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Eight hours after Wayne's visit, Wax stands at an upstairs window of Ladrian Mansion watching the last of the day go dim, waiting for mists that never come. He had told himself he was not going outside anyway. The mists are still soothing to think about. He retreats into his uncle's study, turns up the electric lights — still a small wonder to him, even after months — and sits at the polished oak desk that used to belong to old Edwarn and now belongs to him.

He starts on the house ledgers and almost immediately begins glancing at the stack of broadsheets Limmi gathered for him. He tells himself a little reading is a duty of office; a man cannot make conversation in this city without it. Three of the broadsheets are compilation issues that reprint every story on the so-called Vanishers in date order. The dates do not match the version he has been told. The first robbery happened seven months ago — just before he arrived back in Elendel. There was a four-month silence before the second; the name *Vanishers* did not enter the broadsheets until then. The first freight had belonged to Augustin Tekiel, who said nothing for three months before publicly tearing into the constables over it.

Tillaume arrives with tea, mixed to order — minty, strong, not sweet, to clear the mind — and quietly disapproves. Wax requests the largest sheet of paper in the house. Tillaume returns with an artist's easel and a pad of paper, noting they had belonged to his sister Telsin, who had loved to draw. Wax feels his heart clench at her name; he and Telsin had been distant most of their lives, not by intent but by his laziness, and by the time the same accident took her and his uncle she had been a stranger. He sets the easel up and starts sketching the eight robberies train by train, dates beneath, putting his theories in the margins. Out of old habit he draws a couple of Wayne-style stick-figure bandits in the corner; it helps.

He cross-references his uncle's competitor shipping manifests. Wool prices would have been far too low in Vinuarch to justify the freight charges, and the eighteenth railway line was down that month; only a man with breadcrumbs for brains would have shipped real wool. Tekiel was almost certainly smuggling aluminum under another label to dodge taxes, which is why he stayed quiet for months — he could not afford the attention. That also explains why the gang had aluminum to spare for bullets afterwards; some of the haul, sold black-market, would have funded the operation. The remaining stolen metals — steel, iron, pewter, tin, zinc, brass, even some bendalloy — are the working metals of Allomancy. The aluminum bullets are made to kill Coinshots, Lurchers, and Thugs. And the four hostages — all women, all from wealthy families, none of them openly Allomantic but secretly maybe everything — were never accidental. The Vanishers are collecting Allomancers and the metals to neutralise them. Wool? It had never been wool. The whole robbery pattern is a screen for the hostages. *This is dangerous,* he whispers. *Very dangerous.*

Tillaume, tidying through it all, mildly reminds him about the house account ledgers, then about the new offices in the Ironspine lease, and at last shares a story about Edwarn's horse-racing days. His uncle had been a gifted gambler who consistently came out ahead, and the house had still gone close to ruin while he was out at the track, because he had stopped attending to what mattered. The mark of a great man, Tillaume says, is one who knows when to set aside the important things to accomplish the vital ones. Thousands of families rely on the Ladrian name. Then he gathers the empty cup and leaves.

Wax dims the lights so as not to be backlit at the window — a sniper's target — and stands alone in the dark with his diagram. He has not done his daily prayers. He fishes out the simple earring stamped with the ten interlocking rings of the Path, slips it in, and pretends to meditate. He thinks about the woman on a long-ago train ride who had given him this earring and whom he is still sure was one of Harmony's Faceless Immortals. He talks to Harmony like a colleague and gets back only the familiar wordless encouragement: *use your talents, keep going.* It is hard to feel that ledgers and luncheons are useful work compared to a jailed murderer or a rescued child. He had not found himself until he had left the city.

He thinks of the Vanishers and what taking the case would mean. And against his will he sees Lessie again, head jerking back, blood spraying onto the redbrick wall behind her. It is not the puzzle paralysing him; it is the certainty that taking on the case means risking that moment again, and he cannot do it again. He drops the aluminum round, pulls off his earring, cleans up the broadsheets, closes the drawing pad, and tells himself the truth he wants to be true: no one has been hurt by the Vanishers yet; the hostages will likely be ransomed; the constables are capable. He sits down to work on the house's ledgers instead, and stays at them well into the night.