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Wax moves through the Shores ballroom in his weaponless jacket and reflects that the people are exactly the same as the ones from his youth, only their lace has shrunk and their hemlines lifted. *Power*, he tells Steris quietly, *comes from deciding you do not care what they think of you*. Steris is regretting her gown — she had aimed for fashionable and ended up avant-garde — and sends him to the bar for drinks while she scouts the room. He orders a gin and tonic and gets a raised eyebrow from the bartender for it. The bar runs the length of the wall and is staffed by some two dozen tenders; the ballroom's classical murals show the Ascendant Warrior rising above the wraiths of the Lord Ruler.

When Wax tips the bartender he discovers, to his shock, that the coin the beggar hurled at him is not a coin he has ever seen: a two-metal disk with symbols matching those on the temple walls in ReLuur's evanoscope plates, and a face on the reverse with one eye spiked through. Wax takes it back, slides it across to Steris at a corner table; the coin has to be a relic, and the beggar has to have been more than he appeared.

Steris points Wax at a smug young textile lord and gathering crowd named Lord Gave Entrone — minor on his own, but on ReLuur's list, with prior trade dealings to House Ladrian as a natural opening. Gave greets Wax with a knowing smile and lets his date casually disclose that his hobby is *archaeology*, then talks over her: *artwork from times past inspires me*. When Wax presses, Gave sneers about gentlemen adventurers wasting their lives in the Roughs, and then, more pointedly, about the kind of woman who follows a title to the altar after a richer suitor has bowed out — knowing Wax will reach for the gun he is not carrying. Gave excuses himself in feigned outrage, his crowd scattering with him. Steris tells Wax the dodge itself was the data: Gave turned to veiled insults to escape the topic of archaeology.

Brass enters with the band's next song — a New Seran touch unheard of in Elendel — and Wax approaches Lady Felise Demoux for a dance, only for a dark-skinned Terris woman with grey-streaked braids to cut into his place mid-step. She tells him calmly that he is one of only three Crashers ever born and asks him a precise question — *what happens when you increase your weight while soaring on a Steelpush?* When Wax answers that he slows down, she nods: that distinguishes conservation of mass from a recognition trick, and clears one of two competing hypotheses. She presses a card into his hand — only an Elendel address, no name — asks him to write with further results, and wanders off muttering about why speed bubbles produce no redshift. The doorman later swears he admitted no such woman.

Wax finishes his dance with Lady Demoux (and a long monologue on her prize-winning hounds), and returns to Steris's table, where she has been drinking a fizzy lemon soda that contains the better part of seven cups of sugar — *all the rage* down here. She points him at his next target: Devlin Airs, the well-dressed informant lounging against an alcove archway near the fish tanks while a thin stream of guests slips up to whisper at him and away again. Also on ReLuur's list. Steris insists Wax go in alone — his type, she explains, doesn't open up to an audience — and reminds him gently that on the Roughs he traded and tricked secrets out of people the same way. She tells him he can do this, and finishes his glass of yellow soda water for him.

Across the city, Marasi and Wayne pass under the Seran New District Cemetery's gate, where a statue of the Survivor glares from the arch with a spear through his chest, and the mists have come out tonight. Marasi briefs Wayne on the target: Dechamp, the night gravekeeper whose deposits run highest on her list, who is responsible for receiving the city's unidentified dead. Wayne vetoes the plan to flash credentials at him — authority works differently with regular men — and confesses he has already lifted her constable badge, leaving an empty brandy bottle in her purse in trade. He destroys his top hat into vagrant shape, cuts his suspender strap and a hole in the hat, and turns to Marasi with a knife.

What he does to her sky-blue day dress — slicing out the lace bodice for a plunging neckline, shortening the sleeves above the elbow, tying the cut lace under her breasts to push them up, slitting the skirt and rubbing dirt along its hem at the seams he has carefully picked open — she finds, after the shock, surprisingly skilful work; *everyone looks at the chest first*, he tells her, *which lets the rest of the dress get away with not being properly aged*. She notes, walking up the path, that for the first time at one of his alterations she is not blushing.

They find Dechamp sharpening a shovel beside his hut. Wayne thickens his accent into a generation-older New Seran register, introduces himself as *Mister Coins* with a stick for a cane, and asks after a particular item from a tragic explosion a few weeks back — a body the city brought in for burial. Dechamp sends the boy to walk the yard for *exercise*, takes the banknotes Wayne waves at him, and leads them out into the mists with his oil lantern toward the unmarked common grave where the explosion's dead were laid.