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Wayne turns back to the sausage tray and is slapped by a teenage girl with long straight blonde hair. She is Sophi Tarcsel — the broadsheet columnist Marasi knows from a small column defending her dead father's reputation — and she has come to the party hunting Professor Hanlanaze. She tells him to his face that every guest at the party is using lights her father Remmingtel Tarcsel toiled to invent, and that nobody in this room has heard his name. *You stole his designs, and with them his life.* She pokes a finger into Wayne's gut almost where his canes are hidden and promises she will out-market the men who out-stole her father. *When you're crying, destitute and discredited, you remember my father's name.* Then she goes.

Wayne rubs his cheek. The fun is gone. Marasi notes with some amusement that this is the price of borrowing somebody else's likeness — Hanlanaze has *some dirt in his past* — but Wayne is no longer hungry. He goes to find Wax.

Across the floor Wax cuts the governor and Steris off mid-sentence and walks into the middle of the room. With steel burning, the Allomantic lines of every metal object in the penthouse hang around him in pale blue — chair fittings, jewelry, the framework of furniture, the *flesh of civilization*. He listens.

Bleeder speaks again into his head — feminine, rasping. *So, you realize what I am.* He answers her aloud, calls her a koloss just to see if she corrects him; she does, and he confirms what he suspects — that whatever she has done to herself, she can push thoughts into his earring but cannot hear him back. He remembers Harmony's line that the hearing came from Preservation and the inserting from Ruin, and decides she has only the inserting half. He walks the floor counter-clockwise, hands at his sides with a coin in each fist, watching the lines, watching who walks with him.

She talks the whole way. She killed Winsting because he had to die and nobody else would. She calls Harmony a poor excuse for a god who *moves us like pieces on a board*. She calls the partygoers sewage — *which is not evil, but it is not desirable either*. The voice takes on personality as she goes: soft, haunting, morose. Wax notes it sounds like Bloody Tan had sounded, and remembers what he said. *Someone else moves us.* She asks if Wax is wolf or rabbit and answers her own question for herself — *I am the surgeon.*

Two people circle with him. The tall woman in the red gown — Milan, the one who tried to flirt with him at the bars — walks parallel through one knot of guests after another, never quite catching his eye. And a short server with a tray, going the wrong way around the room, never far from him. Wax mutters his question (*what do you follow?*); Bleeder doesn't answer it — confirming she cannot hear him.

Then she says, very clearly, that the governor is corrupt — covered for his brother for years and would have done better covering for himself — and that of course she cannot kill him yet, because she has not even murdered Wax's father yet. Wax's father is already dead. He spins, hand on his gun, and meets the eyes of the server. The man freezes. Then he runs.

Wax gives chase, draws Vindication, drops Wayne into the gap from between two plump women with cups of wine. Wayne tackles the runner. The governor's guards pile on top. Wax arrives — and finds Wayne swearing inside a heap of guards, a guard bleeding from the gut on the floor, and Bleeder in a different waiter's uniform pushing toward the wall on the other side.

She breaks a window. Wax takes a shot that punches the glass over her head; she throws a chair through it and leaps twenty-plus stories into the mists. Wax is at the window in an instant, telling Wayne to hold tightly — then thinking again. He tells Wayne to stay and watch Innate in case this is the second half of the same distraction that opened the day. Then he throws himself out into the mist after her.