Outside the Treasury bank, Dinios Kol waits while the Apoth contagion crew examines the severed head found in Immunis Rava Ghrelin’s altered safe. Ghrelin has been taken to a medikker’s bay after collapsing, and Kol is frustrated that he cannot question him further without official approval. To settle his nerves, Kol smokes his pipe while he considers how little the supposed robbery motive explains.

When Tira Malo finally emerges from the bank in protective gear, she reports that the head contains no hidden contagion but is not Mineti Sujedo’s. The Apoths identify it quickly through a banded tooth: it belonged to Princeps Traukta Kaukole, an Apoth officer who disappeared about two years earlier while overseeing a barge that vanished with its whole crew. Yarrowdale had assumed smugglers destroyed the vessel, so the head links the present crime to an older, unresolved loss.

Malo explains that the head was preserved with a specialized Apoth dehydration technique, which makes the thief’s actions seem deliberate and symbolic rather than merely practical. Kol and Malo consider whether the impostor left it as a trophy or a claim of responsibility for Kaukole’s death and perhaps other attacks on Apoth personnel. They return to the note found with the head: “For those who sip from the marrow, Te siz imperiya.” Kol recognizes the last phrase as an inversion of the imperial motto and interprets it as “I am the Empire,” though the full meaning still escapes him.

Malo says the head will be treated as the remains of one fallen in war and returned with honor to Kaukole’s family. She also plans to question smugglers and local criminals, though she doubts they will yield much. Kol then lays out the entire chain of events: the thief tracked the Treasury delegation, impersonated Sujedo, entered the vault by unknown means, planted the head and note, staged Sujedo’s murder, and vanished. As Kol reviews the facts, he concludes that the explanation of a theft for healing grafts and a cough does not fit the scale or strangeness of the operation, and he leaves convinced that something fundamental about the case is wrong.