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Kaladin knows he may be making a mistake, revealing himself to a Radiant spren he does not yet trust — but the garnet voice that just spared him from the Pursuer sounded genuinely frightened, and he cannot make himself walk away from that. He leans on a spike of fear-energy rather than his fatigue, breaks into a sprint, and reaches the four-guard post before the second guard can turn — bursting alight with Stormlight to startle them. He catches their thrusts, sticks both spears to their wielders' hands with Full Lashings, crosses the shafts to the ceiling and ducks through the gap, then shoulders the third guard into the fourth and Lashes them into a single struggling lump. He kicks a spear up out of the air. *Hello, old friend. I keep finding my way back to you, don't I?* He can hear another post forming up below, so the tower spren's light leads him out a perimeter balcony instead, down a rope to the floor below, through a startled family's dinner, and back inward.

The tower spren sends garnet light spiralling along the strata to guide him; sometimes the light has no clean path and disappears, then reappears ahead. He runs across the entire second floor toward the atrium, picking up tails, throwing his sticky spear at a pair of guards, stealing one of theirs. A second blockade is organising at an intersection — axes in front, nets behind, crossbows at the back — and they know how to fight a Radiant. An axe bites his side; the wound heals, but another net is coming. He cannot fight gravity any more and feels the loss with every step. He retreats; the spren flashes garnet down a side corridor and into a glassmaker's shop, then through a hidden door into a Thaylen woodworker's shop on the far side — circumventing the blockade entirely. *How do you still fight?* the woodworker asks, gripping his arm. *The same way you do,* Kaladin says. *One day at a time, always taking the next step. Don't get yourself killed. But also don't give up hope.*

The atrium quarter is unnaturally hushed. Where there should be lift-clank and voices there is silence under curfew. Syl guides him north, where moonlight spills through a torn-open secret door in the eastern wall. Beyond the rubble, a short tunnel ends in open mountain air. A sapphire as large as a chasmfiend's gemheart sits in a built-in stand, crusted in crem that has just been chipped off — a node sited to be renewed by storms. The Fused in practical leather with the red-orange topknot, Raboniel herself, is already there with the Pursuer. *I told you he'd come,* she says.

The Pursuer hurls his body away as a ribbon of crimson light, materialises beside Kaladin's spear, then closes in. Kaladin tries the same trick that worked the first time — stick the spear to a body, leave the body — but the Pursuer simply abandons it again. The third time, he takes Kaladin from behind in a precise immobilising hold and waits. He needs to do nothing else; he can outlast Stormlight. *I will kill you,* he tells Kaladin in a thick accent. *I have killed every person who has ever killed me. No one has ever defeated me twice. And since we are no longer confined to Braize at the end of the war, I will pursue you forever. I am the spren of vengeance.* Syl saves him — appearing in Voidspren red and snapping an order to set him down right now: *we need him; you can kill him after.* The Pursuer relaxes long enough for Kaladin to elbow free, Lash him to the floor by his shoes, and break away.

Raboniel does not fight him at the gem. She remarks that the Pursuer is not lying — he will hunt him to the abandonment of all reason — and merely steps away from the gemstone when Kaladin levels his spear. He realises he cannot defend the node alone; better to break it now and hope the others are better hidden. He slashes his laces, Lashes the floor by the doorway, and forces the Pursuer to land in successive pools of light, working through three bodies. With his last reserves he dashes back across them to pull him into a fourth — but the Pursuer recharges from a Voidlight stash Raboniel has tucked nearby. *He has stashes,* Syl reports. *He's getting Voidlight from the other Fused.*

Kaladin flips strategy. *He's called the Pursuer. He loves the chase. When we tried to fight him he was deliberate. Now we're fleeing prey, he might get sloppy.* He asks the tower spren — through the wall, in a voice near hysteria — for a single-exit hidden room with a door that opens and closes fast. The Sibling gives it. Kaladin ducks through, the Pursuer follows on his back as a ribbon — and the stone door grinds shut around his ribbon, sealing him inside. From outside, muffled: a yell of rage. *Coward!* Syl takes the shape of a young woman in a deep-blue Bridge Four uniform at his side. He salutes the closed door.

Returning to the cliff, he finds Raboniel now drawing Stormlight from the sapphire into a held diamond — using the node as a conduit toward the crystal pillar. He grabs a Shardblade-cut piece of rubble, shoves her so she nearly goes over the edge, and smashes the sapphire from its housing. The cracked gem tumbles hundreds of feet into the dark. He feels a faint thickening of the tower's darkness as it falls; the corruption from this particular angle is at least interrupted. Then he flags — and Raboniel, who has caught herself, rams a knife into his chest. He pulls his scalpel; she steps back and watches. The wound heals slowly. *That blade was not poisoned,* she says. *I merely wanted to inspect your healing.* The glass globe that had been beside the gem is gone.

She inventories him aloud — *I see Adhesion; Gravitation has abandoned you; does your hybrid power still let you guide arrows?* — and tells him plainly that killing her means a child somewhere will lose her mother to a Fused. He growls and steps forward anyway. *A true Windrunner all the way to your gemheart,* she says, fascinated. *You had no continuity of spren or tradition from the old ones, I'm told. Yet the same attitudes and structures arise naturally — like the lattice of a growing crystal.* She tells him to leave before her reinforcements arrive. He hesitates on principle, then takes the advice, side aching, and flees into the corridors guided by Syl and the tower spren toward somewhere safe to hide.