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Marasi attends Miles' execution alone, against the advice of the senior prosecutor Daius — who had led the trial she helped prosecute as her first case, and who never goes to executions himself. From the outer balcony above the firing platform she watches Miles tied to the pole with contempt for the constables on his face. The trial had gone quickly; Miles never denied his crimes. She thinks of him pointing a gun at her hiding place in the tunnel — the only moment in that ordeal she had truly believed she would die — and feels herself aged twenty years in a day and a half. She has been nearly killed, has killed, has fallen and been rejected, and now has helped condemn to death a former hero of the Roughs.

The first volley tears into him. The wounds start to close. Somewhere on his body — searched for, missed — is a last Bloodmaker charge. Between volleys Miles yells a Trellish warning at the squad — a coming host of *men of gold and red, bearers of the final metal*, before whom the world will one day kneel, and the people are to worship Trell and wait. The fourth volley spasms him. The fifth strikes home, the healing fails, and he slackens against the pole. A constable steps up and finishes him with three rounds to the side of the head. Marasi forces herself to watch. She is satisfied. It disturbs her. As she turns away she catches a tall figure in a black robe standing below in the shadows, ignored by every constable in the yard, who turns through a gate and disappears down the alley.

Wax limps onto a first-class train at Dryport with a cane, ribs taped, leg dragging — a week of healing is not enough. He sits in compartment three at the small table by the window and waits. Footsteps stop in the doorway. *Hello, Uncle.* Lord Edwarn Ladrian sits down across from him: beard shaved, hair changed, Miles' mysterious "Mister Suit" all along, very much alive after staging the carriage accident that had supposedly taken him along with Wax's sister and aunt. Wax tracked him to this train by the railway numbers scratched inside Miles' cigar box — everyone else had read them as a list of intended targets; they were actually Miles tracking Suit's own movements. Wax also recognised that Tillaume had been too long in the family employ to have been bribed by the Vanishers in a day; he was still working for the man he had always worked for.

Edwarn admits the bomb in the mansion was meant for Wax — his cousin Hinston's untimely disease had forced him to bring his unsuitable nephew back to take the house title at all — and confirms Telsin is alive and *safe*, but says nothing more about her. Then he walks his nephew through what the entire operation had actually been: not a robbery, but cover for an insurance-fraud play. House Tekiel's main business was insurance. A run of high-profile losses, paired with the cargo's eventual return to nullify the claims, has collapsed Tekiel's standing. The Set has purchased the debt for pennies and just quietly seized one of the most powerful financial houses in the city. House Ladrian's own destitution was Edwarn funneling the family money into it. Miles' capture was always expected; the plan needed it. Tekiel is doomed. Everything has *worked out perfectly. Thank you.*

Wax presses on the kidnapped women. Edwarn declines; there is no proof, and one surviving Vanisher will swear Miles alone raped and killed them. Edwarn tells Wax his heritage should make him better than self-righteousness — he is of the Counselor of Gods' bloodline, Twinborn, meant for higher work than running constable errands. Ordering his death had been regret; he had hoped Wax would survive and join them. *You sound like Miles.* *No. He sounded like me.*

Wax reaches for a gun. The corridor fills with nearly twenty young men in black suits, none wearing metal — the Set's own Allomancers — quietly cocking their weapons. He has no evidence and can barely stand. He sweeps the meal off the table in fury — a Wayne move — promises to kill Edwarn someday, and is hauled to the rear of the train and pitched off onto the tracks. He catches himself with Allomancy and watches the train shrink south. In his sleeve, lifted under cover of the table-sweep, is Edwarn's thin black appointment book.

Back in the city, Marasi bursts out into the alley behind the precinct with the small revolver Wax gave her in her handbag, driven by an almost unnatural curiosity. She catches the hem of a dark robe rounding a corner and follows. At the mouth of a side alley a man waits for her: over six feet tall, head shaved, eye sockets tattooed in intricate patterns, two thick spike-heads driven point-first into them, one socket long since crushed. She knows him from the old stories. *Ironeyes.* He apologises for having Pulled her emotions too hard to draw her here — he was never as good at it as Breeze was — and an unnaturally calm sickness settles over her.

Wax has uncovered something very dangerous, Ironeyes tells her. Harmony has views about how things must be done; Ironeyes does not always agree, and Harmony's particular beliefs require him to allow it. He hands her a small book from inside his cloak. She is to deliver it to Wax on his behalf; she may read it if she wishes. He did not bring it himself because Wax would have shot him on sight, and Wax does his brother's work, something Ironeyes feels inclined to encourage. He lifts away over the rooftops by Allomancy and is gone.

Wax drops down onto the platform of the rail station to find Wayne waiting on a barrel, pipe lit, arm still in a sling, reading a small novel he had picked off someone's pocket and left an aluminum bullet in place of. They look south together toward Elendel and its competing skyscrapers. Wayne reckons he had not realised the city was the truly rough part of the world; the Roughs were easy by comparison. Wax slides the stolen appointment book out of his sleeve and explains what he traded for it: a threat, and a promise. They will see this through. Roughs honour. When one of your own goes bad, you clean up the mess.