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Wax arrives at the Yomen Mansion on Steris's arm for the Yomen-Ostlin wedding dinner — the public debut they agreed to in their courtship contract. The grand ballroom is bigger than most Roughs towns, more than a hundred tables under enormous electric-lit chandeliers, ladies in deep colours and outer vests and skirts that go all the way to the floor. The crowd makes his back itch; he prefers parties spread across smaller rooms with watchable exits. Steris has lectured him in the carriage on precisely how to hold her arm — his above hers, fingers wrapping down under her palm — to convey the exact meaning they want passing observers to read.

She coaches him through the room. House Yomen are Sliverists, she sniffs, a horrid religion that would actually revere Ironeyes; they have nevertheless invited a notorious bore named Lord Shewrman to the dinner specifically as an insult to the guests they pointedly left out. Wax suggests, in Roughs voice, that this kind of social maneuvering is the sort of thing that gets people shot in Weathering. Steris coolly declines to indulge what she has decided is his instinctive masculine resistance to the marriage, an exaggerated savagery meant unconsciously to undermine the wedding. He drifts off into casing the room — sniper positions on the two end balconies, defensible pillars below, line of cover for an outnumbered fighter — and catches himself doing it. He has made this decision; he does not have to remake it every few days.

They are seated with Lord Harms and his quiet ward Marasi. Lord Harms explains Marasi's presence with the practised speed of a rehearsed excuse: she is from the Outer Estates, attending university in the city, allowed to live with them because her own parents cannot afford it. Wax tries to draw her into conversation and gets two quiet replies and a downcast napkin. Then a lean server with a faint Terris accent and false Terris earrings appears at his elbow describing the prawn bisque — and behind a fake nose and a wig, those are Wayne's eyes. Wayne presents the soup and vanishes. Marasi asks if she has seen him before; Wax redirects.

The talk turns to the kidnapping of Armal from the Coolerim robbery — Steris's cousin, vanished without word. Lord Harms grouses; Steris laments the constables. Then Marasi quietly asks Wax what it had been like to live where there was no law, and Wax answers honestly — out in the Roughs people thought he was a spoiler in the only game everyone else was playing — and admits Roughs report-writing has reached the city universities, including a fairly specific account of how he had stopped the Surefires. He sips his wine. Something rolls into his mouth: a wax-sealed shell casing slipped into his cup by Wayne. He palms it through a cough. Marasi, far from cowed by Lord Harms's attempt to shush her, lays out a quietly devastating statistical argument: by his own Roughs ratios Weathering had one lawman per five hundred people; the Elendel Octant where they sit has roughly half that. The city is more dangerous than the Roughs by the numbers; nobody admits it because the City is the land of plenty Harmony made.

Wayne returns with the bread. Steris excuses herself to the washroom — wounded by Wax's Weathering dog-story banter, which Wax himself acknowledges was beneath him — and Lord Harms wanders off to the bar for something stronger before the main course. The moment they are gone, Marasi drops the shy posture completely, and Wayne tips his chair back into a brief speed bubble and tips it forward in his usual duster and Roughs trousers, hat spinning on a finger, the waiter's coat already tucked under the next table — the duster, it turns out, had been folded under Wax's chair the whole time, which means Wayne had known beforehand which table they would be assigned. Marasi is openly bemused at the trick; she explains, blushing, that she is in her final year studying *legal justice and criminal behavioristics*, a discipline her cousins find unfeminine.

Wayne hands over a note he has compiled. Each of the women the Vanishers have kidnapped descends from the Lord Mistborn, and most of them are third- or fourth-cousins of each other. They are not just Allomancers; they are wealthy Allomancers from very specific bloodlines. Marasi catches Wax's expression and announces that she has known all along that he had come to Elendel to investigate the Vanishers — that is why she had pressed Lord Harms to bring her to his meetings. He demurs; the deaths were not a fabrication. Wayne presses through. The Vanishers are looking for the wealthy upper-class women in their bloodlines, and those women have stopped travelling on the railways after the kidnappings became public. Where else can they be found? *A place,* Wayne says, *where they wear their finest jewellery, and you can rob the rest as cover.*

A large wedding reception. Wax's mouth goes dry. Steris is one of those women. So is this wedding. The doors at both ends of the ballroom burst open from outside.