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Spook sometimes forgets the mist is even there anymore. Through his savant's tin it has thinned to almost nothing, and the stars overhead burn like a hundred limelights. He stands in the blackened ruin of a mansion the Citizen burned weeks earlier, and watches the skaa crew pick their way through the rubble by feel, packed close because they cannot see the way he can. The stench is terrible; his pewter mutes it, the same way it mutes the pain of every sharp thing his tin still tells him is there. He has been thinking about the pairing of his metals. Tin and pewter are not obvious opposites the way iron and steel are, but the more he uses them together the more right the pairing feels — one sense pushed past human limit, the other body braced to hold it. He cannot help wondering what Kelsier would feel like if he were given the other powers too. He had only ever had half of an ability before. Now he is whole.

The crew is led by Franson, a worker whose sister Mailey is in the Citizen's next batch of burnings. Spook has been laying low — Sazed and Breeze judged it foolish to keep spying on the Citizen's inner council with security as tight as it has gotten — and he feels the restraint badly. He misses the lonely-eyed girl he met at the Citizen's house, and reminds himself sharply not to. After three nights of work Franson comes to tell him the basement pit has been sifted twice over. Whatever they were going to find, they have found. Spook pays them out of a small pouch and tells them to spend the coin on food and supplies before the Citizen abolishes coinage. Then he walks over to the burned banister where the crew has laid out what they came for: nine human skulls, leering and blackened in the starlight.

He had been here when the Citizen burned the mansion. Ten people were sent in. Durn had given him only one thing to follow it with — *count the skulls* — and now Spook knows what Durn had meant. Ten in. Nine out. The Citizen's burnings are survivable, then. There is a way out. That, he tells Franson quietly, is how they will save his sister.

Across the city, Sazed sits at a corner table in a packed skaa bar with Breeze. Three of Goradel's toughs and Goradel himself, dressed down as labourers, hold the next table. Sazed keeps coming back to the same wrongness of the scene: skaa drinking in a bar after dark, while the mists hang over the street outside. A thousand-year-old terror of the mist among the skaa, and Quellion has undone it in a year. Breeze credits the wine. Sazed credits the Church of the Survivor — the worship of Kelsier has spread further than he expected, and in Urteau it has taken a shape unlike the Luthadel one, with Kelsier now called Lord of the Mists. The mists kill, and yet these skaa walk through them. What is he missing.

The thought is interrupted by his own private despair, which he is taking pains not to show: he is approaching the end of the religions held in his Keeper metalminds, and every one of them so far has been full of contradictions. He is beginning to fear that not even hundreds of religions, taken together, contain the truth he set out to find.

Breeze waves him over to a nearby table of mine workers. The men eye Sazed — too tall, too bald, too obviously Terris to pretend at being anything else. One of them tells him bluntly that Breeze talks like every other man with promises, just like Quellion did a year ago, but Terrismen are known not to lie, and they would rather take their questions to him than to a Soother — Breeze looks faintly surprised they had spotted him. They ask him why Venture's son even wants their city. Sazed gives them the truth he believes — that the city is needed for what it holds, and that there are few finer men he has ever known than Elend Venture. Some of them are sceptical. One asks why Venture would bother with Urteau at all when the empire is collapsing everywhere they look; another says that the Survivor of the Flames has already come to handle Quellion for them.

Sazed stops, then asks, carefully, what they mean. Not the Survivor of Hathsin — the new one. The Survivor of the Flames. The Hathsin Survivor threw the Lord Ruler down, the worker reasons; the new one is plainly here for Quellion. Breeze watches Sazed with quiet amusement; he has heard the term already. Sazed asks to meet the man. The locals share a look, then one of them tells him there will be executions tomorrow near the Marketpit. Quellion does not publish the schedule, but word always travels. The new Survivor will be there.