Din Kol finishes reporting his discoveries to Ana Dolabra, including the sack of 7,000 talints, reagents keys, and Rona Aristan’s wall pass. Ana is stunned that Din carried the fortune around the city and decides she needs “deep immersion” to think, climbing into a book trunk to meditate in isolation while Din waits and makes tea.

When Ana emerges, she fixates on what Din withheld: Din can pick locks by memorizing movements. Ana then pivots to the missing Apoth captain, Kiz Jolgalgan, arguing that someone trained around contagions and alterations could be the most plausible poisoner. Ana orders Din to contact Nusis to gather Jolgalgan’s Apoth records—capabilities, postings, and associates—to test whether Jolgalgan could have been present at the secret meetings and connected to the murders.

Ana examines the two reagents keys Din has: the complex key from Jilki’s quarters and the simpler key from Aristan’s safehouse. Ana believes the complex key likely opens the warded portal to the Engineers’ secret meeting site where the mass poisoning occurred, and she expects Captain Strovi’s search of recent fernpaper orders to identify a location that suddenly replaced large quantities—confirming the poisoning site and tightening the timeline around the sixth of the month, eight nights before the breach.

Reviewing the wall pass and the cash, Ana concludes Aristan was likely Blas’s courier, traveling to distant cantons to carry payments or collections tied to Blas’s corruption. Ana and Din assess whether Commander Blas and Rona Aristan were killed by the same person; Ana agrees with Din that the methods are too different, implying two murderers. Ana frames Aristan’s killer as a “cleaner” eliminating links to Blas’s wider corruption, then lingers on the peculiarity of Aristan’s small skull puncture—suggesting unusual force and speed.

Ana assigns Din to bring the simple reagents key to Nusis so Apoth methods can identify what kind of portal it matches. Finally, Ana decides to use the money and wall pass to test their own investigation team’s integrity: Din is to place the cash and pass with Aristan’s corpse where it will be found, then Ana will have Uhad investigate and see how much money returns. Anticipating the risk, Ana insists she will confront Seneschal Vashta if Din is caught, and she sends Din to sleep before the next day’s moves.