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Vin, on her balcony with OreSeur in the mists, is frightened by how little it bothers her now to think of the people she has killed. The great drum of the Well of Ascension is so loud in her head that she burns bronze almost constantly to listen to it; her research sits untouched on her floor, she has not dealt with the kandra spy she still believes is in the palace, and Cett still lives. Zane's voice keeps coming back to her — *why do we always have to be someone else's knives* — and she can no longer find a clean answer.

The mist in her room does not dissipate the way it ought. Zane is standing on the balcony. He has come to take her north. She almost goes; he is hard the way she is hard, broken the way she is broken, and the Well is north. On her way out she takes a vial from the desk — and he flinches at the motion. The flinch is the answer. Elend would not have flinched. She tells him quietly that she cannot go. He asks why — strips off every reason she has and demands a real one — and she finds it: when she attacked Cett's keep and could not say why, Elend backed her. He trusts her. She is staying.

He tells her she was supposed to save him, and slams her into the wall.

The fight is short and very bad for her. Zane still has his atium and now also duralumin — taught to him, through OreSeur, by a copy of the metallurgist's note she never thought to keep secret. She tries to dive for her wolfhound for the atium bead in his shoulder, gives him the code phrase to run — and he does not run. He crosses the room to stand beside Zane and bows his head when Zane calls him *TenSoon* and orders him to obey nobody else. Vin sees, far too late, what she has missed all year. There was indeed a kandra in the palace. The dog body she gave OreSeur was an ideal place to swap one kandra for another, and the "fresh bones" he had led her to discover on the day she was on the wall with Elend were a misdirection he had set himself. He apologises; he does not stop.

Zane kicks her in her already-wounded side, throws her into the floor, lets her get up, slashes her cheek in the same place she was first cut by a Mistborn two years before. She tries the same duralumin coin-Push she used against Cett's men; he cancels it with a duralumin-flared Push of his own and slams her into the wall. Cornered, she reaches for the mists themselves, the way she did against the Lord Ruler — they do not answer. Then she remembers what TenSoon just shouted from across the room: *she knows our secret, the reason we fear Allomancers, the reason we serve the Contract.* Zane orders the kandra silent. TenSoon has already said enough.

She flings a Soothing at the wolfhound, flares duralumin, and feels her mind step into a second body. She drives TenSoon at Zane like a club; Zane kicks the wolfhound aside breaking him, but the kandra rolls within reach. She cuts the atium bead out of his shoulder with the dropped dagger and burns it. The reserve flashes out almost instantly. The bead was lead, plated thin with atium — the same one Zane gave her in the courtyard weeks ago. He never intended to leave her atium she could fight him with.

He walks toward her, confident. She keeps him talking — *my brother told me anyone would betray me*, *he was a wise man*, *he was a paranoid fool* — and watches him. He has been managing the whole of her year: she understands now that the Allomancer hidden among Cett's men at the Assembly was his, placed to make her suspect Cett; that her blossoming fear of frightening Elend was his work too. And she sees her opening. He is reacting before her blade lands. The atium is showing him where she is going to strike. She clears her mind, lets her body start an attack, and watches his open hand reach for the air her arm should fill. Then she twists. Her dagger goes the other way. His knife takes her in the shoulder. Hers takes him cleanly through the throat. He falls into the mists on the floor, surprised, and the voice he has heard all his life chooses that moment to tell him, almost kindly, that it never told him to kill her — that he was never insane to begin with.

Vin checks his pulse, retrieves her dagger, and kneels by TenSoon. He is broken in half. She offers him Zane's body for bones; he asks instead for the second set of wolfhound bones in the closet, not wanting to wear the creature he has just helped kill. He explains the trick back to her so they both understand what happened, and tells her that with his master dead his Contract is void; he must return to his people for reassignment. He has, in helping her, given her the secret his people have kept for a thousand years. He asks her to leave. When she returns, he will be gone. She stumbles out into the hall and runs to Elend.