_2015_11_15_10_19_27_019

“I can’t fathom,” Wax said. “I sold it before going to the Roughs. My father had cut me off by then, and I needed money to outfit myself for the trip.”

“And those words?”

“I don’t know,” Wax said, pocketing the coin. “Thing is, remembering that story bothers me. I told myself at the time that I was trying to help the man, but I don’t think that was true. Looking back, I was just trying to anger my uncle.

“I’m still like that, Steris. Why did I leave for the Roughs? I wanted to be a hero—I wanted to be seen and known. I could have done a great deal of good by taking a position in my house here in Elendel, but I’d have had to do it quietly. Leaving, then eventually trying to make a name for myself as a lawman, was ultimately selfish. Even joining the constables here sometimes seems like an act of insufferable hubris to me.”

“I doubt that you care,” Steris said, leaning in, “but I consider your motives to be irrelevant. You save lives. You … saved my life. My gratitude is not influenced by what was running through your head as you did so.”

Wax met her eyes. Steris was prone to this—startling moments of pure honesty, where she stripped everything away and laid herself bare.

The carriage slowed, and Steris’s eyes flicked toward the window. “We have arrived, but it will take us time to get in. There are many carriages in front of us.”

Wax frowned, opening his window and leaning his head out. Indeed, a line of carriages and even a few motors clogged the way into the coach portico of ZoBell Tower. The skyscraper towered some twenty stories up into the night sky, its top disappearing in the dark mists.

Wax pulled back into the carriage, mist tumbling in through the now-open window beside him. Steris glanced at it, but did not ask him to close the shade.

“I guess we’ll be late,” Wax said.

Unless, of course, he improvised.

“This is the first party in the space atop the tower,” Steris said, taking a small planning notebook out of her handbag, “and the coach attendants aren’t accustomed to this heavy traffic.”

Wax smiled. “You accounted for this delay, did you?”

Steris stopped on a page in her notebook, then turned it around. There, in her neat handwriting, was a detailed agenda for their evening at the party. The third entry read, 8:17. Way into the building likely blocked by traffic. Lord Waxillium carries us up to the top floor by Allomancy, which is completely inappropriate and at the same time breathtaking.

He raised an eyebrow, checking his pocket watch, which he carried in his gunbelt—not his vest—to be easily dropped with his other metals. “It’s 8:13. You’re slipping.”

“Traffic on the promenade was lighter than I expected.”

“You really want to do this the hard way?”

“I believe this will actually be the easy way,” Steris said. “Completely inappropriate though.”

“Completely.”

“Fortunately, you have a reputation for that sort of thing, and I can’t be expected to keep you reined in. I did wear dark undergarments, though, so they won’t be as visible from below while we are flying.”

Wax smiled, then reached under his seat, getting out the package that Ranette had sent him. He tucked that under his arm, then pushed open the door. “People underestimate you, Steris.”

“No,” she said, stepping out onto the misty sidewalk. He saw she wore shoes that fastened securely. Good. “They simply presume to know me when they do not. Understanding social conventions is not the same as condoning them. Now, how is it that we are to—Oh!”

She said the last part as Wax gathered her to him in a close embrace, then unholstered Vindication and shot a bullet into the ground—between three cobblestones—at their feet. He grinned as heads popped out of carriages all down the line. He’d have to leave Wayne and Marasi to fend for themselves this way, but that was likely better. Might keep eyes off those two.

Wax decreased his weight, oriented himself and Steris at the correct angle to the bullet, and Pushed. They shot into the air at a slant, soaring over the coaches in a line. He landed them on one of the skyscraper’s decorative outcroppings a few stories up. Steris clung to him with the grip of a cat hanging above an ocean, her eyes wide. Then, cautiously, she released him and stepped up to the edge of the stonework, leaned out, and peered through the misty depths. Lights bobbed below: coaches, streetlamps, lanterns held high by footmen. In the mist, most were just bubbles and shadows.

“I feel like I’m afloat in a sea of smoke and fog,” she said. The mists twisted and churned as if alive. Eddies and swirls seemed to move against the currents of air, always in motion.