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Wax keeps his gun on Kelesina in the small back room as Edwarn keeps talking through the boxy device — a voice-telegraph, Wax realises, words shrunken by the electric mechanism. Suit is jovial, sorry not to be meeting his nephew in person on matters of *great import*, and offers up Kelesina as a *condolence*. He also lobs out a careful little distraction: the one passenger killed in the train robbery is worth looking into. Wax refuses to be steered. He demands his sister. Suit tells him it is no longer a question of what he is going to do but what he is *doing*.

Kelesina reaches for her pocket. Her aged Terris steward smashes into the room with arms like a man's thighs, slaps Wax's gun from his hand, grabs it off the floor, and shoots Kelesina dead through the forehead. From the doorway a maid screams that Lord Ladrian killed her lady; she runs off shouting it though her view of the room was perfectly clear — a planted witness, the frame already in motion. Wax roars at the box, which calmly notes that a dead scapegoat will do as well as a living one and that the kill order on him stands. The steward kneels at Kelesina's body and pries a gold bracelet from her — then, for some reason, shoots the dead woman once more.

Wax Pushes the device off the table, scoops it up, kicks the inner door into the steward's face, and flees through a hidden door into the servants' corridors — the speaking-box tucked under one arm as evidence to send to Elendel. Half a dozen men in black coats and white gloves open fire from the main hall: a Set kill squad, aluminum weapons, no metal at all for him to sense. He bursts back into the mansion's balcony hallway and is blindsided by the Terriswoman — broken nose, fingers around his throat, his Pushes useless against her bulk — until MeLaan punches her across the face. The blow splits MeLaan's cheek open over a gleaming metal skull: her current body is pure aluminum bone, a few hundred years of saving up. She rips off her own left forearm, exposing a long blade in place of the radius, and runs the steward through the chest. The body deflates like a punctured wineskin. MeLaan slides the forearm back on like a sleeve. Wax takes down the four kill-squad men in the corridor with their own aluminum gun, fishes the gold bracelet from the dead steward's pocket, and finds — when he tries to Push on it — a metalmind so packed with healing that he can barely sense its line.

Out in the atrium Steris crawls from a shrub, unharmed and curious. Wax explains he has accidentally let himself be implicated in Kelesina's murder; *Bother*, says Steris, and grabs on with an eagerness that he notes she really does enjoy. He Pushes spent bullets through a skylight in a spray to weaken the glass, then crashes them up onto the roof and away into the mists. Above New Seran he Pushes off skyscrapers in furious arcs until he crests the cloud layer and they burst into the Ascendant's Field — the white surface of the mists under starlight, balanced between two distant towers. Steris gasps; Wax feels something burn in him like a new metal, and lets himself kiss her. They slip drifting back down into the mists, still in the embrace.

Wayne has his feet up in their hotel suite, reading a peanut-shop pulp about seven convicts piloting an explosion-driven ship to the stars and not understanding why Marasi keeps pacing. Wax swings in through the window with Steris tucked under one arm and blood on his sleeve. He tosses Wayne a note: a friendly wager paid out. Wayne won. Everyone has fifteen minutes to be gone before the constables reach them. Steris is already packed. As MeLaan — back in her male body — drives the carriage away, a bedraggled Aunt Gin stands on the doorstep with a wad of cash, asking in horror whether the bells closing in are the police. *Framed for murder*, Steris calls back out the window — it had been item seventeen on the list of scenarios she had left for Aunt Gin.

A few hours' ride brings them up to a cliff edge in the dark. Wax cuts a Weathering cigar with his belt knife, lights it, and lets the mists enfold him. In his other hand he turns ReLuur's earring spike — nearly identical to the one he used to kill Lessie — and confronts something he has never let himself feel before: he hates God. Not after Lessie's death, not when Bleeder raised the question of why Harmony had not helped. But by hiding the truth about Lessie from him, Harmony has stabbed him in the back. He is not sure he can forgive it.

MeLaan joins him out of the dark and tells him plainly what is being done to him: Suit has set things up so that he sees no choice but to ride for Elendel and clear his name before the outer cities can use Kelesina's murder as a brand to start a war. He says as much himself. MeLaan reminds him there is always another perspective if you look hard enough. He sits with the cigar until it goes out. When the others stumble into the new stagecoach at dawn — six horses, bought at New Seran's bottom-terrace yards — Wayne hops up beside MeLaan on the driver's seat and asks where to. *Not back home*, Wax says, climbing inside. They ride for Dulsing — to see if Harmony dares offer him another perspective there.