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Lift comes back to the orphanage and finally understands what the amphitheatre seats outside it are for: between meals the Stump opens the doors and lets her children out into the open alley-mouth to play. They are younger on average than Lift had assumed, and most of them are the ones nobody else could keep — confused, missing an arm or a leg, blind, broken. A pair of blind girls play a game of dropping pebbles and naming each by sound; other kids run shrieking up and down the stone steps; a school of laughterspren dance above them like silver fish in the air. *I thought you said orphanages were miserable,* Wyndle says from the wall. *Everyone gets happy for a little while when you let them go outside,* she says back.

The Stump drags out a cart of clemabread rolls. Lift gets in line, takes the one shoved at her, and protests when she is told it is meal number two of three: the roll she got last night, the Stump says, was meal number one whether or not she asked for it. She sits apart on the stone, chews, and listens to Wyndle needle her. He has stopped believing the story she tells about why she left Azimir — that she could not stand the lessons or the robes — because she had quite liked the robes, and had quite enjoyed making her tutors chase her around the palace every day. *Maybe,* she allows. *Maybe I just didn't want people expectin' so much from me.*

What she does not say out loud — the chapter lets her think it — is that the palace was not stifling for her. It was stifling for Gawx. The new Prime is owned by his people, watched at every meal, watched in his sleep, his nose and hair tended to by paid hands. She has not been able to look at him since. Wyndle needles her one step further: she came to this country chasing what now appears to be a Herald gone mad and the Assassin in White besides; she is, he thinks, very much not avoiding responsibility. She mutters that he is giving her lip. He thinks so too, and probably she deserves it.

She tells him, at last, the closest thing to a true answer she has: *everything is changing. That's okay. Stuff changes. It's just that, I'm not supposed to. I asked not to.* Her boon from the Nightwatcher three years ago was to be the one fixed thing in a moving world — and sitting here on the orphanage steps she can no longer pretend she has not grown taller than she was that night. She is starting to wonder whether she was lied to.

A skinny boy with a shaved head scoots up to her on the bench and points at her half-eaten roll. She sighs and gives it to him. She recognises him: this is the boy whose mother left him on the doorstep the evening before, the one with the angry healing scar on the side of his skull. He chews, blinks, and gives her a name — *Mik* — and an unsteady question: *Mother. Mother come back when?* No, she tells him gently, mothers do not come back. They had this kind of conversation at orphanages all the time, when she was the one being left. *We friends?* he asks. She tells him he does not want her for a friend; her friends turn into emperors who get their noses picked for them by professionals — and watches him try, very seriously, to follow the joke.

The Stump hauls another fighting child onto the stone, hands him a pair of earmuffs to close out the world, and notices the two of them sitting together. She accuses Lift of plotting to rob her, then aims a finger at Mik and tells her flatly to take him with her when she leaves: she can see through it when an urchin is feigning illness for food, and that one is no idiot, he is faking. Mik wilts. *I miss Mother,* he tells Lift quietly. *Yeah,* she says, getting up, *nice, eh? We get to remember ours. That's more than most like us get.* She pats him on the shoulder. The Stump calls the rest of playtime over and herds the children inside, sparing Mik one last displeased look on his way in.

The amphitheatre empties slowly. The old Tashikki gossips trail off one by one until only the grey-moustached old man from the night before is left. Lift strolls over and asks him, in earnest this time, who tells anyone how to decide what to do with their time — what is the secret to being human? He chuckles and says he does not know it any better than she does. People get such a small allotment of time; the day is done by the time a person feels they're getting a handle on it. Her life will pass, he says, but the organism that is the city goes on. He asks what she is going to make of it — whether she chooses, or is shaped by the greater good; whether she is, in herself, a grand palace or a slum. *If you could see inside me,* she tells him, walking backward into the street, *you wouldn't say things like that. At least slums know what they was built for.* She turns and lets the crowd carry her away.