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Spook flares tin and lets it burn. He has not turned it off in a year. The metal is slow-burning, easy to keep in supply, and the constant flare has done to him what other Tineyes are warned against doing: it has changed his body. He sees by starlight as though by day; his skin reads each pebble through the soles of his boots like a jab; the chill spring air feels freezing through his cloak; the mists, to him, are diaphanous and thin. He must wear cloth across his eyes during real daylight or be blinded. He worries the changes are dangerous. He keeps pushing them anyway because Elend and Vin sent him to Urteau alone, the world is ending, and he refuses to be useless again — to flee a city and let his uncle Clubs die in it, as he did at Luthadel.

He moves through Urteau's empty streets. The streets are not really streets: the city's once-grand canals went dry a century before the Lord Ruler fell, and rather than fill them in the people simply began to walk the bottoms, ten-foot earthen walls rising on either side, ladders and stairs leading up to the sidewalks and buildings of the city above. The locals call them streetslots. Spook walks one toward the building he means to spy on. He smells fresh smoke on the wind from where a nobleman's house was burned recently — one of many such houses in this city under the Citizen. A patrol passes within feet of him without seeing him; their torch ruins what little night vision they had. He waits, still as the wall, and lets them go by.

He has been to Quellion's headquarters before. It is a modest building — the Citizen decries ostentation — set in a small yard, with sentry windows watching the alley approach. Spook slips around the wrong side, where the sentries do not look: through one of their own buildings. A bedroom window, an empty corridor, two guardrooms he passes unseen, a stairwell to a small disused room on the third floor stacked with bedrolls and old uniforms. He sits on the windowsill there — perfectly hidden from anyone whose eyes are not what his have become — with the Citizen's house glowing across the way.

Beldre comes out first, alone, in a plain brown skaa dress that she somehow wears with grace. Her hair is a colour Spook has never seen on a clean head: deep auburn. Everyone in Urteau has heard rumour of Quellion's sister; few have ever seen her. Through flared tin he is close enough to her to read the sorrow in her eyes. She walks to the single bench in the yard, sits before the single surviving shrub, and waits. Quellion has had the rest of the garden uprooted, the murals whitewashed, the city's stained-glass smashed; ornamental gardens, he has decreed, were noble luxury bought with skaa sweat. Beldre's exile to the bench means the Citizen's meeting is about to begin. Spook half-tells himself he watches her only because she happens to be in his line of sight; he is not entirely successful.

The conference begins inside the room across the way. Spook is by no stretch a Tineye, and no normal Tineye could have heard it through the wall, but his hearing is no longer that. Quellion asks for news. Olid — the foreign minister — reports that Elend Venture has taken another small city to the south and immediately abandoned it, taking its people with him, and has acquired another koloss army somewhere. Spook understands the rest: the fourth storage cache is theirs, Luthadel is fed for a while longer, and only Urteau's and the missing fifth remain. A third aide reports that an ambassador from the Survivor's crew is on his way to offer a treaty. Olid argues, gently, that Urteau cannot fight Venture and ought to take it. Quellion refuses, as Spook hears him refuse such things night after night: the Survivor could not fight the Lord Ruler either, and died, and won; only Urteau of all the cities of the Final Empire actually did what the Survivor taught — overthrew its nobles, burned their homes — and the Survivor will watch over them. The meeting tails off into mundane city business: new sumptuary laws against noble-style clothing, more funding for the genealogical committee that hunts hidden noble blood. Spook takes the notes Elend expects of him. It feels strange to hear strangers talk about Kelsier as if they had known him.

His eyes drift back to Beldre on her bench. He almost stands — almost goes down to her the way the Survivor would have done, and asks her why she looks like that — and stops himself. He is no Mistborn, whatever else he is becoming. His way is silence and stealth. He settles back to watch.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer turns to the ash, and observes that the people of the Final Empire never quite understood how much they owed to the microbes and plants Rashek had developed to break the ash particles down — without which the land would have been buried in years, as in the end it was anyway.