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Wayne wanders down to Wax's study, sniffling and storing health against the day, palming a candelabra off a hallway stand and replacing it with a broken pocket watch, then trading a stolen doily for a bottle of Wax's rum on the way in. He finds Wax still at the easel he was at the night before, working over a sketch of Winsting's ballroom with arrows and notes. The shape of the killings has Wax convinced a Steelrunner was at work: the same gun killed four of the loudest nobles in the room and then the saferoom guards below, and the four upstairs all dropped from different angles, as though the killer had blurred between four firing positions in an eyeblink. Wayne supplies the answer no one but a former mugger would think of: the Steelrunner was not aiming at the dead, he was aiming at the men standing next to him, picking out the people whose nerves would do the rest. Wax writes it down. A killer who used the room's tension to make the room kill itself.

Wax proposes sending Wayne to the Village to ask after Steelrunners — and Wayne refuses. It is the first of the month. Wax does not press him; whatever the appointment is, it is the one piece of Wayne's week he is serious about. With a grimace Wax agrees to make the visit himself instead, and Wayne saunters out, drinking the rum and offering chivalrous advice on the wisdom of pinching some on the way to anything awful.

Marasi buys the afternoon edition of the Elendel Daily on the steps of the Fourth Octant precinct. The newsman complains about Tim Vashin's motorcars choking the streets. The headline is *Cry of Outrage in the Streets!* — the paper has flipped between editions, from a Winsting-as-victim morning to a Winsting-as-corruption afternoon. The sidewalks tell the same story: too many out-of-work teamsters loitering on corners with their hands in their pockets, and the governor's empty promises about coach lines and Bilming tariffs not landing on men whose grandfathers worked the jobs they have just lost. *A fire is kindling in the city*, Marasi thinks. Winsting may yet do more damage dead than he did alive.

Wax dismisses his coachman a street short of the Village and walks the rest of the way in mistcoat, Vindication and his Sterrion on his hips. The Village is a thoroughfare in Elendel given over to the trees, an uncultivated forest grown into the buildings that used to line the street; children in white smocks play among the trunks and older youths watch from the steps in the V-patterned robes of Terris novices. Whispers chase him and a runner is sent ahead. Three Brutes of the Synod meet him in a stand of trees and try to send him away; before the lead Terrisman can finish, an old voice from the shadow under another tree stops him. The Brutes turn and bow to Elder Vwafendal — and Vwafendal, stately, white-haired, and darker-skinned than any of them, tells the Brutes that the lawman before them has more Terris blood than they do. He is her grandson.

Meanwhile, Wayne bums a canal ride to Elendel University and stands looking up at the gate with its High Imperial inscription about the soul's hunger for knowledge. Two of the watchful black-coated guards are waiting for him at the front; the broken wall and the climbing tree he has used before have both been patched. Wayne finds Dims on a nearby corner — sleeves torn, polite as muggers go, eating something called *gum* — and pays him fifty notes to put on his hat, coat, and dueling canes and bolt across the gates while the guards chase. Wayne walks through behind a pair of spectacles and a borrowed load of books and makes for Pashadon Hall, the women's dormitory.

Inside is the second of his three monthly trials: Madam Penfor, who throws herself to her feet to deny him as she does every month, and this month is talked round only by the bribe of a nameless Ladrian invitation to Lady ZoBell's evening — invitations Wayne cheerfully reasons Wax would just as soon not use. Disarmed, stripped of his hat, Wayne is at last admitted to the visiting room to meet Allriandre, the daughter of the man he killed in an alley years ago. She refuses to enter the room. She accuses him of being drunk. He burns the alcohol out of himself with stored health and stands sober in front of her while she opens the locket of her father and tells him to say aloud, again, what he did. He says it. She tells him, again, that he will never be forgiven, and then she takes the money for her studies and tells him to leave.

Wax sits in his grandmother's log hut in the Village — paintings of Old Terris on the walls, a too-large firepit at the centre, Vwafendal crinkling herbs into a tea strainer with gnarled hands. She makes the old objection: that mixing Allomancy and Feruchemy in one person is dangerous, that another tyrant of the kind they have already endured cannot be allowed to happen, that he stinks of death and is not the boy his father named. He cannot — will not — be the soft-voiced Terris elder she wanted him to grow into. He came, he tells her plainly, looking for a Steelrunner with a hand in the Fourth Octant killings. She gives him the name: Idashwy. A woman who vanished from the Village about a month ago, claiming her dead brother spoke to her. A woman Wax is shaken to realise he knew, glancingly, in his Village year — without ever having known she was Metalborn. *Bring her back, Asinthew*, his grandmother asks. *She is not a killer. She is confused.* He drops a coin and Pushes himself out between the trees and into the sky.

Back at the Fourth Octant precinct Marasi still gets a small private thrill out of walking through the door each morning into the life she was never supposed to have. Her own desk sits next to Aradel's office; the man himself prowls the floor like a lion. She finds him bothering Lieutenant Caberel about night patrols around the foundry pubs and hands him the afternoon broadsheets. He reads them not as a win but as a loss: the press has spared the constabulary and aimed the public's anger at the governor instead, which is worse — better the conners absorb that lightning than Innate. When Marasi hints, carefully, that the governor may deserve it, Aradel reminds her that their job is to keep the peace, and she retorts that they work for the people of the city, not their leaders. He grants her the point with a grimace and a swallow of tea that should have burned anyone else's tongue off, then sends her with a street detail to the governor's afternoon speech. On the way to his office he mentions, as if in passing, that Reddi resents her because Reddi had bid for her job and Aradel picked her over him: Aradel does not want his best field men gathering moss at a desk, he wants the assistant's seat for someone fresh, and her application — the part about wanting to change the city — convinced him.