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Marasi reaches the bottom of the elevator shaft on TwinSoul's roseite ladder, pink dust crumbling away to mist around her, and finds the service car parked snug at the floor of the shaft. TwinSoul widens the ladder so all three can descend abreast; the car's roof is solid steel. They open the service hatch in the corner of the ceiling and look down into a corridor of natural stone — the entrance to a network of caverns under the city, lit by miner's lamps strung along the wall. Two bored guards lean against crates by the open door, flirting and not watching.

Silajana — through a thread of TwinSoul's crystal sent down to the floor — offers, mildly, to send the pair to the aethers to consider their poor life choices. Moonlight suggests overkill. Marasi takes a third option: she lowers her head through the hatch on a small lattice of roseite, picks her moment by the woman's laugh, drops one of her Allomantic grenades on a fishing line, and freezes the guards in their giggling tableau. The three of them slip down through the open elevator door and out into a cross tunnel; Marasi tugs the grenade out, and the laugh resumes uninterrupted.

They press deeper. Voices ahead force them into shadow behind some rubble. TwinSoul grows a darker-than-usual roseite shell over them, drinks from his water pack, and a five-man patrol passes within a metre without looking down. While they wait it out, Moonlight and TwinSoul start the recruitment conversation Marasi has been ducking. The Ghostbloods operate on three rules: protect Scadrial; share everything inside the team and nothing outside without Kelsier's leave; and never move against another member. Marasi swallows the loyalty rule easily — she has spent her career colliding with other constables' ambition — but the secrecy clause sits like a stone. Joining would feel like swearing allegiance to a foreign country. *And not, she implies, to Wax,* Moonlight notes; the way Marasi holds her team is exactly why they came to her.

Beyond the next bend the tunnel opens into a small stretch where two long, narrow shacks have been built up against the rock — almost as if the Set had laid out a street of shops underground. The rightmost shack is guarded outside by two of Lord Mayor Entrone's bodyguards. Through a window on the short end, Marasi spots Gave himself inside, in formal dining wear and slicked-back hair, slumped at a table among scientists in white coats. He looks ill, not commanding. He is asking what odds they give *her* of getting the bomb to fly. He is asking, more quietly, whether *they* are here. *Nearly,* answers a scientist. *An army of soldiers with golden skin and glowing red eyes.* Marasi thinks at once of the dying Miles Hundredlives and his vision of *men of gold and red.* He had been seeing this.

Gave pounds the table. He was supposed to take Telsin's place when she failed; instead her plan is still in play and an invasion is coming through behind her. The head scientist — a thick-bodied woman in a white coat — steers him back to a scheduled demonstration. Her assistants haul a lean, exhausted woman in a torn evening dress out of a locked cell at the rear of the shack, strap her to a table, and produce a long thin silvery spike. *We believe we've isolated the technique Edwarn was on to,* the scientist says. *Indeed we've refined it.* The needle is threaded through and back out of the woman's upper back. She screams. The wounds bleed. She survives. The spike, dipped and metered, reads roughly five percent Invested. Every person, the scientist explains to Gave, carries a trace of Preservation and Ruin from the moment of their making — and a *vestigial* extra in those whose Metalborn potential never expressed. That trace can be sliced off without killing the subject. Fully charging one spike takes twenty to thirty people. Gave is only interested in whether they can yet *make Allomancers* out of these. The answer is *not reliably*; brief, fading manifestations only, no targeted Metallic Art. He sags. He has nothing to show Autonomy.

Moonlight reads the demonstration differently than Marasi does. To Marasi a non-lethal Hemalurgy is still brutal, soul-theft by needle. To Moonlight this is enormous: a method that produces fleeting Allomancers from ordinary people is one step from spiking using raw Investiture instead of souls — the implication being that the medallion-economy of the Malwish, which still requires real Metalborn, could be replicated mechanically by *anyone.* They have to tell Kelsier.

Gave decides, audibly, that he will *help her army through* if Telsin's plan falters — call all the remaining loyalists into the caverns for shelter, ride out the surface war. He leaves the shack to *see to the perpendicularity* and instructs the scientists to execute the prisoners with invel gas tablets. The scientist tells one assistant to fetch the pellets and another to issue a priority-one evacuation order to the caverns. TwinSoul argues, gently, that a few captive lives are nothing compared to a planetary invasion; they have to follow Gave. Moonlight agrees. Marasi does not. *I'm an officer of the law. I can't leave a group of people to be murdered.* And — usefully — the prisoners have heard everything. They stand.