The Lost Metal

In Tinweight Settlement, a mining town, eleven-year-old Wayne practises shuffles with a stolen deck of cards in the one-window home he shares with his mother, dreading the night she does not come home from the mine. His Terris father is already dead. When her lantern appears he hides the cards and fakes sleep; she finds one anyway, and he owns up.

After a gentle word about stealing, she tells him a story. Allomancer Jak, hunting Blatant Barm the Unwashed Bandit, shoots Gud the Killer across the River Human, gets past Noways Joe in the snake-filled Canyon of Death and, swallowed by the Lone Mesa (Barm himself, turned monster), makes himself a lump in its throat and chokes it from inside. Is the story about the mine, Wayne asks? Everyone has to walk into the beast’s mouth now and then, she says, and he can be whatever he likes:

“You are whatever you want to be, Wayne. You’re the wind.”

The next day there is another collapse, and that night she does not come home. Her story becomes Wayne’s private map of this book: in Bilming he wonders whether they have reached the Canyon, and before the last act he readies himself for the next part.

Almost six years after the Bands of Mourning, Marasi Colms, now a constable-detective, slogs through a sewer under Elendel with a map in one hand and a rifle in the other. Wayne, her partner, grumbles behind her and announces that MeLaan is going to break up with him. In a cavern they find thirty-seven armed smugglers under a Cycle of the Set; Marasi throws two Malwish Allomantic grenades that trap eighteen of them in slowness bubbles and chases the Cycle into a cavern cut by a ravine.

There the case turns strange. The Cycle taps stored strength and swells larger, heals from her glass dagger and even from shots to the head, and his eyes glow red: Trell, he says, is choosing hosts, and wants Marasi specifically. The end, he warns, will come from ash or from the men of gold and red. She cuts one of the four spikes out of his chest and he dies. One spike is trellium, which pulls away from the others; later a masked figure blurs up to the edge of Marasi’s slowness bubble, watches, then runs.

Wax, now Senator Ladrian, argues under an electric spotlight against a measure handing the Elendel governor more power over the Outer Cities, presents sixty letters from Outer City politicians who want peace, and exposes a bribed colleague. It passes anyway, 122 to 118. In his chambers waits an envelope from Harmony: an earring, and a note telling him to make a second once the proper metal arrives. Annoyed, he takes five-year-old Max flying on his back to Ahlstrom Tower, where the family now lives in the penthouse, under a hovering Malwish warship.

At Ladrian Mansion, lent to Marasi’s Malwish beau Allik, Lessie’s white duster still hangs beside Wax’s old mistcoat. MeLaan arrives to say that Harmony is sending her off-world, the first kandra sent out on such a mission, and ends her six years with Wayne, who calls her his first heartbreak. In the basement lab, Wax and Steris find under a spectroscope that the trellium is a God Metal. Trying to split harmonium into atium and lerasium, they and the kandra scholar VenDell stretch a glob under current and force in a sliver of trellium on a timer. The blast wrecks the room; a second, from scattered harmonium meeting humid air, knocks Wax flat.

Wayne has his own disaster: investments meant to make him poor have made him one of the richest men in Elendel. Ranette and her girlfriend Jaxy persuade him that hand-delivering money each month to Allriandre, daughter of the man he killed long ago, is selfish, so a bank takes the payments over.

Combing broadsheets for disguised explosions, Wax and Steris find that Bilming has blasted for a subway for four and a half years without one line to show, and Wax understands: the Set has been testing a city-killing bomb to smuggle into Elendel. He finally puts in Harmony’s earring and stands before a serene figure in Terris robes with two vast wings, one white, one black. Trell is Autonomy, another Shard, who has blinded Harmony’s sight of the future and means to take Scadrial through an Avatar: Telsin, Wax’s sister, in Bilming. Harmony asks rather than orders, but is plain about what he needs:

“it is time again. I need a sword.”

Wax makes him promise it will be the final time, then gives the book’s argument in a line: “But I’m not only a sword, Harmony. I’m a lawman too.” Sixteen replacement vials arrive, the last with a red-painted cork and a note to save it for an emergency. Steris brings his mistcoat, Max hugs their legs, and Wax runs for Bilming.

