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Vin wakes alone in a clean, quiet guestroom on the second floor of Clubs's carpentry shop and is unsettled by how much space she has been given. She has crept the building the night before and found it more inn than shop — a working showroom downstairs, apprentice quarters and guestrooms on the second floor, larger rooms above on the third. Through the cracked door she watches Dockson go past already dressed as a minor nobleman, who tells her there is a perfumed bath waiting for her at the end of the hall. She takes it. The scent makes her smell like a noblewoman's drawer, and she resolves to ask that the perfumes be left out next time. Downstairs the kitchen women are clean-faced and respectful, the apprentices are at work in the back room, and nowhere is anyone sooted. She does not know yet whether they are deferring to her because she is a guest or because they know what Kelsier has told them she is.

Late in the day Clubs's thin, eastern-slang-speaking nephew Lestibournes fetches her up to a well-decorated room on the third floor. Kelsier has set out a half-circle of chairs around a charcoal writing board and convened the crew: Dockson, Ham, Breeze, Clubs, the nephew, and a freshly sooted Yeden in his usual patched coat. There is an extra empty chair no one explains. Kelsier works the room into a list of problems: the Luthadel Garrison, the Great Houses, the Ministry, the atium treasury, raising and training an army, the rebellion's readiness to govern after, and the Lord Ruler himself. Yeden adds his own attitude, dryly. Vin sits with her knees folded under her in a chair too large for her and tries to follow how plainly these men are talking about destroying the empire.

The first piece of the plan is a house war: a Mistborn campaign of noble assassinations to push the Houses into open warfare in Luthadel itself. In passing, Vin learns the night before's "attack on Straff Venture" was Kelsier himself making sure he was seen on the way out with the atium — and that Ham won a bet with Breeze about it. The Garrison is the harder problem. Ten thousand recruits will not break a well-entrenched force of twenty thousand inside a fortified city. The crew is stuck until Kelsier asks for Vin's opinion, and her answer — do not fight it, get it to leave — leads to her follow-up: stage an attack on the Pits of Hathsin with a small force to draw the entire Garrison out of the city. The Lord Ruler cannot send koloss against a threat to the Pits without revealing why he cares so much about them, and the Pits are close enough that the Garrison is the only force in striking distance. While they march, the main army comes out of the Arguois caverns and takes Luthadel itself. Ham will recruit ex-imperial skaa soldiers to train the rebels; Breeze will Soothe ten thousand recruits out of the Central Dominance inside a year.

Weapons will be bought, not stolen, through a sympathetic high nobleman in Fellise called Lord Renoux. Kelsier lets the crew puzzle this through in the room until Breeze laughs aloud and says it: Kelsier killed the real Renoux and installed an impostor in his place — under no circumstances may the man go near an Inquisitor, for reasons no one will explain in front of Yeden. The crew needs a spy who can ride that cover into Luthadel society as the impostor's heir. Dockson cannot — the Ministry has him marked from a previous job and the Lord Ruler himself once saw his face. Nor can Ham, Breeze, Clubs, or the nephew. The role falls to Vin. She is to learn to imitate a noblewoman and infiltrate the Great Houses' social functions as Renoux's young cousin. She pales but does not refuse.

Yeden balks at the impostor scheme, the way he balks at most of what the crew tells him about itself; Dockson reminds him from a corner that he hired Kelsier and that as long as the job is moving, Kelsier gets the final say on how it moves. He continues to be unnerved by the casual handling of every taboo in the room. Kelsier presses on. He will handle the Lord Ruler himself with the Eleventh Metal if he can, and will at minimum trick him out of the city if he cannot. Yeden accepts that he will have to find his own answer for what to do with the Sliver of Infinity once the man is out of his palace, and that the rebellion's writ once the dust settles will run to this city and to whatever scraps of the Central Dominance he can buy off. The Ministry, Kelsier adds, his brother will handle. And at that, a tall, hard-faced man in a skaa worker's jacket steps in from the doorway and tells him no. Marsh has come back, but only to talk privately with his little brother. Kelsier dismisses the meeting. Vin makes a show of going to her room, then returns to the door and listens.