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Armal and her nervous little circle of Wayfarer townspeople walk Marasi together along a back promenade lined with fake trees — and it works. The tranquility officers sent out by Entrone's broadcast stick to the main road, holding the friendly-neighborhood-watch posture in front of the residents, and Marasi slips past unseen. Entrone's mansion on a small stone hill at the edge of town is grandiose enough to draw resentment from the others. Marasi guesses the third floor with its picture windows is yet another observation room, with a few sham parlours to keep up appearances.

At the back door she sends the townspeople to wait among the fake bushes — *think about what I've said. Please.* — and uses Moonlight's picks to let herself into a too-clean kitchen. A second inner door is heavily bolted, and there she has to do things Wayne's way: one of Moonlight's small charges blows it open. She is through the smoke with the pistol up before the two radio technicians inside have got off the floor. She makes the woman flick the broadcast switches on the public-address rig, marches both technicians outside, traps them in a slowness bubble from a charged grenade, and returns alone to a room that now has its inner door open — and a sickly white light spilling from the chamber beyond.

Entrone himself walks out into the radio room: pale, wan, bags under his eyes, a man in a funeral-cut suit and a formal hat. Two bodyguards step in front of him. Marasi tries the formal arrest line; he sighs at her like a tired parent. She fires. One bodyguard goes down; the other returns fire, and she ducks back into the kitchen. Then she nearly walks into a slowness bubble extending through the wall — the surviving bodyguard turns out to be a Pulser like her, hoping to seal her into slow time with him while the world outside sped up around them. He stops his bubble just inside the doorway, and freezes there. Marasi and Entrone are pinned on opposite sides of a slow-time wall, neither able to shoot through, neither able to leave.

Marasi uses the standoff. She tries first to get Entrone to explain why — and gets back a flat refusal, then a clever bluff of her own: *Wax and Wayne have stopped the launch; the city is safe; constables are on the way.* Entrone starts to laugh it off and then realises, too late, that the radio is still live and that everything he is saying is going out across Wayfarer. He flicks it off and concedes she was clever. He explains the Wayfarer population are *cowed civilians* who have never wanted the truth and would not help her if they had it. He concedes more, even. He is opening Autonomy's portal because the alternative is being one of the first killed when she sends her army through anyway. The site was chosen because of the captives — *such a large collection of Metalborn* — and because someone had brought in the *strange power, a glowing light* that the portal requires.

Marasi looks past him through the bubble and at last understands what the portal is. There is no gate; the ground itself glows. The mansion is a sham wrapped around a single twenty-foot pool of pure Investiture — the same mother-of-pearl liquid Moonlight carries — sunk into the floor and beginning to churn. The air above it warps. The Survivorist tenet — *survive* — comes up between them as it always does; Marasi tells him Kelsier never meant survive by being slowly crushed.

Then Entrone crosses the slowness bubble the simplest way. He steps sideways to where the bubble does not quite reach the wall, and punches through the wall itself. He is, it turns out, spiked — a full magazine of pistol fire from Marasi heals over and amounts to a few holes in his suit. He lifts her by the front of her shirt. *I'm a god now, little bastard.* She manages to knock his hat off with the butt of her pistol; he throws her through the window. She lands in a heap of cuts and bruises on the patio.

Entrone climbs out after her, still admitting the truth. *The army is coming. I imagined I'd be some grand lord. But I guess we all have to do what we must to survive.* Through teary vision Marasi sees shapes step out of the shadows behind him — and prays. The radio she left on long enough may have already told the townspeople what they needed to hear; the conversation just now on the patio, in Entrone's own voice, may have done the rest. He reaches for her. She tells him, calmly, that her power has never come from her Allomancy or her gun or her credentials. *I'm a constable. My strength isn't in myself. It comes from the people.*

A clink. Armal has dropped an empty jar — once full of Investiture — at her feet. The supercharged Rioting that follows hits Entrone's emotions like a wall of force.