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Wax launches into the air through the warehouse skylight after the fleeing Sequence, and is briefly disoriented by the unfamiliar skyline. He has flown over Elendel so many times the eye expects its landmarks. Bilming is something else — round in plan, an elevated rail ringing the centre, warships in port, no two buildings alike, and from this height an unmistakable artistic pattern — too orderly, too perfect, too balanced. *Like a child's model of a city.*

The Sequence bounds along the perimeter with the Steelpush discipline of a true Coinshot — using the buildings he has just passed as anchors instead of fixating on the cars below the way newer Pushers do — and Wax gains by anticipating where he will Push next. He raises Vindication hoping to wing the man and take him alive for answers, then the Sequence blasts straight into the sky off a parked car, crumpling its roof flat. Duralumin. Wax has read about that strength; he has never faced it. Every rule he knows about Coinshot duels just changed.

He lands on a rooftop where he stashed his pack, swaps the Steel Survivor's conventional rounds for the aluminum-bullet pouch in Vindication, and keeps Harmony's vials of metal in the aluminum-lined sheath on his belt. The man will come from above. Sure enough, gunfire — and an Steelpush off the steel girders beneath the stonework of the apartment block opposite — caves in the entire wall of the apartment Wax has just landed in. Rubble pins him; the Sequence bounds across, aluminum flask in one hand, gun in the other, and reloads mid-air.

Wax drives him off with a few shots and slips into the hallway. He flares steel just long enough to map the rooms by their metals — and immediately takes a bullet through the wood of the wall, near his head. The enemy is shooting blind through the wall and not missing. *Idiot.* The man is also a Seeker — bronze — sensing every time Wax burns. He kills his steel and slips clear. A Coinshot *and* a Seeker: at least two Hemalurgic spikes, beyond the three-spike ceiling that should expose a body to Harmony's direct control — Marasi had said the Set had found a way past that limit. Harmony's blindness, perhaps.

Civilians spill into the hallway. Wax cannot stay. He kicks a window open, drops, lightens himself with Feruchemy — and instantly the Sequence appears on a nearby roof firing again. So bronze sees Feruchemy too, an ability only the rarest practitioners ever develop. Wax stops filling his metalmind. (He has worn it embedded under the skin by surgeons since the Bands of Mourning business — a person's body acts like aluminum and shields it — though the stories say a strong enough Allomancer can punch through that too. The Ascendant Warrior did.)

He turns the bronze-sight into a trap. He gives a single short Push off a street drainage grate around the back of the building, popping straight up by momentum so the man on the roof reads only one ground-level burst. At the crest he catches a stone formation just under the roofline, hangs, listens to feet shift above, then Pushes himself up directly into his enemy's face and tackles him flat on the roof. Punches: knock the pistol away, find out whether the man has pewter. The Sequence panics, blows another duralumin-grade Push off the iron in the rooftop, and the two of them go up together in a column of wind and g-forces.

Before they reach the apex the man puts his palm on Wax's face, and Wax's reserve goes cold and *vanishes* — a Leecher on top of everything else. The man grabs Wax's belt and kicks them apart; the breakaway latch on the belt opens, the vials tumble into open air, and Wax manages to grab one before it's gone. A shot from the Sequence strikes the vial as Wax raises it to his lips. He swallows a single bare taste before the glass shatters.

He uses iron — filling, then emptying — to play his fall against itself: heavier to slow his rise, then sharply lighter so the wind doesn't take him sideways into a bullet, then heavier again at the right second to draw level with one of the tumbling vials. He stretches; it lands in his palm with a snap. He spins, downs half of it, Pushes off a building spire in a tumble to dodge the next shots, throws the half-vial under himself at the last moment and Pushes off the puddle of metal as it bursts on the pavement. He skids to a stop in a Bilming city square, heart hammering, gun out, scanning up. Empty sky. The man cut his losses.

The square is a dedication ceremony for a new building, paved in decorative stones, ringed by chunky blockish statues. A journalist with an evanotype stand puts a flash on him before he can move. Tomorrow's broadsheets are going to lead with the picture of Waxillium Ladrian landing in a Bilming plaza in his mistcoat. Delightful.

A sleek black car rolls up. Hoid climbs out in a chauffeur's cap and white gloves and offers him a lift. *How on Scadrial did you find me?* *Pardon, Lord Ladrian,* Hoid says, *but you do create quite a spectacle.* Wax declines — Wayne and Marasi are still fighting — thanks him, and launches back into the air to a second flash from the evanotype.