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Vin is half-asleep on her cabin bunk on the supply barge when screams come up from the north end of camp. Finally. She throws off the blanket, downs a vial as she crosses the deck, and Pushes off a cleat into the daymists. From the air she finds it: a body of Yomen's horse have ridden into the north camp and are driving for the supply barges; on the south flank another body has gotten itself three rows deep into the tents but is starting to break the line. Elend's Allomancer perimeter holds the north — Thugs in front, Coinshots picking riders off the back — and his patrols had warning enough to keep the supplies safe. Vin drops into the middle of the southern column.

The fight is hers. The riders have stone-tipped spears and no horseshoes — Yomen is careful — but Vin hates killing and loves Allomancy, and these men have given her an excuse. She crests the first lance with pewter alone, kicks the rider out of his saddle, Pushes herself sideways under the trampling hooves and through a sleeping tent. Inside it she rips its iron stakes from the ground, lets the canvas fall, and Pushes — the tent puffs out and the stakes fly free as spears into horses and men. She does it again with the next charge, folding a tent across the lead riders' legs like a tripwire and burning duralumin to snap it tight; horses go down on top of horses. She is still on her feet, looking for the next charge, when she sees a figure watching her from the mist — short, too short for Elend — and lights up under bronze as a Mistborn. She drops a coin and chases.

He has no playfulness to him; this is not a sparring partner. He runs her over the rock formations into Fadrex proper and across the city's roofs, and even at full burn she cannot quite gain on him. When she has him at the peak of a leap she extinguishes her metals — to keep tin from burning out under duralumin — and unleashes a duralumin-fed Push that shatters the door she Pushed off and flings her at him like an arrow. She arrives at nothing. The other Mistborn has extinguished his metals at exactly the moment she was blind to bronze. It is the second time he has done it; he knows she can pierce copperclouds with bronze, which means her secret is somewhere out in the world. Vin crouches on the roof and realises she has been baited — and goes anxious about Elend all the way back to camp.

She finds him fine and being seen by his soldiers in the wreckage at the camp's perimeter; he pulls her aside. The strike on the camp was a feint and the attack went somewhere else. The koloss. On a plateau across the canal valley, Vin and Ham inspect the smoking remains of trebuchets. They had been hidden in back-cliff caves — almost certainly built originally to throw at Luthadel, Ham judges, but redirected onto Elend's koloss paddock at the base when he camped under them. Twenty thousand koloss have become ten thousand — half of them killed by the rocks, the rest killed by one another in their unreachable rage when Elend lost the bond briefly. He had felt the deaths and misread them as battle. The cost to Yomen is a cavalry company, several hundred soldiers, and his entire trebuchet train, set alight to keep it out of Elend's hands; the cost to Elend is the parity of armies. To split the bond he gives Vin a thousand of the survivors directly. She walks down off the cliff to be near enough to claim them; Elend cuts them loose, and Vin flares zinc under duralumin and Riots them into her head.

Human comes to her almost the instant she lands among them, a fresh cut down one arm, and falls into step beside her through ash to her thighs. The other koloss sit around their dead without much interest. A few work the corpses, peeling skin off — the closest the koloss come to a funeral rite. Vin asks why; Human says only that they are dead. She presses him on the corpses and he tells her they are fewer now, that they have too many swords, that they need more. She suggests more children. He looks at her: she fought, and so she must give. When she pushes him with Allomancy to do whatever he is thinking, he screams, then hauls the smaller body up onto one massive shoulder and takes off for Elend's camp at a run.

Vin keeps the guards back and follows. Human slams the body down at the entrance to the triage tent, rips off its loose blue skin — and pulls four small bloody spikes out of the corpse beneath. The skin had been pinned to the body by the spikes, like cloth nailed to a wall. He turns into the tent and reaches for an unconscious soldier on a cot. Vin freezes him in her head. The rest of it lands all at once. Koloss have no young because they have never needed to breed any. The koloss are made. Out of people. With spikes. The same kind of spikes she has seen before — the same kind that have been driven through her own brother and her own friend Marsh — and the Lord Ruler had kept the secret of where his armies came from for a thousand years. *I am human,* the great blue beast says quietly, looking back at her.