And somehow, impossibly, passes through.

She blinks on the far side of contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a certainty, shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows, shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust, and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding …

And she holds all … In her hand she holds it!

A Tear of God.

Through the cold of the wind’s preternatural singing, she hears, “Mimara?”

She sits hunched over her prize, utterly bewildered.

“Are you okay?”

She holds a light in her hand, a different light, one that shines but does not illumine, a star that glitters as bright as the Nail of Heaven.

“Where did you get that?” Soma asks. He is crouching before her, nodding to the Chorae in her palm—or to what used to be a Chorae …

“You see it?” she asks, coughing at the waver in her voice.

He shrugs. “A Tear of God,” he says with matter-of-fact exhaustion. “Here we are, trying to hammer loose dragon teeth, and you’ve already found your fortune.”

“I did not come for riches.” She studies his dark, handsome face through the threads of shining white radiating from her palm. “So you don’t see the light?”

He glances up at the Surillic Point, frowning. “I see it plainly enough …” He looks back to her, eyebrows raised. “It’s you I’m having difficulty seeing, with that thing pressed against your skin. You look like a … breathing shadow …”

“I mean this,” she says, raising her palm. “What do you see when you look at this?”

He makes the face he always makes when he suspects the others are joking at his expense: a mingling of hurt, resentment, and an eagerness to please. “A ball of shadow,” he says slowly.

She pulls her empty coin purse from beneath her belt, hastily drops the Chorae in it. She vaguely hears Soma say, “Ah, much better,” but pays him no attention. She cranes around looking for Lord Kosoter. She can sense his Chorae the way she can sense her own, but it also feels different, like an outward shining instead of a pinprick of inhaling black. She sees him dozing against the wall with several others, his square beard crushed against the blood-painted splint of his hauberk. But since his Chorae is pocketed, she has no way of knowing whether it also shines in her natural sight.

Fear flushes through her, seems to pull the ancient slave chamber into a slow roll about the axis of her heart. Something is happening to me …

This is when she notices the stranger.