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Cloaked among the crowd along the atrium wall, Teft watches Kaladin frame himself in the entryway across the chamber — uniform sharp, scars stark, eyes unbreakable — and gives himself, for once, permission to feel pride. He raised that boy as much as anyone did, and whatever else he ruined, he did good with that one. Beside him, Lift keeps her head down beneath her own hood, playing his daughter; the trick is that Kaladin draws every eye in any room, while Teft in a cloak is always just another forgettable workman. Phendorana rides on his shoulder, shrunken at his request, whispering quiet comfort. He thinks of the Envisagers who once damaged his family; if not for them he would never have known how to reach Kaladin when the boy most needed it, and so the Blackthorn would have died and they would never have found this tower. Perhaps it was finally time to let the past go.

The fight outside is their cover. Teft and Lift inch along the wall toward the infirmary door. Most of the stormform guards have been drawn out into the atrium to watch, but one stays at his post. They pretend to be terrified civilians; the guard waves them on with a tired palm. Teft grabs his arm anyway — the captive lightning in his skin sends a shock straight through him — and uses the distraction to let Lift crack the door open, then tackles the stormform backward through it into the infirmary. The Regal's bolt of lightning rips into Teft's gut and breaks the stone floor; Lift dives in and pours her Edgedancer healing into his leg as he hangs on, then he uses his own Stormlight to stick the singer's body to the ground and resist the lesser jolts that follow. The guard finally goes limp. Teft finds his shirt burned through and his hair standing on end, which sets Phendorana grinning like a child. She tells him to seal the door; he infuses the frame and yells at Lift to get the captive Radiants up and taking orders. The plan is to climb down the east-facing window — a sheer drop of hundreds of feet — and get clear before the Heavenly Ones notice. They will figure out the rest, Teft tells Phendorana, once everyone is awake. He turns to find Kaladin's surgeon father and his family, and then Lift screams. One of the bodies on the floor — dressed all in black — sits up from under its sheet and swings a Shardblade through her thighs. She drops, legs ruined. The figure rises, glowing with Stormlight: sunken cheeks, hawkish nose, lifeless eyes. Moash.

In the atrium Kaladin does not run. He knows the Pursuer will do as he always does — eject one body and shoot at him as a ribbon — and counts: that is the first husk spent, two left before the creature is forced to either flee or risk dying in his last shell. So Kaladin drops his spear, steps directly into the rush, turns at the last instant, and catches the Pursuer's reaching hands at the wrists. The creature is stronger than he is; that is fine — all Kaladin has to do is give Teft and Lift room to work. The Pursuer taunts him as unavoidable as the coming storm; Kaladin answers, with a smile, that he is not afraid of him — but the Pursuer is going to be afraid of him. Driven to the ground and almost locked, Kaladin meets the creature's eye and tells him plainly: I killed you, and I will kill you now, and every time you come back for me I will kill you again. *I'm immortal.* It doesn't matter. The Pursuer's life is not the blood in his veins — it is the legend he lives, and each death erodes it; in time he will be known not as the Pursuer but as the Defeated, the one who could never beat ME. The Pursuer's rhythm wavers. Kaladin triggers Navani's device at his belt, drops its weight, and is yanked across the floor as if by a rope — out of the grapple — then rolls to his feet, Syl mirroring his posture beside him, and pulls a scalpel.

Inside the infirmary, Moash kicks Lift limply against the wall and drifts forward, eyes only for Teft. The real trap was never out in the atrium with the Pursuer — it is in here with a foe Kaladin himself trained for war. Teft sees, too late, Kaladin's parents and his brother bound and gagged behind a draped section at the rear. He curses himself for missing the second irregularity. He unsheathes the long knife he had hidden under his cloak — he could not move through the crowd carrying a spear — but the weapon looks pitiful against Moash's Honorblade, the one that killed old Gavilar; this is not a Blade meant for great monsters of stone, Teft knows. It is a weapon for killing men. Moash greets him softly — *hello, Teft, how are the men?* — and opens a small sack, throwing strange black sand out across the floor between them. The fight begins, Phendorana at his side.