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Wax and TenSoon run together back through the Homeland toward the entrance, Wax huffing with his lantern, TenSoon on all fours and growling out plans. He has already passed word to the rest of the kandra above through Harmony to abandon the streets and pull back, but Harmony himself says they may be too late. TenSoon turns the riddle over as he runs: the kandra are his ears, and Paalm wants him deafened. He works through how she means to *free* the city — Vin once freed koloss from the Lord Ruler by hitting them with such strong emotion that it opened a seam in their souls through which she could push another's control out. *That won't work on humans*, TenSoon says — humans aren't Hemalurgic constructs. Wax tells him it does not have to actually work, only have to convince Paalm it works; she means to drive the city into a rage and call that liberation.

A chorus of howls slams the tunnel from somewhere ahead — half a dozen voices, each jarring against the others, like nothing TenSoon has heard in a thousand years. They turn back. The howls behind them rise too, and the tight stone of the Homeland suddenly feels too tight. Wax cannot Push on the rock — no pure metal in it — and the tunnels turn too often for long flights. They pull up at another intersection where TenSoon smells *men* ahead of them in ambush, the howls behind them now eager. TenSoon ducks them sideways into one of the small chambers full of stored bones Wax passed earlier. *Another way out?* *No. We fight.*

TenSoon sloughs out of the wolfhound shape in a wet collapse — skin and meat hitting the floor in a slapped-down bucket of slop, knocking over a basket of bones — and the muscles pour up into a new shape in seconds. Arms sprout, then a wrestler's legs, then a koloss-faced skull pushed up like a bubble through molasses. In moments a short, robust, hammer-armed and superhumanly broad body is standing in the chamber, neuter and stretched-skinned, ready for the door. Wax turns to face the corridor as the pack reaches them.

Five of them — quadrupedal half-things with thickened skulls, joints bent the wrong way at elbow and knee, opposable thumbs on long fingers, and dead all-black eyes. Bullets to the head bounce off; Wax tears skin and bleeds muscle but drops none of them. He holsters Vindication, reaches for his Sterrion, then drops that too and brings out the short-barrelled shotgun. *Their skulls have been thickened,* he shouts at TenSoon. He empties shells onto the floor with a sound like rain and wades in. He likes the pistol — extension of focus, soul of the Coinshot — but the shotgun is good for rage. He puts one round under a thing's chin from inside the mouth and decorates the wall with it. He swings the gun across another and Pushes on the barrel for momentum. He blasts off another's arm at the shoulder. He fires a slug down into the back of one that has gone for him, multiplies his weight, and lands on the wound; the next one comes for his throat and he pumps and shoots and Pushes the slug on through the skull. TenSoon rips a fifth in half by its hind legs.

The room goes still. The lantern still burns calmly over scattered bones and twitching things that had been human. Wax is sick at himself for thinking *things*. TenSoon picks his way through and pries a finger-long Hemalurgic spike out of one of the corpses with a faint red cast; one spike apiece, never more, because more would let Harmony in. The level of Hemalurgy required to do this with a single spike, TenSoon says, is beyond his understanding. Wax finds one of the women still alive, paralysed by his shot, watching him through the dark inhuman eyes that she should at least have been allowed to keep. He puts his gun against the eye and fires up into the brain. He offers her a prayer to Harmony, who has helped none of these people, and is not sure it is enough. TenSoon says he will have to ask Harmony if he failed him today by killing. Wax points out drily that Harmony sends *him* to kill all the time. *You are his Ruin*, TenSoon says, picking through the bodies. *I am his Preservation.* Wax stands in silence and swallows the insult. More howls rise in the distance.

Across the city, Wayne has shaken the bonfire crowd off himself by pointing at a phantom in the dark — *I saw that dirty conner right ahead, you head round, we'll trap him* — and sending the wrench-and-broom faction at speed in the wrong direction. He swaps his Roughs hat for a newsboy cap he stashed in a hedge on the way out, pops a fresh ball of gum, and rounds the mansion from the side, intending to slip in the back. He is out of bendalloy and unhappy about it. As he moves past the wall, a voice drifts down to him out of an open upper window — and the accent is wrong, slightly, profoundly. And he knows, suddenly, who Bleeder has been wearing this whole time.

Back below, TenSoon leads Wax to a long-watched cracked wall at the edge of the Homeland — the kandra have known about this fault for years, waiting for it to open enough to be useful. Wax shoulders it through with weighted Feruchemy and they push into a thin slot canyon, wet and knobbed. TenSoon drops the wolfhound to the ground and goes up as a sliding sack of muscles, pushing on both walls and carrying his bones along in a stomach-like bag. Wax climbs after him. The pack catches up below and howls and scrabbles uselessly at the bottom of the crack. He fumbles his lantern in his haste, it smashes on the rocks, the dark slams in — and then his eyes adjust and the walls glow soft blue. Harmony made sure the fungus spread here too, TenSoon calls down from above, so nobody could ever be trapped in this place in the dark again. Wax recognises the empty handholds: he is climbing the Pits of Hathsin themselves, preserved whole by Harmony when he remade the world.

They crawl out through a sewer crack into a city that smells differently awful. TenSoon reforms and reads aloud what has just happened: whatever Paalm was distracting them from is happening now. Wax knows what. The unkilled governor is about to climb up onto a stage and give a speech. Paalm has kept him alive this long because she wants an audience for the murder.