This chapter's epigraph comes from a soliloquy by Adrien, who has just returned to the city of Merridiah. He asks Adrien to tell him about some of his other lives. He says that he knows he has lived five hundred lives, but that the details of those lives have all changed. He wonders how he could have grown old when he has killed himself five hundred times. Adrien says that at least he has stories to tell, and that time does not matter. The banshees, he says, were "experts in muse deception" . He adds that the thrush "specializes in musing politicians" and that he thought he was in danger of expulsion for a "shutterbox exchange student" , but now that Dagny is dead and one of the other students is dead, he thinks he might just come back to his old home.