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Eleven-year-old Wayne sits on a stool in his one-window shack at the edge of Tinweight Settlement in the evening, shuffling a stolen deck of cards and trying very hard not to look at the window. If he looks at the window he will look at the mine, and he is afraid that tonight is the night his mother won't come back from it. He fumbles the shuffles; cards spill across the table and the floor. He thinks about other things on purpose. About the table Uncle Gregr built before a landslide turned him into pulp — sometimes Wayne kicks the table on the off chance Gregr's spirit is watching and is fond of it, because there's nothing else in this house Gregr cared about. About beds, which other children have and he doesn't, and the mistwraiths that are supposed to live under them, which Wayne is certain he could befriend if only he had a bed. About the pile of laundry he washed today — his mother's old job, before she took the heavier work of pushing minecarts inside the beast — and about how he tries on every set of clothes that comes through the door, because that is plainly what clothes are for. Sometimes the pockets have decks of cards in them. He doesn't look at the window. He doesn't look at the window. He can feel the mine out there in the dark like a hole in someone's neck, spurting light like blood and fire, and his ma walks down its throat every shift to dig metals out of its insides.

Then a lantern bobs up the path and Ma comes home. Wayne hides the cards under his mat and feigns sleep on top of it; she sees through the act the way she always does and lets him do it because he tried. She settles on the stool, smudged with mine dust, watching the lantern flicker; her cheeks look a little hollower than they did the week before, as if someone were taking a pickaxe to them. The lamplight pulls her attention to a stray card he forgot on the table. Caught, he hands over the whole deck — Tark Vestingdow's, lifted from a pair of overalls. He sulkily agrees, on prompting, that he also took Demmy's pocketknife. *You can't take what isn't yours,* she tells him quietly. *That's what thieves do.* He puts the knife on the table beside the cards and says he doesn't want to be a thief; he wants to be a good boy; it *just happens*. She pulls him close and tells him he is a good boy, that he has always been a good boy, and when she says it he believes her.

He asks for a story. He's eleven, he tells her — too old for stories, one more year and he can drink at the tavern — and she leans in across her bowl of cold oatmeal and tells him one anyway: the tale of Blatant Barm, the Unwashed Bandit, undone by Allomancer Jak. The two of them embellish it together, Wayne supplying gruesome editorial flourishes from his blankets — exploding heads, melted bone-juice, monsters who get a lump in their throat and choke. Gud the Killer is shot clean across the River Human, straight through the sights into the eye. Noways Joe is bitten by a snake Jak coaxed into doing it, after Joe lay in wait in the Canyon of Death; Joe dies horribly to Wayne's satisfaction. The Lone Mesa turns out to be Barm himself, swollen koloss-style into a monster; Jak, swallowed, stretches out arms and legs to make himself a stubborn lump in the throat and chokes the bandit dead from the inside, then strolls back out down the tongue like it was a fine carpet rolled out for a rich man.

Wayne asks whether the story is really about the mine. Ma allows that maybe it is — that everyone has to walk into the beast's mouth now and then. *Then you're like the lawman,* he says. *Anyone can be,* she tells him. *Even me?* he asks. *Especially you.* She kisses his forehead and recites the little poem she likes — *you are the wind, you are the stars, you are all endless things* — and blows out the lantern. He drifts off easy. A lot is wrong with the world, but as long as she is around, stories mean something. They're real.

The next day there is another collapse at the mine. That night, his mother does not come home.