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Vin arrives at Keep Venture and notes at once that the great pillared ballroom — already the finest in Luthadel — has been sharpened a notch further: whiter linen, harder-pressed uniforms, hazekillers standing at the doors instead of ordinary house guards. Attendance is up rather than down, every guest in their best, and every group huddled around its own. The first cluster she joins, ostensibly to fish for gossip, peels away from her one polite excuse at a time; the second more or less stops noticing her. There is no Kliss on the floor, no Shan in sight, and no use to be made of an outsider with no faction.

She climbs to the long blue-lit balcony where Elend usually reads through the proceedings and finds his cubbyhole empty. From the rail she can see him at the lord's high table at the far end, beside his father, dressed sharper than she has ever seen him. Sazed comes back from the stewards' dinner with the news the room is built on: Hasting, Elariel, and Shunah have all withdrawn their balls. Tekiel is dead. This is the last ball before the Great Houses go openly to war. Everyone has come to be seen on the right side of an alliance one last time; no one has time left for the kind of mid-rank politicking that Vin's cover was built for. She sends Sazed off in a hired carriage to warn Kelsier, who is meant to be playing informant tonight on out-of-date intelligence, and stays to wait the room out for appearance's sake. Standing in Elend's reading spot, she catches herself thinking that she will miss all of this — the dresses, the dancing, the strange and fragile beauty of it — and decides at least to use what is left of the evening.

She walks the balcony to the back corridor that opens onto the host's overhang and gets Elend's attention. He follows her into the stone passage. He is reserved, hair combed, suit tailored, every easy edge of him gone. The dalliance is over. House Venture needs him to stop being a liability, he says, and she is one. He knows she has been lying about who she is. He is not even angry about it; he expected it, says everyone at court plays at being someone else, that he is too. He turns and goes back to the table when she reaches for him. She stands numb in the corridor as the old voice she has not heard in months speaks up inside her — Reen, saying of course he left, no one comes back.

Lady Kliss finds her at the rail and lets the fool-gossip mask slip. She has been a paid informant from the start. The withdrawal rumour she spread for Vin last week, she traced straight back to its source: Vin's own house is making a bid for the weapons market, Vin's own house probably had a hand in the Hasting barge raid. For a fee, she will keep that to herself; for a sapphire necklace, she will sell what she said earlier about Elend getting what he deserves. Shan Elariel is sending Mistborn to kill him in his rooms tonight. Straff Venture is letting it happen — he has quietly thinned the rooftop guards over Elend's wing so the Elariel team can come in clean — and intends to use the resulting scandal, complete with the banned philosophy books in Elend's possession, to be rid of a son he never wanted as heir. Kliss suggests, kindly, that Vin not bother. The boy just spurned her. The back passages of Keep Venture are a maze. She is too late.

She is not. Vin runs through the inner corridors looking for a window big enough to use and finally finds an enormous rose window in lavender glass. She braces against an iron door behind her and Pushes against the rose window's iron bindings until something gives in the stone wall and the whole window tears free into the mist. She rides the impact up to the bronze-plated roof.

She crosses it stripping as she goes — ripping the gown and petticoats off in pieces, keeping the coin pouch and metal vials, ending in a shift and shorts — and sweeps with bronze for Allomantic pulses. The assassins have a Smoker with them and the sweep gives her nothing at first, then something so faint she only half-trusts it. She follows it anyway. She comes over a rise of rooftop on top of the team beside one of the skylights into Elend's room, slams down among them, tears her coin pouch and Pushes the whole spray outward in a single burst that drops half of them. The two she does not drop have invisible Allomantic hands. They are wearing mistcloaks. One of them is Shan Elariel in trousers and pulled-back hair, openly a Mistborn for the first time.

Vin cannot win this. She knocks one of the surviving Coinshots off the rooftop into the dark by Pushing through his own coin onto her bronze anchor, kicks a wounded Thug through a skylight into the room below to scare Elend out of his rooms with a warning instead of a death, and runs. Shan and the other Mistborn come after her over the keep. She drops to the perimeter wall by Pulling on a guard's breastplate, kicks the man free of the wall to send him flying up at her pursuers as an unwilling missile, and hears a satisfying crunch in the mist above.

Shan drops to the gatehouse alone, with daggers out and atium of her own in her body, and there is no more running. Vin swallows the single bead Kelsier gave her, knowing it is good for about thirty seconds against a Mistborn who clearly has more. Shadows bloom around both of them. The Venture guard on the gatehouse begins firing headless arrows up at her through the mist, and Shan simply stalks her, content to outlast her. So Vin does the only thing left: she stops burning atium early, lets Shan commit to the kill, and then re-ignites the last sliver for one second of clean sight. In that second she catches an arrow out of the air bare-handed and rams the shaft into Shan's chest; when Shan tries to Push the follow-up sword aside, Vin lets the sword go and slams the broken second half of the arrow in beside the first. Shan falls dead on a Venture wall, the Mistborn heir of House Elariel killed by a country-girl's cousin no one would have looked at twice an hour earlier. Below, the courtyard has come unstuck — carriages already fleeing. Vin looks once toward the keep and the boy who told her to leave, and jumps off into the mists.