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A flashback: Waxillium is twelve, in a carriage with Uncle Edwarn, being handed two coins. Both show the Lord Mistborn on the front and First Central Bank — the family stake — on the back. Uncle Edwarn explains that one of them is the rarest minting defect in Elendel history, made by a bad striker, valuable enough to buy a small house, and that telling them apart takes an expert. Twelve-year-old Wax crosses his eyes the way a friend at a party taught him to overlap two drawings, locks the images on top of each other, and watches the right-hand bank pillars fuzz. Uncle Edwarn refuses to believe he saw it himself and tells him *the most important things in the world are worth only what people will pay for them* — that wealth is created by raising expectation, not by owning things of value.

At the top of the bank steps Edwarn tells him his father is hopeless with economics and his uncle has *great expectations* of him. Wax says he is going to be a hero. Edwarn tells him the day of heroes is past — that quiet men in offices will shape the new world more effectively than kings or warriors did the old one — and walks him through the lobby to a long, windowless viewing room with spy slits in the wall.

Through the first slit they watch a dirty man in a felt cap explain to a male banker that a loan would let him move his three sons out of the slums; he promises hard work. Edwarn snaps the panel shut. Through the second slit they watch a relaxed Lord Nikolin ask for the financing of another boat. Edwarn closes that panel too and tells Wax he is watching a revolution. Both will get loans. The wealthy regular customer pays three percent. The labourer — desperate, no other bank will touch him — pays twelve, on papers that allow the bank to go directly to his employer for garnishment when he fails, and then to his sons. *I will take the poor of this city*, Edwarn says, *and make of them the same thing.* Value created where none once existed. He puts the coin on the counter for Wax as a reminder.

Wax grabs the coin and bolts. He finds the consulting room where the labourer is being walked through the papers, sets the coin on the desk in front of him, and tells him to take it to a curiosities shop and refuse anything under two thousand boxings, and not to sign. Jendel cannot believe a noble boy would give him something so valuable. Wax runs out of the bank.

Present-day: Wax is turning the coin over in his fingers across the carriage from Steris on the way to Lady ZoBell's party. He finishes the story for her — Uncle Edwarn was livid, lied beautifully to recover the papers, Jendel signed and eight years later jumped from a bridge, his sons are still in debt to the bank, and House Ladrian no longer holds any of First Central Bank because Edwarn sold the stake for capital before gutting the house and staging his own death. He says the bank — and what happened in the Village — drove him out to the Roughs. He admits now that when he gave the coin to Jendel he was not really trying to help him; he was trying to anger his uncle. Steris, with one of her bare-honest moments, tells Wax that his motives are irrelevant to her — he saves lives, he saved hers, and her gratitude is not influenced by what was running through his head as he did so. On the back of the coin, in tiny letters, is scratched *Why did you leave, Wax?* He cannot work out how Bleeder got it; he sold it twenty years ago to outfit himself for the journey out.

The carriage slows. The coach portico of ZoBell Tower is choked with carriages and motors; the skyscraper climbs twenty storeys into the mists and its top is invisible. Steris consults her notebook and shows him the third line of tonight's planned agenda — 8:17, way into the building likely blocked by traffic, *Lord Waxillium carries us up to the top floor by Allomancy, which is completely inappropriate and at the same time breathtaking*. It is 8:13; she has factored in a buffer. She wore dark undergarments to keep them less visible from below, and shoes that fasten securely.

Out on the sidewalk Wax gets out the package Ranette sent — the tether she wants him to test, a length of tight rope with a hooked steel spike weighted at one end. He pulls Steris in close, draws Vindication, puts a round into the cobbles between three stones at their feet, and Pushes off it at a slant. They soar over the line of coaches and land on a stone outcropping a few storeys up the tower. Steris clings to him like a cat over an ocean, then leans out into the mists and tells him she feels like she is afloat in a sea of smoke and fog.

He works the tether floor by floor. The trouble with skyscrapers is that they taper as they rise and his Pushes drift him outward away from the building, with no reliable footholds wide enough to give him a clean Push straight up. On his first throw the hook bounces off the balcony bars and pulls free; on the second it locks and lets him reel them in. Later he tries throwing the hook into a balcony at speed mid-flight, lets the slack pull him into the building boots-first, and grins. *Too slow*, he tells Steris, who replies that it was well performed. He notes that the rope is too bulky to carry as standard, and the hook should be able to release on command — feedback for Ranette. He confesses he forgets how disorienting this can be and tells Steris to close her eyes; she refuses, *this is wonderful*. They land on the top-floor balcony in a flurry of skirts and mistcoat tassels, scaring a small group of partygoers — one dropped glass, several surprised exclamations. Steris settles her skirts and tells him this was an entrance befitting his station. The guards on the balcony watch him land in his Roughs hat and his sidearms, do their job by recognising him, and let him through.