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Steris does not have nearly enough time. But years of accounting and contracts have taught her never to be intimidated by scale: a thousand boxings is not made less valuable because the firm handles millions, and being unable to evacuate even a region of Elendel in the time given does not, in turn, lessen the value of a single life. She leaves Constable-General Reddi in command of the main station and hurries with Governor Varlance to the city docks.

Her own evacuation plan had relied heavily on those docks — tons of people had already been routed there for boats — and that calculation is now wrong. If the bomb detonates anywhere over the bay, those tons of people are exposed, and she is increasingly worried about flooding besides. She has read just enough about offshore detonations to be alarmed without being knowledgeable, which is the worst combination. So she sits beneath a workman's lantern with her notebooks and starts converting plan A into plan B in real time. Varlance takes command of the dockworker foremen for her and sends them to wrangle people away from the wharves into the city.

When a delegation of foremen arrives, Steris tears pages out of her notebook and hands them out by trade: train conductors gathering people into cargo trains, crane operators positioning cargo bins across the street as flood breaks, construction workers reclassified as constables in their brightest hats and vests to drive the bayside districts inland behind tall buildings, dockworkers fetching all the rope they can find for human chains to anchor against the pull of a wave. The foremen do not argue. They do not need to be persuaded. They simply go. It is, Steris notices with mild disorientation, not at all how she is used to being treated when she gives instructions.

She also marks for Varlance which surviving structures she believes are strong enough to withstand a blast or flood — people should be moved into the middle floors, away from windows. *Why haven't you shared any of this?* he asks her, looking through the plans. She admits it was mostly for her own amusement, or her own anxiety. He calls the work brilliant; he asks if she has plans like it for other disasters. She lists them in her even contracts-clerk voice: fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, sudden invasions, dust storms, droughts, food shortages, mass pipe breakings. There are seven more she still wants to write up.

He stares at her. So do several of the other remaining officials, leaning over her maps and notes. Her talents, Varlance tells her, have been wasted. And — there at the lantern in the mist above the bay — something unfamiliar lights up under Steris's sternum. She has felt appreciated by Wax before. Occasionally by Marasi. But to see it in the eyes of strangers, to have her overplanning interpreted not as a personality defect but as a *talent*, is a feeling she has spent years building a careful bubble against the absence of. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be proud of who you are, rather than to spend the day worrying you are embarrassing the people standing near you. Miraculous, she thinks.

The next item is the cargo ships standing off in the bay. She wants them sunk. After bringing their crews in safely first, of course. The idea — drawn from a study of the flooding at Alicago three years ago — is to convert them from drifting hazards into drag, slowing any wave's advance and keeping enormous metal hulls from being carried up onto the docks and into the crowds. One of the foremen hesitates: tugs out, captains to argue with, the scuttling process itself — four or five hours, at least, to do all of them. Rusts. That will not work.

A throat clears behind her. Eight people in plain clothing have been waiting. *Perhaps we can help,* their leader says — first asking, mildly, whether the mass sinking of private vessels is legal. *Yes,* says Varlance without flinching. *On my authority. If we are so fortunate as to have overreacted, the city will pay the captains' losses.* Steris leans in and tells him, low and warm, that what he just said sounded *positively heroic*. He brightens like a child. *Really? Heroic?* *Decisive,* she says. *Very leaderlike.*

The leader of the eight nods to her and launches into the air. So do the rest, one at a time. Allomancers, she realises, useful both for the ships and afterwards for carrying away the injured. The last of the group nods to her and turns away; on the back of his hand, mostly obscured, she catches a small red tattoo. *Your sister,* the man tells her, *sends her regards.* Then he is gone after the others.

That, Steris understands, is the last meaningful thing she herself can do. From here her job is simply to make sure her instructions are being executed. Everything else rests on her husband. None of it matters if that bomb reaches the city. *You had better be on that ship, Wax,* she thinks.