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Wax opens the chapter three days later, standing in his small penthouse study looking west toward Bilming. There is no mist tonight — there has been none for weeks. Marasi's sting will roll out sometime tonight, and he is not going. The notebook is clear, the disguises are excellent, Wayne is at VenDell's elbow to sell the Cycle's face, the boxes are real. Marasi has access to the finest constables in the city. She does not need an old Coinshot with an unloaded pistol who still aches from blowing himself up in his own basement. He stays at the picture window anyway, with the lights of Elendel glowing below — another shimmering star added every few months to the constellation as the city electrifies. He has evanotypes from this perspective going back years. Would the lights, eventually, push the dark out entirely?

Steris brings tea with willow powder for his aches, reports that Max and the baby are asleep, and they go back into the living room — where every surface is covered in stacks of broadsheets from cities across the Basin. They could have hired researchers; they didn't, because the time together is what makes it fun. Steris has a system, of course — read only headlines first, into a *promising* pile, then read those stories together to cross-compare and winnow. They also keep a separate pile of amusing alliterative headlines — pickled pachyderms, snoring snails, a child who ate tar and was fed a rat as antidote — and laugh quietly at each other across the floor. He cherishes the moment, and he does not tell her about the after-effects he has been carrying since the basement blast: bursts of blue Allomantic lines at the edge of his vision when he isn't burning steel, a brief distortion to things in his peripheral vision. He has survived explosions before.

The serious hunt is harder. An explosion at a railway station turns out to be a boiler failure; a fire is plainly a lightning strike. Nothing fits the trellium-harmonium signature, which should leave him relieved — and instead leaves him uneasy, because absence of evidence might just be absence of *their* evidence. He drifts a moment on *ashes falling again,* on the mythical pre-Catacendre world he has read so much about — the days of the Ascendant Warrior and his own ancestor the Counselor of Gods — when ash had been the skin of a dying world, flaking off as it disintegrated. Steris gently asks the question she has been holding back: does he wish he had gone with Marasi and Wayne? He thinks honestly, and says no. He realised the other day that he is past that stage of his life; he is done. Except for the part where his sister is still out there, sensible enough to be a true threat. *Most families have skeletons in the closet,* he thinks. *Most are sensible enough to stay dead.*

He admits the one thread that won't lie still: Telsin. He *should* be the one to deal with her. But he has important work here in Elendel now, and besides — he is no longer that man. Steris leans into him: *what about when you came back to Elendel the first time and hung up your guns?* He explains the difference — back then he was running from himself, he stopped running on the mountaintop six years ago, and what he chose afterward was *this*. She tells him quietly that he doesn't have to be one or the other. The Roughs lawman and the Senate lord and the husband on this floor are all the same person. *And he's the one I love.* It lands. He sits with it.

He confesses the rest, too: the trellium earring he had quietly commissioned from the university when he handed over the trellium spike for study — bare metal in a small stud, since the spike could not be melted to be properly forged into an earring. He had it made because Harmony's note suggested he would need it. Asked if she believes Marasi's read of the dying man's ravings — ashfall returning, the dark days back — Wax says he doesn't know, but VenDell says Harmony is afraid, and that has him terrified. Steris applies her usual method: identify the worst case. He thinks: that the Set discovered this years ago, possibly all the way back to the first Malwish airship crash, that they are not beginning their plan, that they are in the *end stages* of it. They should not be searching for accidental explosions in old broadsheets, they should be searching for *intentional* ones — hidden — concealed as something else.

And then it comes to him: *earthquakes*. Underground test detonations, contained, hidden — but no concealment from seismographs. They dig back into the stacks with the new criteria, Wax cheating by reading whole articles, Steris poking him in the side when he lingers too long. Three hours in, past midnight, he finds it: a series of Elendel broadsheet articles about unexplained tremors in Bilming going back four and a half years — officially attributed to subway construction, except that Bilming already has its prized elevated rail and after all those years still does not have a single subway line running. Seven months ago the tremors got bad enough to rattle buildings in Elendel; the papers are calling it a financial scandal, with construction companies skimming funds, but the source is plainly something else. The most lurid article is the one carrying Jak's usual nonsense in adjoining columns, but several reputable sheets corroborate it now that they know what to look for. The Bilming shipyards have been building gun-heavy *defence* ships under nominal Elendel control since before the Malwish airships ever arrived. And Steris catches the rest: the cargo-size and customs probes in the Cycle's notebook are not about smuggling drugs into the city. They are about smuggling a *bomb*. A big one — the generator alone will be massive, since the reaction wants a tremendous current to scale up. They have been testing for over four years, almost certainly have a working device, and the only piece they are still solving is how to get it into Elendel.

Wax looks at the side table and the two envelopes. Six years he has been increasingly reticent to have anything to do with Harmony; he no longer hates God, but still. Steris nods. He slips the Pathian earring in, and is somewhere else.

He stands, weightless on what feels like solid ground, looking down at the planet itself with the dark vastness beyond. He has been here once before — six years ago, on the mountaintop, dying. *Dying,* Harmony corrects gently. *Sometimes I think that's where I reside. Always there, like a coin balanced on edge.* Harmony stands ahead in traditional Terris robes, kindly-eyed, the legend's face — and, if Wax lets his eyes unfocus, two infinite wings, one white and one black, sweeping out from a centre that is the figure. The red haze that had been creeping over the world before is gone — and not because Harmony drove it off. It Invested the planet, Invested him; what Wax had seen back then was a *shroud*. Harmony responded too slowly. By the time he understood, the shroud had come over him. It does not hurt. It dampens his ability to see the future.

