Helena is taken from the lower areas of Central to a former research-floor laboratory in the Alchemy Tower. Left alone after Stroud locks her in, Helena is too weakened by withdrawal and nullification to run, so she turns inward. She tries to make sense of transference and animancy, wonders whether the Eternal Flame may have hidden something in her mind, and resolves that if Luc were alive he would already be planning escape and rescue; therefore Helena must try to act in his place.

Over what feels like days, Stroud keeps Helena sedated, fed through tubes, and under examination. Stroud interrogates Helena using old academic and Resistance records, discovering old damage in Helena’s wrist that Helena cannot remember. Their exchanges reveal Stroud’s contempt for Helena as a vivimancer who sided with the Eternal Flame, while Helena reflects on her arrival in Paladia, her education at the Institute, Luc’s encouragement, the guilds’ hostility to the Holdfasts, Principate Apollo’s murder, Morrough’s rise, and the Undying’s use of necromancy to turn the war.

As Helena is forced to walk the corridors with necrothrall escorts, she learns more about New Paladia’s machinery of power. Stroud is frustrated that Resistance hospital records barely name Helena because vivimantic healing was deliberately anonymised. Helena encounters an Undying inhabiting Jan Crowther’s corpse, who recognizes something about her but dismisses her after Stroud identifies her as a Holdfast associate. Helena also sees a portrait of Artemon Bennet, recalls his laboratories’ experiments on Resistance prisoners, and briefly encounters Penny, another captured former Institute student, who tells Helena that Helena was right and that others should have listened.

Stroud then transports Helena away from Central by motorcar. As Helena sees the ruined East Island and relatively untouched West Island, she begins shaping a desperate plan: because escape is nearly impossible and transference might expose whatever she sacrificed her memories to hide, Helena decides she would rather provoke the High Reeve into killing her. The journey ends at Spirefell, an old Ferron estate staffed by corpses, where Helena meets Aurelia, the young, spoiled lady of the house, and discovers the High Reeve is not an unknown guild patriarch but Kaine Ferron, a former Institute classmate whose appearance and power have been transformed.

Stroud delivers Helena to Ferron for repeated temporary transference meant to achieve singularity without killing Helena, so that Ferron can reverse Helena’s memory alterations and Morrough can later extract the results. Ferron immobilizes Helena with subtle resonance and skims through her memories with surgical precision, then tells her the war is over and Luc is dead. After Ferron leaves, Aurelia escorts Helena to an unused wing, boasting of her iron resonance and warning Helena to stay hidden. Alone in her locked room, Helena realizes Ferron is far more dangerous and controlled than she hoped, and concludes she must treat the High Reeve not as a man but as a weapon.