(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Wax gets into position outside the Silver House in late afternoon, hours after riding out from Elendel before dawn. He hopes — as he does most days now — that the mists will come tonight; they feel like a friend from his Roughs youth that he no longer makes time for. At four-fifteen, with Wayne already running his usual *Grandma's Been at the Vodka* drunk-act somewhere on the grounds to peel attention away from the upstairs windows, Wax sprints across the lawn, drops a bullet, and Pushes himself up to the second floor.

The window latch resists a simple Push. He weights himself many times over and forces the sash open with brute Coinshot leverage, bending the lock until it gives. Inside is Gave Entrone's private study: papers piled on the desk, a liquor bar half-disassembled, books slumped on shelves whose ends have been emptied. A lived-in room, the only one in a household otherwise polished by an army of servants — the kind of room that hides things.

He works the desk first. The papers offer little of obvious interest: shipping manifests to a factory at the city's edge, a stack of broadsheets with anti-Gave editorials circled in ink, then a newer stack of broadsheets where those same editorials no longer exist. In a drawer he finds personal letters from Elendel nobles, including several from Senator Vennis Hasting — and they are all pleasantries, trade-talk, nothing incriminating. Wax thumbs the much more damning letter from Maraga out of his coat and pockets one of each. He knows Gave and Vennis are colluding; what he needs is the bomb.

The real find is mundane: Gave's desk calendar. A trick from his Roughs days — people lock up their schemes but leave their calendars in plain sight, because they don't think of a calendar as evidence. Two hands have annotated it, the sloppier presumably Gave's and a tidier one a secretary's. Visits to somewhere referred to only as *the lab* recur often, packed tightly between official meetings — close to the mansion, then, or accessible by some private fast route. Other entries are marked as trajectory and distance tests and are flanked by empty blocks of days, the only activity for which Gave has needed to travel any real distance. Then Wax notices the colder detail: there are no appointments scheduled past today. The very last entry, in Gave's own hand, simply reads *They arrive.* He rips the relevant sheets free even though it advertises the intrusion.

He moves on. Burning steel he reads the room's metal lines — nails, wires, bulbs, the nib of a pen, all the unseen iron that increasingly outlines modern interiors. Some people, he reflects, think the day of the Metalborn is ending; in practice the new world hands a trained Coinshot more to work with each year, not less. The lines point him to a safe set into the floor under a couch — a more common hiding place than the picture or the bookshelf, despite the popular stories.

The safe is the kind with no visible mechanism: opened by Allomantic Pushes on internal pins. Wax lets the lines separate into their tiny components, finds the first pin and locks it, then the second, then Pushes the third — and the whole tumbler resets. He runs through it again with the same result. The answer arrives a beat later and tightens his chest: the third pin needs a Pull. The safe is a lock built for a Mistborn — or for a Hemalurgist cheating their way into the same set of powers. Without ripping the safe out of the floor to work on it from both sides he is not getting in, and he is suddenly out of time. Smoke is rising in around the door, and there are shouts for a fire brigade in the hallway: Wayne's distraction has escalated.

He sweeps the room one last time and his eye catches it — a square of nails in the floorboards under the rug that breaks the line-pattern of the rest of the room, the kind of giveaway a Coinshot reads the way another man reads fresh paint on an old wall. Gave may have the spikes that make him an Allomancer, but he doesn't have the instinct of someone who grew up with the powers. The trapdoor opens onto a narrow shaft and a wooden ladder dropping between the walls toward the basement. Wax abandons the safe, drops onto the rungs, and pulls the door shut over himself as the corridor outside fills with running feet.