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Vin rides the cabin roof of her narrowboat as the canal convoy crawls west toward Fadrex, koloss trudging at the towpath ropes, ash drifting on the water. Demoux had survived after all, one of the fifteen percent who took the mist sickness and lived. Many of the supply barges have been emptied so the wounded can ride; the ones that still carry food and tents have been worn pale by two years of war and march. At the prow stands Elend in his clean, fraying whites, beard full, hair longer than she remembers, the body of a man who has stopped being a scholar. He looks like a king and he is brooding. Vin knows him well enough to leave him alone and read.

What she reads is Alendi's logbook — the journal of the first man to call himself Hero of Ages, the man who never reached the Well because his servant Rashek killed him and took the power and became the Lord Ruler. The passage she keeps coming back to insists that the Deepness is sentient — that Alendi confronted it and felt its mind. Vin's own story is too close to Alendi's for comfort; she too thought herself the Hero, she too was betrayed at the Well, only by the thing inside it rather than by a servant. The hatred Human told her the mists feel for her — she has felt it herself. But the logbook is suspect: Ruin can quietly alter the text of books and papers to suit its purposes, which is why Elend's officers no longer write important orders on parchment. Memorise them, or etch them into metal. Anything readable can be rewritten.

She tries to think the way Kelsier used to plan a heist, listing only what she knows for certain: the power at the Well was real; something alive was trapped in or beside it; that thing fooled her into using the power to free it instead of to destroy it; Ruin could alter the world even while bound, and is plainly the hand behind the falling ash and the mist killings. And Ruin is not omnipotent — if it were, it would not have needed to be released. It cannot read her thoughts. It is not random, either. It plans. It feels, to her, almost as if it follows rules. She calls forward to Elend: what is the first thing she ever taught him about Allomancy? *Consequence,* he answers. Every act has one. Push something heavy and it pushes back; Push something light and it flies away. It was the first lesson Kelsier taught her. Elend likes Allomancy for this reason — it is a thing of nature, lawful, rational, unlike the affairs of men. For every Push there is a Pull. *That's important,* Vin whispers. The thing she is fighting is a force, not a person — and forces have laws, and laws can be learned, and learning the law of the thing is how to beat it.

She joins Elend at the prow and asks what he is brooding on. The dead, he tells her: the men he deliberately let walk into the mists so the survivors would be inoculated, knowing he had become the kind of leader who could do that. He fears he is becoming like the Lord Ruler — the man who would sacrifice his own to advance a goal. Vin tells him it was necessary; he answers that necessity is precisely the trouble, that it is the very excuse tyrants have always given themselves. He has been talking to Cett too much, perhaps, but Cett reminds him of Tindwyl in his clear-eyed brutality. Most damningly, Elend now wonders whether he was wrong to outlaw the noble custom of beating children to find Allomantic gifts. The houses used to beat their adolescents near to death because Snapping could only come through that kind of trauma; most children died for nothing. He outlawed it as king. He has begun to ask whether the lives those beatings would have saved — through new Mistborn in the army, through more Mistings in the field — might have outweighed the dead children. Vin tells him she does not like this hardness in him. He tells her it does not yet own him; he can hold the throne only as long as he remembers he was once willing to give it up, and he asks her to tell him if he ever stops remembering. She nods.

A small courier skiff pulls alongside. Noorden climbs across in his too-large spectacles, scribes and ledgers in tow — the cheerful former obligator who in any other career would have been a happy academic — with the casualty counts Elend asked him for. Of the thirty-eight thousand exposed, near six thousand fell sick and roughly five hundred and fifty died, fewer than expected; Noorden supposes soldiers were tougher than the average skaa population. Vin catches at the wording. How does he know how many *should* have died? She presses — exact number sick? Five thousand two hundred and forty-three. What percentage of the *eligible* soldiers, the ones not previously exposed? Noorden's scribes recompute, and he stops mid-sentence: thirteen and a half percent of the whole, but exactly sixteen percent of the eligible. Precisely. To the man. Elend dismisses it as a coincidence of statistics. Vin tells Noorden to look at the other outbreaks too. Sixteen again. And again. Different cities, different ages, different sizes of group, no scatter — exactly sixteen percent every time, only deviating when the group is too small to admit a whole sixteenth of a person. Elend kneels in the deck ash beside the ledger. Populations are not supposed to react this evenly; the chaos of statistics should round to a curve, not snap to an integer percentage. He looks troubled in a way Vin has not seen before, and tells Noorden to verify the data has not been tampered with by Ruin and to extend the count across as many outbreaks as he can find. Noorden, shaken, asks the obvious question. What would it mean? Elend does not answer. *It means consequence,* Vin thinks. *It means there are laws even when we cannot yet read them.* Sixteen. Why sixteen?