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Spook wakes alive, surprised about it, in his hidden room in Urteau. The room itself is contraband — the Citizen forbids unaccounted lodgings, which only makes them more expensive — but the proprietor of the little illegal inn either has not realised who he is harbouring or has not cared. Spook barely remembers the leap from the burning warehouse with his fistful of stolen Allomantic vials; he should certainly be dead. Stripped to the waist in front of a small mirror, lit only by starlight against his flared tin, he stares at the swordcut on his shoulder. It is already scabbing. Beneath the tin, a second metal burns now in his stomach: pewter, a steady warm complement to the familiar cold fire.

He is something the rules say should not be. An Allomancer should hold one Misting power or the full sixteen of a Mistborn — never two. He has tried the others; they are dead to him. Only the pewter answers. And it answers because, however he tries to argue himself out of it, Kelsier himself appeared to him in the fire and gave it to him. Looking closer, Spook sees the broken-off tip of the guard's sword still embedded in the muscle of his shoulder. He reaches for it; a voice — Kelsier's, unmistakable, with no figure to go with it — tells him to leave it as a sign of his survival. When he turns, the room is empty. The voice does not answer when he calls it. He decides he can live with being watched, if this is what comes of it, and pulls his shirt back over the shard.

He needs information. He has been unconscious longer than he meant to be; he does not know what Quellion has done, or whether any of the rest of the crew have arrived. He slips out into the mist-soaked alleys. His lair is a hidden door in a slum wall in the Harrows — the cramped overflow canal where the city's outcasts have piled their shacks against each other up the canal walls until the sky overhead is only a slit. The Citizen does not patrol here. He also cannot forbid the mists, because he preaches that the mists belong to the Survivor — which makes Urteau the first city Spook has ever lived in where a tavern is open and serving at midnight.

He finds one such tavern dug into the Harrows — a firepit gouged into the ground, men sitting on stools and crates around it — and folds himself onto a box in a corner. The bartender, in trousers strung with chains and buckles, kicks a bottle across to him: an old House Venture vintage that would once have cost six hundred boxings, now bought for three peks, a sub-clip coin the Citizen mints to underline that no skaa needs proper money. The bartender does not offer a corkscrew. Spook grips the cork, draws faintly on his pewter, and pulls it free as easily as picking a flower. He drinks the wine straight from the bottle and, tin flared, lets the room's overlapping conversations resolve into separate threads.

Two of them matter. From the firepit: Quellion is rumoured to be planning to gather all coinage into his own treasury, on the grounds that proper citizens should not have to buy and sell from one another; the speakers mutter that the longer the Citizen rules the more he begins to look like the rat the Survivor killed. From a corner, two men sharing a finer bottle: Quellion's scribes are now genealogists, interrogating neighbours, tracing every household back five generations. Two generations of noble blood means death; five generations of pure skaa blood means an office in the new government; everyone in between is locked out. The whisperer notes there is good coin to be made by helping a man disappear an inconvenient grandfather. Spook notices, taking another long pull, that the wine is not getting him drunk — and realises the pewter is shrugging it off the way it shrugs off the pain in his shoulder.

He turns his ear to a different conversation — coal miners, cave-ins, taskmasters who do not care which men die — and remembers, sharply, that this would have been his life if Clubs had not paid for him and taken him east. Most of his life, he thinks, he has been a flake of ash blown wherever the wind chose. Kelsier led a revolution; Vin killed the Lord Ruler; Clubs led the empire's armies; Sazed carried centuries of knowledge; Breeze moved crowds; Ham was a soldier. Spook only watched — until the day he ran from Luthadel and left Clubs to die in the assault. *I just want to be able to help,* he whispers. *You can,* Kelsier's voice answers, beside his ear and only his. *You can be great. Like I was.* He decides, then and there, that he is going to bring Urteau into Elend's empire himself — deliver the city, the cache, and the loyalty of its people. Flaring the new metal, he feels the wood-grain of the stool under him, the footfalls vibrating through the floor; he squeezes too hard and cracks the bottle, then snatches it out of the air with pewter-quick fingers.

The room has gone quieter than he likes. The miners are looking at him sidelong, talking too softly for anyone but a Tineye to catch: *that's him,* one says, the one we saw run through and burned at the Marketpit; *Durn's been telling people he was on the Survivor's own crew.* Spook feels something hard settle in his chest. He has trusted Durn not to talk. He stands as casually as he can manage and walks out into the mist.