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Venli walks the model room she has appropriated to house Urithiru's fallen Radiants, some fifty of them laid out on blankets and draped with sheets, faces uncovered. The chamber has only one entrance and a window for natural light — easy to guard, and conveniently empty when she went looking. The intricate stone model of the tower stands at the centre, twice her height even at miniature scale and bathed in violet moonlight; she circles through the cross-section, wondering what the ancient Radiants used it for. One of the sleepers stirs as she passes — a young woman, eyes closed, face twitching as if in nightmare. The marks the team has chalked on the floor next to her body name her order. *Windrunner.* Further down the row, another twitches. *Also a Windrunner.*

Dul joins her. The Windrunners alone are stirring — caught muttering in their sleep, closer to waking than any of the others. Raboniel had asked her specifically to check on exactly this, evidently expecting it. *The Radiant supposedly loose in the tower is a Windrunner too,* Dul reminds her, *so not hard to guess.* Venli quietly tells him to try waking one when only her loyalists are around: their powers will be suppressed, and a Windrunner freed and lashing out would make a splendid distraction when the time comes to escape. Dul grimaces but agrees — they will need a surgeon, as some of the sleepers are drawing rotspren and hungerspren. Venli attunes Peace; she knows of one in hiding she can place here. Her old order from Leshwi to find somewhere safe for that family had not specified where.

She steps out into the atrium and climbs to the second floor. Curfew is near; the human shopkeepers around the great window have come back out of their burrows like vines after a storm, drawn to the sunlight, and now hurry to pack their carts before nightfall. Several women on the stairs gasp and back away from her, drawing fearspren. She has grown so used to her Regal form that she forgets, sometimes, how it must look — even with a Voidspren trapped in her gemheart she now feels it as her natural shape.

At the meeting point she finds, surprisingly, four Deepest Ones arguing in their own tongue, attended by ordinary singers carrying equipment. They are hunting for the gemstone fabrials — the nodes — that sustain the protective field around the crystal pillar. The whole tower is a fabrial, so their secretspren spin in circles and embedding themselves in the rock to listen tells them nothing: this fabrial is silent to them. They had hoped sand-based detection might work; it did not. Worse, the field is interfering even with Voidspren that should be invisible — the chaosspren now leave visible sparks in the air. The plan offered her is to interrogate every human in the tower, asking after a stray gemstone untied to any visible device.

Venli argues the plan inelegant — the humans have not finished mapping the floors, let alone the secret places — and pushes back politely. The Deepest Ones do not punish a good argument. Then, as she listens to them, a far more dangerous thought arrives: if the tower's interference also makes Voidspren visible and secretspren useless, then a Radiant in this place could draw Stormlight *unseen.* She could draw Stormlight unseen. Timbre thrums Excitement with her, eager at last for practice. *Dared she, though?* The femalen Deepest One turns the question back on her — *where would you put a node, mortal?* — and presses for a guess. Venli forces an unhelpful answer and falls silent. She had not wanted to help them.

The Deepest Ones reason it out anyway. Mortals are busy and lazy. They would site at least one node where a storm could renew it without effort. Storms reach this high only occasionally, but they do come. And the Deepest Ones flow off across the atrium toward the great eastern window — going to look for signs of a gemstone embedded outside. Timbre pulses Disappointment. *I didn't try to help,* Venli whispers. *They figured it out themselves.* Then Mazish — Dul's wife, one of her inner circle — comes hurrying down the corridor humming Anxiety. *They've found another,* she says. *Not another Radiant. Another one of you. Another listener.*