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Elend sits in his book-cluttered study with Sazed, Ham, Tindwyl, and the ex-obligator scribe Noorden, hunting the city charter for any procedural way to block Cett's candidacy. There is none. Sazed has read Elend's own code six times — the code he helped author — and the only path to a hole would be to deliberately misread it, which Elend will not do. Noorden surfaces a Lord Ruler ledger from the palace records showing Cett had been trading quietly in Luthadel for years through nobleman fronts; the warlord is far more practiced at this game than his attitude suggests.

Noorden asks aloud whether it would really be so bad to let Cett take the throne. Elend walks him through it — the warlord rules by himself rather than by law, leaves a patchwork of half alliances and threats behind everywhere he goes, would bring chaos to the city — and Noorden is convinced. Elend knows that the same argument will not move the Assembly; every one of the twenty-three has their own reading of what Luthadel needs, and most of those readings contradict his own. Dockson is writing letters to those who will agree to meet him in the next week. He concedes to Ham that the original crew plan — sell the city to one army for protection from the other — is roughly what the people are about to do anyway. Sazed tells him that is not actually the question. The king's duty is to be true to the man he wishes to become; if the people do not want that man as their king, they will choose someone else. He must not try to guess what they want.

The window scrapes open and Vin climbs in through the ventilation slit, exaggeratedly horrified at yet more books, and lands on a stack of them with her mistcloak smudging Elend's ink. She tries to tell him she has been thinking more about the Deepness; he asks her to hold it until later. Hidden in her was the second thing she came to tell him — what she suspects about Demoux — and that goes unsaid too. Tindwyl makes a cut at Sazed for having helped author the very code they are now picking apart; without raising his voice Elend orders her to apologise to him or leave, and she leaves.

Quietly, watching him from a stack of books, Vin thinks the Elend in this room is no longer the Elend who once needed her. He holds himself like a king. He already handled the poisoning of the wells without telling her. The voice she thought she had outgrown — Reen's — surfaces in the back of her head telling her to leave him first, before he leaves her.

She hears a sound nobody else does, takes Elend's casual suggestion that she go scout Keep Hasting as her excuse, and sees herself out the ventilation window. Outside, in the mist, Zane is perched against the wall — feet braced, body held out into the night by a Pull against a piece of metal below. He nods her upward and they land on the Keep Venture roof.

Vin greets him; he attacks. He is burning atium and she is not. He cuts the tip off one of her mistcloak tassels, dodges her knives without effort, throws her down, and stands over her. Then he tells her, quietly, that the one thing he came here to confirm is true: she has no atium in the city. She tells him she used the last bead the night she fought Cett's assassins. He turns away from her.

His father, he says, has ordered him to kill her. He has stayed away because of it. He offers her a third path: she and he could simply leave — Straff would lose his Mistborn and Elend would lose hers — and they could be free. She refuses. She tells him she loves Elend.

He turns back and shows her his face. Look at the nose. The slant of the cheek. The curl of the hair, cut shorter than his brother's. The question of who Straff would trust as his Mistborn answers itself. He is his father's son by one of the mistresses, born and raised in the keep's shadows because under the obligators of the Final Empire he could not be acknowledged. Elend does not know he exists. After he Snapped as Mistborn, his father finally had a reason to need him. He does not, he says, hate Elend — he envies him for not appreciating what he has.

Last, the warning he came to deliver: Straff has just let several hundred refugees through his barricade. The koloss army sacked Suisna — a day's march from the city — and the survivors are being funneled through to break Luthadel's morale and consume its food. He tells her to think again about leaving. Elend does not understand her. Proof is coming. Then he drops off the rooftop, and she is left in the mist.