In Julius 1808, Enid arrives by ferry in Paladia, seeing the famed river city for the first time. Lila Bayard greets her warmly with Apollo, called Pol, and welcomes Enid into the Institute’s undergraduate vivimancy program. Lila is pleased Enid chose Paladia over Khem and jokes that Enid’s academic seriousness will help offset Pol’s weaker study habits.

Lila takes Enid and Pol on a scenic route through the city and stops at a newly completed war memorial built where the nullium bomb detonated. The memorial lists the war dead, including many Holdfasts and Bayards. Lila admits that the memorial may never feel sufficient, while Enid, unfamiliar with war memorials, studies the names without knowing how she is supposed to feel.

At the memorial, Penny mistakes Enid from behind for Helena because of their resemblance, then apologizes. Lila introduces Enid under the name Enid Romano and says Helena Marino was a Resistance member who died before the Liberation. Mrs. Forrester then questions the Institute’s admission of a foreign student, but Lila defends Enid’s research proposal on vivimancy arrays for treating lung damage caused by the nullium bombing, forcing Mrs. Forrester into an awkward retreat.

While Lila and Pol are drawn into public attention, Enid slips into a bookstore and finds a newly released history of the Paladian Necromancy War. A clerk, who says he was born in the Tower, praises the book as the most complete account. Enid secretly turns to the section on Kaine Ferron and reads a harsh portrayal of him as the High Reeve, mass murderer, willing experimental subject, and Morrough’s likely successor.

Pol finds Enid reading the book and warns that such histories will never tell the truth. Enid searches for Helena in the index and finds only a photograph of Helena, Soren Bayard, and Lucien Holdfast, captioned in a way that reduces Helena to a foreign-born alchemist who survived the war but died in imprisonment and did not fight. Enid is devastated that Helena is nearly erased and that Kaine is portrayed as someone who wanted his crimes and transformations; Enid says someone should set the record straight.

Enid confesses that she came to Paladia because she needed to see where everything happened, but she avoids burdening Helena and Kaine because discussing the past hurts Helena and makes Kaine fear Enid will reject him. Enid tells Pol that he and Lila are the only people who truly know her, and Pol promises she will always have him. Their emotional intimacy turns tentative and romantic before an interruption makes both awkward, and they leave the book behind, still open to the misleading caption.