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Kaladin runs up the stairwell with Azure as the drum-codes name his section under assault. *Like white on black,* she mutters; *I'm missing something. Just tell me. Who are you?* He fires it back at her — *who are you?* — and they burst out onto the wall walk into a scene already half-lost. Oil lamps lit on the towers. Fused sweeping between them on lances trailing violet light. Wounded soldiers scattered on the stones, painspren crawling around them in the shapes of skinless hands. They exchange a look, agree *later*, and split.

Kaladin scoops up a shield, drags a stunned soldier into formation, and starts pulling the broken remnants of the Eighth Platoon back together while his own platoon comes off the stair. He gives the orders fast: Squads One and Two with him on the near side of the tower; Vardinar takes Squads Five and Six and pikes-then-bows to the tower top; Noro takes Three and Four onto the far walk. They move. He refuses to draw in Stormlight — even the smallest pull would light him up to screamers and the Fused would converge on him at the cost of the whole infiltration. *Today I protect through discipline and a level head. I have done this before without flying.*

A Fused drops into the centre of his formation — male, plates of chitin armour creeping over forehead and cheeks marbled black and red — and breaks it apart with a lance swung like a staff. Kaladin levels his pike; the creature lunges along it and slaps a hand to his chest. He goes light. He starts falling — backward, along the wall walk — and the Voidbringer expects him to crash into his own men. The sky is his. Kaladin reorients in the air, shoves off the stone with his pike, whooshes past his horrified men toward the guard tower's doorway, catches the lintel, swings, and lands feet-first on the inside wall of the room. He steps over to the opposite doorway above Noro's squad.

The Fused curves around to attack Beard and Ved on the far side. Kaladin runs up the inside wall of the tower, vaults out the window, slams into the Fused in midair — *leave my men alone* — and clings to its rough robes as it Lashes them higher into the dark over the city. He keeps his right hand free, summons Syl as a long knife — a small Shardblade — and drives her into the creature's belly. It looks at him with deep red eyes, ignores the wound, claws at his neck, spins them in the air. *They can survive wounds. Like Radiants. That Voidlight sustains them.* He still refuses to take in his own Stormlight. The Fused Lashes itself with him attached back toward the wall and they fall together, spiralling. *Cut upward*, Syl tells him in his head, *toward the heart. I sense something about its power.* He forces the Blade up through the chest until it strikes something brittle and hard. The red eyes wink out.

They hit the wall with the corpse beneath him. Kaladin bounces off the body, cracks against the stone, and is forced — on instinct, not choice — to take in a single breath of Stormlight to knit bones and organs. It burns out at once. He shoves himself up. The remaining Fused streak away in retreat. He lands fifty feet from his own platoon, on someone else's section, and kneels by a wounded man to cut a tourniquet from a fallen cloak.

Surgeons flood the walk. Noro's squad finds him, Beard gawping at the dead Fused and at Kaladin. *You actually killed one, Kal.* Kaladin asks how many the Guard has taken down in all the attacks of recent weeks. The men share looks. *None. Azure drives them off. This is the first.* Worse, Kaladin knows from Dalinar's warning that without the Heralds' prison restored the Fused will return, reborn.

He goes to find Azure surveying the Eighth's losses, her cloak peeled off and wrapped around her own forearm with one end draping down past it. She gestures him to the parapet. Out on the horizon, sphere-lights blanket the land: the entire enemy army, marched somehow under cover of today's Everstorm. Days, at most, before they hit. He pushes her — *I need to know how you feed this army.* She purses her lips. Beard is still bragging behind him: *he rode the bastard through the sky*. Studied by her, he reluctantly summons Syl back as a full Sylblade on his shoulder. Noro's eyes bulge; Ved nearly faints. *I'm here,* Kaladin tells her, *on orders from King Elhokar and the Blackthorn. It's my job to save Kholinar. It's time you started talking to me.* She smiles, and tells him to come with her.