He landed among the soldiers and flung them aside. He grabbed an aluminum pistol from one of their racks, loaded it, then waved to the masked people before hurling himself into the sky after the airship.

He was strong. Incredibly strong. The Bands, still clutched in his left hand, somehow gave him not just Allomancy, but ancient Allomancy. The potency of those who had lived long ago, during the time of the Lord Ruler. Perhaps even more. Was that possible?

What did you create? he wondered. And how long will it last?

His resources were diminishing. Not merely the metals inside of him, but the reserves stored inside the Bands. Stores that changed his level of Investiture.

He should have held back, he knew—reserved it for study, or for use in a future emergency—but rusts it was intoxicating. He reached the airship easily, despite only having a few shell casings to Push upon below. He soared up and landed on the ship’s nose, then smashed his hand through one of the windows to the bridge, any cuts healing immediately.

Inside, Suit sat alone. There was no sign of pilots, technicians, or servants. Just a wide, half-oval deck, not even carpeted, and Suit in a chair.

Wax climbed in and raised the aluminum pistol. His boots thumped on the wood. He did a quick scan. People in the hallway outside, he thought. And a bit of metal in Suit’s mouth. The old coin-in-the-mouth trick, a way to hide metal from an Allomancer. Anything inside the body was very hard to sense.

Unless you were bearing the very powers of creation, that is.

“And so,” Suit said, lighting his pipe, “our confrontation comes at long last.”

“Not much of a confrontation,” Wax said, still alight with power. “I could destroy you a hundred different ways right now, Uncle.”

“I don’t doubt that you could,” Suit said, shaking out his match, then puffing on the pipe. Trying to hide the coin. Talking around a pipe let him have a reason to sound odd. “And here I can only destroy you one way.”

Wax leveled his pistol.

Suit looked right at it and smiled. “Do you know why I’ve always beaten you, Nephew?”

“You haven’t beaten me,” Wax said. “You’ve refused to fight. That is an entirely different thing.”

“But sometimes the only way to win is to refuse to fight.”

Wax strode forward, wary of traps. He thought faster, moved faster than normal. The blue lines spread from him as a brilliant web, seeking sources of metal smaller—and farther away—than he could normally sense. At times this seemed to flicker, and for a moment he saw the radiance inside of each person and thing. It felt as if he might be able to move those too.

An awed voice in the back of his mind whispered, They’re all the same. Metal, minds, men, all the same substance…