POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits at a table in the otherwise empty lair while the rump of Camon's old crew kills time waiting for the new crewleader's meeting. The bruises Camon gave her still throb; the mug of ale Kelsier poured for her stands mostly full. The others — Ulef among them, freshly shamed by the way he sold her out hours ago — assume she has been picked to be Kelsier's twixt, the go-between who joins a regular thieving crew to a Misting one. They badger her with the things the underworld whispers about him. He was the best crewleader in Luthadel before he was caught. He was betrayed by someone close to him. The Lord Ruler himself sent Kelsier and his wife into the Pits of Hathsin. She did not come out. He did, and there are men in the crew who think what came out is no longer quite human. Vin keeps her face still and listens. He has lost someone, she thinks. How does he laugh so honestly?
The crew clears out and Kelsier's people drift in one by one. Breeze, a portly man in a dueling-cane suit, Soothes her into fetching him wine before she notices what she is doing. He introduces himself as a Soother and his soldierly companion Ham as a Thug — a pewter-burning Misting who runs security on their crews. Clubs, a gnarled, limping older man, arrives next and sits alone on the far side of the room, glaring at anyone who looks at him; he is a Smoker, the one whose presence will keep them hidden from the Steel Ministry. Last in is Yeden, a sooty skaa worker the other two visibly dislike and who tells them so back without softening it.
Kelsier arrives late with Dockson and walks the room into the job. Yeden is their employer; he leads the skaa rebellion and has paid the crew thirty thousand boxings to do what the rebellion has failed to do for a thousand years — overthrow the Final Empire. In outline: neutralise the Luthadel Garrison, throw the city into chaos, raise Yeden an army to seize the palace, and while Yeden takes the city, pilfer the Lord Ruler's atium reserves. Half the atium goes to the rebellion, half to the crew. Almost as an aside, Kelsier mentions that the Pits are not just a death camp but the empire's only atium mine — he spent a year there learning that himself, which is why no one is meant to survive working them.
Breeze asks the obvious question — what they are being paid for the impossible. The atium is the answer: there is enough stockpiled in the palace to ruin the Lord Ruler financially even if he himself escapes the trap. Ham agrees first, on the grounds that he is going to join Kelsier's crews no matter what they are doing. Breeze pretends to need convincing and is then handed the wine cup Vin poured for him an hour earlier — palmed off the bar by Kelsier without her noticing. He laughs and agrees too. Clubs calls the whole plan idiocy, predicts Inquisitor hooks for all of them, and stalks out the door. Yeden is appalled that Kelsier just lets him walk free knowing the plan; Kelsier tells him plainly that he does not put knives in the backs of people he has invited to listen to him. Yeden tries to back out and is reminded he has already paid. Asked, Vin says she is in too, because that is plainly what Kelsier wants to hear. He smiles and tells the rest of the room that she is a Mistborn like him — a second one on the crew — and Breeze marvels there should even be such a thing.
Before they break, Kelsier tells them there is one more part to the plan: he means to kill the Lord Ruler himself. He sets a thin, silvery-white bar of metal on the table — the Eleventh Metal, drawn from a northern legend the Lord Ruler has worked to suppress — and tells them this is how he means to do it, though he does not yet know how it works. Ham reminds him that the Lord Ruler is the Sliver of Infinity, a piece of God Himself; even capturing him may prove impossible. Kelsier does not argue. Vin decides she has bound herself to a madman, and that this does not matter as long as he teaches her Allomancy.