A soft thump from behind indicated that Wax had dealt with the guard at the door. Normally Wayne would feel left out, since he didn’t get to do any hitting. This time though, Wayne got to make a bunch of idiots stand with their hands pressed against some wood, thinking they were keeping the ship from tipping over.

So it evened out.

“Please.”

The creature spoke with a strange accent, but the voice was unmistakably human. Marasi breathed in and out in sharp breaths, regarding that hand reaching for her. A human hand.

Lips that didn’t move… polished skin… That wasn’t a face, but a mask. This wasn’t some horrible creature, but a person in a wooden mask, the eyeholes caught by the shadows. What Marasi had mistaken for fur was thick blankets clutched around the person’s shoulders.

“Marasi?” MeLaan asked. The kandra appeared in the doorway. “I got it open. What are you doing— What the hell is that?”

“It’s a person,” Marasi said. The masked one turned toward MeLaan, and the new angle lit the holes in its mask, illuminating human eyes with brown irises.

Marasi stepped forward. “Who are you?”

The person turned back to her and said something completely unintelligible. Then it paused, and said, “Please?” That was a man’s voice.

“We’ve got to go,” MeLaan said. “Safe is open.”

“Is the spike inside?” Marasi asked.

“See for yourself.”

Marasi hesitated, then hustled into the other room, passing MeLaan.

“Please!” the man cried, huddled against the bars, reaching out.

The safe gaped open in the corner of the room. The top shelf was cluttered with objects, including the little Allomantic grenade. Prominent among them was also a length of silvery metal. Kandra spikes, as proven in the Bleeder case, were smaller than Marasi might have once imagined—less than three inches long, and slender, not at all like the spikes in Death’s eyes.

She knelt beside the safe, taking it out.

“We have it,” Marasi said, turning toward MeLaan. “Do you want to carry it?”

MeLaan shook her head. “We don’t touch one another’s spikes.”

Marasi frowned, remembering the stories. “Didn’t the Guardian—”

“Yes.”

MeLaan’s face remained impassive, but her tone was stern. Marasi shrugged, tucking the spike into her purse, then searched in the safe. She left the banknotes—stupid, she knew, but it felt more like really robbing to take those—and took back the little cube that stored Allomantic charges.

Beside it were several other small relics—each was coinlike, with cloth bands attached to the sides. They too bore the strange inscriptions in an unknown language. Marasi picked one up, then looked over MeLaan’s shoulder into the other room, where the man in the mask slumped against his bars.

Marasi tucked the disc in her purse, then reached farther into the safe, taking out something she’d noticed earlier. A small set of keys. She stood up and strode through the room.

“Marasi?” MeLaan asked, sounding skeptical. “It might have some kind of disease.”

“He’s not an it,” Marasi said, stepping up to the cage.