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Wellid, a junior sailor aboard the Pewternaut A16, walks the aft deck on watch as Bilming's lights retreat behind the ship and the open water opens out ahead. He chose this duty because a steel-hulled warship felt to him like the safest place to be — better than being in Bilming with that lawman swooping around. He had imagined sailing as serene. Tonight is anything but: the crash of waves, the shudder of engines, and now and then a phantom splash off-beat from the swell, or a distant screech that might be a gull, except no gull screeches at night. He opens his lantern's hood. It lights the mist around him in a useless blazing halo and shows him nothing of the water three storeys down.

Gabria — senior, harsh — finds him with the lantern unhooded, snaps it shut, and reminds him they are running dark precisely so Elendel cannot target them. She asks why he is wearing a life jacket. *I want to be safe,* he tells her. He asks about the *reward* he believes they were promised at journey's end. After a small pause, in which he is plainly missing something, she tells him she is not aboard for any reward, and stalks off. He drifts after her, hears a thump against the hull, inches forward. A hand comes up out of the dark and seizes the railing. A shape follows — black, vaguely human, tentacles waving behind it like the mist itself, the mist declining to touch it. A mistwraith, he tells himself, and screams. He throws his lantern open. The light reveals a tall man in a mistcoat whose tassels are still wet — Dawnshot, climbed straight up the side of the warship from open ocean. Gabria spins and gapes; a second man in a damp bowler thumps down over the rail beside Wax. Wax flings his mistcoat aside. Pounded straight through his shirt and into his ribs is a metal spike.

On the Shaw rooftop, Telsin comes round beside her ruined decoy launchpad. An engineer is shaking her arm. The Autonomy-Investiture in her should have prevented a blackout like that; she feels wrung out and almost mortal. *They took spikes from the bodies,* the engineer tells her, pointing. *Ordinary ones. But one granted duralumin.* Telsin heaves herself up and stumbles to the rooftop's edge to look across the bay. From here the wreckage tells its own story: Wax's departing Steelpush was so violent that it bent and crushed the building's underlying girders, sloping the rooftop where his anchor took. *Your failure begins,* Autonomy tells her, very far away. *You are not worthy.* The warmth inside her starts to drain out, the grey starting at her skin. She tries to console herself: it is only Wax, who has never actually managed to interrupt anything she set in motion. A jump like that one is nearly impossible. His aim is not that good. Is it?

Aboard the warship, Wax downs a vial of steel. The duralumin jump from the Shaw felt for a moment like wearing the Bands again; he braked them at the last second with Allomancy and landed at a row of portholes a few feet below the open deck, then made Wayne climb. A sailor reaches for her gun, Wax for his — but Wayne, freshly carrying a steel-granting spike of his own, flings a handful of bullets into the air and Pushes them, dropping her before either can draw. *Is that what it's always been like for you?* he asks, delighted. *That was so easy. Almost ruins your reputation, mate.* Wax keeps Vindication on the trembling lantern-sailor — Wellid — and worries privately that what he just did to himself and his friend was sacrilege. Harmony is mildly amused. Not blasphemy, he says. More a matter of industrious recycling.

Harmony also warns that he can see only what Wax does and did not know the ship was the delivery mechanism — and that whatever they find in the hold will almost certainly carry dead-man's switches. Wayne gets the hold location out of Wellid, who insists the weapon is fragile and that touching it will detonate the whole ship. Wayne suggests, politely, that he ought to find a way to not be on the ship anymore, very fast. Wellid panics and flings himself bodily off the side into the churning water, lantern and all, leaving them in the dark.

They follow the red lines down a metal stairwell that Wax can Push off ad libitum — the door at the top blown open by a Push, a knot of riflemen on the landing dropped without giving them a chance to fire. Wayne thumps down beside him with an inelegant Steelpush of his own and admits being a Coinshot is harder than the trade looks; he asks if Wax put the spike in the right spot. *I studied the Lord Mistborn's book thoroughly. If I'd missed, you'd be in agony.* They take a rifle off a fallen sailor and shoot the few who refuse to surrender on the way down. They reach a door labelled MUNITIONS DUMP, with a guard outside whose key Wax pockets — someone, he thinks, really ought to explain that leaving a guard outside the door with the key is bad practice — and step over the body inside.

The room is square, perhaps thirty feet across. In the centre stand three large wire-laced barrels, spaced about five feet apart. On the far wall a fourth wired device feeds back to all three. There is no timer, no control panel, no nothing as comprehensible as a switch. Wax reads it for what it is — a dead-man's rig, three explosive devices each with its own power source, each set to detonate if a *do-not-detonate* pulse from the wall device stops or if any single barrel is tampered with. Wayne hands over the bomb schematics from his pocket and they spread them on the floor. Harmony, processing far faster than either of them, confirms worse: the wall device pulses every twenty seconds, and the timing is too precise for three humans disarming simultaneously to beat. Two of the three barrels will go off no matter what.

Wax asks the obvious question — set a charge, leave, let it blow far out at sea? Harmony answers grimly. This is no longer the old harmonium-and-water reaction the Malwish handle for blast mining. This is harmonium *split with trellium* — matter into energy of a class Autonomy and her Set have neither tested nor properly modelled at this scale. He believes they have catastrophically underestimated the yield. The blast could vaporize Elendel and Bilming and the cities nearby, all of them together; in the worst case it could ignite the atmosphere itself. The bomb must not be allowed to detonate anywhere within reach of civilization. The only safe option left is to take the ship — and the weapon aboard it — as far from civilization as they can manage, and live with whatever comes next. *So,* Wayne says, *guess we get to steal a ship, eh? That's new.*