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Shallan slides through the third level of Urithiru dressed in Veil's coat but still wearing her own face, defying Dalinar's pair-up rule with a satchel and safepouch swollen with newly recharged spheres. She isn't really exploring, only sensing. Jasnah had spent years hunting this place expecting ancient knowledge, Navani expecting ancient technology, and so far it has yielded the Oathgates, the lifts, and dust. Shallan feels the wrongness Mraize charged her with hunting — felt it the moment she tried to draw this place, a discordant grating like the geometry of Pattern's own shape.

She picks a corridor and walks until she steps onto the raised speaking-floor of a stone theater carved deep in the rock, balcony above and curved benches below, more real and human than the long arid corridors around it. She tells Pattern what a theater is — a stage for plays — and he calls them a *group lie*; a wonderful lie, Shallan agrees, a time when people imagine together. *The Girl Who Looked Up*, she whispers, and conjures the story out of Stormlight. She uses what drawings she has on hand — children from the market, Vathah, Gaz, Palona, Sebarial, a bridgeman — to populate a vanished village living always in the shadow of a wall that has been there since before stories. The illusion grows beyond anything Shallan has attempted: grass, vines, a sky painted across the stone ceiling, the wall itself rising over the back of the stage. Creationspren in the shapes of old doorknobs and latches roll along the benches around her.

The girl asks the villagers — fruit-seller, mother, drowsing boy — why the wall is there, and every one of them tells her not to wonder, not to go past it, that beyond it lies death. She climbs anyway, days of climbing, sleeps in a hammock made of her own scarf. At the top she looks down — and on the other side the wall is crisscrossed with great staircases leading down into the world. The spikes and statues on her side suddenly mean something else: the wall was raised not to keep evil things *out* but to keep her village *in*. Shallan chokes up; the memory carries her mother and father and brothers with it. The illusion frays. The wall fades, the audience of imagined friends collapses back into Light that pulls home into her chest. *That's how it ended?* asks Pattern. *No,* she says — the girl goes down, finds a perfect city lit by Stormlight beyond the wall, steals some, brings it back; the storms come as punishment, breaking the wall. *That's how the storms first began?* *Of course not,* she says. *It's a lie. A story. It doesn't mean anything.* *Then why are you crying?*

She turns to leave the empty stage and one of the shadowed audience members — one she did not draw — stands up and walks out the back of the theater. Shallan flings herself from the stage, Veil's coat fluttering, and gives chase down the corridor with all of her Light thrumming under her skin. She ties back her hair as she runs — *Radiant would know what to do* — and summons Pattern as a Shardblade to her hand. She skids into a small round chamber and a dozen versions of herself, drawn from her sketches, split around her and dissolve: Shallan in her dress, Veil in her coat, Shallan as a child, as a youth, as a soldier, a happy wife, a mother, scarred, bloodied, bright with excitement. The room is empty when they pass. The walls are scored with deep vertical slots running floor to ceiling — air ducts — and somewhere through them, far below, she can hear the Breakaway market.

She peers into one of the slots and something moves inside. A dark mass squeezes through the narrow space — elbows, ribs, a splayed hand with knuckles bending the wrong way — and a distorted human face turns toward her sphere-light with reflective eyes. She pulls back and summons her Blade wardingly, but to hack the stone open would take forever — and the thing is going down toward the market.

Shallan runs. She breathes Veil's face across her own as she goes, swerves through the tower's puzzle of corridors past children laughing and making shadow-shapes with chip-light, and stumbles out onto a balcony above the cavernous Breakaway. From the floor below: a scream. She drinks her Light back in to stop glowing and takes the stairs at a reckless pace, Veil running headlong into danger as Veil does.

A crowd has gathered between two rows of salvage-stalls and at its center stands Rock, the Bridge Four Horneater, out of uniform, hand bleeding from a wound that went clean through the palm. Veil flashes an Aladar policing-force commission and gets the story: the attacker came from the crowd in a long coat and a hat, a woman screamed to pull Rock's attention, the knife went into his hand, and the attacker ran. No one is dead. Rock guesses it was political — somebody angry at the Kholin guard, taking a swing at any blue uniform. Veil feels a chill. A large Horneater stabbed in the market only a few streets over from All's Alley — a man who looks very like the man Veil knifed there — attacked by someone in a coat and a hat. *Like Veil usually does.*

A voice behind her: *I thought I'd find you here.* The short woman in a brown havah from All's Alley — the one whose eyes had lit at the Ghostbloods' symbol — is suddenly at her elbow, asking pointedly whether Rock did her wrong or whether she just likes stabbing Horneaters. Veil denies it. The woman names herself Ishnah and pitches: she is an excellent writer, can take dictation, knows the market underground, and wants to *join.* Not as a ward — *what are we, lighteyes?* — but as one of *them.* The world is wrong now, she says; nothing makes sense; the Ghostbloods *know things*, and she does not want to be blind anymore. Shallan hesitates. She understands that desire. But the Ghostbloods are despicable, and the woman in front of her is exactly the kind of recruit Mraize would want and Shallan would not. *No,* she tells Ishnah. *Do the smart thing and forget about me and my organization.* And she pulls free and hurries off into the market.