Inej and Nina travel by canal through the warehouse district at night toward Sweet Reef, Van Eck’s sugar silos. Along the way they see bodymen unloading corpses under corpselight, prompting Inej to explain Ketterdam’s grim system for disposing of the dead and the meaning behind “no mourners.”

At Sweet Reef, Inej and Nina confirm the guards’ patrol pattern and prepare to follow Kaz’s plan. Nina worries that her powers have not recovered since parem, but Inej reassures her that they are meant to pass unseen rather than fight. Nina distracts a guard by pretending to be a frightened Ravkan immigrant seeking work, while Inej climbs the razor-wire fence, opens the gate from inside, and uses Wylan’s flash bomb to give Nina a chance to slip in.

After Nina signals that the route is clear, Inej climbs the first silo. From the roof she looks over Ketterdam and imagines Van Eck’s ruin, her freedom from Per Haskell, and the complicated feeling that the city has become home. Inej opens the hatch and releases Wylan’s chemical weevil into the sugar, then rigs a wire and magnetized clamps so she can cross from silo to silo.

Before crossing, Inej remembers her childhood as a gifted high-wire performer, her family’s pride and fear, and the way the wire once made her feel weightless and free. She crosses safely to the second silo and releases another vial of the weevil, but the smell of burning sugar triggers a traumatic memory of the Menagerie.

Inej recalls the customers Tante Heleen forced her to endure, especially a Ravkan man who recognized Inej from her childhood performances and made it impossible for her to mentally escape what he did to her. The memory leads Inej to question whether intimacy with Kaz could ever be safe or whole for either of them. As Inej tries to recover and close the hatch, an unseen hand grabs the back of her neck and shoves her toward the open silo.