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Vin lands on a Fadrex rooftop on the way to Yomen's ball at the Canton of Resource, skirts holding her dress up, and tells Elend that Yomen's Mistborn is again following them three houses back. Elend flares tin and can just make out the lump in the mist. He fingers an obsidian knife; Vin tells him the man will not attack now — he will choose a moment when she and Elend are apart, or when one of them is asleep. Elend realises this is why she has been staying up nights, which makes him more nervous, not less. They go on. The plan, Elend has already laid out, is simple: he confronts Yomen in front of the nobility and pulls the room's attention onto himself, and Vin uses the cover to find her way down to the cache the Canton of Resource basement is hiding.

In the courtyard, with carriages stalled and guards turning, Vin makes Elend promise: once a disturbance hits — and she is sure one will — he is to flee and meet her at camp; she can take care of herself but cannot take care of him too. He accepts. The Canton building is squat, austere, fortress-walled — nothing like a noble keep, with a converted meeting hall standing in for a ballroom. Riveted stone floor where benches used to sit, a stage at the far end where Yomen holds court, no draped finery, no dinner — only snacks, music, a single bead of atium on the king's forehead catching the lantern-light. Elend mutters that Yomen probably hosts these only to keep himself in the rotation; it gives a man power to be the one drawing the nobility into his own home. Vin suggests one dance before the split. He is too nervous. She kisses him outside protocol, asks for an hour, and they part.

She drifts. She does not want conversation; she is here for the geometry of the room, not its people. Two corridor stairwells lead down — a basement bigger than anything in Luthadel, which makes sense for an old supplies organisation. Annoyed at how lightly she seems to be watched, she burns bronze and nearly jumps: the two unremarkable women a short distance away are bursting Allomantic pulses through copper, a Smoker and a Tineye respectively, picked exactly to be dismissable. She drifts; they follow with practised grace. She would never have spotted them without the ability to pierce copperclouds. Yomen is not underestimating her.

She trails over to Slowswift, smoking his pipe in his usual suit, and pauses long enough to murmur that she needs two men he trusts to meet her on the side patio, plus a messenger to Elend asking for half an hour more. She covers it with a fond farewell about hoping he feels better and drifts away again. The patio is mist-lit, half empty — servants will not go out into the mist and nobility do not like to admit they find it disconcerting. Her two tails settle in to talk about the stuffy air. Slowswift's two young men sit at another table, more obviously uncomfortable than she would like. She waits.

Standing at the rail, watching the mist and fingering her earring, she thinks of Reen and one of his old refrains: never stake your survival on someone who is not also gambling theirs. Once she would have agreed. Tonight she trusts Elend to succeed, and to come back to her — a thing she would never have done in her old life. Two messengers come and go from the women's table, passing along the cover story she had hoped for: that the empress is going to be outside staring at the mist for a long while. Then a third man rushes out, tells the unrelated patio-sitters they have to come hear something, and they go. The distraction is on. Vin launches off the railing with a Steel-push, extinguishes her metals, hits both women with one duralumin-fuelled Brass-push that flattens emotion to nothing — a trick she has only ever pulled once before, on Straff — and follows up with an elbow, a head into a table, and a brief brutal choke on the second woman until her coppercloud drops and she falls unconscious. She hands the bodies to Slowswift's young men, makes them promise to claim the women followed her back inside, strips off her gown, hands it over, and slips into the building in her dark working clothes. She finds the stairwell.

Inside, Elend is already deep in his promised distraction. Arms folded, he stares Yomen down across his own table in front of a packed ballroom. He demands a duel. Yomen does not laugh — he answers, asks why he should accept such a thing, points out that as an Allomancer Elend could not honourably duel a normal man. Elend offers him a champion. Yomen says only a Mistborn could be a worthy contest and that he himself has none — his crown was earned, he says, by lawful means and the Lord Ruler's blessing, not by assassins. Elend notes the *no Mistborn* claim privately as a lie. He shifts to honour — the dead city will be on Yomen's head. He shifts to koloss — but Yomen reminds him the Lord Ruler created and used them too. He claims the Lord Ruler's mantle by way of controlling them. He warns Yomen that local nobility cannot be trusted to back him when it matters — and sees, in Yomen's pause, that the warning landed. Yomen grows suspicious that Elend's argument keeps moving, but Elend has grown up arguing with his father; he can keep this going as long as it needs to go. He hopes, silently, that the distraction is enough — that Vin can finish this somewhere below them before the fight for the city ever starts in earnest.