Luc’s recent offensives win territory but leave the Resistance overextended. Some captured districts are difficult to defend, strategically weak, and filled with civilians who fear or resent liberation. With the summer Abeyance approaching and troops concentrated near the ports, the hospital remains under constant strain instead of receiving the pauses between battles that once allowed recovery.

Exhausted and despairing, Helena admits to Kaine that she no longer knows how to save anyone and wishes she had never become a healer. She tells Kaine her secrets about the Stone, the Holdfasts, Wagner’s array, and the obsidian experiments that have failed to yield answers. Kaine asks Helena to bring him obsidian so he can help test it, while Helena explains her own plan to reverse nullium alloy into a resonance-inert mesh armour that could better protect Kaine.

A new bombing shatters the Tower windows and destroys buildings and skybridges across the island’s centre. At first, few casualties reach Headquarters, but Helena soon learns why: the blast has filled the air with nullium dust, meaning anyone who inhales it may lose resonance. The hospital tries to isolate incoming patients and use masks or wet cloths, but the dust is already everywhere, and the staff cannot tell who is contaminated.

Helena is abruptly taken by lorry to a down-island field hospital under written orders signed by Falcon Matias, naming Helena as head of the nullium ward. Helena doubts the order is properly authorised and asks to contact Headquarters, but once she arrives near the blast zone, she finds overwhelming devastation: crushed soldiers, failing medics, no running water, and widespread resonance loss from airborne nullium.

General Althorne arrives covered in dust, bringing bodies and reporting many trapped under rubble. Althorne recognises Helena and urges her to return before Ferron learns she is there, then reveals that no reinforcements are coming because command will not risk spreading nullium contamination or losing more combatants’ resonance. When warning whistles announce necrothralls coming to seize the bodies, Helena realises the field hospital cannot be defended or expanded.

Using Matias’s order as authority, Helena decides to evacuate the field hospital despite containment concerns, reasoning that leaving the dead and wounded for the Undying would be worse. She commandeers lorries and sends out loads of bodies and injured patients, insisting she will leave last because she is lead. As one evacuation lorry departs, another lorry driven by a bloated grey-faced figure swerves toward it, rams it head-on, and a bright flash follows.