(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Wax crosses the Shores ballroom to the informant's alcove, where Devlin Airs is watching the small octopuses in Lady Shores' fish tank pull live prey from the glass. Devlin notes that the lady starves them for a week before each party for the spectacle; she imagines herself the predator, Devlin tells him, and her guests her fish — *though she does not see that she is in a cage as well*. *The cage we are all in*, he goes on; *this Basin Harmony made for us. Nobody leaves.* Wax points out that he did, to the Roughs; Devlin dismisses the Roughs as still inside, and asks who has ever put up the money to learn what lies beyond. *Where there is no money, there are no answers.*

Wax gets it: this is Devlin's genteel way of asking to be paid. He hands over the two-metal coin. Devlin turns it once and answers directly — coins like this have been moving with regularity through black-market antiquities auctions, and he has been baffled, since nothing about them is illegal. Gave bought a few, then quietly stopped and pulled the ones he had off display. Devlin's fee, he adds, is a hundred notes to be wired to his account; he does not take cash on a ballroom floor.

The rest of what Devlin tells Wax is worse. A *good quarter* of New Seran's nobility is embroiled in something — a massive building project to the northeast of the city, with Allomancers involved, that farmers have seen but news of which has been smothered before reaching town. The recent explosion in New Seran was, the papers say, the work of the murderer from the Roughs attacking rich Metalborn — and Devlin does not believe them, since no Metalborn died. As parting advice he tells Wax to *get out* — that the conspiracy Wax thinks he is chasing will not move for decades or centuries; the danger in this room is the other quarter of the nobility, the ones gearing up for the Basin's first civil war. Then he snaps his fingers, gathers a man to follow, and goes.

Cold with the words *civil war*, Wax turns and comes face to face with Kelesina herself. She offers him a transcript of the night's main speech to take back to his *peasant governor*. Wax cuts the polite jab off, takes the offensive by complaining about Gave to put her at ease, then on instinct produces the coin and lets a Roughs accent slip into his voice — *I figure this must be from that big dig in the ground out northeast.* Kelesina freezes. She covers immediately — *people started coining things like those to sell to the gullible* — but her motions across the room afterward are short, frightened. He has told her he knows, and she has fled to a knot of men in suits and then from the hall altogether.

Steris joins him with another glass of yellow soda; he tells her he has just thrown off her timeline by tipping the lady off. *Ten notes says she has gone to contact Suit*, Wax says — and that following her is now the play, because Kelesina is not used to being chased and will make rookie mistakes. He needs an excuse to be thrown out, or a believable reason to leave. Steris produces from her purse a small vial of syrup of ipecac and saltroot she had brought in case the food was poisoned, downs the whole thing, smiles at his protest, reminds him quietly that she is trying to learn the trick of not caring what others think — and proceeds to vomit all over the table.

In the cemetery, the digging goes on while Marasi reads gravestones to keep from looking at the corpses Dechamp is throwing up out of the pit. Wayne sits with his back to a headstone eating a sandwich, offers her a bite of it, then takes a swig from Dechamp's flask the man refuses to share. Marasi wanders into the paupers' section through the curling mists and finds, half-sunk on tilted ground, a masterly black-marble statue eight feet tall: the Ascendant Warrior in sweeping mistcloak, one leg raised as if about to take flight, eyes toward the sky — settled forgotten among the graves of the poor. Marasi talks to her. *For years I wanted to be you*, she whispers; *every girl does.* She asks the dead Mistborn whether she was ever insecure, jealous, frightened, angry — knowing the stories and songs have forgotten if Vin was ever an ordinary person at any point. She had carried the world on her arms while Harmony prepared for divinity, and slain the Lord Ruler with the rest of it; she had left a hell of a reputation for the rest of them to try to live up to.

Marasi returns to the grave just as Dechamp climbs out for a swig of his flask. He is screwing the lid back on, the yard fallen silent of the rhythm of his digging, when Wayne takes a bite of his sandwich, cocks his head — and heaves Marasi bodily into the open grave. Gunfire breaks out from the darkness above a moment later.