(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Wax moves through the mist between Allomantic jumps on a Roughs proverb — *if you want to know a man, dig in his firepit* — what someone discards or burns to stay warm tells you who they are. A church clock strikes eleven; the city is still up, half its labourers without a morning to rise for. He passes Soothing parlours open into the night where Allomancers numb customers' emotions, and the queue outside a Rioting parlour where the chosen feeling can be stoked instead.

He follows shouting to a small Pathian sanctuary — one of the eight-doored Terris-style huts the religion uses to let the mist in — under stone-throwing siege by a knot of drunk men in the dark. He stalks out of the mist with Vindication drawn and the mistcoat flaring, and his profile alone scatters them. Inside he finds the missionary cowering, a Terriswoman in intricate braids beside a broken lantern. He tells her to gather any colleagues she can and retreat to the Village: a Survivorist priest has been murdered by a man wearing Pathian robes. He drops into a back alley after a runner he sees hiding, scares him into wetting himself, and pulls free the detail he came down for. *They came into the pub, two of them in those Pathian robes.* Two. Not one. Either Bleeder had a partner or there are two of her — and the ZoBell ambush was too neatly timed with the chase to be coincidence either. She has help. Almost certainly his uncle Edwarn and the Set.

He moves on to Ashweather Carriage and Coach — a yard at the north edge of the octant lit by tall stanchions, lined with standard road-coaches the city calls Barringtons, every one of them marked along the side with a silver-painted Cett-house shield. The silver paint from the alley behind the church. He works the row of vehicles, finds none scraped, and a pudgy Cett proprietor in tailed formals comes out to size him up. The man's posture flips when he sees the duster's tassels. Wax shows his credentials and asks for the night's prearranged pickups. The proprietor hands them over too eagerly.

Three drivers had pickups near the time of the murder; two are repeat customers; the third is a one-time *at-liberty* pickup booked from the Fourth Octant under the Terris alias *Shanwan* — *secret* — and assigned to coach sixteen, Chapaou's. A young Coinshot in suspenders bursts in with traffic news from a late-night play; Wax reads her and her bag of scrap and tells the proprietor exactly what he is doing — running Coinshot runners as scouts and using a staff Rioter to stoke urgency in passersby, a violation of the Allomantic Agreement of '94. He has no time for that crime tonight; he leaves it for the constable-general and walks out with a description of Chapaou and the names of his pets, to authenticate the driver when he runs him down.

Across the city Marasi walks MeLaan into the precinct house, past a counter laid with rifles, helmets, and ammunition that any newcomer stops at: *Aradel's* visual reminder of how dangerous things are getting. She takes a strong, terrible cup of cooked-down tea (refusing to ask for honey while the men chug theirs in solidarity), and threads through the back to the records office. MeLaan draws stares; she also notes Marasi is *an oddity* — women in uniform — and shrugs that humans are generally sexist, *a natural result of your sexual dimorphism, VenDell says.* They argue Survivorist theology briefly at the door; MeLaan is over six hundred years old and has never gotten around to reading the Words of Founding.

Constable Miklin receives them coldly — he is one of Reddi's friends — but hands Marasi the file on the dam breakage when she asks for it. As they leave he asks her, quietly, why she is here at all when she had a permanent prosecutor's offer with a letter of commendation. Marasi sits at her desk by Aradel's door and explains, when MeLaan presses on the office's manners toward her: the precinct has a hierarchy. Sergeants come up from years on the beat, captains start at lieutenant out of noble stock; everyone is meant to put in time at the bottom. She skipped all of it. Her association with Wax makes the slight worse — he is a high-ranking nobleman and unstoppable, and she is the available target — illegitimate, low-born, the way the world is *changing*, and change is frightening. MeLaan points out that those most resistant to change are usually the ones being trodden on. *Historically true*, Marasi agrees.

The dam file is meticulous despite Miklin's resentment — constable reports, an engineer's analysis, broadsheet clippings, and the trial transcript. The convicted farmer, Johnst, had over-packed sabotage dynamite to ruin a neighbour's harvest as *an accident*; instead he blew the whole dam open, killed dozens, and destroyed the season's crops across the basin. Witnesses called him erratic, obviously mad. At trial he could not name his own children. He was hanged. He was buried. His grave was dug open two nights later, *suspected to be the work of those who lost family.* MeLaan reads the second detail first. *Yes and no — the old guard are really good at interrogating people and doing research before taking a new form. We don't have to do that anymore.* But the grave-rise: *Paalm is nothing if not dedicated to her craft.* She let them hang her body and then crawled out of the dirt. Marasi takes the file. Time for Aradel to hear it.