Before dawn, Din Kol carries the bag of stolen talints and Rona Aristan’s wall pass through Talagray, acutely self-conscious among the other officers. He slips back into Aristan’s unlocked house, enduring the stench of her still-uncollected corpse, and chooses a hiding place he believes Investigator Miljin would check during a search.

Din pries up a floorboard beside Aristan’s bed and stashes the seven thick coins and the wall pass underneath, then replaces the board and leaves. He returns to the Iudex tower and signals Ana Dolabra that the task is complete, unsettled by how serving the Iudex has pushed him into criminal acts.

Later, Din visits Apoth Nusis to have the newly recovered reagents key examined. Nusis notes the key is crudely made and shows no obvious emissions or recognizable scent, but she agrees to run standard tests using reactive plants and fungi. Din also asks about Captain Kiz Jolgalgan, explaining what he learned from interviewing Engineers and working with Miljin.

Nusis grows somber and tells Din that everyone who knew Jolgalgan in the Twelfth Cohort of the Apoths died at Sapfir during the breach, leaving no living cohort-mates to question. She adds that she is overwhelmed with Preservation Board approvals for new anti-titan armaments and related grafts, implying significant preparations after the breach.

Nusis then retrieves Jolgalgan’s alteration papers and reveals Jolgalgan was a high-scoring Sublime axiom but had longstanding psychological issues: anger, paranoia, and outbursts. Connecting this to her own service in Oypat, Nusis explains that Jolgalgan was originally Oypati—an adopted survivor of the dappleglass-consumed canton—making her trauma and instability more understandable. Nusis ends with the crucial update: Jolgalgan has been missing for weeks, vanishing days before Commander Blas’s assassination and before Engineers began dying of the same dappleglass contagion that destroyed Oypat.