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Sazed, Breeze and Allrianne stand at the back of the Marketpit crowd waiting for the Citizen to arrive. Sazed is too excited about the Survivor of the Flames to remember why they are here. He talks at Breeze about ostention — a community emulating its own legend in real life — and how the Urteau skaa, having received the Survivor of Hathsin, have produced a second survivor for the era of executions they themselves live in. He muses that this could become a religion that re-invents itself per generation, each new survivor distinct from the last, faction begetting faction. Breeze asks dryly when Sazed stopped not collecting religions. Sazed protests that he is only theorising; that the new survivor may even prove a real person and help them topple Quellion. Allrianne, in drab skaa dress and visibly miserable in it, points out that any such survivor will then have to be reckoned with as a rival for the city when Quellion does fall. Breeze notes that Sazed has only just come back to religions and is already lecturing about them.

The Citizen arrives in his approved blue, his councillors in red around him, and the discussion dies. Sazed feels a pang of his own — that the prudent thing of letting these few skaa die so the larger plan to save the city can stand, is still a thing he is consenting to. Beldre walks at her brother's side. Something like pain shows in her eyes as the condemned are herded toward the building, a child clutching to one of the women.

Above, on a rooftop in the wealthier ring of the city, Spook crouches behind cloth-wrapped eyes and listens to a voice in his head talk like Kelsier. The voice tells him he must kill the soldiers; he tells himself he is no Mistborn, he is not Vin, he is not Kelsier. The voice answers, *not yet*. He has bribed his way into knowing where the burning will be, has practised with his dueling canes, has pewter under him to make his body feel like a thing built for this. What carries him over the edge is the child. He drops through the hatch, down the stairs and into the wine cellar below, and finds what no thieving crew would ever build a hideout without: a noble bolt-hole, a passage running from the basement of the doomed building into the one next door, with the Citizen's soldiers waiting in it.

He understands then. The buildings the Citizen burns are chosen for their hidden exits; the soldiers are there to extract the Allomancer in the condemned group while the Citizen makes his speech outside. The public denunciations of noble blood are theatre — privately the Citizen keeps the Allomancers for himself. The hypocrisy is not what moves Spook forward. The crying child is. He attacks. Pewter and tin together carry him through soldier after soldier — he had not realised how hard he can swing — and when he reaches the end of the passage four men panic into the basement on the other side and back into the crowd of condemned. He shouts the captives out through the passage and tells the last one to bar the door from the outside. A soldier takes the child hostage with Spook's own dagger; Spook holds him until the door bar drops and the man realises his only exit is gone, then breaks his knees and leaves him to the fire. The bolt-hole door, built by paranoid nobility to resist Thug kicks, refuses to open from this side. Fire on three walls. Spook picks up the child and walks into the flames, pewter balancing what his tin-enhanced senses are screaming at him.

Outside, Sazed and the others watch the building belch smoke. Breeze quietly observes that Kelsier had been wrong — the noblemen alone had not been to blame for what nobility did. Sazed finds himself growing angry at Quellion, and only after a beat recognises Allrianne's Riot on him; the girl is in tears and could, she says, set the crowd on the Citizen right now. Breeze tells her his second-in-command would then execute the rescued; they are not ready. She snaps back that they will never be ready. Sazed interrupts, pointing — a high attic window in the roof is shaking. A plank blows off. A figure leaps from the smoke, cloak burning, a child cradled in his arms, lands on the roof, runs its length, and drops two storeys to the street with the easy grace of a man on pewter. The hood falls back and Sazed recognises him only on the second look — partly because Spook is suddenly older than he has ever let himself look — eyes bandaged, body smoking, child coughing in his arms. He faces Quellion without flinching.

Breeze curses and tells Allrianne they need that Riot after all. He Soothes Sazed's distraction flat; Allrianne hits the crowd and Sazed with one duralumin-grade burst of rage, and the crowd surges at the guards in the name of the Survivor. Spook, for a long moment, does not move. He stares straight at Quellion through his blindfold like a challenge. Then he turns and runs, faster than his legs ought to carry him, ducks down an alley with the rescued girl, and is gone. Breeze dampens the crowd before the Citizen's soldiers can cut anyone down, and the Citizen retreats behind his guards, frustrated and only able to spare a handful of men to pursue. Breeze turns to Sazed with a single dry observation: that was somewhat unexpected.