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Wax Pushes himself out of the Village and over the city, threading between water towers and rooftop ironmongery. Below him, Elendel does what cities do: tens of thousands of lives proceed about their business, and a frightening number of them are technically his — workers on lands he owns, voters represented through his Senate seat, neighbourhoods that depend on whether House Ladrian stays solvent. He misses the Roughs, where you could know everyone you served and feel that knowing them mattered. He drops onto the Tindwyl Promenade to find a knot of foundry picketers pressing a handful of local constables against a wall — the strike turning into something less containable. His arrival is enough to scatter them; he tells the constables to bring more men next time and privately admits the picketers have a real grievance, one he has been quietly trying to answer in his own factories by hiring more shifts at higher wages, and one he doesn't have a complete answer for.

He finds Wayne further down the canal, shoes off, feet in the water, just back from the university and unwilling to be himself for a little while. Wayne asks if Wax ever wishes he had simply shot him the day Wax and Jon Deadfinger found him at sixteen, curled in a crawl space with his guns thrown down a well and his hands clamped over his ears against the shots only he could still hear. Wax tells him no, but if he had been a different boy that day, he would have. *You're the only person I know I can cheer up by promising to kill him*, Wax notes. They go back to work. Wayne has, in fact, found Idashwy: she has been doing the books for a Bournton jeweler, then stopped showing up a week ago and stopped answering her door.

Marasi parks her motorcar at the Hub and walks the rest of the way to the governor's address. The street market on her route is already misbehaving — apples at five notes a basket, speculators clearing the carts, a vendor explaining bluntly that grain shipments out of the flooded east are not arriving and panic prices will hold until the city's storages release. The square in front of the executive mansion is choked. The old captain commanding the Hub-side detail recognises her as Lord Harms's bastard daughter and steers her, half kindly and half indignantly, into a press-pen at the side of the steps — bad view, fine acoustics — and asks her to give his regards to her father.

Working a crowd of beggars on the promenade for word of the Steelrunner who left the Village, Wax looks up at the wrong moment and sees a face he is sure cannot be there: Bloody Tan, the Feltrel mortician he killed, in a crowd of out-of-work men. He shoves into the street after it, Pushes himself ten feet up off a bullet casing to scan, and finds nothing. Wayne catches up with him and writes off the look. *Must have imagined it.* They go up the road to the Bournton District — a quiet, expensive neighbourhood with iron decorations on the upper windows that already feels wrong as a place for a Terriswoman bookkeeper to live — and find Idashwy's door at the top of a rear stair. Wax draws Vindication and knocks. Nothing answers. Wayne admires the wood and kicks the door in. The main room is too clean to have been lived in for long. The kitchen is not. Idashwy is on the floor with a clean spike-shaped hole through her sternum and her eyes turned up at the ceiling.

Back at the speech, Innate mounts his platform behind Sophi Tarcsel — the young inventor's daughter who has been writing opinion pieces about her father in the broadsheets — and her father's cone-shaped devices throw his voice across the square. He talks about his brother. He defends Winsting's character. He promises a full investigation of the constabulary for what may have been a *bungled raid*, and announces aid will go east to the flooded townships. None of it lands on a crowd full of out-of-work men. As Marasi shuffles aside to get a better view, one of the line of guardsmen between her and the platform keeps moving to stay in front of her — back turned to her. When he at last turns to face out, his mouth is moving in silence and his expression is the grimace of a man fighting something inside himself. He pulls a revolver. Marasi is the first person in the square to scream. There is no time to draw, so she jumps and throws a speed bubble over the guardsman, a few bystanders, and herself; his bullet hits the boundary and deflects out over the blurred crowd while one of his own fellow guards, caught inside the bubble, shouts in alarm. Her lunge is enough to slow him; another guard, free of the bubble when she drops it, knocks him down and the rest pile on.

In Idashwy's apartment Wayne walks the rooms while Wax kneels over the body. He finds a cabinet of half-drunk spirits with one empty bottle of port, a trunk holding three folded outfits — Terris robes on the bottom, the most modern dress on top — and reads it out for Wax as the story of a sheltered Terriswoman who finally left her Village and let herself discover both the city's drinks and its dresses. Wax hands him the small leather book *Death* gave him — the one Ironeyes said to keep — and the manner of Idashwy's death makes the book's pages stop being theory. A spike through the chest can tear away a Feruchemical talent the way Inquisitors once tore away Allomantic ones — driven from victim into recipient in the old days, or coated in the victim's blood and used freshly in the new. Their killer used Idashwy's spike to kill Winsting Innate's guests. The killer could already have any combination of Allomantic and Feruchemical powers from a string of bodies they will never find.

Wax sends Wayne to ask after the dead woman's pockets — chiding himself for not doing it first — and Wayne produces a folded page torn from her ledger. It is for Wax. Across the sums, in a different hand, is the single line Bloody Tan said in Feltrel before he jerked Lessie into the path of Wax's bullet — the line Wax has carried under everything for two years. *Someone else moves us, lawman.*