Waiting for Ms. Liu at the motel is pretty boring and tense. Montiago is handcuffed to the bed and is mostly quiet, except when Van is punching him for no good reason. Gavin stands guard outside the door most of the time. There is a lot of debate about giving Montiago a hair cut in order to make him less ragged and lessen his power. Perhaps everyone is thinking about Sampson. Angelina does in fact neaten him up a bit. Van goes out to return the clothes he borrowed, then comes back and thumps Montiago some more. Multiple people call Dan, who seems somewhat annoyed and mostly tells them to cool it and wait. The weather, which had been clear, turns very very smoggy despite high clouds whipping across the city. Gavin takes it as a bad sign.
After a while, Van gets bored beating on Montiago and goes out to get some hardware. In the hardware store, he runs into Luis, who used to be a junior member in his brother's gang, but has gone straight and is working at Ace Hardware. Luis tells him that the murder scared him straight, because it wasn't just a gang hit, it was weird. Apparently Jesus's body had "bits" missing. When pressed about the bits, Luis mentions the heart and the other thing, the spleen. Esteban doesn't really take this very well, and the two have to take their conversation outside.
Luis has a little more information - it wasn't any normal gang that killed Jesus and Sra. San Vincente. He's heard it was a blonde woman, but he doesn't believe the part about a guy wrapped in bandages because that's too much like a movie. Luis also thinks that Van's mother was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Van returns to the motel after this and doesn't say anything to anyone, demonstrating excellent coping skills by punching the bathroom door.
Somewhere around this point pizza is fetched. The grease under the pepperoni looks like a yellow sign. Unfortunately it is too late, as this isn't revealed until the pie is finished.
Orchid Liu shows up at 7:30, escorted by the large man that Gavin remembers from his meeting with Abel. The man's name is Eponymous, which isn't actually mentioned until much later but goes in the chronicle here so the narrator can stop writing "the big man". Eponymous clearly cases the people on entering the room, and has a large pistol in a holster under each arm.
Ms. Liu uses cards from the Lombardy Conclave Tarot in order to try to learn more about Montiago. The cards, when pressed to someone's forehead, change their picture to reflect something about the person as it relates to the nature of the card. Orchid only has a few cards from the deck - apparently only ten decks were ever made, and most are fragmentary at this point.
The Fool reveals a man in rags dancing along the edge of a cliff, while buildings slide off the cliff around him. The Emperor is dressed in yellow rags and has no face. The Empress doesn't change at all - little of that in Montiago, apparently. The World shows the city Carcosa, arranged around a lake. Strangest of all, the Knight of Cups has changed to show a knight fighting with a man in yellow rags, without pressing it to anyone's head or doing the little chant in Romany that goes along with the cards. Orchid Liu is of the opinion that multiple archetypes may be "focussed" on the situation, which would result in increased coincidences and strange occurrences.
Finally Montiago's gag is removed, and he is asked what path he follows. He answers that he follows the path of the King in Yellow. Then he is asked to describe the King in Yellow, and his hypnotic words cause Van to see Carcosa outside the window, stretching away into the distance. Van flips out and has to be hauled off of Montiago by Thielo, and when Angelina comes inside (she has been standing guard) she sees Gavin as a giant marionette... she keeps her cool and cold-cocks Montiago with her gun, knocking him out. The visions cease.
There follows a lot of discussion about Montiago, including a quick education on avatars and archetypes for everyone (Angelina is the only one who doesn't seem to swallow everything Orchid says about the subject). No one has heard of a King in Yellow, and the archetype doesn't seem to be part of the way things are, like archetypes normally are. Perhaps he's a mage? He had no flame to the ether goggles, so that seems unlikely. Perhaps the King In Yellow is an old, forgotten archetype that has influenced things so that he becomes forgotten. No conclusions are reached. Montiago is clearly to either be killed as just bad news, or studied by TNI.
At this point, two gangs coincidentally start having a gunfight in the parking lot. One side has about eight people to three on the other, and wins in short order despite not being real professional killer types. They see the open curtain with people watching and move to deal with the witnesses.
At this point Eponymous takes charge. Van pulls open the door at his signal, and in about thirty seconds two of the gang are dead, one mortally wounded, and another fainted, despite the fact that one of Eponymous's guns jammed. Angelina actually had one of the kills and the wounding if anyone is keeping score. They pile into the cars and drive a few miles away to an empty liquor store parking lot, where they regroup.
Eponymous declares Montiago to be too dangerous to hold at a TNI location if that sort of thing is going to happen around him and directs the team to take care of him. Orchid Liu tells Gavin "He speaks with Abel's word. Consider this an execution, not a murder." Ms. Liu and her bodyguard leave. The team takes Montiago into a bad alley, where Gavin strikes him through the heart with his sword.
They return to their posh hotel, where most of them spend the night talking and eating Chinese food. Their talk inevitably returns to Gwen (why this is inevitable the humble chronicler can't say) which leads Alexandra eventually to produce some philosophy: "She has free will like us, it's just that ours is squishy and made of jelly and her is made of wires and gears."
Van goes roaming again, still disturbed by a very trying day. In the spirit of making a difficult day more difficult he goes to his old apartment, and finds the building boarded up.
Breaking in, he discovers part of a tape outline in the kitchen, and a blood-soaked mattress in his brother's room. There isn't much else still there except for a mummified cat hidden in the dresser! Van returns to the hotel and tells Angelina about the mummified cat after some pushing as to why he's so flipped out. He goes to sleep, and Angelina fills in everyone else on his background that she thought they knew but turned out not to have (and Van thought they had been briefed too, which is why he hadn't told them but did tell Angelina who came later).
Meanwhile, Van dreams of having a ghostly cat on his chest meowing until someone comes and tries to get into his room. He can't make the cat stop, so he tries to hide in the bathroom but the door leads to Carcosa instead. He doesn't remember the rest of the dream...
In the morning, everyone sleeps on the plane on the way back to Portland except for Van, who with sleepy good looks manages to seduce a stewardess and join the Mile High Club. On arriving in Portland, everyone goes to Tina's field hockey game, including Gwen. Later on that day there is some research in the library and some sleep and showers, but that's it for the chaos for the moment.