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Five months on from Feltrel, Wax threads a crowded gala at Cett Mansion in Elendel, nodding to lords and ladies who call him *Lord Waxillium* and *Lord Ladrian* and shouldering through to the balcony for air. Inside it is electric light and laughter and women in long pleated skirts; outside it is mist on glass and a wide view down Demoux Promenade, the unfinished Ironspine Building and Tekiel Tower climbing into the dark on either side of the canal. He has come home at his uncle's death to take up the lordship of House Ladrian — the name on the letter he once wished he had burned. The house is insolvent thanks to his uncle's mismanagement and most of the high city has been offended into the bargain; the only easy way out is a politically suitable wife, and the entire party knows he is shopping. He can still hear the shot that killed Lessie in his head, clean and crisp as the sky cracking.

Lady Cett pokes her head out to fetch him back; he agrees and does not move. The room behind him is hot and close and the Sterrions under his arms are jabbing his ribs, the long barrels never meant for shoulder holsters. Instead of returning, he swings over the railing, drops three storeys on a tossed casing, vaults the garden wall, and lands soft in the coachmen's yard. He swaps his dinner coat for the mistcoat in the trunk of his carriage, slides his shotgun into its inside pocket, buckles on his gun belt, and steps out into the mists himself. He has been to a function nearly every evening since his return and there has not been a misty night in weeks; tonight, he tells himself, is for him.

He bounces down Demoux Promenade from one electric lamp to the next like a Coinshot courier, drawing eyes from passing carriages, both horse-drawn and the new horseless kind. At the base of the Ironspine Building he fills his iron metalminds to make himself almost weightless, then Pushes himself twenty storeys up and grabs hold of an ornamented ledge. From there he climbs by hand and by shotgun-recoil — a blast outward kicks him five storeys higher — until he reaches the open lattice and walks the top girder above the city. The mists are thin tonight; far below, Elendel sprawls in scattered light to the distant bay. Once this had been home. Now it is taller and stranger than it has any right to be, and he is older than his years.

He arcs back down on a Push off the highest beam, falls a half-minute through the mists, and slows himself with a shotgun blast into the paving stones below. The shot ruins the stones. He is already chastising himself for blundering when distant gunfire reaches him — not constables responding to him, but something else, somewhere in the apartments off the promenade. He grins despite himself and lets the rooftops carry him toward it. Patrol work. The thing that drew him out of the party in the first place.

He drops into an alley above a rifleman firing on city constables from behind a stack of boxes. Four armed thugs spin to face him as he lands; he raises his Sterrion on the lead man with the patchy beard. Somewhere behind them, a woman is whimpering. The chapel and the garrote and the spray of blood crash back into him in one moment and he cannot fire. The rifleman cracks a shot through his coat; his steel bubble barely deflects it past his ribs. Appalled at himself, Wax fires into the ground beneath his own feet and Pushes off the bullet, throws himself out of the alley and onto another roof. Behind him, the constables sweep in and do the work he could not. There is no woman; the whimpering had been a gut-shot gang member they drag out groaning. The constables never see him.

He goes home over the wall of Ladrian Mansion, Pushes off the front gate to land on a fourth-storey balcony, and slips through the window he had left unlatched. The hallway is dark; he is no Tineye and has to feel his way. He has nearly reached his bedroom when Tillaume opens an interior door with a candelabrum, perfectly composed, and observes only that the bath is drawn and he hopes my lord has not shot anyone too important. Wax has not shot anyone at all. The butler does not say a word about the scandal his disappearance from the Cetts' will have caused, or about the apology letter he will have to draft to Lady Cett alongside the one already sent to Lord Stanton. He doesn't need to.

Tillaume does, gently, speak boldly. The city has a great many constables. The house has exactly one High Lord, and thousands depend on him. Wax stands there with his hand on a holster and admits the constables in the alley had not, in fact, needed him. He is trying to cling to something he no longer is. He pulls the mistcoat off his shoulders, folds it reverently, lays the Sterrions and the shotgun on top of it, closes the trunk lid on his old life, and tells Tillaume to take it all and put it away somewhere safe, for good. Tillaume sounds approving. Wax walks into the washroom no longer a lawkeeper — only the Sixteenth High Lord of House Ladrian of the Fourth Octant of Elendel City.