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Wayne has limited sympathy for the governor's plight, having worked out over the course of the night that the whole point of having a man in charge is so that, when the assassins get bored, they go for him and not for the fellow selling fish on the corner. *You had to take the good with the bad.* Innate insists on going alone into his study to draft a speech, waves MeLaan's objection off — *what are any of you going to do about someone who can move at the speed of a thunderclap?* — and shuts the door on his guards. Wayne dismisses the other two bodyguards to the window outside, settles into the carpet beside MeLaan, and starts listening to the mansion talk.

He has been listening for hours. People cannot just *think* things — they have to say them out loud — and sooner or later Bleeder will slip up and use the wrong word, like a chap drinking milk in the middle of a rowdy tavern. He notes MeLaan is muttering accents to herself in the dead constable's voice and tells her she would have been a *twofie* — Second Octant, agave farmer touch — and starts coaching her. She is a quick study. They walk together through a Terris-fundamentalist deaf-parents accent for the fun of it. Wayne tells her the trick is hats: a hat is a disguise for the brain, helps you think like whoever wore it last. *Has anyone ever told you you're surprisingly wise?* — *All the bloody time.* — *They're idiots. You're not wise, you're playing them.* *I love it.*

The conversation drifts. Wayne asks her whether immortality bothers her. MeLaan tells him no — boredom is just the cue to put on a new life, be brash where she was timid, crass where she was respectful, *switch it up* — and then adds that the kandra can in fact die, by their own choice, if they want to. About a century after the Catacendre, when Ruin tried to take over the kandra directly, TenSoon and the older heads worked out a method — a small act of concentration that puts the body into a deliberate terminal spiral. Their guaranteed escape hatch. Wayne approves: *always have an escape route planned. Oh, and your 'a's are still off.*

Then he hears something out front — a voice, faint but unmistakable — and bolts. He finds Ranette arguing with the butler on the doorstep. She has been dragged out of bed to deliver a small cloth pouch Wax commissioned: a single bullet, *half-powder as he asked, piercing, forged not to shatter*. She nearly draws on the butler over *dust rat*, makes the man very pale, and tells Wayne she has seen this kind of crowd outside before — in Roughs towns of five hundred, where the next thing that happened was a man getting strung up. *What happens when it's five million who start acting like that…* Wayne takes the bullet, pockets it (he can hold a bullet), invites her for a drink, and is told she would sooner shoot herself and that Misra would shoot her if she did. He sends her home with her doors locked. He goes out into the mist himself to see the crowd, on the theory that if the governor will not let him into the study, the crowd outside might give him Bleeder's plan.

Across the city, Aradel receives Innate's writ from Marasi outside precinct headquarters with both reverence and obvious discomfort. *He names me lord high constable. But… rusts, I'm no lord.* He gives the orders Marasi brings: hard hand on the looters everywhere else in the city, soft hand on the protesters converging on the mansion for Innate's speech. Lieutenant Mereline grumbles that the rioters deserve what they get; Aradel reminds her she has cussed out the Hasting family with some regularity herself. He sends Reddi up with the rest of the force and rides ahead with Marasi and two rifle-corporal escorts. The only spare carriage has just pulled away. Marasi mounts a horse instead, bunches her skirt up between her legs and sits on part of it, revealing a generous expanse of leg, and rides past a stunned Reddi into the night. (She makes a private note to buy trousers.)

On the ride she hands Aradel the letters she stole from Innate's saferoom — coded, dated, annotated in Innate's own hand, and matched line by line to her own statistical records. He asks how legally she got them. *In other words, you stole them.* *Yes, sir.* He tucks them away. He rides without answering for a while, then names what is bothering him: not that he might have to act on this, but that the rioters out there are right. *Ruin… we were supposed to be better than this. What if the Lord Mistborn saw us now?* *I suspect he'd tell us to do something about the situation.* He nods, and they trot on.

Tradition holds, Wax thinks as marewill flowers brush his mistcoat, that the Field of Rebirth looks exactly the same as on the day humankind crept out of the wombs of stone. Tradition is stupid; the grass is manicured and the paths are paved and there are lavatories. The tomb of the Originators sits on the central hill in floodlit weather, with two First Octant constables on the door who have been called in over fears of looters. Wax's reputation is enough to get him past them; a bluff about *codes-required inspections* gets him past the caretaker. He spins Vindication's cylinder in Roughs-tradition salute toward the resting places of the Last Emperor and the Ascendant Warrior without entering their chamber. He lingers at the chamber devoted to the Survivor — a hundred different artists' depictions, an in-museum note that the posthumous *apparitions* in the final days were really the Faceless Immortals — and walks on.

He counts down the chambers dedicated to each of the metals. At the sign of atium he stops, follows the bright blue lines his steelsight shows him, pries back a piece of decorative panelling, pushes a hidden lever, and a door opens into the rock. He slips in with an old hooked-down oil lantern, pulls the door shut, and crouches in the pitch dark fishing in his gunbelt for matches. As he pulls them out, a low growling voice comes out of the blackness around him.

*I've been waiting for you.*