POV: wax
Summary
On top of the Eastbridge tower, Wax makes a sound like a man hit straight in the stomach. He keeps Vindication on the figure in front of him, but his hand wavers and his vision shakes. *It isn't her, it isn't her.* It is — to the eye — Lessie's face, Lessie's voice, Lessie's habit of telling him he leans too hard on his guns when he is a Coinshot. Bleeder tells him she had worried that using Tan's face would tip him off too early to who she really was. She admits in Lessie's voice that she was *never* Lessie — *always Paalm the kandra. But I wanted to be Lessie. Does that count for anything?* He has dreamed of hearing this voice again. He has wept to apologise to her. He starts to lower the gun. He tries to beg Harmony silently for help — and remembers he has taken the earring out. Bleeder has outthought him after all.
Across the city, Marasi, Reddi and eleven constables wrap a block round and come in behind the suspicious carriage. MeLaan's amplified voice carries to them through the cones as they set up at the alley's edge; the speech is just beginning to turn toward Marasi's reformist material. Reddi pulls off his aluminum-lined helmet and confirms the Soother's touch is much stronger here than out in the crowd — the carriage is the source. They go in with dueling canes (no gunplay this close to civilians) and meet a force of the Set's dark-clothed thugs piled out of an inside doorway, blocking the carriage. The thugs put their few guns away by an order from one of their own — both sides are still trying to keep the speech going. The fight gets ugly fast. The constables are outnumbered. Marasi keeps to the back at first, then realises nobody is paying her any attention — they never do — and uses it. She walks deliberately into a struggling pair, fakes being struck, drops to the ground, and crawls along the alley wall in the shadows until she is right beside the carriage.
Two guards block the door. She drops a short bendalloy flicker over the three of them, lets it lapse, drops another. The guards panic — *there's Metalborn among them* — knock on the carriage to ask, and are sent down the alley to warn the others. She gets up and slips inside.
On the bridge, Bleeder walks toward Wax in the mist on the tower's pinnacle. *Maybe I should have come to you and had you help me with my plan,* she says. *But he was watching. I'm glad you took the earring out. At least my words meant something to you.* He tells her to stop. She lays out the path she means to take from here: she will have to do something about him, hurt him for his own good. She still does not know what to do about Wayne, whom she could not bring herself to kill but who is probably better dead than the way he is. He shoves her, lifts Vindication — and she Pushes it out of his hand into the mist. He rams her bodily. They go off the tower together. As they fall she draws the aluminum pistol and shoots him in the leg. He Pushes off the bridge roadway below to slow the fall, lands hard on his good knee, and screams. He looks up. Behind her, the city burns in red violent light over the mist. The country outside the city is dark and at peace.
Inside the carriage Marasi finds a pudgy woman in a three-layered silken gown and, beside her, a stylishly suited man with his eyes closed and his hand on her wrist. One Soother, one Rioter. She sits down opposite with her handgun on them and offers her theory of gentlewomanly conduct — a true gentlewoman never resorts to violence, only the *threat* of it, much more civilised. She cocks the gun. The two are to stop the pewterheads in the alley from beating up her men; then they will talk about the crowd.
On the bridge, Wax spots Vindication in a gutter alongside the roadway. Bleeder is between him and it. He leaps for the gun, rolls onto his back in agony, Pushes himself the last metre. Bleeder levels her pistol on him — and does not fire. Perhaps, after long enough in Lessie's face, part of her can no longer tell the difference between the mind and the body. He gets the pistol up. He spins the chamber to the bullet Ranette sent him. Down the sights he sees Lessie crying. *How am I wrong?* she asks. *I'm not Harmony's hands,* he tells her. *I'm his sword.* He fires.
The bullet takes her in the forehead and barely moves her head. She stares at him as a thin trickle of blood runs down beside her nose to her lip; her eyes widen; the aluminum gun drops from her fingers. *No,* she screams, falling to her knees. *No!* As MeLaan told Wax long ago in the alley, kandra are weaker than other Hemalurgic creatures — only two spikes, and they can be taken. The first kept her sapient. The second, delivered into her skull as a bullet forged from Wax's Pathian earring — a piece of Harmony's own body — let Harmony take her again.