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Wax reads from the small book Ironeyes handed him at the end of the Vanisher affair — an unsigned author writing in his own defence, defending his choice to keep Hemalurgy alive on the grounds that *Saze* is both sides now and Ruin is gone, and asking what else he was supposed to do. Wax taps the page with a pencil and scribbles notes to himself. On the couch opposite, Steris is methodically working through the seating chart for their wedding.

She proposes inviting the Boris brothers. Wax points out that he shot their father — twice — and that Boris Junior has sworn to drink his blood. *I'll just put them on the list, then.* Steris has been a year in his company and has resigned herself to the certainty that something will happen at the wedding: a villain at the altar, explosives in the pews, Father Bin turning out to be an old enemy. She has therefore sorted his old enemies by threat level and ease of access. He flips through her papers and finds names he had forgotten, all neatly catalogued; *that was actually kind of sweet*. He suggests inviting Douglas Venture, who can be counted on to make a disturbance at the after-party, and tells her to fill the rest of his section with his house's seamstresses and the constables-general of the various octants. She accepts the list and asks, in passing, if she might someday know what is in the little book he reads so often. He starts to answer.

The front door slams open. Wayne all but tumbles into the study with Darriance apologising behind him — *can't trust butlers, Wax* — and announces that the Marksman has finally moved. Wax grabs his mistcoat and gunbelt. Wayne and Steris exchange the usual *'ello, Crazy / Hello, Idiot* in passing. Steris sees him off with the request that he avoid being shot in the face, as they have wedding portraits to sit for this evening, and asks him to keep an eye on her half-sister out there. He insists this is too dangerous a chase to find Marasi mixed up in. *If you think that, your professional faculties are suspect.*

Marasi is in fact waiting in the drive at the wheel of a brand-new constabulary motorcar. She has, since the events of the previous year, left her solicitor's career to join the constables under Captain Aradel as analyst and executive assistant — and has been ordered to learn to drive the new rubber-wheeled motorcars and report on whether they should replace horse-drawn carriages. Wax groans, climbs in, and grumbles his way through her gear-shifts. Marks has hit the First Union just as Wax predicted three days ago. Captain Reddi thinks the Marksman is making for his hideout in the Seventh Octant; Wax tells Marasi to head for the Breakouts instead, since Marks likes to be seen, likes the daylight, and is — by the appointment book Wax still works from, the one he took off his uncle — connected to the Set.

He sees Marks cross the thoroughfare in mid-bound and goes after him out the door of a moving motorcar. Vindication in hand, Wax launches himself off a coin, off a passing carriage, onto the roof of Marasi's motor, and out into a series of Coinshot leaps over the city traffic. Marks wears the red costume and the busker's mask painted with black and white tusks, and is everything Wax expects of him — vain, theatrical, allowed too long a leash because the slum dwellers still call him a hero. When Marks throws a handful of coins, one of Wax's Pushes deflects a motorcar from the canal at the cost of crushing its hood under his own weight-magnified body.

Wax follows Marks up the side of a twelve-storey skyscraper, sets a feinting coin against one window, and goes through the next. Across a plaster wall the blue lines show him Marks turning with a submachine gun. He loads a Hazekiller round, Pushes it through the wall with everything he has, and drives Marks back wounded — only to find an empty office with a pool of blood and a discarded gun. He follows down a hallway, loses Vindication to a Marksman Steelpush, and stalks the thief on foot. *There are a thousand worse criminals in this city*, Marks tells him from behind the mask — *I'm a hero of the people.* *You stopped being one when you killed a child*, Wax answers, and Marks flees out a window. Wax grabs a handful of metal-nibbed pens and follows him twelve storeys down to the street.

Marks heads for the Breakouts, where the slum dwellers will hide him. Wax closes, raises a pen to wing him in the leg — he wants Marks alive, Marks knows things — and sees, on a sidewalk below, a face he last saw down the barrel of his own pistol. Long-fingered, thin-haired, a face almost like a bare skull. Bloody Tan. The man who killed Lessie. He loses his Push, hits the cobbles, rolls clear, scrambles up. The crowd parts. The face is not there. He asks bystanders if anyone saw the man; they look at him as if he is daft.

Marasi pulls up nearby — she had simply driven to the destination he had named — and she and Wayne climb out. *Knock you out of the sky, did he?* Wayne asks. *Something like that*, Wax mumbles, and tells himself the stress is digging into his mind. Marks is wounded and trailing banknotes. He will leave a trail. They are not done.