(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

The shock wave reaches Steris in the centre of Elendel like a thunderclap. She gasps as it lands and her ears go on ringing afterward. She and Governor Varlance had been carried inland by Allomancer after they finished at the docks — back near her original evacuation command post — and even at this distance the air has fists. Windows rattle around them. Any closer to the bay and they would have shattered. The buildings nearest the explosion she does not let herself think about, not yet.

A moment earlier the explosion had been a brief sun on the horizon through the mist, magnificent and dreadful at once, blazing through the haze and outlining the city's silhouette against it. In seconds it is just afterimage on her eyes and the slow ring inside her head. The fact that she is still standing on this rooftop, with the windows in their frames and the building under her feet, tells her almost everything she needed to know. *He's done it,* the governor declares, peeking up over the stone railing where he had ducked. *Preservation, he's done it. He detonated the bomb early. The city is saved.*

Steris nods. She lets out a long breath she does not remember holding. Wax was where she hoped he would be. The light fading on the horizon is the proof. And then, instantly, a new worry crowds in to replace the old one. *You had better not have been on that ship when the explosion happened, Waxillium Ladrian,* she thinks at the dark. *You … just … just have gotten off, all right?*

*Will the wave come?* the governor asks. *Yes,* she tells him. *Imminently.* He straightens his cravat — the tic of a man putting the costume back on — and asks, with quiet hopefulness, whether they actually helped, didn't they? Yes, she says. The dockside is going to be a disaster zone for weeks; they will need to rebuild. But she thinks they got most of the people out of the worst districts. Down at the water she can already see the tide pulling back from the docks: the sea drawing its breath before the wave comes back. The studies she has read are inconclusive on what blast-driven water does — she has hopes, no more — and stands ready to be very wrong.

The governor thanks the Survivor and then, awkwardly, thanks her too. He had been worried she would insist on staying at the wharves. There is no reason, she tells him, to stand by the dying city if the city is not, after all, going to die. He nods, eager. She watches him with the small surprise she has been carrying all evening at the new shape of him — the agreeable figurehead chosen for steering who has, somewhere in the last few hours, started insisting on steering himself.

Then she turns back toward the bay. The afterimage of the blast is still printed inside her eyes. She holds the small silver spear at her throat and prays the same prayer she prayed at the docks, into the same fading light. *Just … be safe … Please.*