(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Spook wakes to a voice telling him to get up, and to a world that has been muted into something dull and unrecognisable. His tin is gone — the familiar flame in his stomach, his companion of more than a year, has burned itself out. He can barely see; the rich detail and crisp lines he had grown used to are gone, and the colours are bland. His ears feel clogged. His nose has stopped working. He cannot read the wood under him by its scent, cannot feel the thumping of people moving in other rooms. This, he realises with horror, is how everyone else lives.

He is in a room. Sitting up sends a stab of pain through his shoulder — the sword wound from the Marketpit fight has gone uncared for; his left arm barely moves; the voice tells him calmly that he has lost a lot of blood and will die soon even if the flames do not take him, and that they removed the tin pouch from his belt. Flames? he croaks. The voice asks if he cannot feel them, that they are close. He sees a light down the hallway and understands: he is in a noble's house and the Citizen's soldiers have boarded the windows shut and set it alight, with him still inside, as another of the public burnings he had refused to defend.

He cannot stand. The voice tells him not to walk but to crawl, and not toward the flames but to the room's other door, and then up the stairs to the second floor. He obeys — somewhere in him is a vague trust of the voice he cannot place — and drags himself forward with his good arm. Smoke makes him cough; that is good, the voice tells him, that is why he should stay low. He reaches the top of the stairs, slips in his own blood, slumps against the wall, and almost stops; the voice barks him up again. *Where have I heard that voice before,* he thinks. He cannot place it.

The voice steers him into a study — second door on the left, furniture that thieves can no longer profitably steal because the Citizen outlaws luxury — and he collapses onto the floor as the ceiling above him begins to burn. *Spook!* The walls bubble and blacken; the heat is enormous; he sees, indistinct in the fire, a tall figure standing inside the flames untouched, watching him. The voice tells him to go to the desk. He drags himself to the side of it. *Right drawer.* He pulls it open. Vials — the small alcohol-filled vials Allomancers carry their metal in. He fumbles one and shatters it on the floor. He gets the stopper off another with his teeth and drinks.

He reaches inside himself for tin and finds nothing, and cries out in despair — what good would tin have done him in any case, except to magnify the pain. *Not tin,* the voice snaps. *The man who owned this house was no Tineye.* He reaches again — and finds, where there should be nothing, a new metal reserve. He burns it. His arms steady; his weakness leaves him like darkness before the sun; the heat that had been killing him stops bothering him at all. The metal is pewter. He is a Pewterarm as well as a Tineye. He had never Snapped on it because, before tonight, nothing had hurt him hard enough.

*Stand,* the voice says. He stands. *I have given you the blessing of pewter, Spook. Use it to escape this place. Break through the boards on the far side of the hallway and you can drop onto the roof of the next building; the soldiers are too busy keeping the fire from spreading to be watching for someone leaving from above.* He thanks the figure. The figure steps forward out of silhouette into the light of the flames, and his face is recognisable, and that is the answer to the question that has been bothering Spook all chapter: he will do whatever this man tells him to do. *I did not give you pewter just so you could live, Spook,* Kelsier tells him, and points. *I gave it to you so you could take revenge. Now go.*