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Rlain walks into the tower's laundry room with an empty cart and feels every head in the place turn. The singer guards at the door perk up; the human women working the tubs and bleaching vats stop and stare; chatter drops to whispers. *Traitor. Reject. Oddity.* He keeps his head high — he survived Bridge Four — but feels keenly that with the singers now in charge of Urithiru he has somehow become more of an outsider than ever, claimed by no one. The lighteyed foreman tries to needle him about ruling the place; Rlain explains, for the dozenth time, that the invaders are no more *his* people than the Iriali are the foreman's. The man scratches his head and doesn't get it.

Loading pillows, Rlain overhears three women hissing about him — he hovers over the unconscious Radiants like a vengeful spren, he is the one who poisoned them, he reports any who try to wake. He turns and tells them, deadpan, that he likes cards: best at towers, decent at runaround, Bisig says he's good at bluffing. He nods and goes. Behind him they update the rumour to *he's a gambler — those kind can see the future, foul powers of the Void.* On the way out, one of the singer guards tries the same old trick of putting a foot in his way; he sidesteps it without looking. *See you tomorrow, traitor.*

Through the populated interior corridors, humans give way for him. Singers usually don't look — but those who notice his Bridge Four tattoo react along two lines: hate for the ancient treason of his people, or reverence for the listeners as a brave forerunner sect who readied themselves for Odium's return. To every one of them he is a symbol; he wants to be a person. The closest he ever came was Bridge Four, who at least tried to see him — even if they named him *Shen*, the local equivalent of naming a child *Human*. He spots the brown cremling again, the one that scuttles along the walls near the ceiling — Venli has warned him the Voidspren are using animals for surveillance in the tower because invisibility doesn't work properly here. He pretends not to notice. It eventually skitters off.

He delivers the cart into the Radiant infirmary. The room is busier than ever — water-bearers, bedpan-changers, broth-feeders, volunteers turning the visit into a kind of pilgrimage to look in on the Radiants. Most of them wear the *shash* glyph painted on their foreheads, even though only a few days ago the Pursuer had ordered his men to beat anyone showing it before Raboniel reversed him. Two stormform Regals stand watch in the room as part of a rotation Lezian has insisted on, and he watches Rlain across the floor.

Rlain slips through the hanging-sheet partition that Lirin and Hesina have made into an office at the back. Lirin is peeking out at the stormforms; he and Hesina have certainly been seen and probably been recognised by now, and he suspects the Regals are stationed here because the Pursuer knows it. Venli says they should be safe so long as Leshwi protects them, but Rlain does not trust any Fused, particularly when their motives are this opaque. *What games are they playing?* Lirin asks. Leshwi did not even ask after his son. Even Rlain is baffled — listener songs say little about the Fused beyond *avoid them*. Lirin also asks whether they can trust Venli herself, in her Regal form; Rlain points out she could have left him in prison and didn't. Lirin is, surprisingly, suspicious — *my son doesn't know me as well as he presumes.*

Hesina has a stolen map of the tower's sixth floor spread on the floor and is studying it; she means to get it to Kal as a way to help, with or without Lirin's pacifism. Rlain notices a second map set aside: the Shattered Plains in their entirety, in detail he has never seen before. He has lived out there as listener and as bridgeman and flown them with the Windrunners, but the symmetry of the broken pattern is only obvious from above. Cramped writing in the far east marks a scout report: a large caravan or nomadic group, possibly Natans, somewhere in the smaller weathered plateaus on the chasmfiend migration route. Rlain wonders again whether he should learn to read.

A breath of grief comes up unbidden. An entire people. He is alone. Then he thinks: no — Venli is here. The thought of trying to rebuild the listeners with her nauseates him for several reasons at once, not least his own past attempts at mateform.

Lirin yanks back from the drapes. Hesina reads it instantly as warning and flips a sheet over the maps as if she had spread it down to keep bandages clean. Rlain is a beat slower in tucking the Plains map away. *It's not that,* Lirin says — *come look. I think I recognise one of the workers.* Out among the laundry crew is a short man with a Bridge Four tattoo on his forehead, head down, walking with that familiar mute subservience: Dabbid. Rlain steers him quietly away from the Regals toward the water trough, low voice — glad to see him, asks where he has been, suggests they work together the way they used to as the two Bridge Four men who never got Windrunner powers.

Dabbid resists. Then he leans in, and — remarkably — speaks. *Rlain. Please help. Kaladin is asleep, and he won't wake up. I think… I think he's dying.*