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Lift perches on the outer wall of the Bronze Palace in Azimir while six Azish thieves scuffle their way up behind her. The job, proposed by the aged Tigzikk and run by the nose-broken Huqin, is to rob the imperial complex on the chaotic night the viziers choose a new Prime Aqasix — two Primes in a single week have already been beheaded by a man in white with a Shardblade, and the city's attention is elsewhere. Lift is along because Tigzikk vouched for her, because someone has to look out for the old man, and because Huqin insists she will be useful. Scanning the streets behind her she spots a silver-buttoned figure under a streetlight and feels the cold of recognition: Darkness, the man in black who has hunted her from Marabethia and farther, has not been lost after all.

She drops over the wall into the bronze grounds, and the curling vines of Wyndle — a cultivationspren she calls her pet Voidbringer — grow up beside her in a face of vine and crystal, fretting that this is unwise. With Tigzikk and his partner peeling off for the sculpture garden, Lift takes Huqin and his crew up the side of the palace dome, Wyndle making her handholds out of his own body. At a high window she scatters seeds Wyndle gives her, presses her glowing palm to them, and watches vines burst through the frame and pop the glass — her first deliberate use of the Surge of Growth. Wyndle cheers her on as a budding Edgedancer. Inside, Huqin and the others strip an upstairs wardrobe for fine cloth; Lift, bored, sets out to do what she always does in palaces and eat the dinner of whoever lives there.

She slips down the stairs trailed by Huqin's teenage nephew Gawx, whom she keeps trying and failing to send back. Gawx has memorised the palace maps and knows the Prime's quarters lie one way and the vizier offices the other. He picks the safer take and slips off after the viziers' coin while Lift goes for the food. Along a high decorative ledge, Wyndle sidles her past the guards into the Prime's council chamber; under the long table she eavesdrops as a roomful of senior scribes argues over who is least unfit to take the throne, every "best application" a death sentence after the murders of the last two Primes. Six monarchs in two months, says one voice — almost a Desolation in the form of a single man.

Lift slides under cover of the tablecloth to the banquet against the wall and finally bites into the roll she came for. Then the door opens and Darkness walks in with a stack of properly filed forms — including, when the lead vizier pages through them, a leave of execution for the child. Lift bolts; a minion waiting behind the bedroom door cracks her ribs with a cudgel, but the little food in her stomach burns to Stormlight and knits the bones. As she draws on her power to break free, Darkness presses a small winged creature to her skin and she watches the glow of her own awesomeness stream out of her into its mouth, leaving her hollow and ravenous. He orders the minion to keep all spheres from her so she cannot Invest again.

Marched out under the viziers' protest — paperwork in order, leave of execution legitimate — Lift kicks a half-eaten roll under the table out of reach, and the lead vizier pointedly nudges the table to clip the minion's elbow, freeing her hand. She slips loose and gets under the table; once a passing guard delivers news that "another thief" has been caught, the room's distraction is enough for her body to scrape together one last spark. Slick from neck to ankle, she shoots down the hallway on her knees as if it were ice. Darkness is faster — he Surgebinds too. Through the kitchens and the servants' corridors she runs herself nearly empty trying to lose him, Wyndle streaking alongside, only to round a corner and find a minion holding a knife to Gawx's throat. She calls the bluff. The minion slits the boy's throat anyway.

Darkness slaps the minion for killing without the proper Azish paperwork, and Lift runs. She climbs out a window, gets to the roof, and is free. Then she goes back. The boy was nothing to her — they had only just met, she had told him to leave — but this, she decides, is who she has to be. Kneeling over him in the corridor, she breathes a glowing breath from her own lips into his and the Stormlight she does not really have left flows into him. The Words come with it: *I will remember those who have been forgotten.* Gawx stirs; the viziers gasp; the scions cry miracle. Darkness takes Lift by the shoulder, walks her down the corridor while everyone else watches the boy, and tells her plainly that she is an Edgedancer — he had been waiting to see which of the two Surges she would show. He does not hunt her for her crimes. He hunts her because what she is dabbles in arts that could return Desolation to the world. His Blade forms in his hand and he kneels to take her head.

"She is pardoned." Gawx — alive, bloodied, holding a sheet of paper — stumbles up behind them and declares himself the Prime Aqasix. The lead vizier confirms it: his application was the best, his survival of an attack by the One All White is the sign Yaezir had been asked for, he has always been Prime and they have only now realised it. Darkness studies her, dismisses his Blade to mist, bows to the new Prime, and walks out with no curse and no tightening of the eyes — neither pleased nor angry, only obedient to the law that was, for one breath, all he had. Lift sags against the wall. Gawx kneels beside her. She closes her eyes and asks if she can eat his dinner.