Back in the puzzle room, Momeline locked the door at the sound of arguing in the corridor outside. The numbered tiles took trial and error (no pattern revealed itself) but the party brute-forced the right sequence, and the glass wall of the aquarium went permeable. Talan wildshaped into a goldfish and swam for the chest at the bottom. An eel boiled out of the dark and swallowed him whole. Dravencoles answered with a divine smite and Momeline with the killing edge of her nine-lives dagger, and Talan was coughed up disoriented but alive. The chest, when they opened it, held only a note: the Black Star will prevail. Whatever weapon had been inside was already gone.
A guard knocked. They bluffed him off. They asked to leave, and watched Anvari sweep out ahead of them. She glanced back, double-took, and said nothing. At the dock a sharper guard noticed something wrong, but the party were already aboard their submersible and forced their driver to cast off. They surfaced in the central oasis to a wall of city guards.
The driver knew Mama. She had done him a kindness years earlier and he owed her enough to break orders for it. He steered them across the oasis to an unmarked cave on the far shore, where they waited until a runner from the network brought fresh clothes and led them back into the city under new faces. They went straight to the forum for Mama's trial.
Mama stood the trial in silence. She would not name the foreigners she smuggled into the city, and would not defend herself, and at last Sokari called for the first execution: six guards dragged Silas Mott in. The party did not let it land. Before the guard's sword could take Silas' head from his shoulders, Ferinthria cast hold person and the party dove into the center of the Forum. Momeline cut Silas and Mama free, Lirielle counterspelled the Magisters' first replies, and Ferinthria's Wild Magic surged at exactly the right moment and turned half the party invisible. Dravencoles cast Momeline's Disappearing Dust onto the rest of the party, and they all escaped out the front door of the forum with the Magisters, guards, and citizens in shock behind them.
Mama led them to a cave behind a waterfall on the city's outskirts, where Milo was waiting. Debriefing in safety for the first time all day, they realized the Anvari who had passed them in the vault corridor had not been Anvari at all. Mira was wearing another face. They took Mira's scrying focus out beyond the dome and staged a false conversation over it, hoping Silas was listening on the other side.
Then they went to the Colosseum and put their names on the Senate Trial roster. The first challenge was a maze. Within minutes they had downed a doppelganger, shocked the crowd with the sudden spread of Ferinthria's wings, and recovered one of the three relics. The maze stretched ahead of them, and the harder challenges with it.