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Summary: Chapter 17
Nina and Inej arrive at the sugar district, where Nina distracts the guards by pretending to be a Ravkan immigrant as Inej scales the first silo. The plan is for her to use her talents on the high wire to move from silo to silo. Once she reaches the roof of the first silo, she opens its hatch and drops the chemical weevil inside. As Wylan had explained to her, the sugar sizzles as the weevil does its work. She thinks about the unfortunate fate of workers who fall into the siloes and suffocate in the sweet powder.
Inej recalls learning to walk a high wire, beginning near to the ground and moving progressively to higher and higher ropes. Despite her talent and obvious affinity for walking the wire, her family initially worried about her safety—yet the first time she fell was when she was forced to use a net. This is why she had argued against a net with the gang. Now, perched atop the silo, she rues this decision, deciding that she would feel better if there were a net. Still, as she starts to walk across the wire, she crosses easily to the next silo. This time, after she tosses the weevil into the silo, the odor of burning sugar recalls an experience at the Menagerie. A man had told her that he recognized her as a tightrope walker he had seen and, as a result, she found herself unable to dissociate during their sexual encounter, making the experience more awful than usual. Just as she’s about to close the hatch, a hand grabs her neck from behind and pushes her into the silo.
Summary: Chapter 18
On the other side of Ketterdam, Kaz and Wylan break into Van Eck’s house. As they do so, Kaz wonders if Inej would have told him if she was afraid of the silo job. He remembers being in Van Eck’s house before, when they stole a DeKappel oil painting. This time a dinner party below provides a useful distraction. Wylan burns a hole in his father’s safe with auric acid and Kaz removes its contents: both money and a signet ring that will grant them access to one of Van Eck’s boats. They plan to use the latter to get the Grisha refugees out of the city. As the two work, Kaz tells Wylan that it is Wylan’s shame about being unable to read, rather than the disability itself, that makes him weak (if he is weak). The two are about to leave when Pekka Rollins and some of the Dime Lions surround them, guns drawn.
Summary: Chapter 19
At their island hideout, Matthias, Jesper, and Kuwei are also surrounded by Dime Lions, who pepper them with bullets and bombs. Though Jesper shoots some of them, he and his companions are badly outnumbered. Matthias quickly takes charge and hatches a plan to escape. Detonating some of Wylan’s explosive powders, they escape the catacomb and take cover in another tomb. Kuwei and Jesper create ghostly illusions with the powders that scare and distract the Dime Lions. Then Kuwei uses another kind of explosive to burn a road across the canal. The three dash to safety on the other side of the water. Matthias realizes that, by leading them, he just used Grisha power. Rather than feeling as if he has done something unnatural, he wonders if the Grisha powers are an expression of Djel, the Fjerdan god. If this is true, then swearing an oath to his god and swearing one to Nina are nearly the same thing. He feels hopeful that the two of them will be able to change the world.
Analysis
For Inej, walking on the high wire both represents and enacts freedom and hope. As she thinks back to what it took to learn the high wire, Inej recalls how she felt increasingly free as the wire’s height was raised. First, her father watched her, and she begrudgingly obeyed his rules, chafing at the idea that she had to be under his control and protection. As soon as his back was turned, she challenged herself to more and more dangerous stunts, testing not only her strength on the wire but also the limits of her own daring. Finally, when entirely alone, she sneaked onto a wire strung high above the earth and learned that she had entered into an entirely new world, one where she felt free and in control. With each new risk Inej takes in the present, each of which represents a step away from her enslavement in the Menagerie, she experiences again these feelings of freedom. The desire to be free herself, and to help others be freed as well, shapes Inej’s goals for the future. Before she walks on the wire between the first two silos, Inej thinks about how, once they complete the job against Van Eck, she will be totally free. She imagines that Ketterdam is her audience as she steps onto the wire, because the end of any indenture means that she will be able to fight for Ketterdam and against those who enslave other people.
The auric acid burns through Van Eck’s safe much as the final full recognition of the truth about his father finally destroys Wylan’s illusions and doubts. As Kaz and Wylan watch the acid eat through the safe’s metal, forcing it to yield its treasures to them, Kaz works to relieve Wylan of the shame with which his father burdened him. A safe is built to hold secrets and this one includes Van Eck’s will, along with money and a signet ring. The will explicitly disowns Wylan, which somehow still surprises him. In this moment, though, as he uses his considerable skills to access his father’s carefully secured secrets, he recognizes something crucial about himself. He can burn away his misguided sense of shame just as he burns through the wall of a safe. Wylan’s journey of self-discovery requires that he literally burn through structures his father created for him.
Throughout this section, the gang members use their individual strengths and talents to face seemingly insurmountable odds. Inej scales the sheer silo and tightwire walks between them, a skill she possesses that very few people have. Wylan’s craftiness with explosives and other chemicals combines with Kaz’s cunning to allow them to access the contents of Van Eck’s safe. Matthias, Jesper, and Kuwei also rely on their individual strengths: Matthias takes the lead like a military strategist, and Jesper and Kuwei both tap into their underused Grisha powers. Each character is uniquely suited to succeed in a situation that would have felled other people, even other characters in the book. The plan can only succeed, however, if they work as a team, each member of the group relying on the others to complete their specific jobs to the best of their ability. Yet, as the section also makes clear, no plan can anticipate every obstacle, and what also unites this group of intrepid criminals is their ability to improvise when new challenges confront them.
