POV: wayne
Summary
Wayne steps off the train behind Wax and Marasi at a country station in the Outer Estates, tosses the carriage driver a fat coin to wait, and admires the felt cap with a feather the driver wears. He trades his broadsheet-boy cap and a half-eaten pretzel from his pocket for it; the driver looks at the size of the coin and decides not to argue. The new cap does not fit very well. The Outer Estates make Wayne's shoulders itch — the kind of place where a man drinks lemonade on his porch and pets his dog, the kind of place men die of boredom in, somehow more confining than a cell. He sneezes as he tops up his healing metalmind in trickles through the day; he prefers binge-filling, which makes him miserably sick all at once and then over, but a trickle leaves him with enough on hand if anyone gets shot.
They hike out to the site of the most recent robbery. The tracks bend in tight against the canal here, the canal wide and deep for barges into the city. Wax traces the rails with his hand and notes that every robbery has happened beside water. Wayne watches Wax's accent shifting — six months back in the city and the city is already in his voice, more refined in some ways, less formal in others — and notes that Marasi is reaching higher diction around Wax than around him.
Wax lays out the math. The freight cars were locked, and some had guards inside; hundreds of iron ingots were stripped out of one of them and through the bottlenecked car door inside the time the engineers were stopped — no crew of men could have managed it on muscle alone. A bendalloy speed-bubble would not solve it either; you could fit only six workers in one of Wayne's, you would still be bottlenecked at the door, and the cost in bendalloy to compress enough time to clear the car would be ten thousand notes — far more than the iron is worth. Machinery. They are using something built for the job, and shipping it in and out by water; that is the rectangular impression he found in the dirt where something heavy was set down off a barge. The machinery rides the canals; the canals dock under the foundry; that is the shape of the operation.
Wayne, bored with flowers and dirt, drifts over to Marasi and tries to ask after her Allomancy by way of an unsuccessful detour through compliments — *nice bounce in the cloud area*, *pretty through the coppers*, no, he likes women who could take his face off with a roundhouse — which earns him a horrified blush. He gets to the point. The two of them have opposite powers. What happens when both burn at once? Documented, she answers: they cancel out and nothing happens. He admires the elegance of the most expensive nothing in the world. She confesses her Pulser ability is genuinely useless next to his Slider one — any time she uses it, she freezes in place while everyone else moves at normal speed — and admits, embarrassed, that she has burned chromium to make a tedious day arrive faster. He thinks she is selling it short, and quietly nudges her toward Wax. Wax likes them smart, he says. She declares she has no intentions toward Lord Ladrian, *too quickly*. Wayne is satisfied. Wax needs Lessie's ghost off him, and a new attachment would help; he is privately pleased when Marasi wanders over to Wax at the canal a few minutes later and finds the rectangular impression with him.
On the train back, Wax walks the centre aisle of the first-class car after washing his hands in a washroom six cars distant, turning the case over. Miles is too careful to keep robbing right now; the prior pattern was months of silence between large jobs. He has, however, lost a great deal of aluminum and many men, and will need one quick final heist to refit before vanishing — which gives Wax exactly one last chance to catch him. He is leaning against the corridor wall thinking when a faint scream from somewhere ahead snaps him alert; an instant later a bullet smashes through the glass at the end of the railcar. He throws himself sideways and the round splits the air where his head was.
Through the broken window in the next car stands a figure in black, knit cloth over the lower face, eyes exposed, holding the gun the same way Miles holds his. Wax sees the mistake too late. A common bandit lies low after a near-miss. Miles is not a common bandit; he is a lawman gone wrong, used to hunting rather than being hunted, and if you twist his plans he comes looking for whoever twisted them.