POV: kelsier
Summary
Vin watches ash drift outside the crew's hidden alley watch-hole on a Luthadel street, wishing she could be like it — falling without thought, without anyone to betray her. The voice she keeps hearing in her head is her brother Reen's: anyone will betray you, anyone. He had reinforced the lesson by leaving her himself half a year before, abandoning the crew without a word and stranding her in Camon's debt. Now Ulef, a gangly boy who is the closest thing she has to a friend, pokes his head into the alcove to fetch her: Camon is looking for her and the job is about to start.
Vin lets Camon backhand her against a wall in the rented suite where he is hosting the day's con as the impoverished country nobleman "Lord Jedue." She has learned to bend her face into the look the fat crewleader expects and to expend a sliver of what she thinks of as her Luck on him, to take the next blow off her before it lands. While she does it, she also gives him advice he badly needs: the suite's "servants" are dressed too richly for a desperate house, and skaa attendants would make the cover hold. Camon scowls, then has the men re-dressed and the room repacked with cheap labour. Vin tucks herself against a wall while the obligator of the Steel Ministry's Canton of Finance, a prelan named Laird, arrives. The audience runs by the book — Camon scrapes desperate, asks for the contract House Jedue badly needs, lowers his rate to half a boxing per acolyte head. Laird is too cautious to sign. At the last possible moment, Vin spends the rest of her Luck pushing the prelan's emotions until he agrees to bring the new offer back to his Council.
Hours later in Camon's basement lair, Vin watches the crewleader stand and announce that it is time. He has not told her what for. She follows the "servants" through the streets to the Canton of Finance itself — the very building Camon had insisted to his partner Theron he would not enter — and only inside does she understand the play. Camon means to double-cross Theron: take a quick advance from the Ministry and run before the larger scam can pay out. The obligator they end up sitting across from is not Laird but a High Prelan named Arriev, whose tattoos run further than any Vin has ever seen, and whose smile she does not trust at all. Vin's instincts tell her to leave. Camon presses on, and at the moment of decision Vin reaches out and uses her Luck on Arriev too. He promptly hands over the contract and a chest of three thousand boxings. They walk out unmolested. Camon has scammed both his partner and the Ministry. Vin cannot shake the feeling that something is very wrong.
Across the street, Kelsier has been watching the whole audience from a chair in the obligators' waiting room, eating the cakes. He tells Dockson — who has bribed his way into the timing — that the girl is at least a Misting, maybe more, and that she does not realise she is using Allomancy on a prelan inside a Ministry building. Then a second figure steps out of the Canton building behind Laird: a Steel Inquisitor, spikes driven hilt-to-point through both eye sockets. Vin has triggered exactly the response trained obligators are watching for. Two Ministry tails fall in behind Camon. Dockson goes to handle the tails so they do not lead the Inquisitor back to the lair. Kelsier downs a vial of the eight basic Allomantic metals and goes to pull the Inquisitor off Vin's trail himself — by tugging on the creature's emotions hard enough to make him come and chase.