(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Down at the foot of ZoBell Tower, in the misty floodlights left over from the panicked exodus, Wayne interviews servers. He has been through a dozen of the staff. None of them liked the runaway server, none of them are surprised he turned out rotten, and none of them think he was acting strangely tonight. Wrong man for Bleeder to imitate — a known klutz everybody was already watching. The server was a mole, not the kandra. He asks the guard pile where Drim is — and learns the governor and his bodyguard left hours ago for a secure location, leaving Wayne guarding a decoy. *Well, you're doing a rusting good job of that, mate, ain'tcha.* Wayne decks the smirking guard.

Across the city Wax passes between skyscrapers like a current in the mist, steel burning, the radial spokes of blue lines fanned around him toward every anchor he could need. He explodes through the upper window of the Harms mansion — ripping both casements off their hinges so the misty night pours in — and finds Lord Harms unharmed, eyes wide, scrambling for a modern semi-auto in his desk drawer. Harms has been carrying a pistol since *what happened last year*, and immediately offers Wax his back. Wax tips the muzzle gently down, verifies Harms is who he says he is with a question only the real Harms could miss (calling Wayne *your uncle*), and hauls him off to the top of Feder Tower — a tower picked off the map by random numbers, on the theory that the best way to outthink something centuries older than you is not to think at all. He leaves Harms there with instructions to stay quiet in the dark.

Back at the foot of the tower, Steris comes out into the mist to find Wayne sitting across the street from a pile of bruised guards, eating a sandwich. She settles down beside him and looks up at the spectral floors. *This is how it's going to be, with him, isn't it?* she asks — *always being left behind in the middle of something?* Wayne offers her the noble out: end the engagement, let Wax find someone he actually likes. She asks if he hates her for what she represents. *I don't hate you*, Wayne says. *I find you repulsive. That there is an important distinction.* He gets up, shoves the rest of the sandwich into his mouth, and walks across to sit with the men he just beat up — every implication clear: *I'd rather be here.* Steris closes her eyes against the curb and tries to be someone else for a time, until carriage bells announce Marasi arriving with constables — not a response to the ZoBell incident, Steris realises, but to something else. *The danger has only just started*, Marasi says, and ushers her into one of the carriages.

Wax guesses Innate will be in one of the decoy coaches sent toward his own mansion — Innate would not want to be seen hiding — and intercepts the right one near Hammond Promenade. He drops onto the top of the moving coach from the arch of First Insurance Bank, swings down by the door, hangs by one arm above the cobblestones, and knocks politely on the window. He hands Innate a Sterrion — *so did your brother* — and threatens to walk back out the door unless the governor lets him take over security. Drim sneers at *Faceless Immortals* until Wax points out that he himself missed Wayne slipping in disguised and missed the kandra at the party too. Innate concedes Wax *may review my security protocols*. Wax insists on a paired authentication phrase between him and the governor — *leavening on sand* and *bones without soup* — and tells Innate to share it with no one else, not even his wife, because Bleeder could be wearing the body of a niece or a nephew or a toddler, even a house pet. Wax also suggests, gently, that the governor leave Elendel; the governor refuses (*labour strikes, food prices, riots — leaving would look like cowardice*) but accepts sending Lady Innate and the children to safety. As they dismount at the mansion a servant runs out from the door — a telenote has come, a murder. *Lord Harms?* Wax asks, half-believing he has been outplayed. No. Father Bin the priest.

Inside the dome of Father Bin's Survivorist church Marasi stares up at the body nailed through both eyes high on the wall, blood soaked into white ceremonial robes into a Statemark vest, hand-smears where his arms had thrashed before the spikes ended it. The conventicalists in the foyer wait under Reddi's sharp tongue until Aradel hands the interrogation past him to Marasi. Marasi settles between the matron and the underpriest and listens: a Pathian missionary called Larskpur, a man they all knew from community functions, walked up onto their pulpit covered in blood and denounced the Survivor as a false god — then pulled down the back drape on Bin's body. Marasi follows the witnesses out, then walks Aradel through the wider pattern: the broken eastern dam, the spiked food prices, the strikes — coordinated strain on the city. She also tells him she has statistical evidence the governor has been *offering himself up for sale*. He tells her to keep that quiet for now, and praises her work. Aradel later tells her, off the practised line, the real reason Wax gets under his skin: *it must be damn nice to have other people to clean up your messes for you.* Wax arrives mid-conversation in a flutter of tassels, jumps the pews, lands on the dais and studies the spikes — bright steel lines, so not Hemalurgic, but he wants the metals analysed. Out the back exit a narrow alley shows silvery paint scraped onto the bricks where the escape coach had brushed past. *We should have seen it*, he tells Marasi. *She's trying to drive a wedge between the Pathians and the Survivorists.* They need to know what this creature can do — and he knows a kandra to ask.