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Elend stands alone in the mists outside Fadrex. It has been three days since Yomen took Vin. He has come out into the dark to brood over what he cannot afford to do — abandon his army to mount a one-man rescue of his wife — and he is finding, against everything in him that has ever feared the mists, that they comfort him. He is an Allomancer now; the mists curl around him as though he belonged in them. Vin no longer trusts them. He cannot quite bring himself to share her distrust, even now, even though he knows she has the survivor's instincts and he has only a politician's.

Cett has himself carried out to join him, blunt as always. Vin is as good as dead. Elend knows that is the calculation, but answers that he trusts her to find a way out; if anyone can, she can. He is in denial, Cett tells him, and probably right to be. Cett presses on practicalities. Supplies are failing: Demoux has had to put the soldiers on half-rations. Another of Cett's raiding parties has come back from the surrounding villages with the same story as every party before it — the people in Yomen's dominion are starving so completely that there is nothing left to take and no heart in the soldiers to take it. One group felt sorry enough for the villagers it had been sent to plunder that it stayed several days and helped water their fields and repair their homes. Cett tells Elend he had thought a siege a fine idea; he no longer does. He thinks they should strike Fadrex, take what they can, and retreat to hold Luthadel for the summer.

Before Elend can answer, shouting comes through the mists from a cooking fire. Another fight. Elend hurries toward it and arrives in time to see Demoux step into the middle of the brawl — and one of the brawlers, refusing to stop, turn and punch the general full in the face, dropping him. Elend coins himself forward, lands in the firelight, and Soothes the combatants flat. The fight breaks. The man who threw the punch, a soldier named Brill, admits under Elend's Soothing what the whole camp has been muttering for weeks: the mistfallen are cursed, they are the reason Vin was taken, and he is tired of listening to them speak of the Survivor's blessings.

Ham arrives with his Mistings and hauls the brawlers off for discipline. Elend pulls Demoux to his feet — more shaken than hurt, embarrassed that he had not anticipated it. The other fight Ham had broken up that night, Ham tells Elend, had been the same: regular soldiers against mistfallen. Elend knows what must be done — for the army's sake and for the law's. The man who struck a general will be executed. Demoux suggests solitary; Elend refuses. Discipline is fragile enough as it is.

He cannot keep the two factions in one camp. He turns to Demoux and orders him to take a group of soldiers back with the messenger Conrad along the canal to reinforce Penrod in revolt-torn Luthadel. How many? About three hundred, Elend tells him — meaning, plainly, every mistfallen in the army. Demoux understands. Ham tells him it is the right thing to do; Elend answers, tiredly, that it is not — only that it is necessary. As he stands there in the mist he thinks of koloss as the army's reflection — men reduced to their basest emotions, and not the other way around, the way he has always assumed.

He turns back toward Fadrex's watch-fires. Cett is right. They cannot sit out here and wait while the world dies. He strides off through the dark with Ham trailing, and finds his way to Noorden's tent. The former obligator keeps strange hours; the maps Elend had asked him to compile are there on the table, laid out in patient lines: the locations of every koloss band in the dominion. Yomen refuses to be intimidated by Elend's army. Elend decides to see whether he can be intimidated by someone else's.