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In the grave, Wayne flops on top of Marasi and bursts a bendalloy speed bubble to freeze the gunfire above. He has been hit three times — *no, four*. He picks at the holes in his shirt to be sure his gold has healed them, takes the last bite of his sandwich, and admits he caught the silence of the crickets — Dechamp sold them out, and the boy was the runner. Above the bubble the gravekeeper falls in slow motion with droplets of blood hanging in the air, and bullets refract off the bubble's edge in arcs. Wayne's bendalloy will not hold long.

Marasi reads the volume of fire as fear of Wayne — the ambushers opened up through Dechamp without waiting because they were too frightened of him to risk a hesitation. Wayne is encouraged. The pair work out a plan: she will fire her tiny popgun the moment the bubble drops, *as if she still has range*, to draw the ambushers into thinking they need to come finish the job; Wayne will then drop a fresh bubble at the back of the grave to catch a thrown explosive in time. The bubble drops; she fires both shots; men return fire; one tosses dynamite that hangs spinning at the bubble's lip. Wayne and Marasi scramble across to a second open grave under his next bubble, and the dynamite kills the men who threw it. Wayne climbs out alone, drops a bubble around the survivors who creep up to check the bodies, and beats them senseless with his dueling canes. He returns to the grave and asks Marasi to hand him his hat.

At the Shores mansion, an assistant house steward — an aged Terriswoman in proper robes — sees Wax and the bedded Steris to a guest chamber, fending off the cook's worry and apologising for the *unfortunate occasion of the lady's distress*. Wax thanks her and closes the door and turns to Steris, who cracks an eye and props herself on an elbow: *that was a tad hasty on my part*. He tells her he means to slip out as soon as the speech starts, and asks if she thinks they might hold his sister in this house. *Unlikely*, he says, *but anything is possible.* She asks him quietly what his sister is like. He hesitates a long moment — he has not seen Telsin in decades. She had been the bold one when they were children; he had been the careful one who never knew her. He failed everyone — his mother, his father, Telsin — by running to the Roughs and not staying close. He will find her now. The longer he lives, the less he wants to be alone. *She is my family. My only family.*

The speech outside begins, the introduction announced through electric amplifiers and then Lord Severington himself plowing through a litany of Elendel's tyranny. Wax tries to leave Steris safely in the room; she points out that if he is spotted alone there is no plausible cover, but together they can claim to be looking for their carriage. He concedes. They pass through the dim mansion atrium where a diverted waterfall runs over chimes, past a maid he stares down with as much noble sneer as he can muster, then up under the second-floor balcony where Wax guesses Kelesina's rooms must be. He prepares to jump on a steel coin and Steris asks if he would not like something *substantial* — and lifts the hem of her skirt to reveal one of his small Riotings strapped to her thigh with seven rolls of tape (under two pairs of shorts, in case). He kneels to extricate the gun (*you realise this is the bit of the play where someone walks in on us*), tells her to stay out of sight, and Pushes himself up to the upper floor.

In the gravekeeper's shack, Wayne is snapping the legs off a chair, the place ransacked, drawers ripped, cushions slit. Marasi reports from the window: local constables are carting the surviving toughs away, all of them hired muscle who knew nothing except the name *Wayne* the men who hired them had used. There is no spike in the dug-up grave; the police's Allomancer has confirmed there is no metal there at all, and the runner boy is gone. Wayne kicks a hole in the floor and digs out the gravekeeper's hidden booze stash; he also mentions, between swigs, that he found a ledger under a false bottom in the desk the first thing on coming in. Marasi picks it up: it is the graveyard's master ledger, not Dechamp's — plots, what was found in them, and to whom each item was sold — and beside the entry from a few days back is a manager's note: *if anyone comes asking about this plot, send to me immediately.* Marasi closes the book and fishes from her pocket the paper that lists the workers at the graveyard. *Come on*, she tells Wayne. *We have one more stop to make tonight.*