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Lift lights up with awesomeness and tries to skid down Yeddaw toward Tashi's Light Orphanage the way an Edgedancer is supposed to — feet Slick, hands pushing off walls and corners, an arrow in flight. She can picture it in detail. She just can't do it. Her first skid puts her down crotch-first on the great ramp outside the Indicium and her second drops her off the edge entirely. She lands in a humiliated heap at the bottom, shrugs off Wyndle's panicked checks, and takes off running.

The thoroughfare she barrels down is one of Yeddaw's great trenches, normally swarming and now deserted, awnings dragged in, carts gone, refuse blown about. Storm-warnings rumble at her back. She tries skid after skid; her feet shoot out, she clips a corner, she gets a mouthful of stone, her awesomeness heals the bruises. By the time she pulls up panting outside the orphanage, she has run out of Stormlight and the exhaustionspren are spinning around her like little brown jets.

The small amphitheatre beside the orphanage is empty, the old philosopher gone. Then from deep in the shanty-choked alleyway behind it she hears one low, raw scream of pain and goes cold. She sinks to the amphitheatre floor. She has no awesomeness left, no plan, no chance against two trained Skybreakers. *Do we go in?* Wyndle whispers. She stands up on unsteady feet and steps toward the alley anyway.

The Stump yanks her out of it. *Idiot child*, the old woman snaps, hauling her in through the orphanage door — *you're supposed to be in a bunker* — and slams the door and bars it. She lectures Lift about freeloaders pretending sickness for a meal, then disappears and comes back with a plate. She drops two pancakes on her — sweet centres, Lift's favourite — and announces it is her last meal here. The two pancakes are warm and very obviously not from the children's plate; the Stump had been keeping them for herself.

The big entry room is dark, lit by a single ruby sphere, lined with mats. Other orphans huddle together. *I'm frightened. I miss my mommy. What about the gummers in the alley.* Lift knows the room: she has been an orphan in rooms like it dozens of times across the empire. From the next room over she catches the Stump talking quietly to an older helper — *it's not the day for a highstorm; I'll put the spheres up top, just in case; I wish someone would tell us what was happening.*

Wyndle asks what she is supposed to take from any of this. Lift tells him to hush, and listens. Eyes closed. Then she answers his older question — the one he asked her at the Indicium — about what she actually wants. Not kingship. Not power. *Control.* Not to be pushed around by people or by fate. To be the one who chooses. Wyndle tells her that sounds reasonable enough. *Listen to these kids talk,* she says. *Do you hear them?* They're scared. So uncertain. So is the captain at the city gate. So, in another room, is the Stump. Nobody knows anything; nobody is listening to anybody.

Then a thought stops her. She crosses to the boy with the new scar. He looks up, lucid for the first time since being dropped at the door, and asks when his mother is coming back. The day before he had been drooling at his lunch. *Storms,* Lift thinks. *What did I do to you?* She had been certain she couldn't heal a head that was different from birth. But Mik had a wound. She doesn't remember doing it. She remembers wanting control over her power and only just realising she has none of it.

The Stump returns to scold a child. Lift sits with the cold pancakes and weighs the thief, the thug, the laundered spheres. Maybe even a thief can do some good along the way. And out in the alley, the old man is surely already dead — nobody will notice, one old corpse after a storm. But *I'll remember him,* she thinks. She finishes the pancake, restoring her awesomeness, and waits until the Stump's back is turned. Then she lifts the bar from the door, and slips outside.