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The train limps into Ironstand in the small hours. Wax sits on a platform bench under the arc lamps with a doctor dabbing at the split lip the brute gave him, growling that he is fine. Local constables march four befuddled bandits past in irons. Far down the platform a tarp covers the bodies they have pulled off the train; too many of them. Wax thanks the doctor and walks toward the carriages, then notices Marasi in a doorway shaking her head. No sign of Wayne or MeLaan.

Wayne is a Bloodmaker and can heal practically anything — but a shot to the back of the head or a slow suffocation can still kill him by burning his Feruchemy out. And the new business of the cube, whatever it is — if it shut Wayne's gold off the way it shut down Wax's steel, even healing would not have helped. Wax climbs back aboard the dark train and starts searching for blue lines that ought to be there. Captain Matieu — Ironstand's local captain, whose big cases run to who has been stealing Mrs. Hutchen's milk — tags along, idly suggesting the other servant might want emotional support and lobbying Wax to ride with his posse after the bandits. Wax hears him out only enough to extract names: an established gang called the Nightstreets from the cities near the Roughs, led by a small, koloss-blooded man called Donny — not the giant who fought Wax, not the limping man with the cane. So whoever the cane-man is, he is not local.

Marasi follows Wax through the cars with an oil lamp, pointing out the obvious — they have a job already, and the train robbery may have nothing to do with Wax's uncle — though, equally, it might. Wax reluctantly concedes that the gang seemed genuinely surprised to find an Allomancer gunman in the rear car, which is hard to square with a coordinated hit on him. He pulls open another floor compartment, braces — empty. Then, in a private compartment that should have been unoccupied, he sees moving steel lines below the floorboards. He throws open the luggage compartment: Wayne blinks up, hair mussed and shirt unbuttoned, with a half-undressed and entirely unashamed MeLaan tucked in beside him.

The whole party convenes in a room the stationmaster opens up for them. Wayne receives Marasi's tongue-lashing meekly, eyes on the floor, protesting that nobody had warned him there would be an attack. He had assumed Marasi's last words to him about *moving on* were permission to actually move on; he does not, he says, like leaving a job half done. They had crawled down beside the noisy tracks for privacy and never heard the gunfire. Wax, mostly relieved, comes only halfway to Marasi's defence and refuses to play her ally.

Marasi stalks out and stalks straight back in to tell Wax about the cube she has been carrying around all night. Wax takes the small metal cube from her. He describes it for MeLaan: the same little carving-faced object he had seen rolled at him just before his steel reserves vanished. *Not a Leecher*, she points out — Leechers burning chromium need to touch their target. Wayne notes that the supposed gun does not even have a barrel; MeLaan confesses cheerfully that she has never paid attention to the kandra research she ought to have, and so cannot say whether VenDell's lore knows of any device that negates Allomancy at range. Marasi takes the cube back to look for an answer in the dossier.

They decide to keep moving — a freight train through in an hour, due into New Seran by morning. If the train robbery was connected to the Set it will surface again later; if it was not, they can help Matieu hunt Donny afterward. Wayne and MeLaan go off to gather luggage. MeLaan casually mentions, in trying to defend the snog, that she copied this body off a sixteen-year-old she had eaten a few months ago; the room goes quiet and she winces her way through realising it was *gauche*.

Marasi tells Wax, on her way out, to go check on Steris — *she's doing needlework*, which to Marasi is unmistakable proof her sister is upset, since Steris only takes up needlepoint when she wants to perform appropriate-woman-of-means at the world. Wax finds Steris alone on a bench under the cold electric lights, blanket round her shoulders, working through a hoop. He sits down beside her and tells her Marasi says she is having a rough time of it. She tells him plainly that his blunt-cowboy register is itself a performance — that he was raised among Elendel's elite, that he had tutors and a youth of balls and parties; the Roughs, he answers, weather even granite. He admits the parties were as alien to him as everything is to her — that he used to find empty balconies to stand and stare from, that he had been thought a slow child for it, that Wayne is the real reader. He liked the Roughs because he could stop pretending. *Perhaps I am only acting like the man I want to be*, he says, *but it is a sincere act.* Steris tells him quietly, half-asleep on his shoulder, that he does smile after all — when he is flying on lines of steel; it is the only time she sees joy in him. She dozes off. He sits there with her, looking out at the night, until the freight train pulls into the station.