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Wax climbs the steps of one of Elendel's new Soothing parlours in a quiet residential lane — black coach with a silver-scraped crest already in the drive — and walks straight into the parlour's Soother field at the front door. He curses himself for leaving the aluminum-lined hat at home, against the chance that Bleeder has a spike that can Push emotions in here. The Soothing peels his anger and worry off in layers — leaving the surprise discovery, under everything, of a real fury at God — and then strips even that away into nothing. He hates the sensation. Inside, the city has invented a new kind of business: pay to have a Soother briefly erase how you feel. The matronly proprietress, Mistress Halex, in her own aluminum hat, is unimpressed by Wax's credentials and unsurprised to see a constable in her hallway.

She leads him past a procession of themed rooms — a red-lamped lounge with patrons stretched out under a stained-glass ceiling, a stark white chamber, a black one, a Terris-meeting-hut imitation with a single Soother on a chair extending his bubble — and up the stairs to a private massage room. There Chapaou paces beside a latched window, weeping; the aged staff Soother sitting against the wall has given up. *This man needs a physician*, the Soother tells Mistress Halex. Wax kneels by the driver, asks the name of his dog, gets back *I don't have a dog, he died a few years back* — close enough confirmation that this is the real Chapaou and not Bleeder swapped into a body she had not bothered to interview the original about — and walks him out to his coach.

Across the city, Marasi finds Aradel on the precinct rooftop in his shirtsleeves with one boot up on the parapet, taking reports from his contracted Coinshot scouts: thousands of Elendel residents still on the streets, congregating in pubs, not going home. He sends the lieutenants to ready their constables to clear the pubs the moment he has executive authority for martial law. Marasi hands him the dam-breakage file naming the killer: a convicted dam-saboteur who clawed her way out of her own grave after being executed, because what was buried was not really her. *This is all her doing?* Marasi gives him the more honest answer — it is the city's working conditions, Bleeder is just shoving them along — and presents MeLaan as proof of the rest of it.

MeLaan obliges with a full divine-Faceless-Immortal performance: skin going transparent on the lamplit rooftop, emerald skeleton glittering through, *thee* and *thy* and a maternal cock of an invisible head. *Paalm is a lost soul, tortured by a broken mind and a twisted spirit. We shall aid thee in thy desperation.* Aradel, shaken, asks her to put in a good word for him with Harmony; she tells him his deeds are his own good words, then adds without missing a beat that his snoring is *like unto an hundred angry koloss in the middle of a rockslide*. Halfway down the stairs after, Aradel reads the snoring line as a metaphor for the constables ordering people around like lords. *I'll need to make some changes.*

Then, in the same descent, he gives Marasi her real assignment. He wants weekly written reports on Wax's activities — informal departmental oversight of a deputised house lord who, he points out, never volunteers more than the address where he has left a suspect hanging by his ankles. Marasi names the request what it is — *you're asking me to spy on him* — and accepts on condition that she tell Wax she is doing it. He sends her on to get the governor's writ of martial law for the octant. In the alleyway outside, MeLaan drops the divine register and laughs the whole performance off as theatre she has had six hundred years to polish. For a heartbeat — eyes faintly translucent, a question about showing each person what they need to see — Marasi is not sure which side of her was the act. Then MeLaan grins and says she just hates keeping a straight face through all those *thee*s and *thy*s.

Back outside the parlour, Wax kneels in the back of Chapaou's coach in the lantern-lit mist and unwraps the bundle the driver has brought him: the picked-clean bones and bloodied Pathian robes Bleeder discarded after killing Father Bin. Chapaou gives him the rest in pieces. He had peeked through the coachman's slot at his silent fare and seen a mistwraith — exposed muscle and bone, a face of stretched sinew and grinning teeth — that climbed up toward him and, while he watched, grew a twisted copy of his own face over the skull. He drove on rather than running. He dropped the creature at Lestib Square (named for the Lord Mistborn, and uncomfortably close to the governor's mansion) and was paid in coin and a whispered promise into his ear: *I will make you free*. Wax tells him it was a charlatan, not a demon, and that he was not the one who killed Father Bin.

Wax is about to send for a crime-scene team when he notices something glowing faintly on the hem of one of the robes. He shields the lantern and looks again — a powder, dimly luminescent, easy to miss. He rubs it between his fingers, scrapes a sample into a dried vial, and asks Chapaou if he saw anything glow in the coach (no). He pushes the driver toward his seat with a handful of banknotes and an order to go home or to a hotel and sleep. *She isn't going to come for you.* He keeps the rest of the thought for himself — she has bigger game.