Back at the cottage, Millie manipulates the haze that’s grown up round the model; it’s quite fragile, spinning off vortices of luck that evaporate quickly. She calls Horatio, who’s happy to eat them (they’re odd but good). Shaving the beams with a knife makes the whole thing more unstable and more prone to calve off vortices; the overall power of the pattern seems to be correlated with the mean cross-sectional area, but the stability drops when the area varies more. This lets her build a plan for the order of cutting.

After work, Lin Tan practises with the knife and the steel sample. While it goes through very easily, it’s extremely difficult to turn it within the metal; so rather than shave pieces with an angled blade, she ends up cutting a pair of notches then making a slice to join them.

After sunset, Bessie and Lin Tan sneak over the fence and into the hangar. (Gertrude and Millie wait outside, and provide an inadvertant distraction to cover their entrance.) Bessie keeps watch on the hangar floor while Lin Tan goes inside and starts to cut. This goes well at first, but soon a dark vortex moves purposefully towards her; she slashes at it with the knife, and it splits into two smaller vortices. That doesn’t seem to help, so while fending them off she reaches for the good-luck and pushes it into the things’ path; that works rather better, and they disintegrate.

Bessie has heard the sound of Lin Tan moving around to dodge the things’ attacks, and comes into the envelope to see if she’s needed. Lin Tan carries on cutting, but when she’s nearly half done on the first ring frame an inky cloud forms around the pair of them; even with her excellent night vision, she’s not able to see through it. Bessie climbs blindly out, which helps a bit; Lin Tan finds her body trying to react oddly, though her martial training helps her to keep it under control.

They move to the other ring, and start cutting there; there are more vortices, and Bessie ends up with full-body pins and needles, but is able to hold on to the ladders and fend the things off. After relatively few cuts, they hear and feel a creaking sound, and depart in haste; as they leave the hangar there’s a distinct vision of the two ends of the ship, at right angles to each other, which ought not to fit into the hangar at all and yet somehow does…

The watchmen are running about and ringing alarms, but with some well-timed hiding the pair manage to make it out without being stopped (even if it does seem to involve an awful lot of running uphill away from the hangar). Floodlights are turned on, and the magical field over the hangar is rippling oddly, but the group leaves before the perimeter searches get going in earnest.

Back at the cottage, Gertrude checks over Bessie, whose body seems to have been rearranged and then put back mostly right; but there don’t appear to be lasting effects.