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Marasi rides the swaying stagecoach with Wax reclined opposite, hat over his eyes, boots off — and her punctilious half sister Steris snoring softly against his shoulder. The whole tableau is so bizarre that Marasi has to set it down in her notebook before she can keep working on her report to VenDell and Reddi. They are skirting the foothills northeast of New Seran to avoid pursuit, and Wax intends to drive straight through to Dulsing in another four hours.

Marasi asks whether the Bands are real, and Wax tells her why he really went to the Roughs as a youth: not to be a lawman but to chase tales of the Survivor's gold. Glory, riches, broadsheet adventure. He struggled six years in Weathering before someone made him a lawman official. He had not wanted the Bands to be real, but his uncle has promised Kelesina something, and Edwarn sounds like he can deliver. *It is not the treasure hunter that has decided to go to Dulsing*, Marasi tells him. *It is the detective.*

She finds something unexpected on the silvery cube — a tiny recessed switch in one of the side grooves. She flips it with a hairpin, then burns a pinch of cadmium to see what happens. The cube buzzes; the coach lurches as the speed bubble pops against the moving frame and slams them all from one time slice into the next. The horses nearly die. Wax explains the mechanics — bubbles ride along on something massive and fast like a train, not on something as slow as a stagecoach — and stops them at a stand of walnut trees to experiment safely.

Out in the glade, Wax tosses the armed cube to Wayne — whose metal-laden belt promptly rips from its breakaway straps and scoots twenty feet down the hill — and they piece the device together. It does not strip Allomancy the way it had on the train. It *takes* the metal one Allomancer burns into it and rebroadcasts that power for ten seconds: a Coinshot's Push, a Pulser's bubble. An Allomantic grenade. The man on the train was a Leecher. Wax hands it back to Marasi — being a Pulser has never been much use when *you* are the one moving slowly, but if you can throw the bubble onto someone else, suddenly it is.

The hunch comes next. Wax tosses Wayne the gold bracelet from the Terris steward and asks him to try it. Wax cuts the back of Wayne's hand. It reseals at once. *It is someone else's metalmind*, Wayne whispers, *and I can use it*. An Identityless metalmind — exactly the thing VenDell described — packed with so much stored healing that Wayne could not even sense it as a metalmind until told. Wax cannot use it himself, but the implication is bad: making such a thing requires either a Feruchemist with two powers or Hemalurgy. Or possibly a relic of an earlier age. For the first time he wonders what would happen to society if Metalborn powers were simply something you could buy.

MeLaan waves him up a hill. A mile down the road, two men with axes lounge near a *fallen* tree they have been *cutting at*; the furrows on the ground prove it was dragged into place and moved a time or two. A roadblock pretending not to be one. Empty farmsteads with no smoke in their chimneys at dinner time. The Set has cordoned off the entire region while pretending not to. The coach is going no further.

Twilight comes fitfully — dark in the hollows, sunlight still on the ridgelines — but there are no mists tonight. MeLaan leads them cross-country to a wood near Dulsing itself. Steris rides bareback in a full enough skirt without complaint, and when Wax tells her she must stay outside the village with the horses, she answers without argument: she has hardly any sense of where to point a gun, and even less capacity for sneaking. He grins at the dark. *Steris, you're a gem.*

From the tree line they look down on what remains of Dulsing. In its centre stands an enormous wooden, windowless, half-roofed warehouse ringed by floodlights powered by a turbine on the village waterfall. Red-uniformed soldiers hold the perimeter; the lights are aimed outward, leaving a band of shadow against the walls. They cannot fly in — the Set kept a Seeker at Kelesina's party and will have one here too. They run through their old Roughs code names — Fat Belt, Tube Run, Banefielder, Duck Under Clouds, *Blackwatch Doublestomp* (Wayne makes that one up on the spot) — and end on *Spoiled Tomato*, the plan Wax usually refuses because it depends on landing Wayne in the perfect dark spot between the floodlights and the wall. Wayne points out that they now have an Identityless metalmind full of healing to draw on if he lands wrong. So Wax does it, flaring his metal and Pushing Wayne off the ridge by his shotgun out over the camp.

Wayne hits the ground feet first — both legs snap, then his shoulder as he rolls into a rock pile to dampen the sound, then his skull. He taps the gold bracelet before he can pass out, lets his spine knit, and finds himself crumpled exactly where Wax meant: in the unlit dead band between the floodlights and the building. He hides Wax's gun so his hand will stop shaking, picks out a rabbit-faced guard who keeps getting yelled at by his superiors, walks the man's complaints through his own head until he can think like him, then quietly lifts and yanks the cables to the nearest floodlights. The lights go out. The guard panics; men shout and argue. By the time the lights come back on, Wax, Marasi, and MeLaan have slipped into the shadow beside Wayne at an unfinished doorway.

Inside, the warehouse is dimly lit and stacked with rows of supplies. They sneak between the boxes until they can see what the Set has been hiding. It is a boat. *That's a damn big boat*, Wayne whispers. The hull fills almost the whole building — three stories at the prow, two armlike pontoons at the sides, one of them not unfinished but *crumpled* against jagged splintered wood. *Someone broke it*, Wayne says, *trying to move it*. The Set built the warehouse around the wreckage to hide it from the air while engineers in dark suits and skirts walk the hull with clipboards. They split: Marasi and MeLaan after the spike — MeLaan sliding a long-barrelled gun from a slit in the skin of her own leg — and Wax and Wayne after Suit.