The last officer on the main strip watches the thing that killed Sangara walk toward him through fire it doesn't look at — and the worst part is that he knows the family of its face. It looks like the city's own machines the way a wolf looks like a dog. Light gathers in its chest, and it speaks: just a number, delivered like a verdict to a room that has already been sentenced.
When there is nothing left to do, it hangs above the dead city like an idol — a black star that will not fall — and then it goes north. Toward the field where Mary wakes because the night has a color in it, and learns what a horizon full of everyone you couldn't save looks like. Toward the forest where Norrin's column marches in the dark, following a little red triangle, walking faster after something crosses the stars.
And in the ruins, a dark armored figure drops out of the sky onto everything with a red light still blinking — clearing the dead city district by district, calling one name up the empty streets between kills. He promised to wait for Albert. Nobody said anything about waiting quietly.
Far below, in a hall of red clay, an old scientist reads an empty vault by its shut white flowers and says the only thing he knows for certain: they set him free. Then his battered phone borrows the eyes of a dead city's surviving machines, and three people climb up into the ash to gamble everything on four words shouted at an armored stranger.
We know Mary.