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When you have the earring in, yes. I gain the ability to hear you from Preservation, and the ability to speak to you from Ruin. Each had only one half. I always found it puzzling.

Regardless, I know you have been reading young Lestibournes’s book. I am not pleased that he made it, but I could not forbid him. I will trust that Marsh was wise in giving it to you. Bleeder can use Hemalurgy, but in a way she should not be able to. Kandra do not have Allomantic or Feruchemical powers. She has learned to take these, and to use them to maintain her kandra form.

Fortunately, she is limited. She can only use one spike at a time, otherwise she will open herself to my control. If she trades spikes, she must do it by ripping out her single one and then falling onto another, digesting it and returning her to sapience.

I do not know her game with this city, but I’m alarmed by it. She has spent centuries studying human behavior. She is planning something.

“I’ll have to stop her, then.”

I will send you help.

“I assume, considering the source, it will be spectacular.”

Harmony sighed softly. In Wax’s mind’s eye, he had a sudden image of a being standing with hands clasped behind Him, eternity extending into darkness before Him. Tall, robed, back to Wax, almost visible and distinct yet somehow completely unknowable at the same time.

Waxillium, Harmony said, I have tried to explain this to you, but I did not do a good job, I think. My hands are tied, and I am bounded.

“Who ties God’s hands?”

I tied them myself.

Wax frowned.

I hold both Ruin and Preservation, Harmony said. The danger in carrying these opposed powers is that I can see both sides—the need for life, the need for death. I am balance. And, to an extent, I am neutrality.

“But Bleeder used to be one of Your own, and now she’s acting against You.”

She used to be of Preservation. She has moved to being of Ruin. Both are needed.

“Murderers are needed,” Wax said flatly.

Yes. No. The potential for murderers is needed. Waxillium, I—the personality you speak to—agree with your indignation. But the powers that I am, the essence of my self, cannot allow me to take sides.

Already I fear that I have made things too easy for men. This city, the perfect climate, the ground that renews … You were to have had the radio a century ago, but you didn’t need it, so you didn’t strive for it. You ignore aviation, and cannot tame the wilds because you don’t care to study proper irrigation or fertilization.

“The … radio? What is that?”

You don’t explore, Harmony continued, ignoring Wax’s confusion. Why would you? You have everything you want here. You’ve barely progressed technologically from what I gave you in the books. Yet others, who were nearly destroyed …