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Wax increases his weight a tenfold, flares steel, and Pushes the doors between cars off their hinges, slamming them backward into Miles' fire. Children in the compartments cry; he cannot risk the bullets in this corridor. He bursts out into the howling space between the cars and Pushes off the couplers below, launching himself up over the train. The wind carries him several cars back and drops him on a roof. He kneels, gun ready. He is suddenly aware, with full force, of what fighting Miles actually means.

Miles climbs the roof ten feet away with one of his preferred big-bore aluminum pistols. The fight that follows runs the tops of the railcars at full speed. Wax takes the first round across the side; he answers with a shot to Miles' left eye socket and a second through the forehead. Miles reaches up and tears off the mask, revealing the hawk-like face and short black hair Wax already knew was under it. The eye regrows. The forehead closes itself. He is a Compounder of gold, drawing on his stored health tenfold; bullets to the gut tear in and out of him at point-blank range without giving him pause. His goldminds are bolt-like spikes driven through the skin of his forearms — metal that pierces flesh is notoriously hard for a Steelpusher to Push. He is virtually immortal so long as the gold holds out.

Miles preaches as they fight, between punches and shots. Fifteen years he gave True Madil and nothing got better, because the rot was never in the Roughs; the criminals were the city's trash dumped out for somebody else to handle. The city never sent help. He is no traitor — he is still a lawkeeper, just one who has set his sights on a more powerful brand of criminal. What he is doing now, he insists, is the essence of the law fused with real justice, *an alloy of the two*. He cites Pars the Deadman, a city murderer Wax had hunted at great cost in the Roughs, as proof that the city neither saw nor cared. Wax tells him he has become a monster. Miles answers that Wax's eyes show he knows it is right; Wax has always been a good hound. He is not asking him to join.

Wax takes a beating: punches to the gut and across the face, a knife jammed through Miles' own forearm so the man can hold it and grapple at once, Miles's indifference to pain after a lifetime of injuries that should have killed him. Wax makes himself a tenfold heavier to drive Miles off him; he Pushes off rails behind a passing tree to leap clear; he blasts Miles' good gun off the roof. He cannot beat Miles here. He needs to throw him off the train and pick the fight again in a place of his choosing.

He dumps his weight into his metalmind and lets the wind drag him to the last car. Miles turns and starts back along the train calling out that he will go take care of *Lady Harms the bastard* and put a bullet in Wayne on the way — he has been wanting an excuse to. Wax hurls himself back along the train with a Push off the rails, lands hard with weight maxed, denting a roof into a crater around himself. He flips his revolver open as if to reload; a casing pops up into the air; he catches one and tosses it underhand to Miles. *Goodbye*, he says. Miles catches the cartridge in mid-air and Wax slams the hardest Push he has into it. The Push transfers through the casing into Miles, rips his fist into his own chest, and hurls him off the moving train into the rocky ground beyond a curve. Wax lies on the roof, ears ringing, side bleeding, and rides the train into the next country station.

The country station is owned and run by a minor cadet of the local house. Wax sits shirtless on a bench with a bandage pressed to his side while apprentices work metal jammed by Miles out of the locks of the passenger car where Wayne and Marasi are sealed in. The engineer's beard and flat-topped cap shake as he explains his orders are not to stop the train for anything, *the Vanishers get you when you stop*; Wax tells him that this once it had been the right rule. He needs the train moving again as soon as it can be cleared: Miles is not a steel Feruchemist, but he can run the hour back to the station — and the Compounder of gold may not even feel the distance.

Marasi bursts in. She freezes at the bloody bandage and reddens at the shirtlessness in roughly equal measure, mumbles three half-sentences in panic, and decides she should perhaps leave the room. Wax tells her, gently, that university broad-curriculum rules under Harmony's mandate included basic surgery and full anatomy classes, which Wayne cheerfully misunderstands and which Marasi has been teased about by every classmate she has ever had. She steadies herself, kneels by the bench, peels back the bandage, pronounces the wound in need of stitches, then admits she has never sewn a live person before. *Eh*, Wayne tells her, *I trained on dummies before beating up real people, same thing.*

She counts the scars on his chest — seven — and admits, blushing, that the university's reports of him list only five; she will need the story of the other two at some point. Wayne observes that getting shot is not in itself a skill. They press on: Wayne tells Wax flatly the only real way to kill Miles is to get the metalminds off him, all thirty of which are spiked through his skin and which he is constantly drawing on (it is dangerous, by reputation, to stop a Compounder mid-cycle). They will need somewhere safe to plan. Wayne grins. Wax gives in to the Ranette question.