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Vin sits in her cell — her cot lying legless on the floor where she has taken it apart for screws — and asks Ruin the question that has nagged her for two books: out of a thousand years and hundreds of thousands of people, why pick her? Why steer her to the Well of Ascension to set him free? Ruin, in the body he wears as Reen, does not answer her. He stares through the wall toward the east instead and waxes lyrical about the ash falling deep enough to drown the world, the earth tremors like an old man's dying sighs, the planet pulling itself apart. Much of this, he tells her, the Lord Ruler did to itself; she may blame him if she wishes. He gloats. He says the Lord Ruler rejected him outright at the Well — and that was, Vin does the arithmetic, exactly a thousand years ago. The Well's power must regenerate on that cycle. She files it.

Ruin keeps talking. The point of the world, he tells her in his fatherly voice, is that men who try to help only end up helping him; that is what his power is for. The ashmounts, the koloss, the kandra, the Inquisitors — all built by Rashek, who hated him but could not help building toward him. *I help everyone,* he says, smiling. *My power is the only tool by which things change.* Vin has heard enough. She stands, walks to the front of her cell, and shouts for the guards. She tells them to go to Yomen and tell him she has information to trade.

The audience chamber. Yomen looks haggard — no pewter in his eyes, despite being a Mistborn, and Vin revises her theory: he can burn only the one metal, the bead on his forehead. The Lord Ruler said there was no such thing as an atium Misting — but the Lord Ruler said many things to stay in power, and Vin has stopped taking him at his word. She offers Yomen a question to ask her. He asks how Elend controls the koloss. She tells him: emotional Allomancy enhanced by duralumin, the Allomantic alloy of aluminum; mix duralumin with zinc or brass, Pull on a koloss's emotions, and the creature is yours.

He does not laugh her off. Ruin strolls a slow circle around her, amused, wondering aloud what her game is. She presses: there were five storage caverns and Elend and she found the others. The trail ends here, at Fadrex. The Lord Ruler left a plate in this cavern as in the others — claiming there is no solution to the dying world — but she does not believe him. There has to be more buried across the five plaques. Yomen notes, drily, that she — purported murderer of his god — is a strange person to come pleading the Lord Ruler's cause. But she finds his angle in the sentence after that. Yomen thinks the Lord Ruler is still alive and that the path of caches across the empire was built by him, for him, to lead someone here. To Yomen. She gives him the answer he wants. *He wanted us to meet,* she says, and Yomen sends for his maps.

She marks the caverns on the Canton map: Luthadel in the centre, Satren, Vetitan, Urteau arrayed around it, and an X at Fadrex. Yomen calls the pattern random. Vin disagrees — and asks him for the mineral-deposits map. As soon as it overlays the first, the pattern jumps out: every cavern sits on a major metal mine. Vin realises why. Kwaan's writings were inscribed in metal because metal was *safe* — and *safe* meant safe from being read by Ruin, whose vision metal blinds. Hide a cache in a mine, and he cannot see it. He needs someone to walk inside the metal and read it out for him. He needs her.

Anger replaces shame. Vin looks again at the path that has driven her — past every cache, into Elend's objections, into Yomen's city — and she finds the same unaccountable hunger underneath each step: atium. Ruin cannot read her mind, the Lord Ruler told her, but he can push her emotions. He has been pushing her, all this time, toward the metal he wants. And she has obediently led him to it. *Why?* she thinks, looking at the smug figure across the room. *What is the atium to him?*

The doors burst open and an Inquisitor strides in. Grey robes of the pre-Collapse Ministry, one spike driven deeper than the other, face inhumanly twisted — and behind that, familiar. *Marsh,* Vin whispers. He ignores her, kneels his head to the apparition no one else can see, and tells Yomen to give him the atium he found in the cache; Elend's koloss are about to attack and the metal cannot be in the city when they hit. Vin closes her eyes. Yomen tells Marsh, confused, that there was *no atium in the cache* — only the seven beads he had personally laid aside as the Canton's own reserve. *I let her think otherwise,* he tells the Inquisitor. *Misdirection.*

Ruin roars. For a single second the body he wears blossoms outward into a churning blackness — the same thing she walked through under Luthadel on her way to the Well — before he snaps back into Reen's shape with his hands behind his back, pretending the slip did not happen. Vin edges away from him and closer to Marsh. Marsh hisses at Yomen that he is doomed for failing his lord, then turns to the window as Elend's army breaks camp.

*Why does your god care about atium?* Yomen asks, baffled. *It is worthless without Allomancers and houses to bid for it.* Marsh tells him he knows nothing. Then the Inquisitor tells Yomen to let his city burn before forty thousand koloss: he will not lift a hand to help a man who has failed him. Yomen pales. Vin watches the army form up outside and feels, with no evidence she can name, suddenly certain that Elend will not attack. She tells Yomen so. She tells him to listen to the creature in the room — to see that his own priest disdains him, wants him dead, that the Lord Ruler's faith has gone elsewhere — and to join with her instead.

Marsh mocks her idealism. Not about killing him, he says — he knows she has killed one of his kind before — but about Elend. *Your husband belongs to Ruin,* he tells her. *We all do; we resist; we bow eventually. Only then do we see the beauty of destruction.* He asks her what it will mean if Elend *does* unleash the koloss on this city, slaughtering for a thing he wants. Memory of Cett's tower, of Zane beside her in the fire, of the slaughter she did for Elend then — she lived through it and never killed like that again. She opens her eyes. *Elend won't attack,* she says quietly. *Because he is a better person than I am.*