Summary
As guards drag her back into prison, Jesper and Wylan save Inej. Inej hands Jesper Heleen’s diamond choker, which Inej stole when she attacked her (the “something shiny” Kaz asked her to steal). Jesper uses the diamond to cut through the glass on the “Fjerdan Might” display, though soldiers pursue them with a battering ram. At the last possible second, Jesper cuts a circle through the glass, and Inej jumps through, making her way inside a tank. She shoots the glass, shattering it, and Jesper and Wylan join her. They escape in the tank, dragging the “Fjerdan Might” banner behind them.
Nina washes up on the other side of the river and resuscitates a drowned Kaz. They run toward the Ice Court fields, where they meet the rest of the crew in the tank…followed by a column of Fjerdan tanks. The crew’s tank destroys the bridge between them and the army. They roll to the harbor, where they find thousands of ships full of soldiers with guns trained on them, plus a Grisha Heartrender on parem. The crew agrees to not go down alive, except for Nina, who asks Kuwei for a dose of jurda parem. She takes it as the others protest; suddenly, for Nina, everything makes sense.
Matthias watches all-powerful Nina command the army to stop and sleep. The army collapses, and the crew makes their way across them, Matthias leading Nina. Jarl Brum and other drüskelle attempt to stop them, wearing Grisha-resistant armor called corecloth; they shoot Matthias and Nina, but she stops or survives all of the gunfire, summoning the sleeping Fjerdan soldiers to remove the corecloth from the drüskelle. Matthias watches Nina slowly kill his mentor and the boys he trained with, and he asks her to spare them—he was taught better, so they can be taught, too. She releases all of them, ripping the hair from Brum’s head, and the crew boards the Ferolind and sails away.
Inej listens as the crew grills Kuwei (translated by Nina) about the effect of one dose of jurda parem and what’s about to happen to Nina. Nina is resigned to her fate—either intense suffering or lifelong, debilitating addiction. Inej and Nina talk about how Kaz’s breathing pattern changes every time he sees Inej, as well as Nina becoming a scary monster tale Fjerdans tell their children. Kaz and Inej talk privately, and she tells him about her plan to sail and kill slavers; he evades her questions, but he asks her to stay with him. Inej asks how—with gloves on? Never touching? Inej says she will have Kaz without armor or not at all. Though she internally begs him to respond, he’s silent, and she leaves.
Nina suffers immensely while detoxing. She doesn’t want Matthias to see her like this. She asks Matthias not to give her another parem dose, no matter how much she begs; she asks him to stay until the very end. They argue and make plans together, ending with a string of insults and Matthias telling her “Don’t go.”
On the ride home, Jesper is annoyed that the Ferolind is like a ghost ship. Even Wylan seems to be avoiding him, which saddens him after all the flirting. Only Kuwei comes and stands with him on the deck, and the language barrier stops conversation. When they return to Kerch, Kaz sets up the exchange with Van Eck. Jesper, Inej, Kaz, Matthias, and Kuwei go to a quay on the far side of Ketterdam, where Van Eck gives them 30 million kruge, then says none of them are getting out alive. He’s got an army, as well as Tidemakers and Squallers using parem. Jesper draws his guns with a rush of anticipation.
Kaz learns that Jan Van Eck never represented Ketterdam’s Merchant Council. He intends to control all trade of jurda parem himself—it’s like Pekka Rollins scamming him all over again. The Tidemakers make a wave to destroy the Ferolind, but Kaz shouts that Wylan is on board; Van Eck reveals that Wylan is illiterate so is useless to him, since he’ll never be a businessman. The Tidemakers destroy the ship. Kaz then admits that the young man beside him isn’t Kuwei; it’s Wylan, and Kaz just lost a bet about whether his father would spare his life. Nina, powerful on parem, tailored Wylan to look like Kuwei (this is why Jesper hadn’t seen Wylan, and why Kuwei had been hanging around). In a moment of weakness, Kaz looks at Inej to see if she’s okay. Van Eck notices, and he sees that Inej is Kaz’s weak point; he captures Inej and takes the money.
Kaz is confronted by Jesper, who feels excluded—again. Kaz explains that Jesper betrayed them: He’s the one who got the Ferolind attacked by Pekka Rollins back before they even left Ketterdam, when he was gambling and mentioned that he was about to “get flush.” That was enough for Rollins to clue in. Kaz wants to commit horrible violence—he let himself get scammed again, and Inej is gone. Instead he tells the rest of the crew that he’s going to invent a new trick…as long as he has the right crew. Dirtyhands is back.
In the final chapter, Pekka Rollins looks at the raggedy crew before him. We learn that Kaz didn’t hurt him in that cell in Djerholm, but released him instead, saying “you weren’t meant to die here.” Rollins told Kaz he owed him—now Brekker has come to collect. Kaz wants a message delivered to the Ravkan capital, plus 200 thousand kruge, in exchange for his shares in the Crow Club and Fifth Harbor. Rollins, impressed by Kaz’s threats against Van Eck, agrees; after the crew leaves, Rollins and his crew speculate about why Kaz wears gloves. Rollins thinks Kaz doesn’t stand a chance against Van Eck, until he sees that his watch, wallet, tie pin, lucky pendant, and shoe buckles are missing. Rollins tells his man that he hopes Van Eck wins…otherwise he’ll have to kill Brekker himself. That’s a problem for another day. For now, there’s money to be made.
Analysis
The novel both begins and ends with sections from “others”—non–heist crew members—both of whom are from Kerch. This grounds the novel in Ketterdam, despite most of the action taking place abroad. The novel’s bookended structure extends further, as we see Kaz Brekker trade away what he fought literally to the death for in the opening chapters: his stake in the Dregs empire he’s built. In the beginning, Kaz was willing to risk his life, and Inej’s, to maintain control of Fifth Harbor. Now, he’s willing to trade it away for the chance to get Inej back and get vengeance on Van Eck.
In the final phase of the crew’s escape from Djerholm, Inej steals Heleen’s diamond necklace. In doing so, she steals the symbol of the wealth Heleen has accumulated from running the Menagerie, abusing young trafficked people like herself. Inej uses this diamond to literally escape a glass cage. Not only is this symbolic of Inej’s liberation from Heleen and her traumatizing influence, it also shows Inej taking a symbolically meaningful object (a beautiful necklace) and transforming it into an object with real, practical value (destroying the "Fjerdan Might" exhibit and allowing her friends to survive).
While Matthias and Nina unite romantically at the end of section 5, section 6 sees Inej and Kaz take the opposite route, as they pass each other like ships in the night. “The Wraith” becomes Inej, and Kaz becomes “Dirtyhands,” a reversal of roles that shows Inej finding herself while Kaz loses himself—especially when Inej is taken from him. Kaz asks Inej to stay in Ketterdam with him, but a life with Kaz “with armor” is not good enough for Inej. Her begging him to respond internally leaves the impression that the couple’s (lack of) communication is one of their most important weaknesses.
At the end of the novel, the heist is complete. The crew has liberated Kuwei Yul-Bo from the Ice Court, and the secret of jurda parem is in their hands. However, the heist structure itself is not complete. The crew didn’t complete the getaway. Inej is gone, they never completed the exchange, and none of them are rich—when they show up in front of Rollins at the end, they’re actually quite beat-up and unimpressive. In order for the heist structure to be resolved satisfactorily, the reader will need to turn to the second book in the duology. Ending with Rollins’s musing that “Right now there was money to be made” encourages the reader to pick up the second novel; if we don’t, Rollins—and people like Rollins, who abuse people to accumulate unfair wealth—only get richer in the meantime.
