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Vin wakes at Clubs's shop two weeks into the recovery from the pewter drag north, her head still pounding — though more weakly than the first morning, when the pain had been so bad she could barely think. The return trip had taken two weeks of slow march; the run out had taken less than a day. She rises, makes her way to the bathroom, settles into the warm scented bathwater she had once found ridiculous and is now grateful to soak in. Her hair is past her shoulders now and she resents that almost as much as the headache; long hair flies in your face when you jump. She dresses for the workroom — practical clothes, not a gown — and comes downstairs.

She finds Clubs, Dockson, Ham — sent back from the Garrison now that the part-timers are no longer needed — and Breeze mid-conference. They are weighing whether there is any plan left. Vin asks for ale at not-quite-noon, gets ribbed for the pewter drag, drinks it anyway, and tells them, bluntly, that with the army gone there is nothing left for the crew to do — that the operation was the army, and what isn't the army (Marsh's Ministry placement, Kelsier's night work) doesn't need a crew. Ham reports that the Valtroux Garrison has been relieved by their own Luthadel Garrison, which is now out chasing splinter groups of the cave army that fled before the main slaughter. The hunt could take months.

Kelsier arrives with his ordinary cheer and a baywrap in hand. Breeze tells him to his face that the job is dead, that the army is gone, that they should quit. When Kelsier does not respond hard enough, Breeze accuses him of having used them from the start — of having gathered the crew, the rumours, and the Eleventh Metal not to enrich anyone but to make himself the most famous skaa crewleader who ever lived. He tries, briefly, to Soothe him. Kelsier tells him not to. Before he can answer the rest, Spook bursts in with the news that the obligator bells are ringing for a gathering at Fountain Square. Kelsier is not surprised. He takes the crew to watch.

They claim a rooftop on the edge of the square for a coinpouch and Clubs Smokes them against Allomantic detection. Below, a hundred thousand skaa are packed into every street within sight. The Lord Ruler arrives down a corridor of them in a black carriage drawn by white stallions, indifferent to the people his wheels clip, and a mass Soothing washes outward from him over the crowd — a flat, willless apathy so heavy that even Vin's copper can barely shut it out. Breeze mutters that even at his peak he can Soothe only a few hundred men at once. Kelsier flares zinc and Riots the crew's emotions back into them, holding the bubble alone until Vin starts Rioting too and feels his strain ease.

Vin picks her own father out of the obligator retinue around the carriage — Tevidian, in the gold robe-scarf of the Lord Prelan, the most senior man in the Ministry after the Lord Ruler himself. Dockson swears at the news. Eight Inquisitors flank the platform around four basin-fountains.

Ten cart-loads of prisoners are dragged up onto the central platform — mostly women and children, Kelsier says, picked at random; not the families of the cave-army dead, just people, chosen for nothing but to remind the city who runs it. Four at a time the Inquisitors take their heads with obsidian axes beside the four fountains, and the bodies are bled into the basins until the fountain water reddens — a deliberate visual marker for the back of the square, where no one can see the platform itself. The crew watches in their separate ways. Spook retches over the back of the roof; Ham groans; even Clubs looks shaken; Dockson stands vigil; Kelsier braces both hands on the chimney behind him, knuckles bloodless, to keep himself from running across the square. The bleachers of seated nobility laugh and joke through it. Vin finds Elend in the bleachers, sitting silent among the small minority of noblemen who look horrified rather than entertained.

Then Kelsier turns and tells the crew what they are. The job is not dead. The army was one piece of a plan that was always about stopping the thing in the square in front of them, and part one of it — pulling the Garrison out of the city — has been done at the army's cost, which is what makes it real. With the Great Houses on the edge of a house war and the Garrison months away chasing rebels, the crew will recruit a smaller force inside Luthadel itself, hide it among the skaa population rather than in any cave, take the palace and the Lord Ruler's treasury during the chaos, and use his own atium to hire the returning Garrison out from under him. The mercenaries the Garrison is built on will follow the money. He chose this crew because they had reputations for conscience, he tells them; the job was never about the boxings. They can leave if they want. If they stay, they stop questioning him.

One by one they stay. Vin looks back across the square at the silhouette in the carriage and thinks that he, not the missing Garrison, is the real foe — and that nothing else they do will matter unless they find a way to put him down.