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Wayne and Wax take the warship the hard way. With the bomb room locked and the key in Wayne's pocket, they fight room by room through what turns out to be a thin skeleton crew — most of the Set's zealots having stayed behind to defend the Shaw. A half hour in, Wax Pushes open the reinforced bridge door and finds the four ranking officers dead on the floor, neat self-inflicted shots, the wheel locked in place at full speed toward Elendel. Wayne is appalled at the city-folk capacity for that kind of fanaticism. The Roughs at least had the decency to be eccentric in less terminal ways.

Wax reads the locked controls for what they are and curses. The wheel is wired into the same dead-man's logic as the barrels below. Harmony confirms it: unlock the bridge and the bomb goes. They are not on a ship but on a rocket — the same self-propelled idea the other launch used, scaled up, set to detonate the moment forward motion stops or it strikes land. Wayne points out the lights of Elendel already on the horizon; Harmony, more softly, sets the clock at twenty minutes.

Wax rushes back out onto the deck declaring they have to try to defuse the bomb anyway. Wayne stops him at the railing because, as it happens, he has had an actual idea. The ship is built like a mesa, alone in flat country. It is ready to gobble up a hero. He walks Wax through the shape of it: sculpt a speed bubble so that all three barrels are inside but the wall coordinator is outside; pour water into one barrel to detonate its harmonium in the smaller water-reaction; Push the barrel out of the bubble as it blows; the warning signal to the wall device has to travel along wires through frozen time, giving him room to do the same to the other two before the larger reaction can be triggered. Wax objects flatly that electricity is far too fast — even speeding time up by a factor of a thousand would not outrun it. *Oh,* says Wayne.

*Wait,* says Harmony. *This could work.* He reminds Wax of a red-corked vial he was handed earlier in the week. Wax fishes through his sheath and comes up holding a handkerchief — *barely used,* offers Wayne helpfully — because Wayne traded the vial out for safekeeping. Wax starts to understand what is being prepared. He says, carefully, that this plan still ends the way it ends; even with full metalminds no one survives a harmonium-water blast in that small a room. Wayne tells him he had figured that part out. He just needed to know the plan worked without Wax. He hands his friend a rifle, crouches, and Pushes himself off it — flinging Wax out into the dark over the bay. *Get to ground in one piece, mate. Keep breathing.*

Alone, Wayne uncorks the vial and asks what the dust actually is. Harmony explains. Earlier in the week, when the team performed their own harmonium-splitting test in the laboratory, something happened that Harmony cannot account for: Wax did not merely blow up the room. He *created* something. The grit at the bottom of the vial is the faintest measure of lerasium from legend — the metal Vin found at the Well of Ascension and used to make Elend a Mistborn — alloyed with a trace of every Allomantic metal. Drink it and burn it and Wayne will be a Mistborn long enough to matter. Wayne downs the vial, waits, mutters something about anticlimax, then realises he is supposed to *burn* it. Fire in the veins. Kick to the head. Damn.

The important new metal, Harmony explains, is duralumin: a Mistborn's charge of duralumin flares every other metal at once at proportional power. Wayne understands and starts emptying his bendalloy pouches into a canteen of water from a corpse — pouch from his pocket, pouch from his other pocket, pouch from his sock, the rest of seventeen pouches he's been carrying around for years. *Enough?* he asks. *Oh, Wayne,* says God. *Yes. I think it will.*

Harmony appears beside him in the hold as a transparent Terris figure with the shadow of himself behind it, and offers Wayne a choice. There is, very slightly, a way to use his new powers to Push back against upcoming metal sources and hold the ship offshore — treading water — long enough that someone might find another solution. One in a hundred. The other option is the speed bubble plan: detonate the bomb's harmonium in the small water-reaction, kill the heating mechanism that drives the larger split, save the cities, do not survive. Wayne picks the sure path. He arranges, with serious care, for Harmony to look after the family of the man he killed years ago. He confirms Wax will live — channeled mostly upward, plus pewter, plus God's hand on the scale. Then he asks the only thing he actually wants answered: will this earn him forgiveness? Harmony tells him, gently, that there is none owed anymore — that whatever he was once carrying, the ledger is closed. And — quietly — Wayne discovers that he isn't doing it for that. He knows, finally, who he is — he is, with a roar of capitals, *the God damn HERO*.

He asks for Harmony's hat. Harmony does not wear one, but touches Wayne's head and gives him the impression of a Terrisman's earrings, a glow that feels settled there. Wayne drops into the old Terris accent — telling Harmony, in his best impression of his own godhood, to hang on to his robes for what comes next — sculpts a speed bubble around all three barrels but excludes the wall coordinator, burns the stomachful of bendalloy and the duralumin together, and Pushes on time itself harder than any Allomancer in history. The bubble crystallises. God himself freezes. Lights stop. Even Wayne's eyesight gives out until he burns one of Harmony's vials and switches to steel-sight to see. Then he floods the first barrel from the canteen, Pushes it out of the bubble as the blast starts blooming — fire and blue lines, the barrel releasing its soul — and the cracks begin to creep across the crystal sphere around him. He leaps to the second. Floods it. Pushes it. The signal up the wires moves like syrup. He slams into the third, dumps the last of the canteen, Pushes. All three barrels hang motionless outside him in the slow time, only the first blast even beginning. He drops the canteen and breathes. You get yourself swallowed, sure — but you finish the thing off from inside its own throat.

Far away, on a Bilming street, Marasi walks with Armal and a few of her surface friends toward Blantach's offices through a city ignorant of the crisis. She thinks the mist feels different tonight — holding its breath. On the Elendel docks Steris freezes mid-instruction, hand at the small silver spear at her throat, turns to the bay, and says a prayer.

The crystalline bubble shatters. All becomes red light and blossoms of fire.