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Marasi is parked by a window in Innate's private study, notepad out, while the governor takes his executive staff through the crisis. The cabinet quarrels over the only two strategies any of them has — *let it blow over* (the sanitation director, an attorney from her own programme of years ago, runs that line) or *crush it* (the minister of trade citing looting already underway, the secretary of education pushing for outright force and reminding Innate that the Lekals will use tonight against him at the next election). Innate has already told them the assassin is a rogue Faceless Immortal — MeLaan showed him her true face before the meeting — and after the way of their kind they have ignored what he told them. He glances toward Marasi once, in concession. She returns the look calmly; once upon a time she dreamed of being in meetings like this, and is surprised to find herself frustrated by all the talk.

Innate dismisses them with a sharper *out with you all, I need to think* than Marasi has heard from him before. He keeps her behind, unlocks a desk-drawer safe for the seal of office, and writes the writ: Aradel has his martial law for the octant, and is appointed *lord high constable* — executive authority over every constable-general in the city for the duration. The other octants' constables-general will need to report to him. Asked what the constables should do, Innate gives a two-part order: don't stop the crowds converging on the mansion (he wants to speak to them), but elsewhere put the fear of the sword into the looters. He looks up at Marasi and names her aloud as Wax's connection — *I wasn't aware I'd attracted your attention* — *you haven't. He has. Damnable man.* — then steps out before she can finish a sentence about crowd mentality. She tucks the writ into her purse beside her pistol.

Outside in the entry hall, with Wayne lounging in a corner with a stolen pen and a serving man scrubbing the saferoom blood off the floor, the footman tells her it will be some minutes before a carriage can be dredged up; half the city's cabs are out running notes for the executive staff. She idles, watches the orange haze over the city through the mist, then changes her mind about going to find Wayne and wanders instead down the stairs to the empty saferoom. *A city close to breaking,* she thinks at the bottom. *This has happened before.*

The saferoom still smells of the soap used to clean the blood. The walls are lined with shelves of pristine books; she pulls one volume of the Words of Founding at random and finds its pages uncut. She walks the room thinking of the Survivor's night, the speech that came after, the Last Emperor rising on his words — and of how Innate is not Elend Venture and the crowds, when he stands in front of them, will know it without knowing why. Then her eye catches on a shelf of seven volumes by the Counselor of Gods — pristine like the rest, except that the third, fourth and fifth spines are scuffed at the bottom. The middle pages of one of them are cut into a square, with a key in the hole. Innate has not been reading Breeze's essays; he has just forgotten which volume hid the key.

The key does not fit the desk. A safe under the rug, set into the floor in the same way as the one upstairs, accepts it. Inside: a pistol, unfamiliar cigars, a house-buying stack of banknotes — and a bundle of letters. Marasi takes them to the desk thinking she will find an affair. Instead she finds the city's real shadow government — letters between Innate and house leaders, coded in language like *we agree that certain courtesies will be extended* and *these are acceptable terms*, but dated, and annotated in Innate's own hand with the favours each one bought: a tariff against outside refined steel for a favourable land purchase by his own family; a judge's seat handed to a Hammondess scion. Line by line they match Marasi's notebook of suspicious legislative events at the precinct. There are none to the Lekals; she notes with relief there are none to Wax nor even any old ones to Edwarn Ladrian either. Under the letters is Innate's private ledger.

She sits with it and is overwhelmed. *The people are right to be in revolt.* If this is the crux of Bleeder's plan — shove Innate under the spotlight, expose his corruption with the city already at boiling point — then in revealing the letters Marasi is playing into her hands. But if Innate is this corrupt, he needs to be exposed. She tucks the letters into her purse, locks the safe, replaces the key, and heads back upstairs. She knows the same scrubbing servant saw her go down and come back, and that Innate will know exactly who to suspect. She does it anyway.

Across the city, Wax flies eastward through the carpet of pinpricked lights, looking for somewhere quiet enough to think. His uncle's needling and Bleeder's Lessie jab are still in his head, pins pushed into his temples from opposite directions. He lands on top of one of the towers of Eastbridge — last lit thing in the city facing the dark beyond — and asks the question he has been circling: *Did Harmony know? Could He have saved Lessie?* He answers it himself. To believe in a god is to accept that the god is not going to deliver you from every problem. In the Roughs he was used to that. What is different now is that Harmony is personally on the other end of an earring, asking Wax to do things, and did not give a warning he easily could have given. He pulls the earring out before sending the thought *Are you there, Harmony?* — half-glad to be unheard.

He sits on the bridge's pinnacle looking east at the dark countryside and yearns, just for a moment, to leap out into it and trade the city's hundreds of thousands of strangers back for the handful of people he could actually know. He does not seriously consider it. He sits with what freedom actually means to him — not the absence of responsibility, but the freedom to do what is right without first having to check whether it is also wrong. Then he calls himself a coward, in his own voice, and turns away from the dark. He jumps off the bridge and Pushes himself back into the city. He has not liked where his thoughts have been going.