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Vin creeps down the stone stairwell into the Canton of Resource basement. It is the obvious place to have hidden a cache — the Ministry arm that fed the people and ran the canals — and her hopes for what is down here are high. The stairwell empties into three corridors at right angles. Two guards loiter against the wall of one. Steel and iron are useless to her here — she cannot make noise. So she burns brass and zinc and works on them carefully: gently Soothes their alertness, Riots their boredom, watches one yawn, then the other, then both at once. She scuttles past them into the dark hallway and waits, heart thudding, until one of them mutters about being tired. She is delighted with herself. It has been a long time since she has had to sneak rather than fight.

The basement is a grid of narrow corridors around larger rooms, basic supplies in some — flour, ordinary stores, no cans-and-catalogue of a cache. She finds a corridor lit a little better than the rest, hears voices, sees four guards at one end and two at the other. She picks a third group at the edge of her hearing, drops all her metals, then burns duralumin and zinc together and Pulls one focused, enhanced burst of emotional Allomancy onto the distant men. A curse rings down the corridor, then shouting, then a brawl breaks out. The four guards rush to investigate; she Riots the curiosity of the two who linger, and they go too. The door behind them leads to a storeroom, and inside it is the trapdoor she has been looking for.

She drops through, Pushes a coin to feel the floor below, lands in pitch dark. A lantern on the wall, flint, light. And there is the cache door — its rock mounts torn apart from outside, the door itself still standing, propped open just wide enough for a person to slip through. The opening has plainly cost someone immense work. She wonders briefly why anyone would have torn the mounts apart like this. Yomen keeps a Mistborn who could just as easily have pulled the door open with Steel. She slips through anyway, jumps to the cache floor — and behind her, stone grinds against stone, and the door closes.

Upstairs, Elend is in the middle of an actually good argument. Yomen is interested, the crowd is bored, and Elend can hold one or the other but not both, but he has not had a debate this satisfying in a long time — Ham never goes deep, Sazed does not like to argue at all — and he half-wishes he had met Yomen when he was younger and could afford to enjoy this. He throws out the Terris stewardship program; Yomen reminds him it was the Canton of Inquisition's proposal, not the Lord Ruler's initiative, and quotes Trendalan back at him. Elend is relieved when shouts of surprise interrupt the discussion and two soldiers haul a dazed, bloodied Vin in her ball gown into the room. Yomen stands and demands to know where the empress is.

Elend sees his chance: he will probably never be this close to Yomen again, and there is only one way to know whether Yomen was lying about not being a Mistborn. Try to kill him. He coins onto the stage, ballroom screaming around him, glass daggers out, drops two false dinner-companion guards with coins, grabs Yomen by the throat and squeezes. No pewter flushes Yomen's limbs. No Steel-push or Iron-pull tries to shake him loose. Yomen hardly struggles. He lets him go, half-convinced — and Yomen pulls a glass knife of his own from somewhere and slashes. Elend, with pewter, should be able to dodge an unenhanced man easily. He cannot. The first cut opens his forearm; the second takes him in the side. He looks up into Yomen's eyes and burns electrum, throwing his own atium-shadow false trail in the way. Yomen hesitates, suddenly blind. *He is burning atium*, Elend thinks. *He is Mistborn after all.* The side cut is bad enough that he disengages — Pushes himself up off coins thrown over the heads of the cowering nobility, and out through the patio exit Vin had indicated to him.

Three hours later in the command tent, his side and arm patched and only pewter keeping him upright, Elend paces. Vin does not return. He tells Ham what happened, eats under protest, and decides at last to go back into the city for her. Ham points out he is liable to die on his feet if he does. A man comes in with a letter from the city. The note, addressed to *Pretender Venture* and signed by King Yomen, confirms what Elend has already guessed — Yomen has her — and thanks him drily for the satisfying conversation that bought the time. Mistborn, the note adds, are all the same; they overreach.

In the cache below, Vin sits with her back to the closed stone door, the dying lantern beside her. She has Pushed, Pulled, kicked, tried duralumin-flared pewter — and the door does not move. The forced-open mounts she had taken as a work site had been done for one reason: Yomen had pulled the iron plates out of the door so no Mistborn could ever Push or Pull it open. The floor slopes away, denying her leverage. The hinges have been weighted or piled-against from outside. She had searched the room cursorily for atium and found nothing — of course there was none, she tells herself; Yomen had time to clear it before he set the trap. She is an idiot. She prays Elend did what she told him.

Then she hears a footfall in the dark. She rises into a crouch, burns bronze, and feels him — an Allomancer, Mistborn, the same man whose pulses she has been chasing through Fadrex for weeks. Her trap, she thinks for a moment, with cautious relief — Yomen meant to separate her from Elend before setting his own Mistborn on her, and a single Mistborn she can beat and hold for ransom. She waits until he is close, kicks the lantern at him, and launches forward with daggers. The lantern catches his face for half a second as she falls toward him.

She recognises him. Reen.