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In the backup-lair cellar Vin sits with Ham and Breeze writing the plan off. If Marsh broke under an Inquisitor, everything is compromised: the Lord Ruler now knows the house war was a cover, so he will neither leave the palace nor send his guard out into the city; without that opening they cannot take the palace; without the palace there is no atium treasury at the end of it. Breeze thinks it is time to fold the operation while they are still ahead. Dockson looks up from his ledgers and reminds them why they stayed: not the atium, but the work itself. Vin watches the easy banter and realises she is going to miss them.

Kelsier comes in haggard from pewter drag, drops his mistcloak on the floor, and tells them what he has been doing. He shattered the atium crystals at the Pits of Hathsin — several hundred pockets, every one he could find — and cut the Final Empire's only atium supply off at the source for the next three centuries. The room goes silent. Breeze calls him both a blessed lunatic and a blessed genius: atium is how the Lord Ruler keeps the Great Houses obedient, and the squeeze will run downhill no matter what the crew does next. Kelsier asks whether the Inquisitors have moved on Clubs's shop, hears no, and goes to bed when Dox tries to push him toward pulling out. They will talk tomorrow, he says.

The next afternoon, with Kelsier still asleep, Vin watches Sazed cook stew in his steward's robes and asks him whether any of his collected legends include the Eleventh Metal. They do not. He tells her, gently, that if the Keepers knew everything no one would need to keep collecting. One of Clubs's apprentices — Tase, the new lookout now that Spook is gone with Renoux's retreat — runs in with word that the obligators are gathering Fountain Square for another round of executions. Dox swears; Vin thinks immediately that the Ministry is answering the Pits. Kelsier comes out of the back room in plain skaa clothing and says, flatly, that he is going to watch because indirectly he is the one who killed these people. The crew, minus Clubs and Sazed and the apprentices, follows him out.

A few streets short of the square he stops in the moving crowd and makes Vin listen for the prison carts. She filters past the shuffling feet the way Spook taught her and catches horses and wheels. Kelsier climbs to a rooftop; Vin and Ham go up with him. From the lip they can see a line of barred carts coming in along a quieter route. Breeze is first to note that the prisoners are too well-dressed. Vin resolves Spook in the front cart alongside Renoux. The Ministry caught the canal procession on the way out of the city — Marsh did break — and the servants, guards, and staff the crew hired for Mansion Renoux are about to be made an example of along with the rest. Kelsier drops off the roof. Vin catches him in the street and begs him to leave it: there are too many soldiers in the square only blocks away, with Inquisitors at the head of them. He tells her, disappointed, that she still has things to learn about friendship, and runs. Ham sprints off into the crowd in another direction without a word. Dox and Breeze pull Vin into an alley.

Kelsier swallows two vials in the run, drops into the middle of the soldier ring around the carts, and Pushes outward with everything he has, hurling men back by their breastplates. He tears the iron door off the lead cart with pewter and tosses the prisoners down into the street, telling them to run. Then he turns and finds a robed Inquisitor lowering its hood at him with a smile, and squads of fresh hazekillers pouring out of the side alleys. The carts were a trap; the executions were the bait. The Inquisitor is the same one that hunted Vin in the rain. It asks after the girl. Kelsier asks why only one came, and is told that it won the draw. Obsidian axes come out.

Kelsier tries to stall — Pulls himself up and over the second cart, dodges the Inquisitor on the rooftop of it, breaks soldiers with the door he Pushed earlier, jumps to free another cart's people — and decides to break and lead the thing away once Ham can get to the rest of the prisoners. Then Ham arrives, at the head of one of the rebel squads they had stashed in the city, slamming into the soldier ring; the crowd of skaa coming down from the square thickens behind them and slows the imperial reinforcements; Elend Venture of all people pushes into the square with a dueling cane and two bodyguards, shouting Valette's name and demanding to know who authorised a raid on a Renoux convoy.

Then the Inquisitor, frustrated, reaches out and casually beheads a fleeing servant in front of Kelsier and grabs another. Kelsier stops running. He pulls a pair of vials from his sash, throws them back, flares his metals on his rage, and hits the square with a single great steel Push that opens up a pocket around the two of them as everyone with metal on them is hurled clear. He tells the Inquisitor he is ready.

In the alley Breeze kneels in the shadow, working: soldiers can be pulled off the line by what he can do to their nerve. Vin sees a soldier drop his staff and run, kneels beside Breeze and asks how she can help.