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Elend walks the streets of Fadrex beside Yomen in an uneasy truce — neither man entirely comfortable with the other, both pinned together by the koloss horde swelling silently outside the gates. Yomen is impatient: they should be addressing sanitation, he says — health and food are how an army survives — and quotes a text Elend read as a younger man. Elend does not bother to argue and steers them toward the infirmary instead.

He keeps his eye on the soldiers on the way. Many are working to repair the increasingly bad earthquakes' damage. He salutes those who salute him, meets their eyes; he can feel them stand a little straighter once he has passed. Yomen watches him do it with a faint frown — an obligator who marks his own kingship with a single bead of atium at his brow and is used to running things from behind a desk, not the front line. *You don't know much about leading soldiers, do you?* Elend asks. Yomen bridles. Elend catches him quoting another scholar; *I read it too.* What scholars miss, Elend tells him, is the emotional load on a battlefield — soldiers need their leader visible, not abstract on a tower musing about the cosmos. Yomen falls silent. He concedes that Elend is, at minimum, an interesting man. *I'm a bastard,* Elend says cheerfully — not by birth but in composition: an amalgam of scholar, rebel, Mistborn, nobleman, soldier, all of which spent years fighting each other in his head. He has only just got them working together, and now the world is ending. *Here we are.*

Yomen's infirmary is a converted Ministry building; Elend takes the gesture as a small credit. Physicians work on the wounded from the first clash with the koloss; Yomen goes to argue infection rates with the staff; Elend sits with the worst cases, men maimed because of his miscalculation — he failed to see that Ruin could rip the koloss back from him. *And yet,* he thinks, sitting beside a one-armed soldier, *I was right to retreat.* He would rather lose inside this city than win outside it, because the winning side is not always the right one. Still, a ruler who cannot protect his people is not much of a ruler.

A disturbance at the door. A weeping woman is holding a convulsing boy — *mistsickness,* the physician says, and takes the child to a cot. The woman cries that she kept him inside until today, that she knew the mists wanted him. Yomen, unsentimental, tells her she should have followed his order to expose everyone in the city; now her son will take a bed that may be needed for a soldier. Elend watches the boy. He stops convulsing; his face is twisted in pain. Elend has felt pain like that once, when his father had him beaten near to death to see if he would Snap — to make him an Allomancer.

*Yomen,* he asks, casually, *did your people ever work out what causes mistsickness?* Yomen shrugs: does a sickness need a cause? It strikes sixteen percent to the man, Elend tells him. Yomen simply nods. Sixteen is a powerful number in his Church — the days it took the Lord Ruler to reach the Well of Ascension, the number of original Inquisitors, the number of Allomantic metals. *There are fourteen,* Elend starts. *Fourteen we know of,* Yomen says. *Not a number of power. They come in groupings of four — four physical, four mental, four enhancement, four temporal — and assuming your lady is right about atium's pair, there must be two more.* Two by two by two by two. Sixteen.

The pieces snap together. Sixteen metals. Sixteen percent of the population taken by the mists. Pain like a Snapping. Elend dashes out of Yomen's conversation and back into the soldiers' ward. *Who here was taken by the mists?* he asks. *When I made you stand out?* The one-armed soldier raises his hand, apologising for his weakness. Elend pulls his spare vial and tells him to drink it. The man drinks. Elend kneels at the cot. *Do you feel anything?* *Tired, my lord?* Then the soldier frowns, looks at himself, says it is odd. *Burn it,* Elend tells him. *Your body knows.* The soldier cocks his head, concentrates, and on Elend's bronze pulses out as a Misting.

Yomen arrives behind him; Elend is still kneeling with his eyes closed. *The mists were never our enemy, Yomen,* he says. *They were trying to help.* Not killing the people who fell. *Snapping* them. Every one of the sixteen percent forced into a near-death pain because their bodies hold the latent gift. The mists are growing humanity an army.

A frazzled soldier bursts in. *The koloss are charging.* Ruin knows what Elend has just worked out, Elend thinks, and is not waiting for more troops. *Yomen, every bit of powdered pewter, tin, steel, and iron in this city — get it to anyone who was struck by the mists. Make them drink.* *Why?* *Because they are now Allomancers,* Elend says, turning for the door. *This city will not fall as easily as everyone assumed. I will be on the front lines if you need me.*