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Wayne tells his hat — solemnly — that he is sorry, but it has to stay behind in the motorcar before he enters the Breakouts. Wax tells him to stop talking to his hat. The Breakouts is a different world inside: tall ash-walled tenements casting long shadows in the afternoon, clotheslines strung across the sky like hanged men, the smell of food half cooked and bodies half washed. Marasi notes that the Lord Mistborn tried hard to keep slums from forming in Elendel at all. Wax absently rolls a coin across his knuckles. He has lost his guns somewhere.

Wayne drifts off to find a hat. He picks an old man hacking up his lungs on a stoop, trades a flask of whiskey for the man's cotton cap, parrots the man's mumbling, clipped accent back to him to get the vowels right, and asks him to say *another word starting with H*. *Huh?* Perfect. Wayne ditches his duster and dueling canes in an alley, keeping his wooden knucklebones, and walks into the slum dressed and accented like he belongs there.

He joins a group of bored men under a dirty awning eating bruised fruit and asks who the outers are. Conners for sure, says a man with a bowl-shaped bald head — they only come here to arrest someone, never care otherwise, never do anything about the factories upwind dropping ash on people who, Harmony said, are supposed to be done with ash. Wayne notes how much worse this place is than normal and mentally files it for later. He hints at a reward; *bowl-head* recognises him as *Edip's son*, tells him not to be a rat, and forces an apple on him. Wayne sits and eats it and waits.

When the group breaks up, *bowl-head* heads out alone — to warn Marks, obviously — and Wayne tails him to a hideout, almost catches him too wide in a bendalloy speed bubble, fishes a blanket out of the trash from inside it, and settles down a few doors away with the cap pulled low. *Bowl-head* checks, recrosses, and slips into a building across the street. Wayne crosses after him and listens at a rotten shutter. Inside, the man is shaking Marks down: a thousand notes is a thousand notes, and a little encouragement will keep the lads loyal. Wayne approves. *Ratting out a friend: off-limits. Extorting a friend: just good business.* He slips on his wooden knucklebones and charges the shutters.

He hits the floor inside a fresh speed bubble. Inside it, Marks — unmasked, big-lipped, bushy-eyebrowed, bandaging his shoulder — is just close enough to be caught. Wayne lays him out with one punch, takes the knuckles back off, helps himself to an apple, waves cheerfully to a frozen and uncomprehending bowl-head, and tosses the unconscious Marks out the window before climbing through after him.

* * *

Up the street, Marasi is trying to do her own work. She is now a fully credentialled constable under Captain Aradel, and reminds herself that Wax does not get a vote on her assignments. She takes the next group of witnesses — three young boys lounging on the steps, smoking incense, the eldest perhaps nine — and tries the standard prosecutor's tools: keep them talking, treat them like belligerent witnesses, bait them into a story she can pick apart on the lie. The boys ogle her, joke about her *peeking*, and play along just long enough to register her offered coins. Then Wax gets out his own coins, Pushes one out of sight, and the boys scatter without saying a word. *That was very helpful*, Marasi says, folding her arms. Wax retorts that they would have lied to her, and that they were drawing the wrong sort of attention.

She walks away angry. She is not, she tells herself, infatuated. He has been clear, he is engaged to her sister, and they could at least be professional colleagues. She finds Wayne lounging on nearby steps eating an apple — *care for one? not too bruised* — with a bleeding Marks slumped at his feet. Wax joins them, checks the wound, exchanges with Wayne the small inscrutable look the two of them always share. *Wayne has his methods*, Wax tells her. *In a place like this they're better than mine.* She rounds on him: he had known they would not get anywhere asking questions, Wayne needed cover, and she had been the cover. *I suspected*, Wax allows. They start out of the slum with Marks over Wax's shoulder.

Wax and Wayne stiffen at the same moment. Wayne shoulders Marasi sideways against a building as crossbow bolts crack down out of the air. By the time she looks back, a wooden shaft is sticking out of Marks's body and Wax is already in the air on a coin, going up after the sniper. Wayne *stay here*s her and bolts down an alley. Marasi notes, with some bitterness, that someone clearly did not want Marks taken alive. She crouches beside the body to confirm he is dead — the bolt has gone right through the skull, which seems improbable for a crossbow — and to sketch the position of the corpse. As she does, she realises: *if I were the sniper, I would double back to make sure of the kill*.

Behind her, a click. She turns slowly. A ragged man with dark eyes is stepping out of an alley with a crossbow in his hands. He fires the bolt off over his shoulder — eliciting a Wayne-shaped yelp from the alleyway — and is on her before she can move, glass dagger to her throat. Wax drops to the cobbles in front of them, mistcoat unfurling, coin in hand. They face each other across the standoff.

*Most men take a hostage out of desperation*, Marasi remembers from her training. *You can talk them down.* She does not talk him down. Cursing herself for not having had any cadmium in her stomach — for being embarrassed of her Pulser gift when she should not be — she does the other thing she has been trained to do: drives her hand into her handbag, finds the small pistol she keeps there, pulls it against the underside of the man's chin, and pulls the trigger. The top of his head opens. She does not, for a moment afterward, hear anything at all.