Gemmel snorted. “When I’m done with you, you’ll be able to kill a hundred men with a single coin. You’ll be able to Pull a man’s own sword from his fingers and strike him down with it. You’ll be able to crush men within their armor, and you’ll be able to cut the air like the mists themselves. You will be a god. Waste your time with emotional Allomancy when I’m finished. For now, you kill.”

The bearded man loped back to the wall and glared at the keep. Kelsier slowly reined in his anger, rubbing his chest where he’d been forced to the ground.

And... something odd occurred to him. “How do you know what I was like in the old days, Gemmel?” Kelsier whispered. “Who are you?”

Lamps and limelights were lit in the night, their glow breaking out through windows into the curling mists. Gemmel hunkered beside his wall, whispering to himself again. If he heard Kelsier’s question, he ignored it.

“You should still be burning your metals,” Gemmel said as Kelsier approached.

Kelsier bit off a comment about not wanting to waste them. He’d explained that as a skaa child, he had learned to be very careful with resources. Gemmel had just laughed at that. At the time, Kelsier had assumed the laughter was due to Gemmel’s natural erratic nature.

But... was it because he knew the truth? That Kelsier hadn’t grown up a poor skaa on the streets? That he and his brother had lived lives of privilege, their halfbreed nature kept secret from society?

He hated the nobility, true. Their balls and parties, their prim self-satisfaction, their superiority. But he couldn’t deny, not to himself, that he belonged among them. At least as much as he did among the skaa of the streets.

“Well?” Gemmel said.

Kelsier ignited some the metals inside of him, burning several of the eight metal reserves he had within. He’d heard Allomancers speak of those reserves on occasion, but had never expected to feel them himself. They were like wells of energy he could draw upon.

Burning metals inside of him. How strange it sounded — yet how natural it felt. As natural as breathing in air and drawing strength from it. Each of those eight reserves enhanced him in some way.

“All eight,” Gemmel said. “All of them.” He’d be burning bronze to sense what Kelsier was burning.

Kelsier had only burned the four physical metals. Reluctantly, he burned the others. Gemmel nodded; now that Kelsier was burning copper, all signs of his Allomancy would have vanished to the other man. Copper, what a useful metal - it hid you from other Allomancers, and made you immune to their emotional Allomancy.