turns on him on the landing. Why is he asking about Jewels? Aren't they engaged? Mildly, kindly, Parlin tells her that the engagement was their fathers' arrangement; that he had assumed they would both be disinherited the moment they ran south; that she has never been particularly kind to him and that he has always known she finds him stupid; and that Jewels, for what it is worth, laughs at his jokes. When Vivenna asks why then he followed her at all, he blinks at her — *for Siri, of course* — and walks down the stairs to find Jewels. Vivenna watches him go with the new knowledge that he is twice the person she is, and finds that she cannot make herself care.

In her room she bolts the door and crosses to the curtains. A man waits on the balcony with several days of stubble and worn dark clothes, a deep black sword across his arm. He tells her in a flat angry voice that she is causing him a great deal of trouble. She opens her mouth to scream; the drapes lash forward, wrap her body, pin her arms, and close around her neck. Vivenna thinks, dimly, that she has survived a Lifeless raid only to fall in her own room — and then, before anyone in the house can hear her thrash, she goes under.