Marasi wakes in a truck rolling into Bilming, a city of rising skyscrapers and spreading suburbs. Her driver, Moonlight, shows a red tattoo on her forearm: she was the masked watcher in the sewer, and she comes from another planet. Hoid is driving Wayne’s truck. The sting is a trap the Set wanted: as Wayne and VenDell, posing as Franis and the dead Cycle, reach the weapons drop, Bilming constables flood in. The Set’s Coinshot, Dumad, blows a duralumin Push outward in every direction; Getruda, a Hemalurgist with Wayne’s own powers, ties Wayne up in a duel; Wax arrives and turns the fight. Wayne beats Getruda, offended above all that she has stolen his accent. Dumad, who dresses like Wax, leads Wax across the skyline, drops a building on him, leeches his metals and scatters his vials; Wax lives only by changing his weight as he falls.

At the Bilming station the team mourns two constables killed in the raid, and Mayor Gave Entrone taunts them about jurisdiction. Wax tries a second earring, of trellium, and hears Telsin, panicking about how to deliver her bomb. Then Death walks in: Marsh, Kelsier’s brother and Harmony’s Inquisitor, dying without atium, who crumples a gun barrel pointed at him, cows the mayor, and gives them a name, Tobal Copper. Asked about a three-diamond sign, he confirms it is Kelsier’s. At the missing Copper’s booby-trapped apartment, Wayne puts on a hat, becomes Copper for a while, and points them at a disreputable broadsheet. Its proprietor greets Wax as Dawnshot and shows them Copper’s engraved metal plates of rocket trajectories, a letter implicating Elendel senators and an evanotype of Elendel under falling ash. Then Telsin walks in and tells them they have two days. Sure she is stalling, the friends split up, Wayne and Marasi apart in action for the first time in six years.

On a rooftop Telsin begs Wax to take his family and flee to the Roughs, claims Harmony’s agents killed their parents, and lays out Autonomy’s two plans: bomb Elendel, or invade it with the men of red and gold. Wax sees that she is stalling, and that he is no longer the brother she knew. Searching Mayor Entrone’s mansion behind one of Wayne’s distractions, Wax finds letters from Senator Hasting and a trapdoor into a tunnel.

Marasi finds her way to a Ghostblood safehouse; Moonlight says she allowed it as an audition. There Marasi meets Codenames, the worldhopper Kaise, and TwinSoul, an aetherbound who shapes rose-coloured stone into furniture and maps. Through Kaise’s seon they speak with a likeness of Kelsier. TwinSoul names Autonomy’s first plan, invasion, with the Set’s bomb a gambit, an amputation; Kelsier authorises a secret weapon, the Ghostbloods’ purified Dor. In Copper’s old workplace, a tire factory, Moonlight soulstamps a door out of brick and they find the Set’s hoax: a theatre showing moving pictures of Elendel under ashfall and a miniature ruined city, a catastrophe staged on film.

In Elendel, acting senator Steris is shut out of a select council while Admiral Daal buys his way in. She gets in by hiring Constable-General Reddi as a paid expert, finds the politicians set on war, and takes the floor by threatening to make herself vomit. She unmasks a kandra among the constables, TenSoon, just as a radio operator brings Wax’s message: the bomb is real. The Bands of Mourning, sent for in hope, arrive drained. Most of the council flees on Daal’s airship, and Governor Varlance agrees to help Steris evacuate the city.

In the tunnel under Entrone’s mansion, Dumad and Getruda open fire. Wayne takes a bullet meant for Wax, then glass and Pushed coins; bleeding out his stored healing, he holds both doubles spellbound with a monologue in Marsh’s accent until Wax fires his explosive anti-Hemalurgist rounds. They escape, and Wayne shrugs off Wax’s question about how he really is.

Underground, Marasi watches Entrone’s scientists pull Investiture out of captives. The method will not impress Autonomy, so Entrone resigns himself to her red-eyed, gold-skinned army and orders the captives killed. Marasi frees them; Moonlight explains that the invasion will probably come through Shadesmar; TwinSoul wraps himself in a stone giant to carry the captives up. Hunted by Hemalurgic abominations, the two women find the Community, a fake town whose people have been told, with actors and projectors to help, that ash has returned above. Cornered, Moonlight uses her essence mark to rewrite herself into an Elantrian who no longer knows Marasi, and stays behind to hold the wall. In the Community Marasi meets Armal Harms, a distant cousin the Vanishers took seven years ago.

Wax wrecks a convoy of decoy trucks and finds no bomb, only Autonomy speaking through a dying operative. Then he and Wayne take a beer break on a billboard, with sandwiches Steris packed, and Wayne admits what has been eating him:

“Maybe I can’t ever do enough good to balance the bad I done.”

