Lift steals a food basket and retreats into Urithiru’s ventilation shafts, bantering with Wyndle while feeling unsettled. In her hidden nest, she measures her height and despairs that she is changing despite asking the Nightwatcher—and possibly Cultivation herself—not to. She fears losing who she was, especially as her mother’s little girl.

Wyndle senses a blanket of wrongness in the tower, and Lift discovers her powers are failing: she cannot slick herself or summon Wyndle as a weapon. Outside, she sees Windrunners collapsed on the Oathgate platform. A red bird, pursued by a vicious green predator, staggers to a balcony; Lift drives off the attacker—by biting it—then grabs the wounded red bird.

Though her abilities resist, Lift forces healing to work, mending the bird’s wing. Listening to it, she follows its insistent guidance through the tower, hearing thunder that suggests stormforms inside. On a lower level, the bird leads her to an elderly Alethi man’s corpse, apparently robbed, and mourns in his arm. Lift recognizes him as an old resident and promises to remember him.

A tall, scarred man in an Alethi uniform emerges from the darkness with the green predator on his shoulder. Calling her “Little Radiant,” he says he has wanted to hunt her. Realizing enemies are inside and Radiants are being neutralized, Lift clutches the red bird and runs.