POV: vin
Summary
Vin throws herself off Keep Venture's wall and arcs through the night mist by coin Pushes, remembering the first weeks Kelsier gave her this. She lands on the perimeter wall with her bronze open and her steel lines reading the streets; nothing unusual. OreSeur, obedient to last night's instruction, has rounded the grounds in his new hound-body and is waiting for her. To his quiet pride he keeps her pace down the dark cobbles when she opens up with pewter, crests a six-foot garden wall behind her, and — when she shifts to a rooftop chase by coin-Push for ten solid minutes — turns out to have come up the side of a short building, jumped to the tenements, and travelled the roofs behind her by canine balance and scent. He concedes, formally, that he may have been hasty about the wolfhound's bones; its senses are excellent.
She lets him follow on, up onto the city wall, where she stands over the watchfires of Straff's army and turns the bar of duralumin over in her fingers. The two-year mystery of atium and gold not being an actual pair has been answered by Terion's work and the Eleventh Metal Kelsier called malatium — every Allomantic metal pairs with an alloy, even those two. She wonders, idly, what the equivalent rumour about duralumin might be, and whether her old teacher Sazed — who went south, in the direction Kelsier claimed to have found malatium — has heard any.
Movement. The Watcher is standing openly on a nearby tower, not even bothering to hide. She throws a fan of coins to start the chase, frees her metal-belt for OreSeur to bring along, and pursues. The Watcher is fast — possibly the fastest Mistborn she has ever crossed with apart from Kelsier himself — and she finds out firsthand how hard it is to track a determined Mistborn through the mist. He drops into a fountain square, sparkles with daggers, kicks himself across the surface in a spray of water, and at last loses her by Pushing through closed shutters into a second-storey room of a derelict building. She pierces the coppercloud he has hidden behind with her bronze — an ability she keeps to herself — and decides to test, since he is in there listening, what the duralumin does to a Mistborn watching her.
She burns it. A burst of sensory chaos — heartbeat like a drum, breeze like a gale, a dog scratching for food two streets away, a stranger snoring — and then nothing. She has burned her entire tin reserve, and her pewter and bronze beside it, in a single stretched heartbeat. The duralumin, she realizes on her knees with no night-vision left, pairs a metal not with a sense but with whatever else she happens to be burning, and consumes it in a single huge flare. OreSeur pads up out of the dark with her belt in his mouth. She thanks him; he reminds her he requires no thanks.
The Watcher returns. He drops down behind her rather than fleeing — lean-faced, dark-haired, no mistcloak, head cocked in genuine confusion at what he just watched her do. She tells him, half-laughing, that she might have done it to lure him in. He answers that he is an enemy, and that he helped her against Cett's assassins because he is "also insane". He asks whether she really killed Him; she says yes. He asks why she plays "their games" and gestures at Keep Venture; she says it is no game when the people she loves are in danger. He shakes his head as if disappointed, flips a coin to the cobbles between them, Pushes himself away into the dark. She lets him go.
Vin tells OreSeur they will need a harness so he can carry her spare metal vials for her, the way he used to as a human. The hound says no harness is necessary. He turns one shoulder toward her; the fur parts and the flesh under it splits open. He has her place a glass vial inside the wound. The skin closes around it. She burns iron and sees no line — metal inside another body cannot be Pushed or Pulled, just as her own earring cannot. He tells her, formally, that he will deliver it if she needs it; that it is the Contract and nothing more. They walk back together toward the palace.