POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits in her corner of Camon's lair watching the fat crewleader drop golden boxings one by one into the chest he has just brought back from the Canton of Finance. Three thousand boxings is more than a successful underworld year. The Ministry should never have parted with that much money so easily; Vin keeps telling herself this, and the dread will not let her go. She decides she has to get out of the lair before whatever is coming arrives.
The thought of leaving alone almost stops her. She has never been alone — her brother Reen led her between cities her whole life, and even when he vanished half a year before, the crew at least was a roof. Of all the people in Camon's crew, Ulef is the only one she might persuade to come with her. She pulls him out of his table of friends in a whisper and goes back into the sleeping room to gather her few possessions: a pebble from each city she has ever lived in, a small earring Reen said her mother had given her, and a chipped bit of obsidian he had carried as a good-luck token and left behind when he abandoned her. She puts the earring in. She comes back out into the common room and Ulef is gone from his seat — standing instead at Camon's elbow, having sold her out.
Camon hurls a stool into her back as she runs for the stairs, then bears her down and beats her with a cold-eyed fury Vin has seen on him before and knows is no ordinary beating. She tries to push her Luck against him to soften his rage and feels it slide off. She thinks of her brother's voice: anyone will betray you, anyone. The other crewmembers turn their faces away. She is on the floor under Camon's fist when the stairwell door cracks open and a lean, scarred man in nobleman's clothes walks in. Camon is thrown bodily back from her against a wall by a force no one in the room can see. Dockson steps in behind him. Camon, dazed on the floor, recognises the scarred man at last: the Survivor of Hathsin.
Kelsier takes the chest of three thousand boxings as "payment" for saving the crew's lives. The two Ministry tails that followed Camon home have been killed, he tells the room flatly, and so has the Steel Inquisitor dealt with — by which he means distracted. He hands the crew over to Camon's second, a man named Milev, instructs him to dispose of Camon by turning him out as a beggar rather than killing him outright, and clears the room — down to the four hidden men Kelsier has spotted watching from behind a false wall. He wants a private conversation with Mistress Vin.
Dockson roots a bottle of bad wine out from behind the bar; Kelsier offers Vin a drink and gets silence back. She accepts only ale, on condition he taste it first. He shakes it for the sediment, drinks half, and sets it in front of her. She watches them across the table, body aching, and waits for them to show their hand. They are unsettlingly easy with each other, and easy with her — a thing she has never seen between underworld men. He sets a vial of clear alcohol with metal flakes in it on the table and tells her to drink. It contains two of the eight basic Allomantic metals. She drinks it and finds the small reserve of Luck she has always carried inside herself replaced by something like a golden hoard, and within that hoard, two distinct sources of power rather than one. He has her Soothe him with one and Riot him with the other, and that is the test he needed: a Misting gets one Allomantic skill, but if a person has two they have all of them.
She is, Kelsier tells her, Mistborn — only the second skaa Mistborn he has ever met. Dockson presses a few quiet questions about her parents and gets back a mother who was a half-mad whore in the underground and a father who, Vin eventually says, is a high prelan of the Steel Ministry. Kelsier whistles softly at that breach of duty and tells her her father gave her a rare gift in his blood. She is one of the most dangerous and influential people in the Final Empire, he says — and because she was not born to a noble house, she does not have to play by their rules, which makes her more dangerous still.