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Wax startles awake in the crew cabin of the freight train to a sound like distant explosions. He grabs Vindication before he is properly upright, stumbles forward into the engine cab — and recognises the noise as waterfalls. New Seran rises in front of the train: an enormous tiered city built across a dozen flat-topped stone terraces, each split by streams that drop from one level to the next in places by a step, in places by fifty-foot cataracts, all of them eventually running back together into the river that bears the city's name. Buildings sprout between the streams; green vines drape the cliff faces; the Seran mountains rise behind them whited at the peaks. The engineer — a New Seran man named Colms — grins at their reaction and tells them privately that he thinks Harmony was vain when He laid this place down. He points up to the top terrace, where the statue of the Lord Mistborn marks the waterman district two blocks from their hotel, the Copper Gate.

The freight will only reach the bottom of the terrace stack; passenger trains take the lower-middle tiers and gondolas carry passengers up from there, which is hours. Wax looks at the bleary Marasi and proposes a shortcut. She accepts under protest, points out she is wearing a skirt, and lets him grab her around the waist. He launches them off the freight in a long arc, drops Vindication's bullets into the ground to bounce off, and Pushes them up the cliffs in great leaping rooftop-to-rooftop passes. He notes how few apartment buildings New Seran has compared to Elendel, how few horses, how the gondolas serve not just between terraces but across them like an aerial transit network. He uses one as an anchor to fling them up the last fifty-foot waterfall and lands them on the top terrace beside the falls. Marasi, who has hated the flight, backs from the edge as soon as she is on the ground.

Walking toward the Lord Mistborn statue, Marasi points out that the foot traffic of New Seran — pastel dresses, striped suits, boater hats, almost no carriages, plenty of pedicabs — opens up around Wax in his mistcoat and gunbelts the way a school of small fish moves clear of a passing predator. She quotes Wax a Lord Cimines study comparing the way pedestrians give a constable room with the way prey animals respond to one. She raises the question of Wayne's availability for the evening, since she wants him for what she euphemistically calls grave-robbing — the obvious first place to look for ReLuur's spike is the mass grave of the explosion's victims, and she intends not to do the digging herself.

Wax freezes on a broadsheet a papergirl is holding up: *FARTHING MANSION HIT*, and above the headline a jagged reverse-mah symbol painted in red. He knows that symbol from his Roughs years; it is Ape Manton's mark. He buys the broadsheet, asks where Farthing Mansion is, and pushes through the crowd toward it. The symbol is freshly painted on the mansion's stone wall, identical to the one he had known on a Roughs stagecoach. The Ape is supposed to be locked up in True Madil's vise of a jail; that he is here painting walls is on its face impossible. Marasi catches up and asks the obvious question — is this connected? *Not the Ape*, Wax says: he hates Allomancers enough that he would not take the hand of a Metalborn trying to save him from a fall. The Ape will not have come to terms with the Set. *We ignore him*. They walk on past a Lurcher juggler tugging objects out of the watching crowd.

Marasi takes Wax's arm and reads him the diagnosis nobody else has dared to: that his hunt for his uncle has tipped from a case into a grudge — that Mister Suit beat him in the Hundredlives case and he is going to win the war he lost the battle on. She concedes the breeding-Allomancers fear is real and serious; she only asks him to keep his head about it. He sends her on alone to check in at the hotel — *you are here for the spike, Marasi; I am here for Suit* — and goes back to fetch the rest of the party off the freight.

At the Copper Gate, the elderly Aunt Gin gives them a tour of a penthouse suite while Wax systematically breaks open every painted-shut window so that he has an exit route to jump from, Wayne tries to barter his shoe for Aunt Gin's outsized flower-festooned hat on the grounds that the hat would suit him next time he needs to be an old lady, and Steris hands Aunt Gin a sorted-by-property-damage catalogue of contingencies — fires, shootouts, hostage situations, koloss attacks, cattle stampedes through the lobby, seventeen documented explosions in Wax's vicinity. Aunt Gin reads it with growing alarm and asks whether these things are threats. They are not, Steris assures her; only preparations.

MeLaan sticks her head in from the adjoining suite in nothing but shorts and a chest-wrap to ask the room's opinion on bust sizes for the evening, ducks back out to general silence, and re-emerges a minute later in the same bones but now bare-chested, having decided to attend the reception as a man instead. She will go in support, but as she points out: this is Wax's play, not hers — she is along for the brawling, not the detective work. Wax, Wayne, and a fascinated Steris take this in. Marasi walks the bewildered Aunt Gin to the door and, in parting, asks her to send to the trade bureau for the names of every person who works at the local graveyards.

They divide for the day: Marasi and Steris in the suite across the hall, Wayne and Wax in this one, MeLaan a private room to *melt* in alone. Wayne will go with Marasi tonight to dig up graves; Wax, *unfortunately*, is going to a party.