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Wax perches in his mistcoat on an electric pylon overlooking the floodlit governor's mansion in the mists. The mansion itself looks calm, but the streets outside it are anything but: he has walked through them already and heard the anger curdling into something with no focus, drink-thickened, a hidden killer somewhere in the grass. He has stopped briefly at his own house for his aluminum-lined hat, short-barrelled shotgun, and thigh holster; left Harms hidden on the rooftop because hauling him here would only hand Bleeder a hostage; and trusts the constables to keep Steris tucked away. He cannot be in two places. He sits with that.

Then Bleeder's voice slides into his head — body's immune system imagery, surgeons-don't-see-the-fingers-of-mist, a thousand soldiers turning on the body itself when *the body turns upon itself*. He drops off the pylon and walks, trying to triangulate by how far her voice can reach. She admits she plans to kill the governor — *I will need to kill him, you know* — but not for sport. *I'll free them. Every one of them.* She rejects *lawman* as his real answer to who he is, and dares him to ask her to show him what he is. He paces toward the dark office building across the street from the mansion; she lets him spot the open window with her behind it. They talk through it. She names him a good investigator who is, by definition, a dog chasing its own tail.

Then she puts the knife in: *Have you asked Harmony why he didn't save Lessie?* A whisper at the right moment, a warning at the back of his mind, anything — and she would still be alive. Did Harmony know what Lessie meant to him? Did Harmony know that as long as she was alive Wax would never come back to the city where he was needed? *Did he, perhaps, want her to die?* Wax fires beside her in the window, on purpose, just to hear the crack of breaking air in the mist. *I'm sorry. Cleaning the wound is often more painful than the cut itself.* She blurs out of the window with Feruchemical speed and runs straight at the mansion.

Wax launches after, scattering ravens off the lawn, and finds her on the front steps in a body-length scarlet coat, the Marksman's black-and-white mask cracked up one side, the door guards already dead at her feet. She vanishes inside. He tears the front door off its hinges in his Push and follows. In the sitting room he spins Vindication's cylinder to a hazekiller round, Pushes it for extra speed, and shatters her ankle as she lands. She drops; he puts a second shot through the eyehole of her mask and goes for one of the kandra-detection syringes — and then a hidden wall bursts open and the governor's special security detail spills up out of the saferoom stairwell in panic. Bleeder blurs into them; they kill more of their own than they put on her. She is at the saferoom door before Wax can clear the chair he is behind, and she unlocks it with a key she should not have.

She turns to him to gloat at her own speed, and finds Wayne — face down among the dead guards in a uniform he stole from the body of one of them — popping a speed bubble around Wax and her both. Wax takes the gift. He empties both Sterrions and the short-barrelled shotgun at her at point-blank, deflection at the bubble rim be damned, then Pushes a syringe at her unprotected back. The bullets hit; Bleeder takes a shotgun slug through the back of the head that breaks the mask off her face; she sags against the doorframe — and then she is upright, healing in front of him, and through the door before the syringe (also deflected at the bubble's edge) can reach her. She flips it off the wood and is gone.

Wax ducks out of Wayne's bubble — the lurch and nausea he is used to — and follows. The saferoom itself is empty save for Innate kneeling over Drim, who has taken the assassin's bullet through the neck in the governor's place; the governor is using his own shirt to try to stanch a wound that is already past stanching. *He saved me*, Innate weeps. *He leaped into the way right as the assassin shot.* Wax runs through the passphrase — *Leavening on sand* / *Bones without soup* — and confirms this really is the governor and not Bleeder wearing his face. He explains why she ran: Bleeder obtained her Feruchemical powers only two weeks ago, her metalmind is small, sustained Steelrunner speed drains it fast — but he also knows there is a second reason and cannot name it. She did not finish the job she said she came to do. *Why? What was the plan?*

He tells Innate to leave the city. The governor refuses. He is the leader of this city; he will be seen, he will speak to the mob, he will gather his cabinet through what is left of the night and make sure there is still a city in the morning. He no longer has a bodyguard — and dumps the Bleeder problem squarely in Wax's hands. *I don't have a bodyguard any longer. I'm in your hands.* He goes. Wax, on a hunch that costs him nothing, plunges the loose syringe into the dead Drim anyway; nothing happens; he had not really expected it to, but it makes him feel better.

Up the saferoom's escape tunnel, halfway to where it surfaces on the grounds, he finds her red cloak in a bloody heap. And on the wood above it, scratched in with a fingernail and dabbed with dried blood at the eyes and mouth, a crude stick-figure of a man. Three lines below it, in blood: *I rip out his tongue to stop the lies. I stab out his eyes to hide from his gaze. You will be free.*