Miles gasped, and extinguished his gold. He felt weary, suddenly, and slumped back against the wall. His two minders watched him with emotionless expressions.

“Go,” Miles said to them, waving a weak hand. “Check over my men. Use your Allomancy to determine if any of them accidentally left metal on their bodies. I want them clean.”

The two men looked at each other. They didn’t behave as if they cared to obey him.

“Go,” Miles said more firmly. “So long as you’re here, you should be useful.”

After another moment of hesitation, the two men walked away to do as ordered. Miles slumped down farther, back to the wall, breathing in and out.

Why do I do that to myself?

There had been considerable speculation about what a gold Misting really saw when burning his metal. A past version of himself, certainly. Was it the person he had actually been? Or was it a person he might have become, if he’d chosen another branching path of his life? That possibility had always struck him as sounding reminiscent of the mythical lost metal, atium.

Either way, he liked to think that burning his gold on occasion helped him—that each time he did it, it let him take the best of what he had been and mix it with the best of what he could be. An alloy of himself, then.

It disturbed him how much the two people he became hated each other. He could almost feel it like an oven’s heat, radiating from coal and stone.

He stood back up. Some of the men were staring at him, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t like the criminal bosses he’d often arrested in the Roughs. They had to worry about looking strong in front of their men, lest they be killed by someone who wanted to seize power.

Miles couldn’t be killed, and his men knew it. He’d once put a shotgun to his own head in front of them to prove it.

He walked over to a pile of trunks and boxes. A few were full of things Mister Suit had ordered stolen from Wax’s mansion, effects the man hoped would help them fight—or perhaps frame—the former lawkeeper. Suit had resisted killing Wax at first, for some reason.

Miles left them and walked around to the back side, where his own trunks had been deposited following the hasty evacuation of their old hideout. He picked through a few, then opened one. His white duster was inside. He took it out, shaking it, then got out a pair of sturdy Roughs trousers and a matching shirt. He slipped his tinted spectacles into the pocket, then went to change.

He’d been worried about hiding, worried that he’d be recognized and branded an outlaw. Well, an outlaw was what he had become. If this was the path he had chosen, he could at least walk it with pride.

Let them see me for what I am.

He would not turn from his course. It was too late to change one’s aim when the hammer was already falling. But it wasn’t too late to straighten his back.