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In his senator's chambers in the House of Proceedings, Wax submits to Steris's pre-floor checklist. Cravat tied and pinned. Shoes polished. First piece of evidence — a silvery Malwish weight-altering medallion, flipped and caught. Second piece of evidence — a folded stack of letters. Third piece of evidence — left on the desk at home. Steris produces two spare copies from her bag without comment. Five-year-old Max presents his own list of scribbles: dog picture, cat picture (which looks like a squirrel because he's bad at cats). Wax solemnly accepts both. His daughter Tindwyl babbles in the corner under Kath's eye. Last, Steris hands him his long-barrelled Ranette-designed pistols — unloaded, two safeties, but visibly menacing in a city that prefers to kill with poverty and despair. He kisses his wife — a step not on her list, an oversight — and tells her she should be the one giving the speech.

He walks down to the Senate floor and goes not to his seat but to the side of the speakers' platform, where he stands hooked into his gunbelt and looms. He learned to loom interrogating prisoners in the Roughs, and is still quietly astonished by how many of those skills work here. After days of debate his is the last speech in line — a position he traded for at length, hoping it will give him the best chance to derail the Elendel Supremacy Bill. Governor Varlance is too occupied with his face powder and his row of medals to look up; Wax silently mourns Aradel, who stepped down two years ago, and notes that Varlance's chief accomplishment in office so far has been rededicating seventeen parks.

The vice governor — the Terriswoman Adawathwyn, who Wax suspects he may have known in the Village — recognises House Ladrian. Wax saunters up onto the lit podium, turns slowly, and declares the bill a fantastically stupid idea. Senators smile; they have come to expect this from him. He grants that the Basin needs a unifying leader — but argues that elevating an Elendel governor no one outside the city can vote for is the opposite of unifying. The dockworkers' senator Melstrom — in practice a puppet for nobles Hasting and Erikell — calls back that the Outer Cities need a strong father. Wax flips the medallion up, Pushes it to the ceiling, catches it again, glances across the floor at Admiral Jonnes of the Malwish in the seat reserved for visiting mayors — all of the mayoral chairs around her empty in protest.

He pulls the letters from his pocket — sixty signed appeals from politicians in Outer Cities willing to work with Elendel and increasingly afraid of what their own people will do if Elendel keeps pushing — and proposes that the chamber kill the bill and build a national assembly instead. Boos, but mostly silence. He turns his back on Melstrom and waits for the bullet. *With all due respect*, Melstrom says, hitting him right in the back, *you are a new parent and don't understand how to raise a child. The capital is the father; the Outer Cities are the son.* Wax folds the appeal-letters away, pulls out his other set of papers, the ones Steris dutifully made backup copies of, and reads aloud: a letter from Hasting and Erikell promising Melstrom a cut of their shipping revenues in exchange for his vote on this bill. The chamber erupts.

Wax demands impropriety hearings. Varlance, coached by Adawathwyn, agrees — but rules they will happen *after* the vote, with Melstrom, Hasting, and Erikell sitting it out so that the result isn't tainted. The straw-poll vote to continue passes easily. Wax's last shot has missed. The governor dryly invites him to set off any further explosions or sit down; Wax says he has only a final plea left — not from Lord Waxillium Ladrian, but from Dawnshot, the lawman. He turns in a slow circle and tells the chamber that if Elendel is going to play parent it should treat its children well, that ignoring the Outer Cities' voice will simply teach them to ignore Elendel's. Then he sits, beside Yancey Yaceczko, who whispers *good show, Wax*.

The vote begins. Lady Mi'chelle Yomen votes against the bill first. Wax tracks the senators he had been working on one by one — Lady Faula, Senator Vindel, Maraya — and listens as each vote lands with the force of a bullet. Several of the names he had counted as persuadable break the wrong way; he had expected better of them, and feels it. The hereditary lords in fact split slightly less badly than the elected senators, who answer to constituents whose lives this bill is supposed to improve. According to the latest census, more people now live outside Elendel than inside it, and most of the laws on the books date from a time when there was one city and a ring of farming villages; the villages have become cities, and they want a voice. When the tally comes in at one hundred twenty-two for and one hundred eighteen against, the bill passes. Wax sits with the worse-than-shot feeling of a year of work coming apart. If he is going to stop the civil war the Set is engineering, he is going to have to find another way.