Harmony tells Wax he is *blind* — nearsighted, in his terms, able to see threats only once they come very close. The shroud will lift in a few years, but the danger is now. He had thought he had more time. He has been moving too slowly. *Yet again,* he says. And now — through the Connection of the earring, by which he can see Wax and hear him — he knows what Wax has discovered, and what it means. The bomb. The smuggling.

Wax asks the lawman's question: *who is Trell?* Harmony's answer is unusually direct. *Trell is the god Autonomy — a Shard of Adonalsium, like the powers I bear. Autonomy is held by a woman named Bavadin, but her many faces — her avatars — act with independence. Trell, the male god from the ancient records, is one of them.* He explains that Shards have a driving Intent: he bears two — preservation and destruction — and they keep each other in equilibrium. Autonomy's Intent drives her to divide off from the rest. She rewards the bold, those who survive against odds, those who try big plans. He believes this is why Telsin was able to talk her down from outright destruction of the planet. *Autonomy offered me an ultimatum last year, while I was being blinded — give this world to her and move to another. I refused. One of the last things I saw was the person she chose. The same one who persuaded her this world had value, and who presented a plan for its domination.* *My sister?* Harmony nods. *The leader of the Set. Invested by Autonomy. Avatar of a god on this world.*

The betrayal of it lands hard. Wax thinks of Telsin in their childhood, the woman who had always got her way — first manipulating adults into thinking her sweet, then playing the city's elite, then shaping world politics, and now, evidently, holding the borrowed power of a god. He pushes back: only now, Harmony tells him this? *I contacted you a year ago. You still didn't want to speak with me.* Fair. *But Wax — it is time again. I need a sword.* That was what he had been when he killed Lessie for the second time; cleaning up God's mess; executing the rogue kandra driven mad by lack of spikes. Harmony makes his case: he has tried other ways and failed; he has been moving too slowly; the offworld army Autonomy is gathering and Telsin's in-world plan are both already in motion. Disrupt Telsin and Autonomy may abandon her — that is the best bet. The army will have to wait for time he is buying with Wax's hands.

Wax asks what to do with the second earring. Harmony tells him — gently, with the smile of someone too burdened to be eager — that just as Vin's earring had once Connected her to Ruin without her knowing, this one will Connect him to Trell's avatar. She will be able to sense him, and he her. *A tool for you to use,* Harmony adds. *As you wish.* Wax is not at all sure he wants to play Telsin's games — she always gets the better of him.

He looks at Harmony and, for the first time, sees not the vastness or the legend but a *man* — thrust into a war none of them was ready for, playing catch-up against powers older than civilization. *He's doing his best,* Wax thinks. He needs help, and there isn't anyone else. He had run to the Roughs once to escape, and stayed because people needed him. He had found peace in Elendel and would not return to the field because he wanted it or needed it. This time he would go because he was *needed*. *Final time?* he asks. *I promise,* Harmony says. *Final time.* A weight settles. Wax tells him he'll stop Telsin — but Harmony will have to deal with Autonomy herself. Asked what Harmony has been holding back, Harmony admits *many things* — none of them on purpose hurtful, but he cannot promise survival or absence of pain. *Do you trust me, Wax?* *No. But I trust her less.*

He is back in the penthouse in a heartbeat — never having physically left — with Steris kneeling beside him. He tells her: God has been blinded, the urgency was missed, he has asked for intervention against Telsin. He needs to go. *Of course I will worry,* she says. *But it's not me or them. Not politics or Allomancy. Not me or Lessie. It's never been either/or. That part of your life isn't over just because you didn't need it for a while. You need it now. We all do.* She produces his mistcoat — already laundered and folded into a cleaner's bag under a stack of broadsheets — because of course she has been ready for this for some time.

A knock at the door. They find a wrapped package in the hallway: sixteen vials of alcohol-and-metal-flakes, the last with a red-painted cork and a note. *Use the others instead of your normal vials. Use the last in an emergency only.* Wax takes them solemnly, then opens his strongbox for two fully aluminum pistols of Ranette's making — Vindication II, a heavy-calibre with hazekiller-round chambers designed to forcibly eject spikes from a Hemalurgist's body, and the Steel Survivor, a long-barrelled precision sidearm meant for Pushable ammunition. There is more in the box: a two-foot gun bag holding Ranette's most destructive design, assemble-on-site, *a weapon not for a lawman but for a soldier*. He puts it back. He is still a lawman.

Steris packs his ammunition and a lunch into his big leather shoulder bag, plus the aluminum-lined pouch belt that will keep his metal vials inviolate against enemy Allomancers; he loads half of Harmony's new vials into it. He asks her to take the Senate seat in his absence — to talk to the governor, to prepare the body for the worst — and brushes off her *I'm not good with people* the way she once brushed off his arguments about House Ladrian. *I stepped up because of your dreams. I see in you the same person — a better one. You can lead as well as I can. Better.* She is afraid; she agrees to try. He kisses her, one hand still holding the mistcoat.

Two small arms wrap around the both of them. Max is out of bed — *because I'm in here.* Why isn't he? Steris picks him up. *You need to go fight monsters now?* Max asks. *If I can find them,* Wax tells him. *You can,* Max says — *Uncle Wayne told me you're the best detector that ever lived, you can find any treasure there ever was.* *I've already found the best treasures, Max,* Wax says, turning, mistcoat tassels rustling in that old familiar way. *Now I just have to keep them safe.* He throws open the balcony doors and launches into the sky toward Bilming — stars above, stars beneath, a road of light pointing the way west.