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Navani at last hears Kaladin's voice through the wall of the chamber of scholars. He apologises for collapsing into sleep after the night's events; she tells him firmly that his job is not to save the tower, only to buy her time to reverse what has been done, and that he succeeded. He warns her healing is slower now and that he believes the remaining nodes will all eventually fall — if any is discovered, he will destroy it himself. He could not reach the Oathgates: his Lashings do not work in the tower and he must climb by Adhesion handholds. He did steal a full case of twelve spanreeds, and Syl believes she knows why they function — the rubies are powered by corrupted Voidspren, much as Renarin's spren is corrupted. Kaladin warns of a Radiant named Lift the Sibling lost track of, and signs off to rest with Dabbid attending him.

Pacing the room afterward, Navani feels smothered by the scale of the problem — she must repair a structure whose mechanisms she learned about only days ago, built and broken by Radiants who broke their oaths at the Recreance and stole the singers' forms when the singers became parshmen. To distract herself she hunts for a smaller problem and lands on Kaladin's need to move up and down the tower quickly. Tomor's prototype glove. The junior engineer survived the assault; she leans over his desk under the cover of correcting a calculation and quietly orders him to smuggle the device out — including the map to the weight shafts on the twentieth floor — even though it might cost him his life. Tomor is awed to learn that Stormblessed is the unknown Radiant the singers have been hunting.

She is staging a second decoy conversation when Raboniel appears in the doorway. The Fused is wearing a loose, formal-looking gown rather than her usual practical dress, and walks Navani out into the hallway toward the crystal-pillar shield. There a common warform soldier under Fused supervision is hacking at the blue light with a Shardblade — and Navani recognises the weapon: Sunraiser, Elhokar's Blade, taken from his corpse. The warform holds it unbonded, no gemstone at the pommel; the singers gave the prize to a common soldier because most Fused who keep captured Blades, Raboniel later says, are the ones who enjoy the pain. The Blade carves a wedge from the shield and the shield restores itself in the same instant. Navani holds her face still, an agonyspren clawing up out of the floor behind her, and tells Raboniel that if she wants Navani's cooperation she should not flaunt the sword pulled from her son's body. Raboniel claims, perhaps truthfully, not to have known.

Raboniel walks Navani back to the scholars' wing — turning left into the room Navani's people had used as a library — and announces new arrangements. Navani will work alone at Raboniel's desk in this room; twice a day she may send her scholars written orders that Raboniel will personally vet. The Fused then opens a box on the floor and sets out two things. The first is a glass globe wired through with a tiny replica of the crystal pillar — found at the first node. Raboniel has worked out what the shield is: a kind of perpetual half-Soulcasting, the air around the pillar held by the fabrial in the belief that it is solid glass. Cutting it does nothing because the model immediately reasserts itself.

The second is a small diamond glowing with light that is not quite Stormlight and not quite Voidlight — a faint, teal-tinted third. Raboniel calls it Towerlight, names it as a mixture of Stormlight and Lifelight, and tells Navani it is the reason she came to Urithiru. She believes the various forms of Light can be mixed and changed; she wants to know whether Stormlight and Voidlight, which she calls opposites like oil and water, can also be joined — as proof that humans and singers can coexist. Navani corrects her: oil and water are not opposites, just immiscible without an emulsifier, and on the table she makes one from oil, water and stumpweight sap to show her. Raboniel concedes the philosophy and agrees to deliver functional gemstones to the scholars in exchange for cooperation. She warns Navani to use difficult ciphers in her hidden notes; the spren she will set to unravelling them appreciate a challenge.

Left alone with a guard at the door, Navani finds a vein of crystal in the back of the room and presses the Sibling for the location of even one remaining node. The Sibling refuses — humans, they say, always sound so reasonable; the pain comes afterward. Navani retreats to the desk with a stack of books for cover and begins writing down everything she knows about light.