(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Marasi follows the Cycle down a tunnel of brickwork laid over rough cavern stone, the walls of an older world the Catacendre never quite swallowed. The gang has strung a chain of flickering electric lights along ancient rusted sconces. She has one of Wax's charged Allomantic grenades left and only a few minutes of useful charge on it, so she sets her rifle down, takes her pistol — less metal than the rifle, a marginally better tool against an unknown Allomancer — and creeps forward, leaving her spare metals behind in the same logic.

The tunnel opens onto a second cavern split by a long narrow rift, an old stone span fallen into it and a newer makeshift rope bridge thrown across the gap. She does not cross. The Cycle is crouched behind rocks between her and the bridge, waiting for her to expose her back; when he rises and lifts a pistol she triggers the grenade on reflex. The Steelpush tears her own pistol out of her hand and sends it into the chasm — and at the same instant veers every one of his bullets aside into stone. His pistol goes the same way, sailing across the gap.

So she identifies herself as constabulary and lists his charges and tells him to surrender. He grins and grows. His suit is built for this: snap-buttons along the arms and wooden side-buttons spring open as his muscles swell to ridiculous size. A Brute. She kills the grenade to save charge and runs for the rope bridge and the gun on the far side; he beats her there, tears the bridge ropes loose, and lets the whole construction drop into the rift. *Trell has wanted you in particular, lawwoman,* he says in a voice grotesquely high for the body it comes from. She turns and runs for her rifle instead; he gets to it first, snaps it in half, and hurls the barrel back at her. She bounces it at him with another grenade flicker — and nearly drops the box at the recoil, learning the same lesson he is: that neither of them is practised in the powers they have brought to this fight.

He catches her arm. She drives a glass dagger from her belt straight through his forearm; he howls and drops her and pulls the blade out. Then his wound closes itself. A second Feruchemical talent — Bloodmaker healing — riding alongside the strength. No-one has two by birth. So he is a Hemalurgist, wearing his powers in spikes. She backs onto the lip of the chasm, the rifle's broken barrel in one hand and the grenade in the other, and his eyes start glowing red. He tells her Trell is choosing hosts — avatars — and that the simplest way for him to earn his immortality is for her to die.

She does not surrender. She wedges the grenade timer-set into the rocks at her hip, clamps the rifle barrel under her arms against her chest, and counts. *Every Push creates an equal and opposite Push.* When the grenade fires, it shoves the barrel into her chest, which shoves her — backward, off the cliff, across the fifty-foot rift, and into the far wall. She lands stunned and winded on the right side of the chasm just as the charge dies. Through tearing eyes she finds his fallen pistol on the stone and gets three shots into his face as he lands beside her, arm cocked to crush her skull. He drops.

She is hurt. Her left shoulder will not stop telling her so. *Wax does this every day; how is he not in pieces?* She makes herself check the corpse anyway, and finds the bullet wounds in his skull stitching themselves closed. Healing through a head shot. She rolls him over and rips his shirt open and finds four spikes driven between his ribs — and as she cuts them out one by one with the recovered glass dagger her fingers register that the thin, four-inch one has the dark red rust-flecks of the metal they have been chasing for years. The metal Paalm used to hide from God. Trellium.

His eyes snap open while she works. He speaks again through the broken jaw, the voice grating and not entirely his own, the red glow deeper. *The ash comes again. The world will fall to it.* She digs faster. *Your end comes. Either in ash, or at the hands of the men of gold and red.* She rips the trellium spike free and the glow dies and the body finally stays dead. She digs out the other three for good measure, slumps against the wall, and shuts her eyes — too tired, by some long way, to lift a gun if Wayne hasn't yet finished his end of the cavern.