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Wax picks his way across the chamber alone, hand up to hold the others back at the doorway — *the center row, walk straight* — and calls the traps as he goes: a pit either side, a square slab that will drop a ceiling blade. *How does he know that?* Steris asks. *Affinity for things that kill people,* Wayne mutters, smarting under the suspicion of every gaze in the room. Nobody quite says it, but the question hangs: someone got here first; who?

Wax crouches on the steps and sorts through the broken glass with his fingers. The dust on it is years deep — ReLuur could not have done this; the trap corridor outside still had the unsprung half loaded, and the sprung half had bodies in it. The kandra would have come away with pictures and gone home to gather his own people for the slow expedition this place deserved. Telsin steps up past Wax to the dais itself and stares at the empty velvet pedestal. *How?* she breathes. MeLaan points out the obvious: whoever stole the relic wouldn't have reset the traps behind them.

Edwarn stands with his pipe in hand and a face of bristling, genuine anger — and Wax, stretching a tassel of his coat against a shard of the broken display case to measure it, decides slowly that this is not an act. The case was too tall to ever sit on this pedestal. Something is wrong about all of it, but he can't quite get there before his uncle exhales and says: *Time for this to end, then.*

Wax spins. His gun is on his sister, not his uncle. Telsin looks back at him calmly, slowly draws an aluminum pistol from her dress that he could not sense. *I'm sorry, Waxillium.* He hesitates, just for a breath, and that is too long. He fires; she fires; his round swerves wide off her Steelpush, and hers — aluminum — strikes him at the join of neck and collar. She puts a second into his gut. He goes down the steps and lies at the foot of the dais, groaning.

Marasi is moving before she has time to think. She swings the rifle on Suit and fires; he Pushes her round wide and then rips the weapon from her hands with a Push she can feel through her bones. He is an Allomancer now. Wayne springs at him with dueling canes; Suit's own metal-banded cane Pushes him across the room and into Marasi. Telsin hurls something small and metal between the two of them — one of the Set's grenades — and their reserves are simply gone. She tosses Suit a bag of coins. He Pushes a handful clean through Wayne as he charges back in; Wayne curses in midair and crashes, then heals — the gold metalmind keeps him standing — and bolts out the door past the bend of the trap corridor.

Suit catches Marasi as she lunges, shoves her aside, kicks her down, plants his boot on her throat and shouts up the corridor for Wayne to come back or watch the others die. No reply. Suit takes his foot off her, half-rueful: he has the sense to know Wayne has run because their odds are best with him out and free.

Above them on the steps, Wax — bleeding from collar and belly and a third hit, metals burning down — staggers up and lurches not for the door or for Suit but for an empty corner of the room. Marasi sees the choice for what it looks like, a man trapping himself. The slab beneath him drops out. He plunges.

Telsin walks down to where MeLaan writhes on the stones — Marasi hadn't seen the kandra fall, and only now begins to guess what happened. Telsin slides a knife from her dress, kneels over her, and digs one Hemalurgic spike out, then the other, pocketing both. MeLaan runs out from inside her clothing in a slick of greenish-brown flesh, leaving her skeleton of green crystal staring up at the ceiling. Marasi reads the trick: there are fluids that paralyse a kandra and unmoor their muscle from bone; with her splinted leg and a back-twist MeLaan couldn't have braced to fight.

Through the rip in Suit's shirt Marasi catches a glint of metal between two of his ribs — not the fang-spike of Ironeyes, but something subtle. The Set hasn't merely studied Hemalurgy — they've worn it.

Telsin sends Suit down the pit after Wax: *you know him best, you hunt him down. I've met rocks less durable than my brother.* Suit swaps guns with her so he carries the aluminum pistol, ropes himself down. Red-uniformed Set soldiers from the camp file in. Telsin — *Lady Sequence*, one of them calls her — confirms what Marasi already suspects from how Suit obeys: in the Set she outranks her uncle, and has all along. She orders the plain combed for Wayne, who is *extremely dangerous, particularly if he has another vial of bendalloy*.

Steris stands at the chamber wall, eyes fixed on the hole Wax fell through. Allik grips Marasi's arm — the man he worshipped shot down before him, Suit in his life again. *I'll get us out of this,* Marasi whispers to them both. Somehow.