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“So we catch up,” Steris said, rapping her pencil against the clipboard. “What’s next?” Admittedly,shedid look adorable in her oversized goggles and military-caliber vest over her tea gown. He also noticed his cravat sticking out of the pocket of her dress.

“Spectroscopy,” Wax said in response to her question. “Let’s burn some flakes.”

“Wait,” Marasi said. “You couldn’t get it to melt—how are you going toburnit?”

He took a file to the clamped spike, catching the shavings on a piece of thick cardstock. “Most metals will burn, Marasi, if you can get the pieces small enough and can apply enough oxygen. We’ve managed it with harmonium, even though we couldn’t melt it fully.”

“That’s… strange, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Indeed,” Wax said. “But we are, as has been noted, talking about the bodies of gods.”

He set up the spectroscope and managed to burn some flakes, using the oxygen line, to take some readings. Then he heated a piece again to get it to emit light waves and took readings on that. The machine made a pen move on a piece of paper, like a seismograph—only here, the highs and lows represented frequencies of light. Those patterns of light corresponded to different elements.

In this case, strangely, he got a straight-across line—a full spectrum. Though at the end of the spectrum, in the red, the machine tried to send the line higher than the maximum. Which shouldn’t have been possible, for all that he’dseen it once before.

He unscrewed the pin holding the arm in place on the paper and reran the machine. Again a full spectrum at maximum—into the red, where the pin on the arm swung out and off the paper with a jerk.

Wax breathed out. “Seems proof it’s a God Metal.”

“Indeed,” Steris said, scribbling notes in the darkness.

“Someone tell the dumb conner what’s happening,” Marasi said. “How is this proof of anything?”

“It’s complicated,” Wax said. “Each element has a kind of signature, represented by the wavelengths it releases when heated. It’s basically a way to identify elements and compounds. Like using fingerprints to identify a person.”

“And this metal,” Steris said, “somehow projects afull spectrum,as if it were made of pure white light. But it also has something strange happening in the red, as if it has a light beyond what the machine can calculate or read.”

“I’ve only seen something like this once before,” Wax said.

“From harmonium?” Marasi guessed.

“Yes.” He tapped the table, then shook his head. “In dealing with these metals, so many things seem to break the laws of physics. I feel like I’m experimenting with something dangerously beyond our understanding.”

“Should we move to the safe box?” Steris asked.

“Probably wise,” Wax said. “Particularly since the next step is to put some of these shavings into acids.”

The “safe box” was Steris’s name for the small reinforced box they’dbuilt into the back wall. Three feet square and three feet deep, it was made out of aluminum and steel, with a large safe-like door on the front. That door had a small plate of very thick glass at the top, so you could look in. This contraption could take a grenade without trouble, and had handled an ettmetal-water explosion before.

Harmonium—ettmetal—was highly unstable. You needed to keep it in oil, as it tended to react even to theair.Since they couldn’t know how trellium would respond to his acids, Wax set everything up inside the box, then latched it closed. From there, he could use some thin arms on gears inside to tip a little bit of trellium into each of the ten flasks of acid—and two flasks of a base.

Harmonium wasn’t affected by acids, but maybe this metal would be. Anything to give him more of a foothold, help him understand. As he worked, Marasi walked over to the wall where Steris and he had pinned ideas, experiments, and thoughts regarding harmonium. Rusts… the oldest of those were over five years old now. Wax found it depressing to realize how little progress they’dmade.

“All of this,” Marasi said, reading the notes. “I don’t think I’ve lookedat it closely before… You’re trying to split it.” She spun toward him. “You’ve been trying todivideharmonium into its base metals? You’re trying to create atium!”

He looked back into his viewer, continuing to dump flakes into the acid.

“Not just atium…” Marasi said. “Lerasium too? That’s the metal that… ItcreatedMistborn! It’s explained in the records left by Harmony. Allomancy entered the world because the Lord Ruler gave lerasium to some of his followers, who burned it and were changed. Those first mythical Mistborn—they held incredible power. You’re trying to replicate that.”

“No,” Wax said. “I’m trying to see if itcan bereplicated.”

“All these years,” Marasi said, “and you never told me why you kept needing ettmetal? I thought you were trying to figure out how to make airships, like everyone else!”

“We’ve barely made any progress,” Wax said, finishing with the acids and turning away from the safe box. “But Marasi, don’t you see? The Set is devoted to restoring the ancient powers to people—they’ll use eugenics, Hemalurgy,anything.So if it’s possible to make lerasium again,weneed to know about it.”

“You still could have told me,” she said.

“I wanted to have something useful to show first,” Wax said. He walked over to join her, passing Steris, who was fiddling with the trellium spike. Beside Marasi, he looked up at the wall of pinned ideas again. Remembered how thrilling it had been when first working on harmonium.