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Lopen flies a quick survey of the island while Rua keeps pace beside him. The dead city has the shape of a flower with radiating petals; the rest of the island is one long empty beach, all of it suspiciously unsuspicious. He drops back down to where Rushu is sketching the outermost buildings, which are coated in the familiar melted crust of centuries of highstorms and so feel, here at least, properly old. Rushu guesses these particular ruins were already crem-covered before whatever cut the highstorms off began.

The squad of eight spearmen and one Radiant move into the heart of Akinah. Roofs have caved; pillars and wall stumps remain, sinking gently into the ground like a slowly composting forest floor. Rushu cross-references her notebook against an ancient map of the city and confirms this is the right place. The scale of the dead capital surprises Lopen — older cities, Rushu explains, were small because no one yet knew how to build aqueducts or run reliable food trains. He cannot shake the sense of skull-windows watching him, and tries to laugh it off as one too many of Rock's spirit stories around the fire.

Rushu aims them at the raised platform that probably housed the Oathgate — the ruling class always sat on the Oathgates, in Azimir and Kholinar and Thaylen City alike. A sailor named Pluv runs up with a warning note from Rysn: everything about this island is too expected, too perfect, gemstones laid out on the beach for the taking, ruins exactly as one would imagine them. Lopen hands over the dun gemheart he pocketed earlier; Rushu examines it with a pocket jeweller's loupe and tells him it is quartz, not diamond — a Soulcast fake. They walk on to the largest still-roofed structure on the platform and find the chamber that should have held the Oathgate: faded mural on the floor, no slot for a Blade, mechanism rusted to powder. Too clean a ruin. The original Oathgate platform on the Shattered Plains sat unused for thousands of years and still worked when Bridge Four reached it.

Rushu orders the sailors to search the rubble in pairs for any stairs or trapdoors leading downward. Most cities don't build down — basements flood — but most cities also slowly disappear under their own crem, and Rushu is now of the firm opinion that the real Akinah sank into crem long ago and the *city* they are walking through is the top layer of a deliberate forgery. The sailors find a hidden stairwell in an unimpressive building well off the main plaza, half buried in debris. Lopen follows Rushu down by spherelight; the stairs end at a blank stone wall. Then Rushu produces a chained-gem-on-fingers Soulcaster from a pouch on her belt — Navani sent her with one when she refused to send a Blade — and Soulcasts the wall to smoke. Past where it stood lies an underground cavern roughly twelve feet high, vast enough to feel like a plateau, with the dim outline of an Oathgate control building at the centre. The whole faked city above was the misdirection. Whoever guarded this place would happily have let them sail away with all the quartz they could carry, if only they had been satisfied with the fake. Lopen checks the spanreed Huio gave him; it is not blinking, which is the *all is well* signal. He tells Rushu she is a genius and a storming fool both, leaves her with the sailors, and Lashes himself out of the city back toward the beach. Whoever runs this island had been willing to let the expedition leave with their fake riches; finding the real prize has made them all targets.

On the Wandersail Rysn hears the first clue as a clicking, like carapace on carapace, and turns expecting Chiri-Chiri returned. Instead she sees hundreds of fist-sized cremlings crawling up the side of the ship out of the water. Each carries a scrap of skin or bone on its back. She spots one with an eyeball balanced on it. She screams a fraction too late to warn anyone; the ocean around the ship is boiling with the same creatures.

Violet fearspren coil at her feet. The straps on her chair fight her trembling fingers; by the time she is loose, the cremlings are everywhere. Instead of crawling onto her, however, the swarms nearest her start *fitting together*: clasping legs from the inside out, presenting their backs outward, the skin and bone fragments puzzling into a continuous outer surface. Feet, legs, a writhing torso, arms, a head; the cremling-bodies inside the figure twitch and bulge until something seems to settle, and then a tattooed nude man with no genitalia is standing on her deck, lines of ink hiding the seams. Nikli greets her by name. Her expedition, he says regretfully, has proven very persistent. Behind him other swarms are forming similar figures around the captain and the remaining ten sailors; the men try spear-thrusts and the spears go straight through, cremlings boiling out of the wound around the haft.

Cord steps deliberately between Rysn and Nikli and answers him in Horneater. Nikli replies in the same language, then switches to Veden — he had not expected to find one of the *Sighted* on this trip, he says, and the Sleepless do not kill her people lightly: she has long guarded Cultivation's Perpendicularity, and her presence here is regrettable. He addresses her formally as Hualinam'lunanaki'akilu. He tells Rysn that the moment for negotiation has passed: she ignored his earlier warnings, the shore party did not take the bait of the fake Oathgate, and the very cosmere is at stake — a few deaths now are the cost of preventing a catastrophe. He looks away, very humanly ashamed; he says, for what it is worth, that he genuinely enjoyed their time together. Cord shouts something at him in Horneater that turns into an argument, then turns to Rysn and whispers in Veden that the argument was a distraction — *hold your breath* — heaves Rysn over her shoulder, leaps up onto the floating chair, and uses it as a step to launch them both clear over the rail into the dark water below.