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The Lopen lounges in midair a few feet above the deck of the Wandersail beside Cord, who is mashing something pungent for that night's supper. The crew, friendly when they boarded, has turned subtly strange since the resupply at Hexi — short glances, odd Thaylen hand gestures aimed at him as they pass. He cannot put a finger on what is off. He asks Cord whether she has noticed; she has, in her careful Alethi. Mostly he likes hearing her talk — likes the lilt of the Peaks in her vowels, likes that she is taller than he is and only a few years younger than he is. He has already stuck Huio to walls for her three times to no romantic effect, and decides cards must be next.

Huio flies in, drops a letter from her parents into Cord's hands, and shows off a box of aluminum foils and plates that Ardent Rushu wants to experiment with — she is trying to invent a spanreed-style return channel back to the ship. Lopen tells him aluminum can stop a Shardblade if thick enough and is rare because few can Soulcast it; Cord adds that the Peaks trade for it from the spren in the other world. Huio takes the box off to tinker.

Cord turns thoughtful, watching the ocean. She admits she had been afraid of leaving her homeland, but discovered out here that the frightening and the interesting are the same thing — and finds she likes being afraid of things. Lopen, listening, asks after her father: is Rock truly in danger over what he did for Kaladin and Amaram? Cord answers that the danger is of Rock's own choosing — he intends to go home and submit to judgment — but that she and her sister mean to stay and see for him in the meantime, using their gift of sight. She names the spren around them: Rua as a fanciful flying ship, Caelinora near Huio, windspren in the air, wavespren in the foam, anxietyspren trailing the ship like dark crosses almost too faint to see. And, she adds, luckspren — five of them in the sky today where two days ago there had been none. She sketches the arrowhead shape for him. Lopen promises to pass the count to Rushu.

Cord nods, and Lopen lets the Lashing go. He thumps down to the deck harder than he meant to. He pats the planking, grins at himself, and goes looking for his older cousin, hoping he can show Cord up at cards next. He finds Huio in their cabin with one of Rushu's spanreeds completely apart on the desk, monologuing in Herdazian about how the captive spren are reacting to the aluminum foil — pressing away from it like prey from a predator — and theorising that the aluminum interferes with the conjoined ruby's sense of its partner across the spren world.

Lopen flops onto his bunk, the only one on the ship, since the sailors had refused his request for a hammock as though he were mad. He is bored, but it is not just boredom. The thing that has been chewing at him about this whole mission, he decides as he plays at sticking his infused rubber ball to the ceiling and catching it, is that the Voidbringers coming back was supposed to be the end of the world and it has turned out to be a grind. Months of inching skirmishes against Fused who simply reincarnate the moment you kill them; ground gained by feet at a time. The Radiants are the good guys — he has decided so, even granting that some of them have done bad things in the past — but he cannot shake the parallel to the years the Shattered Plains swallowed Alethi lives one bridge run at a time. He says aloud that he wants the ship to move faster and the mission to start meaning something.

Huio proudly holds up the reassembled spanreed in answer. Lopen makes him test it: Huio scribbles a circle, and the conjoined pen on the other end skates back and forth in a single line — no vertical motion at all. Huio repeats the test; same result. They share a grin. Huio promises to pay Rushu back for the broken reed next month — both of them, like Punio, give most of their Radiant stipend back to the family — and Lopen agrees to break the news. He walks out onto the deck, proud of his sea legs, and stops short: most of the crew has bunched at the port rail looking down at something in the water. He Lashes upward to see. Floating beside the hull is something enormous, and very, very dead.