Helena travels to the Outpost under false medical-relief papers, though her real purpose is to treat Kaine Ferron. At the crowded tenement, a concealed necrothrall marked with Ferron’s iron symbol guides Helena through hidden factory passages into a fortified, lavish panic room built by Ferron’s family, where Ferron is drinking heavily to dull the pain from the array carved into his back.

Helena tries to remove the gauze from Ferron’s wounds, but the pain is unbearable, so Ferron reluctantly lets Helena render him unconscious again. While cleaning the injuries, Helena uses resonance to study the array and realizes it is not only draining the talisman in Ferron’s chest but also consuming Ferron’s body, leaving Ferron too depleted to counter the damage. Remembering Crowther’s instruction to save Ferron if possible or bring back the talisman if not, Helena decides Ferron is too important to the Resistance, and too changed by his help, for Helena to let him die.

Helena removes her sunstone amulet, intending to alter its Holdfast crest so Ferron might wear it, but the stone falls and shatters, revealing a strange silvery-white liquid core. Helena senses that the object can heal Ferron and presses it over Ferron’s heart with her resonance. The substance passes into Ferron’s body, briefly illuminating Ferron from within; afterward, Helena sees no clear transformation except that Ferron feels warmer and the cold decay is less violent. Helena hides the broken red shards, applies Shiseo’s salve, bandages Ferron, and wakes Ferron without explaining what happened.

Over the following nights, Helena returns to treat Ferron despite Ferron’s suspicion and silence. Ferron is no longer visibly grey and the rapid deterioration slows, though Ferron is not truly healing yet. After more than a week, Ferron shares new intelligence: Morrough is quietly searching for a guard from a Hevgoss prison complex because Morrough’s promise of immortality to the Hevgotian militocrats has failed to satisfy them, and the latest setback has strained their alliance with the Guild Assembly.

When Helena asks why Morrough is using aspirants rather than the Undying, Ferron reveals that the Undying are bound to Morrough through bone phylacteries used in their talismans. Morrough can remove the phylacteries to travel without all of them, but if the connection severs, the Undying die; fugitives were reanimated as liches, and stolen phylacteries eventually crumble, damaging the Undying’s minds. Helena understands that Ferron needs Morrough defeated because Ferron cannot free himself by simple escape.

On the bridge back to the East Island, Helena struggles with Crowther’s order to hold Ferron’s attention and make Ferron loyal or obsessed, because Helena’s belief in Ferron as a mere Undying, murderer, spy, target, or tool is weakening. Helena stops at a neglected shrine to Luna, remembers the difference between Paladian and Etrasian myths, and performs an Etrasian stone-stacking prayer for the people and causes Helena still carries. Helena adds a final stone asking not to be made responsible for Kaine Ferron’s death; when the tower holds, Helena takes it as the only hope left.