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Wax bounds across Bilming with Wayne clinging to his back and mist curling in their wake, then launches off a building half the height of the Shaw for a balcony partway up the tower. The Steelpush is barely enough; they land lightly in planters between two broad dark windows. Wayne complains they were supposed to crash through the glass like the Ascendant Warrior did before she killed the Lord Ruler in some children's book Max likes. Wax points out the door, which is more sensible and unlikely to leave them cut to ribbons given that neither of them can heal worth much.

The door is locked. Floodlights snap on inside, silhouetting weapons being raised, and the windows shatter under a burst of fire. While the gunfire tapers off Wayne confesses to a sort of late-life astonishment at the path that took him from a funny train-robbery case down in the Basin to dark gods, armies, city-killing bombs — *and ghosts, Wax. We still ain't talked about the ghosts.* Wax unhooks the Big Gun from inside his coat and asks if Wayne can keep their attention. Wayne grins: *Scary Tree?*

So they run it. Wax strips off his mistcoat and a spare pistol and hands them over; Wayne takes them with shocking calm — usually there is some ritual of throwing bullets into a fire first — then starts firing from beside the window in Wax's coat, tassels waving, doing an eerily accurate vocal impression. The squad inside fixates on the famous Coinshot whose exploits the broadsheets have only inflated since he found the Bands of Mourning. While they tunnel-vision on Wayne, Wax Pushes the deadbolt and slips into a small adjoining hallway separated from the floodlight room by a wall.

He guesses right. Soon a small group of soldiers in red uniforms creeps down that hallway toward the balcony, light spilling around them from behind, blinding them. Wax is overhead the whole time, holding to the ceiling on nails in the floor, and he drops on them and finishes them the old way — a few coins flung into the air and delivered noiselessly into the back of their skulls. *Allomancers had been regarded like shadows. Or the mists themselves. Silent, hidden, practically formless.* He understands the legend now.

Then he flanks into the main room. The floodlights are wheeled — a planned ambush positioned for a Coinshot coming in over the balconies — and arrayed in a line with shooters in the gaps. Aluminum bullets cannot be Pushed, but the floodlights can. Tapping iron weight, he Pushes into the room and smashes the lights into one another, crushing the soldiers between them, then slides across the floor and sweeps the wreckage out the window in a second Push. Wayne saunters in afterward and tosses the mistcoat back. *Sorry for the bullet holes.* There are at least sixteen, even in the tassels. *How did you not get shot?* *By not bein' where the bullets was.*

Wax puts the coat back on and inventories his weapons: the Big Gun in his left hand, the aluminum-framed Steel Survivor loaded with normal lead so he still has Pushable rounds, and Vindication with aluminum bullets and two hazekiller rounds ready for Metalborn. Wayne pulls out a dueling cane; Wax meets his eyes and shakes his head. *Harmony knew. He knew what I'd need to become.*

He fishes out the trellium earring and slips it in. No visions this time — only Telsin's attention coming on him, and faintly, the sound of her giving orders. She is at the top of the tower, and she is sounding frantic. *Waxillium. You should have left the city as I suggested.* He clicks through Vindication's chambers and tells her he has come to clean up the family's mess. She calls him a frightened child who has never had the vision to take a risk, who is thirty floors and *hundreds* of her Hidden Guard best away from her, and tells him he has never understood — that he cannot beat her, that whatever he tries she will always be ahead. He hefts the Big Gun in one hand, downs an extra vial of steel Harmony gave him, and raises a steel bubble though her men carry aluminum.

*Funny that you claim to be the one with vision,* he tells her, *when you've always underestimated me. If you'd had any foresight, you'd have killed me when I first came back to the city seven years ago — before I came to love the things you're seeking to destroy.* Then he rips the earring out and tosses it aside. Footsteps and calls sound from beyond a stairwell door at the end of the cross-hall, then go silent. Wayne steps up beside him. *Mate. You sure about this?* Wax raises his gun in two hands and strides forward. *Stay behind. Follow once I'm done. But don't engage. It's time for Harmony's Sword to do his job.*