Tossing Max’s weighted wicker ball, Wax works out where the bomb must launch from: Bilming’s highest point, the Shaw. Below the city, Marasi fights Entrone, and Armal’s people drink Kelsier’s Investiture and Soothe like the Lord Ruler, freezing the mansion in emotion. Beneath it lies a glowing pool, the portal, and through it Marasi can sense the army.

Wax, with Wayne on his back, Pushes onto a balcony halfway up the Shaw. Accepting that he is Harmony’s Sword, he fights up the central steel stair through hundreds of Hidden Guard, glimpses Harmony’s memory of the Battle of Luthadel, and asks never to be made to do this again. On the top floor Wayne talks the frightened guards into leaving, and the friends swap doubles: Wayne handcuffs himself to Dumad and falls with him, healing while Dumad dies; Wax kills Getruda. Under the city, as Autonomy’s soldiers begin to step through the pool, Marasi and the Community’s Allomancers burn off its power and she drops both charged grenades into it. The slowness bubbles hold; the well runs dry; the invasion is stopped.

On the Shaw’s roof Telsin waits with a rocket. Wax Pushes it over, and it is hollow; the real bomb is on a Bilming warship steaming for Elendel. Wax has Harmony sever Telsin’s Connection to Autonomy; abandoned by her god as unworthy, she dies.

Told that one warship is coming, Steris refuses to leave, clears the bayside for a tsunami, and has eight Ghostbloods sink cargo ships to break the wave, once the governor has confirmed it is legal. Varlance tells her that her talents have been wasted.

Wax drives a spike from Dumad’s body through his own lower chest for duralumin, gives Wayne one that makes him a Coinshot, and flies them both to the warship Pewternaut A16. In its hold, Harmony explains, are three bombs, wired so that disarming one sets off the other two, enough to vaporise Elendel, Bilming and more. Wayne works out how to shrink the blast, sees that his plan does not need Wax, and, having already traded for the red-corked vial, Steelpushes his friend far out to sea.

Alone with Harmony, Wayne learns that the vial holds a little lerasium, made in Wax’s experiments; he is Mistborn. He asks whether this earns him forgiveness, and Harmony tells him he no longer needs it. He asks for a hat, and Harmony gives him his own. Then he swallows all seventeen pouches of his bendalloy, makes one perfect speed bubble around the three barrels and, burning duralumin with it, compresses time almost to nothing, filling each barrel with water and Pushing it out to fire early. The bubble drops.

Treading water on a leg broken by Wayne’s Push, Wax says goodbye and thank you; Harmony shields him from the waves, and Hoid comes for him in a small motorboat. In Elendel, Steris sees the flash, early, and braces for the wave. After death, Wayne learns from Harmony that Autonomy has withdrawn, for now, and is pleased with himself:

“I’m probably the best constable who ever rusting lived!”

He asks whether he made the biggest explosion anyone ever made, hears yes, asks Harmony to tell Steris, and stretches away into the Beyond.

Marasi comes home by train, and Allik tells her Wayne is dead and bakes for her. Summoned by the three-diamond sign, she finds Kelsier himself at the Ghostblood hideout. TwinSoul offers her membership and a mission, finding Moonlight; Marasi refuses, because she could never share what she learned, and Kelsier accepts it, then forbids any move against her.

Two days after the blast Steris brings Wax home from hospital. He blames himself: without the spike he gave Wayne, Wayne could never have Pushed him clear. Steris tells him it was Wayne’s choice and shows him her list of Wayne quotes for occasions, and Varlance offers her the post of Disaster Preparations Officer. Wax proposes that they honour Wayne by letting themselves be happy.

Wayne’s money does its work: Allriandre, who works at the forges, inherits his fortune, and Ranette and Jaxy come home from their honeymoon to find their property vastly expanded, his wedding gift, with a note in crayon. On a skyscraper above Elendel, Kelsier meets Sazed: atium dust found in Wax’s lab will keep Marsh alive, and Sazed lets Kelsier believe the lerasium was destroyed. Kelsier urges a fast technological age to find allies, and means to protect Scadrial at any cost. In Shadesmar, MeLaan reads Harmony’s letter about Wayne and goes on with her mission.

Two years later, in 350 PC, Wax and Steris stand before a bronze statue of Wayne in the Field of Rebirth, with a desiccated frog in Wax’s pocket, per Wayne’s will. Marasi is leaving as ambassador to the Malwish Consortium, and Wax guesses she means to run for governor. Marsh tells Marasi that Wayne is truly gone, and hands Wax a note in which Harmony apologises for interfering in his life and promises never to do it again. Kelsier’s argument for a faster future is left for Era Three.