Innate demanded, tossing his pad onto his desk. He walked up, then spoke more softly: “Wind’s whisper.”
“Drunken steam,” Wax said back, latest passphrases exchanged. Innate was authentic. “Locking your guards out was foolhardy. They would have fought for you, protected you. We chased her off one time before.”
“You chased her off,” Innate said, walking back to his desk and picking up his pad. “The rest were useless. Even poor Drim.” He went back to his pacing, speaking the lines of his speech to himself and practicing emphasis.
Wax fumed, feeling dismissed. This was the man they struggled to protect? Wax made his way to the window. It was open, surprisingly, letting in wisps of mist. They didn’t travel far. He’d heard legends of the mists filling rooms, but that rarely happened.
He leaned against the window, looking out at the darkness, listening with half an ear to Innate’s speech. It was inflammatory and dismissive. He claimed to feel the problems the people had, but called them peasants.
This would just make things worse. She wants that, Wax thought. She wants to free the city from Harmony by making it angry.
She knew what Innate was going to say. Of course she knew. She’d been leading them around this entire time. Every clue Wax had found so far had been carefully planted for him. So what did he do? Stop Innate’s speech? What if that was what she wanted?
He tapped his finger on the windowsill. Tap. Tap.
Squish.
He looked down, then blinked. A wad of chewed gum had been stuck here. Wax lifted his finger, and—as he contemplated it—something started to fall into place. Something he’d been missing. Bleeder had set this all up from the start.
Wax’s suspicions had begun because she’d deliberately alerted him by wearing Bloody Tan’s face. That had been a conscious ploy on her part, a way to start the festivities. Everything was moving on her timetable.
Bleeder had had everything already in place when this night arrived. She’d been planning this for a long time. Far longer than he’d assumed.
So where was the best place to hide?
Rusts.
Wax reached for his gun and spun.
He found himself facing down Governor Innate, who had taken out a sidearm and leveled it. “Damn it, Wax,” the governor said. “Just a few minutes more and I’d have had this. You see too far. You can always see a little too far.”
Wax froze there, hand on his gun. He met the governor’s eyes, and hissed out slowly. “You knew the passphrase,” Wax whispered, “but of course you did. I gave it to you. When did you kill him? How long has the city been ruled by an impostor?”
“Long enough.”
“The governor wasn’t your target. You think bigger than that—I should have seen. But Drim … He was in the saferoom when you entered below. Is that why you killed him? No. He’d have known you were gone.”
“He knew all along,” Bleeder said. “He was mine. But tonight, I killed him because of you, Wax. You’d shot me up…”
“You had on the governor’s clothing underneath the cloak,” Wax said. “Rusts! I’d bloodied you. So you needed an excuse for why the governor was covered in blood, an excuse to pull off your shirt and stanch a wound.”
She held the gun on him, immobile. The weapon didn’t register to his Allomancy. Aluminum. She was prepared, of course. But she seemed torn. She didn’t want to kill him. She’d never wanted to kill him, for some reason.
So Wax yelled for help.
It was risky, but nothing ever ended well when you obeyed the person with the gun on you. As he’d suspected, Bleeder didn’t shoot at him as the door burst open. Wax pulled out his gun and fired at Bleeder, to distract her as he dug in his gunbelt for the last needle that MeLaan had given him.
The guards turned their guns toward Wax and started firing.
Idiot, he thought, throwing himself toward the governor’s desk for cover. Of course they’d do that. “Wait!” he said. “The governor has been taken. Don’t—”
Bleeder gunned down the guards. Wax rolled behind the desk, but still heard it as they cried out in shock, their own governor—so far as they knew—shooting them down. Wax winced, cursing. Those deaths were upon him.
“I guess the rest of the constables will be upon us soon,” Bleeder said. “They’re not free yet. Neither are you, despite how I’ve tried.…”
Wax peeked up over the desk, then ducked down again as she swung the gun toward him. The governor’s face was twisted