After a successful trade with a dishonest pawnbroker, Hadrian and Cat buy vat-beef sandwiches and eat near a canal. Cat asks Hadrian to describe his castle on Delos, and Hadrian recalls its cold cleanliness, towers of granite and black glass, and the distant beauty of the sea. The memory softens him, but when Cat asks whether he wants to return, Hadrian reacts with fear and certainty: he does not.

Cat tells Hadrian he does not belong in Borosevo’s streets and should be somewhere higher, but Hadrian denies that he belongs in a castle. When Cat asks where Hadrian would go if he could go anywhere in the Dark, Hadrian avoids naming his old ambitions and instead tells her the story of Simeon the Red, a scholiast hero who befriended the winged Irchtani, resisted human mutineers who wanted to enslave them, retook his ship, and became an Imperial explorer.

Cat asks what became of the Irchtani, and Hadrian explains that they still exist, that some serve as auxilia in the Imperial Legions, and that there has even been talk of citizenship for long-serving Irchtani soldiers. Hadrian then asks where Cat would go, but Cat says she is not going anywhere. She imagines Luin through her mother’s stories of fairies, silver trees, and hidden pools, while Hadrian silently recognizes a harsher truth behind those legends.

Inspired by his memories and by Old Crow’s earlier words, Hadrian admits that he wants a ship and the freedom to travel beyond Emesh. He dreams aloud of fleeing his father and the Chantry, seeing xenobites, and seeking truths in the wider galaxy since he cannot become the scholiast he once hoped to be. Speaking the desire makes Hadrian realize how deeply he wants it, though he also knows he and Cat have nowhere near enough money to leave.

Cat grows tense as Hadrian talks about escape. When Hadrian promises he would not abandon her and imagines taking Cat with him to Luin and to meet the Irchtani, Cat quietly says she cannot leave because she is planetbound. She then reveals that Hadrian does not need to leave Emesh to see xenobites, because there are xenos on Emesh already.