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Vin walks into Clubs's kitchen mid-banter — the crew teasing Breeze about an imagined post as Minister of Sanitation, Spook in helpless laughter, Dox working ledgers, Clubs watching the room from his corner — in the wreck of her ball gown: a bloodied white shift and shorts, a cheek opened by a knife, a forearm wrapped in a rag. She tells them, more or less evenly, that she has killed Shan Elariel on the Keep Venture roof. Shan, it turns out, was a Mistborn all along.

Sazed gets her into a chair, calls for his healer's bag and a cloak to spare Spook's composure, and starts in on the arm wound, which has hit bone. Kelsier presses her: she had no business engaging a full Mistborn — running was the right answer — and why on earth did she start it? She tells him: Shan was on her way to kill Elend Venture. Kelsier exhales in exasperation and calls Elend not worth the plan and the crew's lives. Vin explodes. None of them — well-fed, well-dressed, planning rebellion from the comfort of a sympathetic carpenter's kitchen — knows what an actual skaa life is. She gives them the version she does know: nights in alleys, beggars coughing themselves to death beside her, lying awake terrified of the men in her own crew, hating her brother and loving him because at least someone was paying attention. They are not skaa, she tells Kelsier in particular. They are noblemen without titles. She walks out.

She does not go to her room; she climbs to the roof and sits with her back to the parapet in the cold mist, half-numb. The old voice — Reen — comes back to her up there: of course he left, this is what comes of letting them get close. After a while the trapdoor opens and Kelsier climbs out with a cloak. He hands it to her, sits beside her, and says the mists protect, give power, hide. He asks what really happened. So she tells him: Elend dropped her before any of the rest of the night began. She protected him anyway. Kelsier understands; he loved Mare even after she betrayed him, and you do not stop just because being loved hurts.

She tells him more than she has ever told anyone. About her mother — the voices in the woman's head that drove her to kill the baby sister, and that would have come for her next had Reen not stopped them. About loving Reen even though he beat her and swore he would leave one day and finally did. About being afraid that Kelsier is next on that list. He does not promise he is not. He apologises instead for the parts of him she had right downstairs: he does not give the nobility much of a chance, and being half-and-half does not buy him the skaa life he claims for himself. She tells him being half-and-half is what gave him the opportunity to choose, and that choosing the skaa half makes him as skaa as it matters to be. He likes the sound of it.

Then she gives him what she has been carrying since the ball: House Venture mines the Lord Ruler's atium at the Pits of Hathsin, and the supply has been failing for years. That is the lever. Kelsier sees it land — Venture's taxes, Venture's power, the whole architecture explained — and tells her, gently, that he will try to find another way but that Venture has to fall. She nods. She has, in her own ledger, just betrayed Elend too.

She has one other thing to show him. Tonight, she says, she found the assassins through Shan's coppercloud by listening hard enough through her bronze; she believes she could feel the Lord Ruler's Soothing through her own copper as well, and that an Inquisitor tracked her once when he should not have been able to. Kelsier tells her piercing a coppercloud is supposed to be impossible — he has tried it himself and failed. She closes her eyes and asks him to burn metals one at a time. She names pewter, then tin, then steel as he changes. Kelsier swears, shaken. He concludes — though he resists it — that the rule must depend on raw strength; that this is one more sign there is something about her that does not fit the ordinary measure of a Mistborn. She also catches, faintly, a slow distant pulse she cannot place, coming from no one in the room. He turns the moment back to her and her hopelessness about Mare's loyalty: if Vin is right that strong enough Allomancy pierces copper, then Inquisitors could have heard him sneaking into the palace through any Smoker, and Mare did not have to have betrayed him. He does not commit; he just rises and takes her back down to the kitchen, telling her Sazed is going to fret all night until the cheek is finished and Ham is dying to hear about the fight.

Elsewhere in the city, Elend sits in Jastes's carriage with a sack of forbidden books on his knee. He fled Keep Venture in the confusion of the broken skylight; the chaos let him slip away easily, and he is using the cover to keep a previously-arranged meeting with the Venture spies he set on Valette. Felt, the chief of those spies, climbs into the coach and reports: Valette's Terrisman led them to a woodcrafter's shop run by a skaa carpenter called Cladent — watch-nested rooftop, sealed windows, every sign of a well-funded thieving crew rather than any honest shop. Elend calls the watch off and tells Felt to tell no one. He rides back home more relieved than betrayed: she lied, but it appears she was not a planted spy of another house, only a thief, and his secrets are no more compromised than that. He surprises Jastes with the observation that if a skaa girl can pass for a noblewoman this completely, then perhaps the skaa themselves are not as different from the nobility as everyone is taught.

Back at Keep Venture the gate guards close on him at once. Straff has the soldiers in his study and is mid-scolding when Elend arrives. The official version of the night gets handed down: an entire Mistborn assassination team came for Elend, Venture archers killed the leader fleeing across the wall, the leader was Shan Elariel. Elend notices Straff gloss over the surviving man on the roof and dismiss the guard reports of a third Mistborn who appeared to be fighting on his side. Elend retreats to a guest bedroom with hazekillers posted at the door and the balcony. He resolves, lying there, that he was too hard on Valette earlier, that she may not be a noblewoman but that does not make her unworthy of another conversation, and that once the house war is past he intends to find out the rest of who she actually is.