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Lift, wearing Wit's Towerlight illusion of Navani's face and body, sprawls across the chair in Navani's office in Urithiru while Brightlady Khal and Brightlord Aladar keep the pretend queen busy with imported food and rejected proposals — Opposite Day, seventeen new holidays, supervised access to things that explode. The illusion always includes the full gown to hide her shorter frame, leaving her effectively peering out from chest height. She is, she tells Wyndle from a flop across the armrests, useless. Gav is lost. Everything she touches goes wrong, and that is why they have locked her in a room while the world is being saved.

The Sibling interrupts with a faint echo of a voice from a distant corridor saying "peeky time" — which Lift recognizes at once as her stolen chicken, the one the scarred man took before vanishing into the same hole that swallowed Navani. The Sibling also tells her, quietly, that without Navani physically present they are not fully functional; for weeks more it is fine, but distant rooms are already getting blurry. Lift records placeholder phrases in Navani's voice for the Sibling to play through the closed door, drops the illusion, and slips out as plain Lift past unsurprised guards.

The Sibling guides her to a chamber the tower itself cannot perceive — a room lined in ralkalest foil, aluminum thin enough that a Shardblade can scrape through it. She climbs the wall on Wyndle's vines, cuts a circle up through the ceiling, and pulls herself into a stone cell containing a caged chicken — and an unconscious, hairy, far-too-naked old man chained from the ceiling, whom she does not at first recognize through the blood.

The cell door — supposedly broken — opens behind her, and three of Mraize's people come in: two thugs and a many-ringed woman in a havah. Lift drops the chicken back through the floor for safety, then tries to fight in a chamber too small to build up speed. She tumbles and slips by turns — the Edgedancer making the floor sticky when she needs traction and slick when she needs distance — and brains one thug into the stone with feet that suddenly will not let her foot leave his face. When the ringed woman zips at her with Feruchemical speed, Lift turns the floor sticky beneath her, and the Feruchemist's own momentum snaps both her legs.

Only then does she look up properly and recognize the bloodied man on the chain as Zahel, the swordmaster ardent. He tells her — with quiet astonishment, no longer indifferent — that what he just watched was the most impressive raw display he has ever seen, and that incredible power without training shows up as clumsiness. He says, simply, that she needs a teacher. She tells him he needs some pants. Guards finally arrive to cut him down.

That night, with her chicken under one arm and her own much-disliked lanky frame folded in on itself in the doorway of the medical rooms, she goes to find him. The mother she has been pretending was still alive; the body that keeps growing; the cousin she could not save — she lines them up honestly, and concedes that refusing to grow is refusing to learn. For the first time in her life she does not run from a teacher. Looking at the floor, she asks, softly, how they would start.