“Hers?” Kelsier asked. “Vin? Is she here?”

The thread vibrated in Kelsier’s fingers like the string of an instrument. Waves came along it from one direction.

Kelsier followed them, noticing again how Preservation had covered this city with his essence. Perhaps he figured that if he was going to be strung out anyway, he should lie down like a protective blanket.

Preservation led him to a small city square clogged with glowing souls and bits of metal on the walls. They glowed so brightly, particularly in contrast to the darkness of his months out alone. Was one of these souls Vin?

No, they were beggars. He moved among them, feeling at their souls with his fingertips, catching glimpses of them in the other Realm. Huddled in the ash, coughing and shivering. The fallen men and women of the Final Empire, the people even the common skaa tended to dismiss. For all his grand plans, he hadn’t made the lives of these people better, had he?

He stopped in place.

That last beggar, sitting against an old brick wall … there was something about him. Kelsier backed up, touching the beggar’s soul again, seeing a vision of a man with hands and face wrapped in bandages, white hair sticking out from beneath. Stark white hair, a fact not quite hidden by the ash that had been rubbed into it.

Kelsier felt a sudden shock, a painful spike that ran up his fingers into his soul. He jumped back as the beggar glanced his direction.

“You!” Kelsier said. “Drifter!”

The beggar shifted in place, but then glanced another direction, searching the square.

“What are you doing here?” Kelsier demanded.

The glowing figure gave no response.

Kelsier whipped his hand back and forth, trying to shake out the pain. His fingers had actually gone numb. What had that been? And how had the white-haired Drifter managed to affect him in this Realm?

A small glowing figure landed on a rooftop nearby.

“Oh, hell,” Kelsier said, looking from Vin to the Drifter. He responded immediately, throwing himself toward the wall of the building and climbing desperately up it to Vin’s side. “Vin. Vin, stay away from that man.”

Of course yelling was pointless. She couldn’t hear him.

Still, Kelsier seized her by the shoulders, seeing her in the Physical Realm. When had she grown so confident, so knowing? Those shoulders of hers had once cringed, but now they gave her the posture of a woman fully in control. Those eyes that had once widened in wonder were now narrowed with keen perception. Her hair was longer, but her slight build somehow seemed far more powerful than it had when he’d first met her.

“Vin,” Kelsier said. “Vin! Listen, please. That man is trouble. Don’t approach him. Don’t—”

Vin cocked her head, then leaped off the roof, away from the Drifter.

“Hell,” Kelsier said. “Did she actually hear me?”