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The strange new storm rumbles overhead with no stormwall — a creeping front, Lift thinks, more like a thug in an alley waiting on a passer-by than the orderly wave of a highstorm. She slips past the mouth of the alleyway beside Tashi's Light Orphanage and creeps in among the shanties, jury-rigged out of cloth and rotten planks that a strong sneeze could level. Most of the alley's people have gone to the bunkers; a few stubborn faces watch from rag-hung windows, anticipationspren curling up beside them like red streamers. Above the trenches, the sky goes thick and dark.

She gropes deeper into the alley until the only light is the red flash of distant lightning, which makes the laundry-lines look like broken bodies and the shanty walls look bloodied. Wyndle whimpers against her leg. *Something's wrong*, he says. Everything is. She trips over a body — a clothed arm under her hand — and reaches down to learn the face of the old man whose scream she heard. She means to remember him. But the cloth on the arm is wrong: too stiff, too thick, not a shiqua. A flash of lightning shows her a woman's face staring up sightless, in a black-and-silver uniform painted crimson by the storm and covered in something silky. She jumps backward into a second body, propped against the wall and tied to a shanty, head loose against the shoulder. She knows both of them. Darkness's two minions — and they are dead.

Then the old man's voice begins to speak. He tells her, into the dark, about a people he met somewhere she will never visit who believe that each night they die and each morning a new soul wakes in the body — that the memories are inherited, the continuity manufactured by the brain, the self a fiction maintained from day to day. He muses about why a philosophy like that doesn't bring the chaos one would expect. Lift spins, blind, trying to find a wall and finding only an oily, crawling motion on every surface around her.

A succession of lightning flashes finally lets her see him. The shape of a man, naked, with whole pieces missing — a shoulder ending in a stump, holes through the stomach and thighs, one eye socket empty — bloodless. The clicking, skittering sound that has been encircling her resolves: thousands of finger-sized cremlings on every wall, on his legs, climbing into the missing arm and the empty eye, presenting little patches of skin on their backs and interlocking from inside to make a person out of swarm. The old man is not an old man. He is a counterfeit assembled to look like one.

*What are you?* she manages. *Just another refugee*, he says — and tells her she needn't fear him, because his war is hers and has been for millennia. The ancient Knights Radiant knew his kind and named them friend, in better days before the Last Desolation. He admits he killed the two Skybreakers — calls it self-defence, then immediately recants: they could not have killed him, so it wasn't, but they came asking for a contest in not so many words and he obliged.

He has been watching the city's interesting people, he tells her. He names them only by trade — *the assassin, the surgeon, the liar, the highprince* — and adds her to the list. The others all overlook her, he says, and he thinks that a mistake. He produces a sphere and the alley fills with light. Lift sees that she's worked herself into a dead end between shanties; the wall is climbable; the cremlings on it scuttle aside to let her go. *Clever monster*, she thinks. He knows.

He gives her the lever. *He'll kill the one you wanted to save, if you flee*, he says — meaning the man the Skybreakers were originally sent for, who is not him at all. Nale knows to stay away from his kind. There is someone else in the city the Herald is stalking, and the Herald, mad as he is, will not leave the job unfinished. When she presses for a name he turns it into a trade — *we are in Tashikk, are we not?* Answer his questions about herself, and he'll give her a hint.

He wraps a black shiqua around himself as he talks, cremlings coursing around him, his eyes crawling out and being replaced with lighteyed ones. He tells her his name — *if you ever meet another of the Sleepless, say you've spoken with Arclo* — and invokes a name *Axies* she does not recognise. His questions are odd: he is building a philosophy. Cities, he says, may be organisms men cannot see. What bred her? What did this city need her for? *I am special,* she thinks, *so why don't I know what to do?*

Wedged on a shanty roof above two corpses with a Sleepless creature dressing itself by lamplight, Lift lets the secret fear out: what if she isn't special, what if she has been lying all along, what if instinct doesn't guide anyone, what if everyone is frightened and nobody has the answers? She hears the guard captain at the city gate again, and the scribe Ghenna, and the Stump in the orphanage kitchen — *I wish someone would tell us what was happening* — and accepts, terrified and then strangely relieved, that maybe she will manage anyway. *I left Azir because I was afraid*, she tells him. *I came to Tashikk because that's where my starvin' feet took me. But tonight, I decided to be here.*

The realisation arrives like a jolt. *I didn't heal that boy.* The Stump is laundering spheres because she needs the Stormlight and has been feeding on it without knowing — and she's been quietly healing the children, sheltering the ones she can't fix because her power doesn't know what to do with congenital illness, and reading the recoveries of the others as a scam against her. Lift grins up. *The Stump is a Radiant.* Arclo meets her eyes, sighs that they'll talk again — *like Nale, I am not one to leave tasks unfinished* — and tosses his sphere down the alley toward the orphanage to light her way. She leaps from the shanty and runs.