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Wax and Wayne rise into the mist on a long Steelpush off the carpet nails of the Shaw ballroom. As they climb Wax argues with Harmony in his head: he has done his part, he has become the sword; now he wants the god to do *his* part if Autonomy herself shows up at the top. Harmony tells him Autonomy will not personally intervene — exposing herself is not her way — and that Telsin is so densely Invested that bullets are unlikely to work; if pressed, the best he can manage is a stun, an interruption of her Connection to her god. Wax takes the deal. He also notices that the mist itself has been doing something to him all day, easing his fatigue and his old pains; Harmony says yes, but it has not worked as he hoped.

They land on the cold rooftop. The mist keeps its distance from Telsin in a careful invisible bubble, the way a kicked dog stays out of reach. Her eyes are pulsing red. Behind her, hidden from the street by the construction skirt, the long sleek launchpad stands under floodlights, engineers still fussing with the rocket on top of it. Wax sends Wayne over to give the engineers a generous lunch break, which it takes very little intimidation to arrange.

Telsin is too calm. She tells Wax he is going to step aside now and let her finish what she has been preparing — that he is finally going to admit she was right all along — and lectures him about what a man like Harmony would or would not be willing to sacrifice for a planet, while a constable hesitates to do what needs doing. She walks toward him through Vindication's sight line as though it is not there, because Harmony has already told him it is not. She invites him to watch her Ascend. The texture is off — quiet conversation, a doomsday device stopped, an enemy this confident — and the detective in him notices before the swordsman in him can react.

He stops trying to be the Sword long enough to be a detective again. He thinks back through the charts of failed launches he's been chasing all book and concludes the launch vehicle never actually worked well enough to lift a weapon this size; if Telsin really believed the world would end without her firing it, she would have fired it the moment he arrived just to see if it might work. So he lowers Vindication and tells her flatly that it does not work. She freezes. He raises a hand, increases his weight, and Pushes the whole apparatus over. The contraption collapses and the rocket hits the rooftop with a hollow clang. A decoy.

Now the connections come fast. The lab near the docks was not poorly sited, it was sited for a backup delivery mechanism — and when he forced his way through the mansion earlier and reached the tunnel they panicked and moved the bomb there. By road and rail Steris has the city sealed. By air it cannot reach. That leaves the sea. The mist thins just for him, and across the bay he picks out the wake of a Pewternaut-class warship running dark for Elendel — the very ship he saw moored at the Bilming docks all day and dismissed as a show of force.

Telsin whispers that Autonomy had told her he would figure it out, and that Autonomy seems to prefer him to her. She is not sure how to feel about that. Then she explains, with cruel calm: yes, the rockets never quite worked. Yes, the ship is gone. Yes, the bomb is rigged to detonate if the ship is stopped or shelled. She has him. He can hurl himself into the mist and end up swimming in the bay, or he can race to Elendel and die in the blast with everyone else. A new world begins tonight, devoted to a god who is neither weak nor divided.

Wax cannot Steelpush to a moving ship that far across open water without losing his anchor. He cannot outrun it. He cannot strike it without setting off the bomb. He turns to her, and for the first time the vitriol in her voice is unmistakable: she has hated him for decades, she says, because he never once admitted she might be right; today she is doing what has to be done and he is going to watch, and weep, and she is going to Ascend.

*Hit her, Harmony,* Wax thinks. *Cut her off. Now.* Telsin gasps mid-sentence. The red in her eyes dims; her body collapses to the rooftop. Harmony tells him she is being held together only by Autonomy's power — only Autonomy withdrawing it will actually kill her — but for now she is down. The ship, though, is still moving. And as Wax looks down through the broken skylight where mist pours in like water into a drain, he can barely make out a corpse lying below.