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Elend rides through the morning mists of his own camp with Cett strapped into a custom saddle beside him, dressed in a black cloak that hides the ash on him and lets him be seen by his soldiers — a Tindwyl habit he has decided to keep. Cett tells him going into Fadrex in person was a mistake. Not because Elend was in physical danger — both of them know a Mistborn could have left whenever he wanted — but because he met the people he is now besieging, danced with them, talked with them, and the order to assault them will catch in his throat when it comes. Elend does not disagree. He has been warring with himself for weeks: the Elend who only ever wanted to protect, and the Elend Cett and Tindwyl have been forging, who understands that sometimes he has to hurt a city to save the empire.

Cett argues the wells should be poisoned. After a long silence Elend agrees, on one condition: Vin is to leave a written notice on each of the six wells she finds, so that the citizens of Fadrex turn to Yomen for water and burn through his storage cache demanding it. He does not want to kill the city. He wants to worry it. Cett grudgingly approves, and gets permission to send ten thousand men out to bully the surrounding villages — but not kill — so that Yomen's spies write him worried letters about a kingdom collapsing around the edges. As they reach the command tent the ground heaves with another earthquake; horses skitter and tents fall and Cett nearly slides out of his saddle. The tremors are growing worryingly frequent. Elend grew up in the Final Empire and never heard of an earthquake in the inner dominances; now they come every few weeks.

Inside, Cett is uncharacteristically on edge — Elend suspects he is worried about Allrianne back in Luthadel with Sazed and Breeze — and pivots to the silence from Luthadel: no supply barges, no messages, nothing on the canal. Cett gives them, at most, a few months on the siege without resupply. The tent flap parts and Ham sweeps in with Demoux — pale and thinned, but on his feet for the first time since the sickness took him. Ham reports that almost all the late-recovering soldiers are back at their posts. Cett needles Demoux about something the others have been hearing in the camp; Ham admits it: a rumour that the men who fell sick were being punished by the Survivor for lack of faith. Elend dismisses it, then has to stop himself — he was the one, after all, who shouted to the army on the morning they walked into the mists that Kelsier is Lord of the Mists, and that whatever the sickness was, it had to be his doing.

The briefing finishes; Ham goes to spar, Cett is carried back to his tent, and Demoux lingers. Hesitantly, eyes down, he asks to be released as general. No one ought to lead in this army except a man the Survivor approves of, he says, and the Survivor obviously does not approve of him. He proves it not with faith but with arithmetic. The sickness took five thousand men — to the digit, sixteen out of every hundred in the army. Five hundred died. The survivors mostly rose in a day, but three hundred and twenty-seven did not — one in sixteen of those it touched. And the three hundred and twenty-seven all lay ill for the same span: sixteen days exactly, hour for hour. The same number, over and over. Demoux reminds him that sixteen is the number of months Kelsier spent in the Pits of Hathsin, and the age at which Vin became Mistborn. Coincidence, Elend says. There are a lot of those, Demoux answers.

Elend gives up arguing the point and tries instead to turn it around: if Demoux — one of the most devoted men in the Church of the Survivor — was taken by the sickness, then faith was never the test. He gives Demoux a quiet Soothing nudge, tells him his self-pity is in the way, and sends him out to look for the real cause. Demoux grants him a tentative nod and leaves. Alone, Elend is left turning his own argument over and finding it less comforting than he wanted. Demoux is one of the most faithful men in the army. What if the others who lay sick for sixteen days were, too? He opens his mouth to ask — and the shouting begins outside the tent.