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Fifteen-year-old Asinthew — the Terris name his grandmother insists on, twenty-eight years before Waxillium Ladrian kicks down a hideout door in the mist — slips out of Tellingdwar's evening recitation in the Village to chase his sister Telsin. At sixteen she has wormed her way into the easy centre of a circle of older Terris youths, where her tagalong brother decidedly has not. He stumbles after her through the forested street to the Synod Lodge, joining Kwashim, Idashwy, and a tall, silent boy named Forch who recently burned a dining lodge to the ground. They mean to sneak past the Tin Gate and drink in the outsider city, and Telsin makes clear that her brother — too obsessed with rules to be one of them — is welcome to peel off and go back.

He almost does. While the others scamper off, Asinthew doubles back and crouches under his grandmother's open office window, where a mustached Elendel constable has arrived bearing an anonymous letter that names Forch for the arson. The list of clues in the letter is in Asinthew's handwriting; he sent it. Grandmother Vwafendal refuses to surrender one of her own to outsider justice. The detective warns her that arson of this kind is usually a harbinger — *something bigger is coming, Elder* — and sets a bullet down on her desk as a reminder before walking out. She catches her grandson at the window by his reflection, walks him through her case for letting the Synod discipline its own, and tells him to leave Forch alone. On his way out he palms the bullet.

That night, through curfew, he sits at his dorm window listening to the rain and watching the wet path until Forch himself crosses it carrying a sack. Against every instruction, Asinthew follows him to an old, disused dormitory storage hall. He climbs three flights toward candlelight — and a small boy of about five, stripped to the waist and bound to a plank between two tables, with knives laid out on the bench beside him.

Forch is on him before he can react. They are both Twinborn — Coinshots who are also Bloodmakers — but Forch is older and far better practised. Nails fly from his hand by Allomancy; a steel bar Pushed off a stack of tables snaps a rib against the wall; finally Forch tucks him under one arm, weight reinforced by his metalmind, and drops him three stories out the window into a maple tree. Asinthew saves himself only by Pushing the constable's bullet down through his own boot into the mud, anchoring his fall by the line of blue light.

He crawls back inside. Up the stairs again, broken-ribbed and soaked, he finds Forch standing over the weeping child with a bloody knife. They lock into a Push-on-Push standoff with the single bullet pinned between them and a steel bar grinding the boy he used to be into the doorframe. In that frozen moment Asinthew sees the bullet not as one thing but as three — tip, casing, primer — three separate sources of metal. He releases his Push on the tip and casing and shoves *only* on the primer at the back. The bullet fires itself in the air. The casing snaps back into Forch's own Push; the slug drills cleanly through his skull. The bullet-split trick enters the world.

The elders pound up the steps to find their gentlest secret horror collapsed dead, the captive child clinging to Asinthew's leg, and Asinthew standing with a spent casing in his fist. He looks at his grandmother and the rest of the Synod and decides, quietly, that he will find his own way out of this place.

Twenty-eight years later, Wax is the silhouette in the doorway of a Elendel bar-turned-hideout, mistcoat tassels flaring, a shortened shotgun on his shoulder. Migs and eight men empty pistols and rifles at him; the bullets simply will not land. While Migs screams at the lawman to *do something*, Wayne — already inside the barricade in a coachman's hat, having quietly miscounted himself in as a ninth gangster — laughs, tips his hat, and starts dropping the lads with dueling canes. Wax vaults the barricade, kicks the last man down, and holsters his gun on the constable captain who comes up the steps. Migs kneels and waits to be shot. Wax tells him he is not worth killing, hands the room over, and excuses himself on his way out into the dispersing mist: he is, unfortunately, due at his own wedding.