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Marasi sits at a table in the dining car of the southbound train, the southern country rolling by outside the window, and stops cold on a page from VenDell's dossier. The page is a wild two-colour pencil sketch ReLuur drew unprompted the previous afternoon — a burning red face wreathed in horns and spikes, with eye-sockets like voids — captioned with VenDell's interview transcript: a beast that fell from the dark above the sky, that has no eyes but is looking at him now. The kandra has appended his own marginal note: *something is wrong with the eyes of the creature. Perhaps spikes?*

The word jars Marasi across to another book in her purse — her copy of the small book Ironeyes had given her to pass to Wax, the Lord Mistborn's own writings. The chatter and laughter of the dining car presses at her as she reads Lestibournes' thoughts on Hemalurgy — that almost anything can in principle be spiked into existence by rewriting a Spiritual aspect, but the failure modes vastly outnumber the successes, and even the Lord Ruler mostly produced flawed results: koloss that murdered each other from boredom, kandra that fell to puddles without their spikes. Best, the Lord Mistborn advised, to stick to transferring powers; everything else is a millfield of mistakes. What disturbs her most is not the warning but the proposal it sits inside — that the elderly and dying among the Metalborn be asked to give their abilities up at death so the spikes can build greater individuals. He makes a good case, and that is the trouble. She wonders, looking back at ReLuur's sketch, whether the thing in the picture is a new hemalurgic experiment of the Set, or a botched one, or something else of Trell — that god with the unknown metal who keeps surfacing at the edges of every case.

She turns from the lore to her actual job: the spike. ReLuur was wounded in an explosion that ripped a piece of his body away; he fled, leaving the flesh — and his Investiture spike — behind. Kandra flesh stays in its human shape once cut from the body, so whoever cleaned up after the explosion would have buried it as a corpse. A mass grave for the explosion's victims, then, is the obvious first lead. Unless the Set already understood what they were holding, and have it themselves.

The laughter behind her resolves into Wayne's voice. He has insinuated himself at the next table to mooch New Seran accents off a drunk couple in evening dress, and slides into her booth grinning. He bullies the waiter into a whiskey on Wax's tab and asks her what she is hiding from. She lets out, more honestly than she meant to, that she is tired of being treated as an appendage of Waxillium Ladrian: she went into law in the first place to become something people thought she could not; she got hired at the precinct because Governor Aradel wanted someone close enough to Wax to keep an eye on him; the kandra arranged this whole mission as a way to *hook* him; and whatever credit she earns out here will land on Wax when the spike comes home. Wayne does her the small dignity of taking his boots off the table, tells her *nobody is forcing her to stay with them*, and then derails the conversation with the long shaggy-dog story of a man named Chip, which ends in a punchline he readily admits has no relevance to her situation. He winks at her, drinks his whiskey, and ambles off to chase down MeLaan in her enormous lace hat.

Marasi packs the dossier back into its folder. A small cloth pouch slips out — a Pathian earring and a note in VenDell's hand: *Just in case, Waxillium*. She yawns, tucks it in, and crosses the rattling platforms back through the first-class car and into the private car at the tail of the train, meaning to drop off the dossier on the way to bed.

She finds Wax and Steris still up in their compartment with every surface buried in Ladrian ledgers — Wax having just unearthed a misrecorded four-clip tip from a dockmaster's reimbursement, his second lost clip of the night to Steris's one. Steris, delighted, calls him a *bastard*, then catches herself and remembers her guest. Marasi hands over the dossier, tosses the pouch at Wax without explanation, tells him to look at the drawings of monsters, and goes off down the hallway toward her own door.

Reaching it, she glances out the front window of the car — and sees the rest of the train rolling off into the distance, leaving theirs decoupled and drifting on the tracks. At that moment the door at the far end of the car bursts open and a man on the platform beyond raises a gun and fires straight down the corridor.