He found himself facing down Governor Innate, who had taken out a sidearm and leveled it. “Damn it, Wax,” the governor said. “Just a few minutes more and I’d have had this. You see too far. You can always see a little too far.”
Wax froze there, hand on his gun. He met the governor’s eyes, and hissed out slowly. “You knew the passphrase,” Wax whispered, “but of course you did. I gave it to you. When did you kill him? How long has the city been ruled by an impostor?”
“Long enough.”
“The governor wasn’t your target. You think bigger than that—I should have seen. But Drim … He was in the saferoom when you entered below. Is that why you killed him? No. He’d have known you were gone.”
“He knew all along,” Bleeder said. “He was mine. But tonight, I killed him because of you, Wax. You’d shot me up…”
“You had on the governor’s clothing underneath the cloak,” Wax said. “Rusts! I’d bloodied you. So you needed an excuse for why the governor was covered in blood, an excuse to pull off your shirt and stanch a wound.”
She held the gun on him, immobile. The weapon didn’t register to his Allomancy. Aluminum. She was prepared, of course. But she seemed torn. She didn’t want to kill him. She’d never wanted to kill him, for some reason.
So Wax yelled for help.
It was risky, but nothing ever ended well when you obeyed the person with the gun on you. As he’d suspected, Bleeder didn’t shoot at him as the door burst open. Wax pulled out his gun and fired at Bleeder, to distract her as he dug in his gunbelt for the last needle that MeLaan had given him.
The guards turned their guns toward Wax and started firing.
Idiot, he thought, throwing himself toward the governor’s desk for cover. Of course they’d do that. “Wait!” he said. “The governor has been taken. Don’t—”
Bleeder gunned down the guards. Wax rolled behind the desk, but still heard it as they cried out in shock, their own governor—so far as they knew—shooting them down. Wax winced, cursing. Those deaths were upon him.
“I guess the rest of the constables will be upon us soon,” Bleeder said. “They’re not free yet. Neither are you, despite how I’ve tried.…”
Wax peeked up over the desk, then ducked down again as she swung the gun toward him. The governor’s face was twisted in a mask of anger and frustration.
“Why couldn’t you have given me a little longer?” she demanded. “So close. Now I have to kill you, claim you were the kandra, and blame you for shooting my guards. That way I can still talk to the crowd, free them.…”
Yet she didn’t come for him. She still seemed upset. Best to take advantage of that.
“MeLaan, go!” Wax shouted, then Pushed on the nails in the floor, flinging himself up into the air.
One of the corpses at Bleeder’s feet grabbed her around the legs.
Wax Pushed off the wall, leaping toward Bleeder. She growled, then slapped his hand as he landed, knocking the needle free. Rusts, she was strong. She kicked MeLaan off as Wax dove for the fallen needle.
She became a blur. As he tried to grab the needle, Bleeder snatched it and spun around, slamming it down into MeLaan’s shoulder. It was done in an eyeblink.
Then she lurched to a stop. She seemed jarred by the motion. Her metalmind storage, at long last, had run dry.
Wax pulled out his gun and fired, lying with his back on the floor. The bullets ripped her skin, but did nothing else. Nearby, MeLaan’s shape distorted—face drooping and the skin going transparent.
Wax lay on the ground, his emptied gun pointed at Bleeder, whose skin re-formed from the wounds. They stared at one another for an extended moment before boots in the hallway outside made Bleeder curse, then dash for the window. Wax grabbed his other gun, following, then threw himself down as shots sounded outside.
He waited a moment, then glanced up, but didn’t spot her in the swirling mists. Wax cursed, rolling his arm in its socket. Rusts. That bullet hole he’d taken earlier in the night was bleeding again, and the pain was returning. He thought he’d chewed enough painkiller to keep it away.
“You all right?” he asked MeLaan, who had managed to sit up.
“Yeah,” she said, though the word was mangled by her melted face. “I made them do this to me once to test it out. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
“Thanks for the save,” Wax said, anxiously scanning the room for hidden compartments with his steelsight. Quivering lines in the closet. Could he be so lucky? He rushed over and yanked it open.
Wayne—tied securely and gagged—tumbled out and hit the floor with a thump. He was alive, thank Harmony. Wax knelt down, sighed in relief, and loosened the gag. Wayne looked like he’d been stabbed in the leg, and his metalminds had been stripped away so he couldn’t heal, but he was alive.
“Wax!” Wayne said. “It’s the governor. Bugger’s got the same ‘a’ as MeLaan!”