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Wax looks down at the new corpse beside Marasi — face most of the way blown off — and reflects that it would have been hard to identify even before she shot him. Suit's people generally are. He gives her his handkerchief. She is staring straight ahead with blood and bone across her face, asking flatly whether what she just did was *unexpected of me*. He tells her she did well, and that she is going to have trouble hearing for a while; the pistol against her own ear has probably done some lasting damage. She blinks down at the handkerchief and starts to wipe her face. Wayne staggers out of the alley with a fresh hole in his shoulder and a crossbow bolt in his hand, complaining cheerfully that they have lost their interrogation subject; Wax tells him living was more important. Marasi half-hears him.

Captain Reddi arrives at the head of the responding constables, salutes Wax crisply, and quietly asks if Aradel is here too. *The constable-general is engaged in another investigation, my lord.* Wax tells him to secure the area and try to identify the dead man. Reddi congratulates him on the Marksman kill in a flat tone. Today's *excellent work*, Wax thinks, is one more dead end on the trail to his uncle. Words from the book Ironeyes gave him drift through his head: *it can make anyone into an Allomancer*; *if we don't use it, someone else will*. Reddi mentions there is another scene — *politics*, *the governor's brother*, *you should see for yourself* — and pulls Wax toward a constabulary carriage.

Marasi sees Wax grab Wayne and turn toward the carriage without her, and the snub stings. She heads for the motorcar, where Reddi intercepts her with the line that she is out of uniform on her day off and ought to go home. She stares him down — Aradel is her boss, not him, and the constable-general will dismiss her himself if that is his wish — and gets the grudging concession that she may follow. She drives the motorcar after the carriage, head still ringing, beginning to recover.

The site is a fashionable mansion above the Hub in the Fourth Octant. Aradel has deliberately kept the scene small: only one constabulary carriage in the drive. Wax sees Marasi arrive and waves her over. *Do you know what this is about?* He doesn't either. The two constables at the door salute Reddi and ignore her; he leads them in, warning that with Lord Winsting involved this will be a nightmare to keep contained. The governor's brother is dead. Wayne palms a decorative Citizen Magistrates cigar box from a side table on the way up, replacing it with a bruised apple. Marasi resolves to make him put it back.

Upstairs, the ballroom is a litter of bodies in ball gowns and tight black suits, hats fallen, the tan carpet stained in wide red patches. Claude Aradel himself — rectangular face under a few days' red stubble, leathery and field-worn, very nearly sixty — picks his way through it. He came out of a decade's retirement to take the constable-general's seat after Brettin retired, in the year following Miles' execution; he is also the man who plucked Marasi out of a stack of more conventional applications and gave her this job. He nods her in. Wayne complains that the fun is already over.

Wax crouches beside the nearest body — Chip Erikell, said to run smuggling in the Third Octant — and Marasi catches Isabaline Frellia among the dead, with a constabulary file as tall as Wayne. Aradel tallies it: seven of comparable notoriety, near thirty notable corpses with their guards, half the city's criminal elite plus crime-friendly nobles, all in one room. Wayne proposes the appropriate response is a party; Marasi points out the danger of a sudden vacuum at the top of the underworld, and Aradel nods. Wax argues no inside party would benefit from this — only an outsider — and Marasi picks the thought up: someone who profits if the system itself comes apart.

Wax walks the room, pacing, reading the spatter. *This was a melee*, he concludes — not an external strike, but a firefight started from the middle, with random parties shooting at one another. Aradel notes a handful were killed not by bullets but by knives in the back. Wax asks to see Winsting himself.

A young constable leads them down a narrow musty stairwell, single file. Marasi asks Aradel for a statistical handle on this kind of violence; she can count incidents like this on one hand. Aradel notes the dead came from no single criminal trade. Wax floats the theory that Winsting convened them, intending an execution that backfired. Wayne dismisses it on the grounds that politician slime is a different sort of slime; Aradel agrees and adds that Winsting had been suspected of going to auction his Senate vote — killing the bidders would be self-defeating.

Four guards lie at the foot of the stairs, all shot from behind from the direction of the saferoom, in rapid succession. Wax reads it. Wayne reads it. *Steelrunner*, Wayne says — a Feruchemist storing speed, then drawing it out, fast enough to kill four men before any of them can turn. Marasi sees the look in Wax's eyes when a Metalborn crime crosses his path: he is wondering about his uncle again. Edwarn still has Telsin in his keeping, best as anyone knows; Wax will not talk about the details.

Inside the saferoom Winsting sits in his easy chair with his throat slit, the dried blood thick down his front like paint. His tongue has been cut out, and the constables are awaiting a surgeon's opinion on the cut. Wax reads it: the killer was let in by Winsting himself through the locked, peephole-bearing door, while the guards were still watching the stairs — someone they trusted, perhaps one of their number, who killed Winsting first quietly and the guards afterward at speed. *Either way, it was a Steelrunner.* The tongue, Wax muses, is a message. *What are you up to, Uncle?*

Wax tells Aradel he will pursue the Metalborn end himself — Steelrunners are uncommon — and asks for a report when the scene is fully cataloged. The press, Aradel grants, will get out of hand; there is no holding this. *Let them*, Wax says, *I think that is the point.* He pauses at the door on his way back to sit for a wedding portrait. *Prepare for a storm. This wasn't done quietly; it was done to be noticed. It was a challenge. Whoever did this is not going to stop here.*