e’ll tell on us.… You know he will.
 Wax rolled onto his back, staring upward. Darkness. The pit had twisted during the fall—he remembered ramming into one of its curves—and deposited him here.
 Rusts … how could his vision swim when he couldn’t see anything? He fumbled at his gunbelt and came up with a vial, which he managed to down, replenishing his metal reserves.
 You coming? Of course you’re not. You never want to risk trouble.
 No. He could see something. A lone candle in a black room. He blinked his eyes, but it was gone. A vision of the past. A memory …
 Light in a dark room. Set there to distract …
 That was what the dais up above had been. The Bands had never been there. The people who had built the place left the broken glass, the empty rack, the dais and the pedestal—all as a ruse. But they’d made a mistake.
 The glass box they’d broken had been too large to fit on the pedestal.
 Candle in a dark room … Wax thought. That meant the Bands were somewhere else. He blinked, and thought—as his eyes adjusted—he actually could pick out light.
 He wasn’t in a narrow pit. That hole had dumped him out somewhere. He heaved himself over in a twist, coming to his knees, and felt at his gut. Blood there. A bad hit, all the way through, judging by the wetness he felt trickling down the back of his thigh. He’d taken a shot to the leg too, but that didn’t matter. He’d broken that leg in his fall anyway.
 The shot near his neck was the worst. He knew this without even touching it, knew it by the way his body worked—by the way pieces of him were growing numb, the way certain muscles didn’t respond right.
That light. A soft blue. Not a candle, but one of the built-in lights of the building. He crawled toward the light, dragging his broken leg, scraping on stone, sweat streaming down the sides of his face and mixing with the blood he spilled to the ground