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Vin reaches Luthadel in a cold drizzle that does not banish the mists. Burning bronze, she counts at least a dozen Allomancers — Mistborn — closing on her position. She lands barefoot on the wall and looks down at her old capital. The city is empty. Whole streets stand torn open, buildings burned, the slums dark; the fires that still burn burn untended, marking neighbourhoods like watch-lights. The greatest city in the world, abandoned and dying. She is alone except for the things flying toward her — and that, she reminds herself, was the plan: lead Ruin here, in person, by letting him believe she has come to fetch the atium.

She bounds across the city in the mistcloak Kelsier gave her on her first night, and lands in the rain in front of Kredik Shaw — the Lord Ruler's palace, the Well's shell, abandoned and broken-windowed since his death. Ruin appears at her side in his fatherly voice. *Here? We have searched this place.* She does not look at him. *You revealed yourself,* she says. *I'll never fetch it now.* He admits that he no longer believes she has it; she came too easily. He will, then, have to make her talk. He names what he is — mountains, waves, storms, the end — and vanishes. Lightning flashes in the mist. Robed figures step out of the rain.

Thirteen Inquisitors come for her. Marsh climbs up the rubble of a ruined building to watch. His chest is a forest of spikes, one between each pair of ribs, plus eye-spikes — easily twice as many as any other Inquisitor she has ever counted, including the one she and Elend killed together. He does not enter the fight. The others charge.

Vin burns duralumin and detonates a Steelpush into the first pair, throwing them off their spikes; she rebounds, foot-first, into the chest of another and yanks an eye-spike free with pewter-charged strength. The creature screams but does not die. One eye-spike, she learns, is not enough. She is plucked out of the air and thrown into a spire; her thrown daggers shatter on cobblestones. The grip that catches her around the throat moves with Feruchemical speed — the same speed she has felt off of Sazed, the same kind of strength she has felt off of Marsh earlier. The new spikes have given these Inquisitors Feruchemical powers. Each of them is, essentially, a small Lord Ruler.

*You see?* Ruin asks in her head. Vin duralumin-pushes free of the throat-grip, opening a wound in her neck, and burns the last of her metal vials to restore her steel. She bounds, fights, dodges; she breaks one Inquisitor's knees with a pewter-enhanced kick and finds him standing again a moment later, healed. She takes blows that pewter deadens but cannot prevent. She Pulls herself up onto the spires of Kredik Shaw, among the iron towers, and the flock of robed Inquisitors comes after her. She drags one off a spire on the way down, lands on a lower spike, and the spike runs through his chest as she rips free; he hits the cobblestones below and his head separates as the spike continues through his neck. She drops the head into a puddle and stands. Marsh screams.

Four Inquisitors catch her at once. She extinguishes tin, burns duralumin with steel and pewter together, and detonates outward — every spiked body within reach is thrown off her. She hits the cobblestones with the last of her pewter spent. The pain in her back and throat catches up. Marsh steps in front of her.

This was the plan. The mists had answered her twice before, both times when she was at the end of herself. She had decided to put herself in worse trouble than she had ever known and trust them again. *Come on,* she pleads. *Please.* Marsh looms over her. The mists do not come. They puff away from her the way they have for the last year, the way they retreat from an Inquisitor. She is being shunned.

Marsh kneels and goes to work. He breaks the leg she tries to pull herself up on, then her other arm, then the first arm. She screams. The torture is methodical. She has not known anything like it since the streets, before Kelsier. Ruin in her head, kindly: *Now we will begin. Where is the atium, Vin?* She crawls, blind with pain, reaching for mists that will not have her. She realises, with grief, that no one is coming.

The brief second viewpoint inside Marsh's head: he is in Hemalurgic bloodlust, Ruin cannot pull him out of it, and he is enjoying himself — and yet, somewhere very small in him, a piece is shouting *no*. He remembers that Kelsier loved this girl like the daughter he and Mare never had. He remembers giving up the skaa rebellion one year before his brother toppled the empire, the great shame of his life. *Not again. No more giving up.* He breaks her fingers one at a time. And then his hand passes the earring in her ear — twisted, chipped, half a tiny spike — and he remembers two things at once: the story Vin told him about her mother, Reen coming home to find his sister murdered and Vin alone, an earring through her ear; and Spook's letter — *don't trust anyone pierced by metal. Even the smallest bit can taint a man.* Inside the high of killing the Hero of Ages, Ruin's grip on him is at its weakest. Marsh does not give Ruin time to react. He rips the earring from her ear.

Vin's eyes snap open. The voice in her head stops in mid-sentence. The mists return to her with a snap — sensing the tin she is still burning, swirling around her like an old friend. She is dying; Marsh is reaching for his axe. The pain begins to ebb. *Please,* she begs the mists one last time, reaching for them; they feel suddenly, completely familiar. From the Well of Ascension, a voice tells her. The same power. Solid in the bead of metal you fed Elend. Liquid in the pool you burned. *Vapour in the air, confined to night. Hiding you. Protecting you. Giving you power.* She gasps in a breath of mist and it goes through her like fire; her body burns like a flared metal; the pain is gone. Marsh's axe is already in motion, water spraying off its arc, when she catches his arm.