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Wax and Wayne come back into Ladrian Mansion arguing about Bloody Tan. Wayne saw the corpse and shot it himself; a Bloodmaker can heal a head wound only while it is happening, not raise a man already laid out; therefore the face Wax keeps seeing on the promenade cannot be Tan. Wax saw him twice. Darriance catches Wayne's flung coat in the face and reports that Ranette has dropped off a package for Wax and an instruction for Wayne which amounts to a slap — and that Lady Harms is waiting in the sitting room.

Steris has come to confirm that Wax is still on her arm for Lady ZoBell's party. The invitation is missing — she blames Wayne — but it does not matter; Wax is the lord of a Great House. She mentions, as if it were calendar trivia, that the governor is attending despite the day's events; Wax, who has been hunting on the promenade all day, has no idea that there was an assassination attempt on Innate that afternoon, and walks straight back out to chase it. Wayne already has the evening edition off the table and his hat back on his head. Darriance is in the closet retrieving the duster he just hung up. Steris, dryly, suggests she will take the butler to the party instead.

Outside, Wax needs a moment alone in the carriage. Wayne swings up on top with Hoid — the new coachman, who shrugs and makes room — and Wax pulls the shades down. From his pocket he takes the small spike-shaped earring of the Path, the one delivered to him under mysterious circumstances years ago and which the leather book has lately made him afraid of. He puts it back in. The answer comes instantly, in his head, with the clarity of someone sitting beside him: *Unfortunately, your fears about the earring are correct. It is a Hemalurgic spike.* Wax Pushes the door open and draws Vindication before he understands what he is doing; the voice patiently itemises the eighty-four boxings of coach repairs his bullets would cost.

The conversation that follows is the heart of the chapter. Harmony names himself — *the Hero of Ages, once called Sazed* — confirms Wax is not insane, and gives him the killer. The face on the promenade belongs to a Faceless Immortal of the Third Generation whose old kandra name is Paalm and who now calls herself Bleeder: older than the destruction of the old world, almost as old as the Final Empire, and gone mad. She has torn one of her two Blessings out of herself, broken her Contract with Harmony, and — by a means he does not himself understand — learned to hide from him. With only one Blessing she should be incoherent; instead she is using stolen Hemalurgic spikes the way a kandra should not be able to, Idashwy's Steelrunner spike among them, swapping them one at a time so Harmony cannot reach in and seize her through the second.

Harmony is candid about his limits. He hears Wax through Preservation and speaks to him through Ruin; he holds both, in balance, and *cannot take sides*. He fears he has made the Basin too easy: a perfect climate, renewing ground, a people who got the radio a century late because they never needed to want it. He admits fallibility. He asks Wax to stop Bleeder because he cannot, promises help, and — almost in afterthought — asks him to be less harsh with Marasi, whom Harmony has worked quite hard to maneuver into a position where she can do good. The carriage interior warms; the voice goes; Wayne hangs upside-down at the window asking if Wax is done talking to himself and offering, in seriousness, the time he beat the voices out of his own head against a wall.

At the precinct station Marasi stands in the observation balcony above the interrogation chamber, hands not quite steady. Reddi sets the assassin's bracers on the table — no other metal on the man — and they wait for a Leecher to confirm he is not metal-loaded. Caberel proposes threatening the prisoner's daughter to crack him; Marasi quotes Article Eighty-Nine and refuses to let the room go there. Reddi needles her for siding with the solicitors and Aradel cuts him down for it — *if you paid more attention to the very laws you are sworn to uphold, perhaps Daughnin wouldn't have gotten back on the street last month*. Aradel asks Marasi to take the interrogation herself.

Wax walks in wearing his Roughs hat and Wayne in someone else's constable hat. Wax Pushes one of the bracers; it falls off the table too easily. *Those aren't metalminds. This man is a decoy.* He waves Marasi along to the cell — politely, even acknowledging that she brought the man in well — and on the stairwell tells her what he has just been told: their killer is a Faceless Immortal who calls herself Bleeder, can wear any face, and is hiding even from Harmony. He is sure this is not her, because the governor is still alive.

In the chamber Rian looks up. *She said you'd come talk to me.* Not Harmony — Rian is clear about that. Rian says she promised him freedom and gave him chains, and that there is something for Wax in his arm. Wax cuts it out: a coin. He wipes it, turns it, and goes very still. He shoves it into his pocket without showing Marasi what is on it and says they need to be at Lady ZoBell's party tonight, because Bleeder will be.