From the start, he’d been drawn to zinc and brass, Allomancy that let him play with people’s emotions. It had seemed most similar to what he’d done unaided in the past. But he was a new man, reborn in those dreadful pits. Whatever he had been, it wasn’t enough. He needed to become something more.

Kelsier threw himself upward, Pulling his way to the roof of the building. Gemmel kept going up past the roof, flying toward the tips of the four spires that adorned the front of the building. Kelsier dropped his entire bag of coins—the more metal you Pushed off, the faster and higher you could go—and flared his steel. He Pushed with everything he had, sending himself upward like an arrow.

Mists streamed around him. The colorful lights of the stained-glass windows withdrew below. A spire dwindled on either side of him, growing more and more narrow. He shoved off the tin cladding on one of them to nudge himself to the right.

With a final Push of strength he crested the very tip of the spire, which had a knob on top the size of man’s head. Kelsier landed on it, flaring his pewter, which improved his physical abilities. That didn’t just make him stronger; it made him more dexterous as well. Capable of standing on one foot atop a globe a handspan wide hundreds of feet off the ground. Having performed the maneuver, he stopped and stared at his foot.

“You’re growing more confident,” Gemmel said. The other man had stopped just shy of the tip of the spire, clinging to it below Kelsier. “That’s good.”

Then with a quick motion, Gemmel leaped up and swept Kelsier’s leg from underneath him. Kelsier cried out, losing control and falling into the mists. Gemmel Pushed against the vials full of metal flakes that Kelsier—like most Allomancers—carried on his belt. That Push shoved Kelsier away from the building and out into the mists.

He plummeted, and lost rational thought for a moment. There was a primal terror to falling. Gemmel had spoken about controlling that, about learning not to fear heights or get disoriented while dropping.

Those lessons fled Kelsier’s mind. But he was falling. Fast. Through churning mists, disoriented. It would take only seconds to hit the ground.

Desperate, he Pushed on those vials of metal, hoping he was pointed in the right direction. They ripped from his belt and smashed downward into something. The ground.

There wasn’t much metal in them. Barely enough to slow Kelsier. He hit the ground a fraction of a second after Pushing, and the blow knocked the wind from him. His vision flashed.

He lay in a daze as something thumped to the ground beside him. Gemmel. The other man snorted in derision. “Fool.”