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Marasi steps out of the rocky tunnels into the floodlit cavern of the Community and finds, beneath the painted ceiling, a town. Rows of brick and clay townhomes face a central park of green-painted wood chips. Couples promenade hand in hand. A father bolts together a swing set while his children wait. A man in a white uniform walks the lanes delivering jars of food and humming as he goes. There are no shadows worth slipping into and nowhere to be furtive; she straightens her shoulders, ignores the increasingly pointed stares, and walks the place as if she belongs.

The detail that pulls her attention is what is *not* present. No nails. No lanterns. No metal window frames. The only metal in the whole cavern is the aluminum brackets cradling the ceiling floodlights and the speakers of a public address system. The rucksack on her shoulder — pistol, charges, picks, Moonlight's glowing jar — suddenly feels conspicuous in a way nothing has all night. Two women in day dresses pass at a brisk pace, glance at her, glance again, and quicken; Marasi's instincts read it instantly. They are off to tell someone. Acting against her instincts, she breaks into a trot and follows them.

They lead her to a two-story townhome screened by trellises and painted ropes meant to mimic vines. Inside, a stately blonde woman in a decade-old grey-blue dress takes Marasi firmly by the arm, draws her in out of view, has the drapes closed and a lamp lit, and sends one of the others — *Fialia* — out to fetch *Kessi* and *Abrem* and *the others*. *You've already been seen by too many, dear,* she says, and bustles off to fetch biscuits and tea while Marasi sits, baffled, in a plush chair. *Don't be afraid,* the blonde woman tells her. *We have plenty here — like in the old days. Before the disaster. Before the ashfalls. We are safe down here.*

Up there. Down here. The pieces lock together and Marasi sits very still under the weight of what she is finally seeing. The painted ruined-city model she found at the studio above was not propaganda being prepared for some future use. It is propaganda already in use. These people have been told for seven years that the surface burns under ashfall and that this cavern is the only refuge from it. They believe it. They have been raising their children to believe it.

A small council assembles around her — *Drenya*, *Fialia*, *Kessi*, a stocky man with a tool belt, two more women — and they peer at her as if she has crawled out of the apocalypse they have been promised. They are eager for news of survivors. The man with the tools has three daughters he lost in Bilming when *the world ended*; *it has been corroding me ever since I was saved,* he tells her. *Saved* — they had been brought down here, the blonde woman explains, by a random lottery of scientists who could only rescue a few before the eruptions. Some are Allomancers. Others come from Allomancer families but never manifested themselves. Without ever planning to, they have laid the whole shape of it out in front of Marasi — a tidy little colony of people the Set selected for their Allomantic lineage, kept underground, kept compliant, kept breeding. The playground in the front yard tilts in her vision and becomes something darker.

Marasi also learns — without the residents knowing they have told her — how the deception is sustained. Periodically an outsider stumbles in through the tunnels and confirms the ashfall story, then is taken away *to one of the other caverns*, never to be seen again. The outsiders are actors. The flat outer walls of the cavern, she suspects, are one-way glass into observation rooms. A Hemalurgic abomination once *broke in* and the security force valiantly killed it; it was let in on purpose. *Lord Mayor* Gave Entrone, they tell her, is a *tyrant* — he refuses to let them search for survivors, refuses to let them help. He came from one of the caverns under Elendel originally and rules this one from a mansion at the edge of Wayfarer with a broadcast station inside it.

She agrees with them about Entrone and lets it pass at that. The final piece falls into place — the planted Allomancers, the breeding, the long game — and as she puts it together a second recognition lands. The stately blonde woman at her side, patting her hand and pressing tea on her, is not a stranger. She is Marasi's distant cousin Armal Harms — the woman Miles Hundredlives and the Vanishers kidnapped seven years ago in Wax's first Elendel case. The missing person at the head of Marasi's oldest unsolved file is sitting on the next cushion, alive, certain the world is over, and offering her another biscuit.