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Navani descends to the prison cell of the Assassin in White sixteen days after the Fourth Bridge's field test, carrying two spheres. One is a captured Voidlight diamond, its purple-on-black described as Rushu's *hyperviolet*. The other is the strange dark sphere Szeth retrieved for her — at first glance the same impossible color, but the air warps around it and the wrongness of looking at it sits in her stomach. Her husband had owned such things years before the Everstorm, and the question of how is what brought her here.

She makes Szeth tell her again about the night he killed Gavilar — the fall, the broken body, the message for Dalinar, the sphere pressed into a murderer's hand because Gavilar trusted his murderer more than the men whose names he gasped out. Szeth still cradles his black-smoke Shardblade in his lap; Dalinar judged the safest place for the weapon was in the hand of the man it speaks to. Navani would prefer to sink it in the ocean alongside the gem that held the Thrill, and would prefer the assassin executed. Instead he sits in white, with spheres around him to banish every shadow, and answers her questions in a flat voice. She asks if he hates her. Yes. *Good,* he says. *Good. Thank you.* She flees the cell shaking and nauseous.

An hour later she walks the Cloudwalk, the open promenade ringing the eighth tier. The view is becoming famous; people from seven princedoms and three Makabaki governments mingle along the rail, a few Aimians with their corded beards among them. Urithiru is becoming the cosmopolitan city she and Dalinar hoped for, and she tries to feel that as a victory. She meets her grandson Gavinor at the prearranged spot. The boy is still too small for five, still too solemn, still recovering from what was done to him in Kholinar, but he has learned to laugh again with her. He chatters about a horse Adolin let him ride; then, quieter, he asks her to convince Grampa to teach him the sword, because if he had one, no one could hurt him and he could find the man who killed his father and kill him back. She holds him very tight and promises only to ask.

Down the promenade Dalinar and Taravangian pass, taking their public stroll. The crowd bows too low to be only for her; she had forgotten the meeting. She and Dalinar both know they can't yet excise Taravangian from the coalition — his crimes are no worse than Dalinar's own, and the coalition needs Jah Keved. The early circulation of Dalinar's memoir has lost some of the moral high ground for them, too; her Kholin soldiers walk a touch lower-shouldered now that the worst of the old unification campaigns are public reading.

She visits her cluster of scientists at the far end of the Cloudwalk. The atmospheric ardent Brother Benneh, eel-thin and beaming, shows her his anomaly: the barometer *rises* before a highstorm up here, and the temperature rises with it — five degrees warmer on the Cloudwalk than on the plateau below. She knows what she is looking at. The tower is bracing for the storm; it once regulated heat, pressure, humidity. If she can wake it, life up here will change. But the spren that runs it is supposed to be dead. She also hands the dark sphere over to two of her engineer-jewelers, Talnah and Nem, who pronounce its diamond practically flawless — a sphere that could hold Stormlight for months, Voidlight for longer — and confirm her impression that the air around it warps. She gives them leave to compare it against captured battlefield Voidlight and to test whether it powers any fabrial. Voidlight, normally, doesn't.

She climbs to the small windowless chamber near the tower's top where Dalinar and Jasnah hold their private meetings — chosen because the upper floors are small enough to seal off and the wall-vents through the lower levels make eavesdropping a real threat. She reviews her notebook on the dark sphere, including Rlain's witness: he can no longer touch Voidlight without it pulling at him, but this thing felt different — painful, *with a song he had never heard,* vibrating wrong against his soul. Adolin arrives with Shallan and the Mink, who has spent weeks being shown the tower and is dressed not as a general but as a man who would rather be anywhere a uniform can't go. He has lost Adolin five times today and is plainly scoping the air vent in the corner. Dalinar arrives, leaves his guards in the corridor, raps Adolin's boots off the table with three D-words for *decorum, discipline, dedication*, and prompts Shallan for the map. She and Dalinar breathe out their Stormlight in tandem, the disc spirals into the room, and the chapter cuts as Roshar takes shape between them.