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Wax leads Steris and Marasi down to the basement of Ladrian Mansion, where his metallurgy hobby has spread to occupy the better part of a floor: sample drawers, acids and solvents, burners, microscopes, and a back room with a forge and anvil. He had started small in the Roughs — a mining town's purity-testing kit, the trick of tracing a bullet by its casing — and expanded the work tenfold once he came home. Lately the spectrometer has held his attention. The questions wake the simple kind of excitement he had not been able to feel through his middle years, when his life was falling apart.

He straps on goggles. Steris follows, dons her own, hands him an apron, and lifts her clipboard. He has only recently talked her out of wearing two pairs of goggles at once; her current apron is more of a flak jacket. *You two,* Marasi says from the doorway, *are adorable.* Steris suggests, sweetly, that she may want corrective lenses, and points at the sign over the door — GOGGLES REQUIRED, with a crayon asterisk reading *'Cept Wayne*.

Wax sets to work on the trellium spike — clamped, scratched, heated. Diamond scratches it; corundum barely marks it. Just above a nine on the scale. Brittle, unlike harmonium, which is nearly as pliable as gold. The gas burner takes a chip white-hot but cannot melt it; the electric melter pushes past three thousand degrees and the chip still will not liquefy. Steris points out that TenSoon has told them metals are the bodies of divinities, and the god metals were once the source of the mists themselves — by which logic the vapor of one should burn out lungs. She wonders aloud whether the god metals change states by something other than temperature.

Marasi watches the clamped spike. *It's full of power,* she says. *It's a Hemalurgic spike, so it's …* *Invested*, Wax tells her — the kandra term — a fragment of a person's soul taken by Hemalurgy and stored. A kind of battery for life energy. *A murder weapon, at least,* Steris agrees, shutting off the burner.

Marasi then tells them what she has not told them yet. When she pulled the spike from the Cycle's chest he started ranting, in the way Miles ranted when he died. The same talk of *men of gold and red*. And — new — talk of starting the ashfalls again, as in the Catacendre. Restoring the days of darkness and ash. Wax starts to call it impossible — the Ashmounts are stilled or gone, the tectonics are not there — then stops himself. Harmony himself had seemed baffled when he showed Wax Trell's influence enveloping their planet. Their world and their god are three and a half centuries old. There are things in the wider cosmere far older. Far craftier.

He turns to the spectrometer. Files a few shavings onto cardstock — small enough pieces of even unmeltable metal will burn — and runs them under the oxygen line. The pen traces a flat line straight across the page: a full spectrum, as if from pure white light. At the red end, the arm tries to swing past the maximum the machine can record. He unscrews the pin and runs it again; this time the pen swings off the paper entirely. Proof, Wax tells Marasi — who asks him to translate — that this is a God Metal. Each element has a signature in the wavelengths it emits when heated; this one writes the full spectrum and then something past the red the machine cannot read. He has seen the trick once before: from harmonium.

He admits, looking up at the wall of pinned ideas — the oldest of them more than five years old — that he is a hobbyist, not an expert. He has shared his notes with the university metallurgists building Elendel's first airships and Allomantic grenades, and they have made the same observations he has. He will have to turn the trellium spike over to them eventually; this is too important to keep as a private toy.

Marasi, scanning the wall, suddenly turns: he has been trying to *split* harmonium all these years. Into its base metals. Into atium — and lerasium, the metal of legend that the Lord Ruler gave the first Mistborn. Wax does not look up. He is not trying to make lerasium; he is trying to see if it can be made. The Set will pursue the ancient powers by any route — eugenics, Hemalurgy, anything — and if lerasium is producible, he and the people who oppose them need to know about it. *You still could have told me,* Marasi says. He had wanted, he tells her, to have something to show first.

He shifts the experiment to the safe box — a three-foot reinforced aluminum-and-steel cube built into the back wall, with a thick glass viewport. It has weathered a grenade and an ettmetal-water explosion. Inside the box he tips small slivers of trellium into ten flasks of acid and two flasks of base, working through gears. As he works, the old momentum slips away from him. He has worked enough hopeless cases to know one going cold.

Then Steris calls him over. The trellium spike is reacting to the harmonium.