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Sazed works the warehouse the city has turned over to the Suisna refugees. Once Kelsier had filled the same building with the swords and armour he had quietly cached for the rebellion; now those weapons are in armouries and a few hundred broken people lie on its floor in whatever blankets the merchants will let them have. Straff has pressed every able man into his own ranks and waved the rest of the village through, knowing Elend cannot turn the weak away. Sazed moves from group to group with his coppermind supplying names — a grieving mother whose last sick infant he cannot promise to save, then the next family, and the next. His old instinct to offer one of the lost religions in moments like this for the first time will not come; faith in nothing has had its rebellion drained out of it.

Tindwyl finds him in the warehouse, notes that he is tapping no wakefulness, and tells him she can see he has nearly burned through his stored reserves. Then, abruptly, she asks to be shown whatever he found out at the Conventical that sent him running across two dominances. He agrees, and they leave together.

Breeze watches the two Terrismen go and lets himself feel pleased. He has been working a quiet Soothing over the room — easing the refugees' grief, easing Sazed's fatigue, easing Tindwyl's sense of duty just enough to let the feeling she has been hiding from him for weeks come to the surface — and arguing to himself that none of it is invasive. Soothing done well is the encouragement of natural feeling; the real talent is reading what is already there. The same argument leaves him able to admit, in private, that he is ruined for love — every woman who has ever responded to him might only have been responding to his Allomancy. There is no way to ever be sure.

Elend comes through with Ham in his white uniform, briefly, horrified by the warehouse and resolved to drag the clothing merchants down from Kenton Street to see it for themselves. Breeze Soothes Ham less argumentative, Elend less uncertain, and lets them go. Then he closes the warehouse and retreats to one of the palace's booth-shaped dining rooms for his nightly cup of wine with Clubs — the one man on the crew who keeps his copper up against him at all times, and the only company in which Breeze can simply be quiet. Clubs toasts the Survivor, "damn him for knowing us better than we knew ourselves," for ruining a pair of thieves and scammers by making them feel responsible for a city. They both drink.

Allrianne turns up at the booth, slides onto the bench beside Breeze, and helps herself to his cup. He keeps insisting to himself that she is half his age and gives up resisting anyway.

One booth over, Vin sits in the dark with OreSeur, her tin-sharpened hearing catching every word. She has already eliminated Dockson from her short list of who might be the kandra impostor and now she is checking Clubs — pushing her bronze through his coppercloud until she can hear the faint pulse of his own copper, something she suspects only she and the Lord Ruler have ever heard. Clubs is no kandra. And Allrianne is a Rioter — she has been pushing Breeze's desire for her ever since she arrived. Vin tells herself the girl might well be more than a Misting; Kliss and Shan both turned out to be other than what they wore.

With Clubs eliminated, only Demoux is left. Vin decides it is time to act. She climbs back to his quarters to take him into custody and discovers he has already slipped out the gate alone on what the gate soldiers say is one of his ordinary solitary patrols. She and OreSeur take to the rooftops and trail him through the mist toward a flicker of firelight in a small square.

There, two hundred skaa are huddled around a bonfire — Vin has not seen skaa willingly out in the mist since the night of the Collapse — and Demoux is greeted at it like a man they have been waiting for. He stands, accepts a chair and a steaming cup, and preaches. He is no shouter; his is the quiet, half-hesitant voice of a hardened young man, and the crowd hangs on it. He tells them not to fear the mist — that the Survivor gave it to them — and to hold on through the siege, because the Survivor himself endured the Pits and the death of his wife and survived. Then he turns plainly political: the Assembly must keep Elend Venture on the throne, because the Survivor chose him — not Penrod, not Cett — and the skaa Assemblymen in his audience are to go and tell their counterparts so.

Vin listens, knives quietly put away, rebalancing what she thought about him. He is sincere, gentle in argument, even when he tells the crowd that she will protect them — and that, somehow, she will end the ashfall, bring back the yellow sun, the blue sky, and the green plants of the obscure old texts. Vin does not know who started that promise. Neither, when she later asks him, does Demoux. It is in the air, and it is spreading.

When the meeting breaks up, Vin drops to the alley behind him and confronts him. He shrinks before her, expects to be disciplined for pandering, and asks her not to tell the crew — Ham thinks the Church is silly, Breeze thinks it only useful for handling people. He tells her plainly that he believes: Kelsier once directed his blade with Allomancy in front of the recruit army to make a point, and Demoux is convinced he still sometimes feels the Survivor steadying his arm. Vin does not argue him out of it. She tells him she will speak to Elend but not to the others.

On a rooftop afterwards she asks OreSeur what Kelsier had told him to preach when he wore the Survivor's returned face on the night of the Collapse. OreSeur gives the short answer: hope, and rebellion. None of the promises about the sun and the ash and the sky. Vin turns toward the palace to find Elend, the kandra hunt no closer to over than it was that morning.