On the twenty-second floor, at the end of a long hallway, the building manager used a set of keys to open a door into a large apartment. He gestured for them to enter, with a grunt.
“Anyone else been in here?” Wax asked.
“No,” the manager said.
“He’s been gone for two weeks,” Wax said. “And nobody came looking? No constables? No family?”
The manager shook his head, grunted, then left them—apparently wanting nothing to do with constables.
“Wonder what his problem is,” Marasi said, shutting the door behind them.
“Dunno,” Wayne said. “But whatever he has, at least it seems noncommunicative.”
Wax walked to the center of the room. One wall had narrow floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, with steel girders between. The wall to its right was filled with bookshelves. There was a stylish sitting area to the left, with a smart yellow rug and black furniture. Everything was exceptionally neat, though keeping your place clean was probably easy when you was either dead or vanished.
“So,” Marasi said, “they grabbed him or killed him. Then left this apartment alone and visibly pristine. Trap?”
“Trap,” Wax said, with a nod. “Give me a minute to use Allomancy to scan about.”
Turned out it’s really tough to make an explosive trap withoutsomemetal, even using modern clay explosives. They found three tripwires and one pressure plate, each hooked to a doozy of a grenade. The Set evidently didn’t care about a little collateral damage.
“So, whoever you’re chasing,” Kim said, wringing her hands nervously, “they got here before us. Rusts. I didn’t know what I was in for…”
“They were undoubtedly behind Copper’s disappearance,” Wax said. “Be careful, everyone. There might be a trap we missed. Kim, would you encourage anyone in the neighboring apartments to leave for the next hour?”
She left to do so, and the rest of them set to some familiar work: going over a scene for clues. Kim returned a short time later while Wayne was inspecting the writing desk near the bookshelves. She knelt down beside him, looking up at the bottom as he knocked for secret compartments.
“Um…” she said, still acting uncertain, “I did as you asked. But… why are we bothering to search? Your enemy has been over this place thoroughly.”
“Sure,” Wayne said. “I can even prove it. See these little drill holes? You make those to beextrasure there’s no secret compartments, but only if you want to leave the furniture in one piece. Which is less fun… but sometimes there are good reasons. Like if you want the room to look normal to a bunch of constables when they visit, so they’ll be more likely to get themselves exploded.”
“So what is there to learn?”
“Well, you see, this is a kind of fight,” Wayne said. “A back-and-forth. A dance. They set those traps in case someone dangerous got wind of the Set. You don’t need to blow up ordinary constables. Just theextraordinary kind.”
“Like you?”
“Hell no,” Wayne said, then pointed to Marasi, searching through books, then to Wax, knocking against the far wall and listening for compartments. “You see those two? They represent the best of two worlds. Wax, now, he’s instinct. He’s lived a lot, been shot at a lot. He didn’t have the schooling to be a constable—he spent his school years learning from Terris scholars about old things people wrote a long time ago.
“But Marasi, she’s knowledge. She’s spent her lifestudyinghow to do this sort of nonsense. Sometimes I think she must have read more books on being a constable than have ever actually been written. She talks of crime patterns, preventing chains of poverty, and smart things what make you think maybe being a constable is aboutmath.
“Put the two of them together, and you’ve got both. Instinct and knowledge. Practice and application. The enemy, they looked this place over, sure. They had first crack at it. But they left bombs. That whispers that they’re worried they missed something. And so the dance, the fight. Canwefind what they didn’t?”
“Curious,” she said. “And what do you add to the team?”
“Comic relief.”
She cocked an eyebrow.
“Maybe a little whimsy,” he said. “Improvisation. Vision.”
“You have a broad imagination, then?”
“There are broads in my imagination almost all the time.”
That provoked a smile. Seemed like a nice enough person, when she wasn’t pretending. Course, she was probably a traitor of some sort. Shame about that.
“Hey, Wax,” Wayne said. “Look at this.”