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Vin scouts Fadrex alone after dark. She wears no mistcloak — close-cut black shirt and trousers instead, for quiet — and no metal save the coin pouch in her sash. She jumps across the rocky shelves that ring the city, cloth-wrapped coins her muffled anchors, and notes in passing that the mists now snap back from her skin instead of curling against it; the change has been gradual, and there is no longer any pretending the mists are still her home.

A bronze sweep tells her the obligator king's back-side guards burn no metals. The reason is the same reason Cett could not raise a proper Mistborn defence in Luthadel — there are simply not many Allomancers left for any one ruler to recruit. She slips past, runs the city's rooftops in long Allomantic leaps, and revises her image of the place upward; what Elend had called "provincial" is in fact a real city — skaa slums, a smattering of noble mansions, two proper Luthadel-style keeps. She lands above one of them — a low-slung white-marble keep with stained-glass walls — and lets the colour-broken mist take her briefly back to her first ball at Keep Venture as Valette. She catches herself wondering how much of Valette was a role and how much was already her, then turns away. She does a wider sweep — no obvious starvation, streets swept of ash, an unexpectedly high count of occupied noble houses — and goes looking for Cett's informants.

The first is a back-garden meeting at a quiet mansion: an old man with frosty hair and bushy eyebrows, pipe in hand and book in his lap, who calls himself Slowswift and refuses to play the informant role. He is a storyteller, he says — and an old poetry-writing friend of Cett's from before politics ate him. He tells Vin that Yomen is a good man and a fair king, better than Cett ever was, and that he has no intention of selling such a man out to the army camped at his canal-mouth. He explains, when Vin presses, what Yomen has actually done: stepped into the post-Collapse vacuum, taken control of the plantations and fed the city, restarted Fadrex's factories and mines, restored the old obligator order the people had been crying for since the Lord Ruler vanished. He is throwing a ball tonight — at Keep Orielle — on the very day an enemy army arrived, because Yomen always personally attends, and because that is exactly the kind of unbothered familiarity his rule trades on.

When Vin gives up and starts to leave, Slowswift notes, almost to himself, that they say she will stop the ash and turn the sun yellow again — Heir of the Survivor, Hero of Ages — and asks how that destiny is fitting. *Quite the destiny to live up to.* She turns back into the mist and says yes, she will: it is that or give up. Slowswift waves her back into the chair. He tells her Yomen is in truth a Canton of Resource bureaucrat — competent at moving supplies and organising work, an ordinarily adequate king for ordinary times, badly out of his depth as the world ends. His weaknesses are few. He is calm and honourable; his danger to himself is that he genuinely believes in the Lord Ruler and his Ministry, which makes him willing to try the impossible because providence will see him through. His other weakness is his wealth: a private fortune so vast that no Fadrex obligator should be able to account for its source. Vin reacts too sharply to that — *the cache, he really does have the atium* — and Slowswift notes with amusement that she should learn to give less away. He sees her to the railing, mentions a customary fee, and accepts her bag of imperial gold with a small smile and his regards to Ashweather.

Vin checks bronze on her way out — old habit; weak old men are exactly the people she most suspects of being Mistborn — and gets nothing. She moves on toward a second informant, a beggar Cett has flagged as findable in a particular ash-piled square late at night. She lands on a roof overlooking it and picks the man out: not asleep with the others, sitting in the falling ash, humming. Something about the picture is wrong. She does not pause to work out what. She turns and jumps away, and never knows whether the choice mattered.

She follows the road Cett's notes describe and lands instead near a blocky wooden building she has been ignoring for a reason. It is the Canton of Resource regional headquarters — once the largest Ministry building in the city — and Yomen has, of course, made it his palace. It is busy at this hour and ringed with soldier platoons. Beneath it, Vin knows, sits the Lord Ruler's Western cache. Part of her wants to drop down a hidden stair tonight. She does not; even Kelsier would not have tried it on a first sweep. She turns away.

That is when she notices the tail. Burning bronze, she catches a thin, obscured pulse from behind — an Allomancer burning copper, easy bounds, Mistborn (only a Mistborn could burn both copper and steel at once). He does not know that she can hear through copperclouds, the way the Lord Ruler and his Inquisitors could. She had left her own copper deliberately off, to draw out whatever was hiding. Now that she has, she does not waste it: she runs for the city gates, and at the right moment Pushes herself violently backwards off the heavy iron brackets that hold the gates to the rock. The pulse behind her vanishes the instant she does.

She drops to a rooftop and crouches there, tense. The vanishing is too clean. A real Mistborn would not give up the chase that fast or that completely. She knows of only one other thing that pulses in the mist — the spirit, unseen for a year now, the same thing that nearly killed Elend and then restored him as Mistborn. Whatever it is, it is not Ruin; she has felt Ruin, and they are different. She does not stay to find out. Cold and unsettled, she Pushes herself out of Fadrex and back along the rocky shelves to Elend's camp.