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Lift creeps down the inner hallway of the safehouse toward the sound of Darkness's voice with Wyndle at her ankle, who fills the walk with helpful, anxious suggestions for the gentler ways she might die today — a quick blow to the head rather than a disembowelling, suffocation if possible, falling at a pinch — anything but stabbing, please, so that he will not have to remember her on a Shardblade. *Remember the girl in the market,* she tells herself. Her hands are trembling anyway.

The corridor opens on a deeper chamber lit not by spheres but by larger unset diamonds set out as steady lamps. She crouches at the half-open door. Inside, Darkness paces in a stiff white shirt before two underlings in his black-and-silver uniform. One is a round-faced Makabaki man; the other is a woman with a long dark braid and a square face, probably Reshi. He is dressing them down for poor focus on the order's purpose. The woman protests that she stopped an alley assault that morning; Darkness grants that the deed was well, then reminds her that small crimes are a distraction. Surgebinders, she supplies. He has earlier today found a lead they both missed: a second offender is in Yeddaw.

The man takes a careful breath and wonders aloud whether the return of the other Radiant orders might not actually be welcome — surely they don't want to be alone in this. No, Darkness says, evenly. He once thought as the boy does; Ishar corrected him. Without Honor alive to regulate the bonds between men and spren, new bonded humans will rediscover the deeper oaths, and there is a chance — even a small one — that the Voidbringers will use that to cross between worlds again and trigger another Desolation. Absolute fidelity to the mission Ishar set is therefore required: any chance of that outcome justifies every present killing.

*You're wrong,* a soft voice says from the shadow inside the door — *you may be a god, but you're still wrong.* Lift nearly comes out of her skin. There is a man sitting on the floor a hand's reach from her, and she has missed him completely, eyes nailed to Darkness: tattered white clothes, head shaved down to a short brown fuzz, ghost-pale skin, a long sword in a silvery sheath cradled along his body like a doll. He shifts and leaves a faint white afterimage behind him that fades a heartbeat later. *They're already back,* he whispers in a smooth Shin accent. *The Voidbringers have already returned.* White clothes. Bald head. Silver-sheathed Shardblade. *Shin accent.* This, she realises with a fresh spike of horror, is the Assassin in White.

Darkness turns to him without heat and tells him he is mistaken. What he saw on the Shattered Plains was a cluster of remnant listeners from antiquity summoning a few Voidspren in the old forms — he has contacted Ishar, and Ishar has assured him so; the new red-lightning storm is an oddity, nothing more. The assassin presses anyway: the new storm, the red eyes. *You're wrong, Nin-son-God. You are wrong.* Darkness answers him in the same level voice — *Szeth-son-Neturo* — and tells him that to question is to begin a slide into inaction; the only path to sanity is to pick a code and follow it. *This was the way of the Knights Radiant,* he tells the two initiates, *and it is the way of the Skybreakers.* The other orders, he adds, always considered themselves above the law; only the Skybreakers understood that the trustworthy thing is something external to yourself — even his own mind, he says, *especially* his own mind, cannot be trusted.

He sets them a deadline. Find and judge the Surgebinder hiding here by sunset. Lift he reserves for himself: *she is mine.* If the local one is not found by sundown he will deal with the matter himself, and he is not willing to wait longer than that, because once a few of them gather, more always come — he has seen it for the past five years; Surgebinders cluster. The woman and man salute and start to leave. As they move, she lights up softly with Stormlight and, when she notices, blushes.

*Bollocks,* Lift whispers, and gets out of there — past the doorman dozing at the front, back into the room with the practice swords, out through the shutters into her overgrown tree, down to the street, and around a corner into an alley where a family is quietly eating pancakes in a shanty with two whole walls. She slides down the stone wall and sits, heart hammering, complaining out loud that she is hungry again. Wyndle coils around her leg and, in a voice gone small, says what she has already worked out for herself: that name — *Nin* — is one of Nalan's names. A name for the Herald of Justice. They are supposed to be gone. If Darkness is one of *them*, what are she and Wyndle supposed to do about any of it? She has no answer. Eventually she gets up and starts walking, slowly, back toward the immigrant quarter and the orphanage.