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Sazed sits with Breeze and Allrianne in the Canton cavern lair beneath Urteau, the three of them waiting for Spook to come back from the city above. Breeze has bullied a few soldiers into breaking open the cache stores for a proper meal; both he and Allrianne have changed back into their nobleman's suit and peach dress at the first opportunity, as if to remind themselves who they actually are. Goradel keeps a tense watch from a nearby bookcase. Quellion's soldiers have set a camp outside the Ministry building above, and the team's days of moving freely through Urteau are clearly over.

The conversation circles the same problem. How does a boy fall two storeys to cobbled street, carrying a child, walk away, and turn up in the underground's mouth as the Survivor of the Flames? Breeze insists Spook cannot have been Mistborn all along — they would have noticed through the Final Empire's fall and the siege of Luthadel — and Sazed hears the unspoken corollary, *I would have noticed*. He had watched the leap himself, though, and the body had landed with the poise of a pewter-burner. Sazed briefly catches himself reaching for his copperminds to look the question up before pushing the impulse aside. He has set the Keepers' knowledge down for a reason; he will not pick it up just to win a curiosity.

He retreats to his curtained corner and his portfolio. The next religion in the stack is the Nelazan faith of the god Trell, a doctrine he has been saving toward the end for its mathematics and its astronomy and now finds, like the others, riddled. Their teachings on the afterlife are vague to the point of evasion; the answer to too many questions is *ask Trell, and he will answer*. He puts the page down without committing to a verdict. He cannot focus. His mind keeps coming back to the boy on the rooftop.

Above the cavern, in the ash-buried plot that had once been a garden behind Quellion's residence, Spook finds Beldre alone at the lone surviving shrub. He has worked out, he tells her, why her sadness is so deep — not the dead garden, not her exclusion from her brother's councils, but the simpler thing: she is the sister of a man murdering people in her sight, and she cannot stop him. Spook himself killed for the first time today, and so he knows the shape of that grief now. He tells her Quellion is not the man she remembers — that he is murdering Mistings' neighbours to disguise the fact that he is gathering Mistings — and he offers to take her out with him before her brother falls. The Survivor's voice in his head, urgent and exact, tells him to walk into the house instead and kill Quellion while the guards are thinned. Spook refuses: not in front of her. Beldre tells him she will start screaming, then does. Spook runs, leaving Quellion alive for now.

Back below, Sazed gives up on his portfolio and sits with the spread of his unworn metalminds — iron, steel, tin, copper, no gold or atium, and at the centre the four polished copper bracers that hold the entire stored Keeper corpus that an older Feruchemist had once read into him over years of patience. He cleans them by lantern-light. Breeze joins him, restless, and finally asks the question outright: why polish what you refuse to put on?

Sazed answers without performance. He is, so far as he knows, the last Keeper. The knowledge in these bracers will die with him; he is not always sure he regrets that fact. The years he spent teaching the recovered religions after the Lord Ruler's fall went poorly — people were interested but not faithful, and museums do not feed starving children. To wear the bracers now, while he is still sorting truth from lie inside them, would be a hypocrisy — he would be pretending to a Keeper's authority he has not earned back. Breeze argues, gently, that the dark coming over the land is exactly when knowledge is most needed; Sazed answers that he does not know any longer whether he wants to fight the dark at all.

The cavern shakes — another tremor, harder than the last, the metalminds clinking together on the table, the few foodstuffs left on shelves crashing down. Breeze white-faced asks whether these have been coming more often. Sazed confirms that they have. Before the conversation can recover, Goradel hurries in: Spook is back.

They find him at the front of the cavern. There is blood on his clothes that is not his and a charred rip across the bottom of his cloak. His eyes are uncovered, and his face has gone hard in a way Sazed does not remember. He gives orders. They are going to take Urteau for Emperor Venture: Breeze is to seed the city's underground with the truth about Quellion's Mistings, and Sazed is to find a way to flood the canals back into the streets — using the engineering knowledge stored in his copperminds, since the construction that diverted the water down here is documented in books he memorised years ago. When Sazed balks at the metalminds, Spook presses; when Sazed asks how he survived the leap and why he hoods his eyes, Spook falters into something like the boy Sazed remembers and asks only that he be trusted for now.

Sazed looks at him and sees that he cares about this city in a way Sazed himself no longer cares about anything. He glances toward his curtained-off corner where the metalminds lie. As long as he is using them for engineering, he tells himself, and not preaching their religions, he is not yet the hypocrite he is afraid of becoming. It is a thin excuse. It is enough. He agrees.