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Wax rides home to Ladrian Mansion in dry clothes — the same suit he wore on the morning's raid — while Steris retreats to her father's house. He nods Cob off for the rest of the day, sits down on his own front steps, and lets the accumulated bruises of the morning settle into him. Then he hears footsteps inside the house he gave the staff the day off from. He flicks a vial of steel-flake whiskey down his throat, leaps up over the grand entry banister on lines of light, and arrives at his study door with Vindication held beside his head.

The kandra in the brown suit is on the other side of the door — and is firmly fond, he announces, of the sixth-century anteverdant skull Wax currently has a gun pressed against. *Don't make a hole in it; it's an antique.* Wax holsters the gun. Inside the curtained, dim-lit study he finds Wayne in his easy chair eating walnuts, MeLaan in the chair beside in a different body than last time, and Marasi examining the unfamiliar lensed box on the pedestal. The kandra introduces himself: he is VenDell of the Sixth Generation, *who is most certainly not TenSoon*; please if shot, please in the left leg.

VenDell wires his evanoscope into the wall socket and casts a cone of light against the study wall. A photograph of Elendel's Field of Rebirth blooms there. Wax has never seen anything like it. Wayne throws a walnut at it just to confirm it is only light, then another for good measure. *Image projector*, VenDell explains; commonplace within the year. He has also let slip that the images will, in time, learn to *move* — which is the kind of thing Harmony has been more and more careless about recently.

The lecture begins. VenDell projects a Feruchemical metals chart and walks them through it, settling on the bottom quadrant — chromium, nicrosil, aluminum, duralumin — the *hidden* metals whose abilities are Fortune, Investiture, Identity, and Connection. He defines Identity: every person's Investiture is keyed to their spiritual self, which is why no Feruchemist can use another's metalmind. Then he poses Marasi's question back at her — what if a Feruchemist could store Identity away? Better still: store Identity, store Investiture itself, and feed an attribute into a metalmind that is no one's. Anyone with even a drop of Feruchemist blood — most everyone alive — could draw on it. Anyone could be a Feruchemist. Anyone could be made Mistborn.

Wax points out the impossibility: you would need an actual Full Feruchemist to make a single set, and none has been born in a long time. VenDell concedes — and pivots to Hemalurgy. Wax pulls Ironeyes' book from his safe and waves it at him: the Lord Mistborn himself condemned the practice. VenDell agrees; the kandra will not make new spikes. They are waiting on a Full Feruchemist to be born — and on whoever else is racing them.

Then the artifact. VenDell projects a mural that one of his brothers — ReLuur of the Third Generation, explorer, body-expert, genius — photographed in a chamber far from the Basin: a pair of bracers of spiralling metal on a pedestal. Then another: a wall plate in a script no one in the Words of Founding knows. Then a frost-rimed statue of the Lord Ruler with a spear. Then a fuller view of the bracers — many metals twined together, made for a Full Feruchemist. Then a man standing on a peak, arms upraised at a glowing spear that floats just out of reach, a corpse at his feet, and the bracers on his wrists. *He found something*, VenDell says. *He doesn't know where.*

ReLuur has come home missing an entire arm, half a chest, and one of his spikes. With it gone he is no longer sane and the kandra cannot get a coherent account out of him — only the pictures still inside his pack and the conviction that he was ambushed in New Seran on his way home. VenDell asks Marasi to travel south with MeLaan and recover the spike. She has, he notes wryly, become his second choice on this since the first refused. Wax notes, while still affecting refusal, the small and slightly horrible fact that VenDell is wearing the hands of his ancestor Breeze, willed to him after death and brought out *for special occasions*. He has just shaken hands with his ancestor's corpse, and pours himself more whiskey.

He almost gets away with refusing. *I doubt you need me*, he tells Marasi — until VenDell flips the evanoscope to one last picture: a New Seran street scene, taken just before ReLuur's ambush. Foliage, striped brown suits, white dresses — and a woman in her forties, lean and solid, dark hair around a face Wax knows very well, looking back over her shoulder while two men pull her down the street by the arms. Telsin. His sister, alive, prisoner in broad daylight, and Edwarn very probably the man whose back is turned in the frame.