Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol leave the Iudex tower to find Vashta’s evacuation underway and collapsing into chaos: streets clogged with carts, animals, and panicked crowds, with only the Iyalet cart trains showing any order. With escape seemingly impossible, Ana refuses to wait helplessly and insists they go east to witness the leviathan’s arrival and learn whether the Empire will survive.

After Din borrows a spyglass from a Legionnaire, they reach an abandoned eastern rampart with a view toward the sea walls and the breached gap. As distant bombard fire rumbles, Ana reflects on how the Empire prepares for death each wet season and admits she withheld that the assassin was a twitch so Din would not do “something gallant and stupid.” Din, shaken, asks if this is the time for honesty.

Din confesses he fraudulently earned his Iudex exam scores: unable to read and write well, he learned lockpicking to steal exam copies, then memorized the answers and practiced writing them. Ana reacts with angry disbelief—not at the cheating, but at Din’s assumption she did not already know. Ana reveals she chose Din specifically because the cheating proved he was resourceful, rule-breaking, and determined, and she noticed his reading and writing struggles from the beginning.

Din asks why Ana would tolerate him, and Ana reveals that her aversion to stimulation is not caused by augmentations; it is her natural disposition. Ana adds that this made her suitable for a voluntary alteration that succeeded because of who she already was, and she frames Din’s hard-won survival and adaptation as another kind of self-assembly the Empire should value. As Din tries to process this—and wonders who “assigned” Ana—another quake and a sickening breeze signal the leviathan’s approach.

Through the spyglass, Din sees the colossal, plated leviathan lumber into the breach, its vast shell and unsettling, luminous-eyed underside barely comprehensible through the trembling air. Din screams as massed artillery hammers it; then a uniquely immense detonation—the titan-killer—follows. When dust clears, the walls still stand and the leviathan lies split open and dead. Blue flares rise on the horizon, and Ana quietly concludes the meaning: the beast is slain, and the Empire endures.