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Wayne drops the speed bubble and Wax opens fire. First job, draw their attention. He sets a Steelpush bubble of force around himself to deflect non-aluminum bullets, drops a shotgunner at the back of the room with a clean shot to the head and a second a moment later — the shotguns are least dangerous to him and most dangerous to the cowering bystanders. The boom of the rounds rattles the cavernous ballroom; partygoers scream and scatter for the walls or hunker under their tables. The Vanishers are slow to realise where the fire is coming from.

Wax tap-flares his iron metalmind, makes himself a hundredfold heavier with the corresponding flood of strength, raises his pistols clear of the radius, and Pushes outward from himself in a hard expanding ring. Tables and chairs and silverware scrape and topple away from him in a circle; the guests caught in it are shoved bruisingly but alive toward the perimeter. He stands alone in a circular clearing at the centre of the room amid spilled wine and broken china. The bandits in front of him let loose; he meets the volley with a second Push that briefly stops the rounds dead in air and bounces them back, just enough to scatter the line. A shout goes up: *Coinshot in the room! Get out your aluminum!*

He drops weight, fires a round into the floor behind himself, Pushes off it, and arcs over the barricade to land in the middle of the bandits. He clears six in a spin — spread-armed, one revolver per side — before they get an aluminum round loaded. The aluminum is too expensive for most of them to risk in chambers, so it stays pocketed. He Pushes one man's pistol back into his face, drops him, then weights himself and Pushes shots clean through a thick oak table and into the bandits hiding behind it. The next volley pings off his cover without blue lines — they have caught up. He drops the now-useless Push bubble, draws the long-barreled Terringul 27 from his calf, and switches to hollow-points that lodge in wood rather than tear through into bystanders.

Meanwhile Wayne rides an overturned table to the south end of the room and dives off into one speed bubble after another around a single bandit at a time, reappearing somewhere else than the bandits expect, dueling canes already wet. By Wax's count he is up to seven down.

Past the kitchen door, Tarson is dragging Marasi toward the north exit, an entirely aluminum revolver pressed to her temple — no blue line on the gun at all. The masked leader watches it from the doorway. Something about him strikes Wax: the imperious posture, the eyes that lock to his, the voice. A shock crosses Wax's mind that he is looking at Miles Dagouter. He skids out of cover on a serving platter he Pushes off floor-lodged bullets, drops two bandits flanking Tarson, and tries to Push Tarson's gun aside — but the aluminum throws no line. Tarson grins under Wayne's stolen hat and swings the muzzle to Wax.

The killing shot is there and Wax cannot take it. Lessie's death plays back on a loop. Then Marasi locks her legs and slams her head up into Tarson's chin. Tarson's shot goes wild; Wax drops him with a round to the arm rather than the chest (Marasi is too close), then with his last bullet across the room shoots the masked leader in the head. The leader falls. *So much for that theory,* Wax thinks; Miles is a Twinborn of a particularly dangerous sort and would not have fallen to a single round.

Aluminum rounds whip past him. He scoops Marasi up, Pushes off his dropped revolver, and bounces them up through the chandeliers onto one of the music-balconies. Two more bandits storm the balcony stairs; he crushes them under a Pushed harp. He spots Wayne going limp across the room under a smirking bandit's gun — gut-shot. *Steris or Wayne?* He picks Wayne; the gang need Steris alive. Marasi gets one of the dead bandits' pistols pressed into her hands with the instruction to fire it if anyone comes for her.

Wax leaps off the balcony with weight maxed for Pushing-power, rips a row of chandeliers apart with one massive Push to clear his arc, then drops weight to almost nothing and arcs across the room through the falling crystal, suit-tails flapping, emptying all six chambers into the bandit standing over Wayne. He kills him on the way down and lands kneeling next to Wayne in a fresh speed bubble Wayne throws up the instant the threat is gone — he had been forced to drop his own bubble and play dead because a corpse that healed itself in a stationary bubble would have signalled to the bandit that Wayne wasn't actually dead. The bullet hole in his belly closes itself slowly under his Bloodmaker metalmind, which by his count has one more wound left in it. He ribs Wax about Marasi — *you always did like 'em smart* — and Wax tells him Lessie has not been gone a year.

They finish the last six between them: Wax catapults Wayne off a table with a Push on his metalminds, follows him in on a different arc, throws his empty revolver into the face of one bandit, and improvises a bullet by Pushing the empty shell casing Wayne had earlier slipped him through the skull of another. Wayne drops two more with dueling canes. The last bandit is behind Wax — and falls to a single rifle shot from Marasi on the balcony, the Ladies' Target Club at the university having ranked her well. She drops the one in the shadows that Wayne had counted, too.

*The one of the two,* Wayne mutters. Steris. Wax curses, throws himself across the room and out the front door. The street outside is empty save for a row of horses, a knot of bound grooms — and a body of constables just arriving. The masked leader's body is gone from where it fell; only blood remains on the marble. Wax sits down on the steps, exhausted, and cannot let the Miles Dagouter suspicion go.

The aftermath is louder than the fight. Captain Brettin, constable-general of the octant, corners Wax in the kitchens and lectures him on jurisdiction and citizens who think they can take the law into their own hands. He is interrupted by Lieutenant Reddi's body count: thirty-one Vanishers dead, six taken alive, and only one civilian — Lord Peterus himself, shot before Wax started fighting back. Brettin's tone shifts; the lecture peters out into a posturing exchange about whose city this is. Wax answers tiredly, declines to be jailed, and walks out into the ballroom.

Lord Harms sits at a side table, pale, shaking, the swagger gone. He takes Wax's hand and begs him to find Steris at any price; Wax promises he will. Wayne palms a confiscated aluminum revolver into Wax's pocket — one of ten the constables collected, replaced with a drawing — and a fistful of useless rifle-calibre cartridges to go with it. Marasi confirms that Steris is no Allomancer or Feruchemist, which collapses one of Wax's cleaner theories. He walks Marasi to her carriage; she kisses him on the cheek before climbing in. Wax takes Wayne home with him to Ladrian Mansion for the night.