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Dabbid has been different all his life. That was the word his mother had used — he liked it because it did not pretend. He had not started speaking until he was six. He could not add numbers in his head. He could follow instructions if they were short, and he could understand things if he was given time. Once, as a child, he had put a rope around his own neck just to see how the baby Dabbid had felt — the midwife had said the cord was around his neck when he was born, and he had only tightened the rope a little, not jumped from anywhere — but everyone had panicked and called him stupid and taken ropes away from him for years. That had been how it always went. He did things others wouldn't do, didn't understand why people were frightened, and learned to be very careful not to scare them.

After his mother died everything got meaner. He ended up at war washing a lighteyes's clothes, then ended up blamed for the brightlady's secret affair — he eventually worked out, much later, that she had lied to punish her actual lover and not him. He had ended up running bridges, terrified, certain he had already died — and a horse from one of Sadeas's own soldiers had finally trampled him and broken his arm and left him to wait for the end. Then Kaladin had hauled him out of Damnation and given him a new family.

He never quite came out of battle shock. Clapping still sounded like bowstrings; footfalls like hooves; singing took him back to the bridge runs. But he had started, slowly, to feel like himself again — except that his new family had no idea how he had been born. They thought he was Bridge Four different, not Dabbid different, and he had stayed silent because the moment he spoke they would know. Stupid, he reminds himself, is a choice — and a mistake is not the same thing as being stupid. He is different, not stupid.

Then everyone got spren and he didn't. Then the tower started speaking to him. He still isn't sure he hasn't done something dumb — but going to Rlain hadn't been dumb. He is certain of that.

He leads Rlain up through the tower. They meet singers a few times; Rlain talks them past with the right rhythm. They take the hidden stairwell Dabbid knows, slip past the patrols on the sixth floor, and keep climbing. He worries the whole way that Lift will have run off. She knows the tower better than they do; she said she could find her own way. But when they reach the meeting place on the tenth floor she is sitting on the ground eating curry and bread she has stolen from the Fused — and offering Dabbid some flatbread. She muses, to Rlain's discomfort, that immortal soldiers have to relieve themselves like anyone else. She asks Dabbid when he started talking. *I was six*, he says, blushing — and then, more honestly, *I could, for a long time. I just didn't.*

Dabbid leads them up to the door of the hidden room on the eleventh floor; the door has stopped working because no one has fed it Stormlight in too long, but Lift presses her palm to the gemstone and it opens for her. Inside it smells of sweat and blood. Dabbid hurries past Teft and reaches Kaladin on the floor — thrashing in his blankets, face slick, teeth gritted, the cut along his side a violent red mass of infection crawling with rotspren.

*Storms*, Lift says, and steps back. Rlain admits he has never seen a fever like this. Dabbid asks her, please. Lift flares with Stormlight, kneels, flinches as Kaladin thrashes, then drives her hand against his chest. The redness recedes; the rotspren flee. Kaladin's back arches in pain and then collapses. She pushes her other hand against his side and forces so much Stormlight into him that he glows. The scabs flake away from clean new skin. She sits back, sweating; *that was hard*, she whispers, harder even than when she healed Gawx. Dabbid takes her hand to thank her — and lets go, because it is the hand she has just wiped her brow with. Her own Edgedancer slickness, she remarks, doesn't work in the tower any more. The growth-and-healing surge still does. She wonders why.

Rlain presses Dabbid on why he has been keeping silent. Lift cuts in — *he don't gotta say nothin' if he don't wanna* — but Dabbid tries. *I just didn't want you to know I'm different.* Rlain folds his arms in carapace and says they are all different, with a word for Dabbid's kind of difference that makes Dabbid flinch — Rlain doesn't mean it cruelly. *Touched*, Lift offers — she has known kids like him on the street; they don't think the same way, and it happens. Dabbid says it happens, and it happened to him, but with Bridge Four no one had known. *You shouldn't have to hide what you are*, Rlain says. Dabbid believes the tower has told him that when he becomes Radiant he will be healed — that the brain he was born with is not the one he was supposed to have. He is starting to wonder, after the queen's displeasure at his secret errands, whether the tower has lied to him. But someday, when he is Radiant…

Rlain pulls out fresh blankets — washed earlier by Dabbid, who wanted something to do — and they begin to wrap Kaladin in them, and then a gruff voice behind them asks what in storming Damnation they are doing. Dabbid turns. Lift is perched on the end of Teft's shelf, pulling her hand back from his exposed foot, Stormlight curling off her. Teft is sitting up. Teft is awake. Dabbid leaps; Rlain hums. *Wasn't I supposed to heal the stinky one too?* Lift asks. Teft looks under his blanket and demands to know where his storming clothes are — and what happened — they were at the tavern, right? Rlain starts to explain that the tower is occupied, then stops, because Kaladin is stirring. They hush. Kaladin blinks awake, tenses, sees Rlain and Dabbid, and relaxes into a deep breath. *Is this a dream*, he whispers, *or am I finally awake?* *You're awake, Kal*, Rlain says, kneeling to take his shoulder. *Thank the purest tones. It worked.*

Dabbid steps back as Teft says something that makes Kaladin sit up and laugh. He is not Radiant. He is not brave. He is not smart. But today he had not been stupid, either. Once, Kaladin had pulled Dabbid out of Damnation itself. It feels good to return that act of heroism with a small one of his own.