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Miles walks the dark tunnel between the dorms and the forging hall of the new underground lair with Mister Suit, who chastises him for having let Wax see his face on the train. Miles answers that he was not about to shoot Wax in the back — Wax deserves more than that — though he does not mention to Suit the round he had earlier fired from behind glass, nor the cloth of the mask his bullet had driven into his eye socket. Suit still suspects he let Wax escape on purpose. Miles knows in himself that this is no longer about the robberies; it is Roughs justice — one of them dies, and that settles it. They were never friends.

Suit reminds him that he is becoming a liability and that the Set are losing patience. The disastrous loss of aluminum at the wedding has left the Vanishers nearly destitute — Miles had been intending to use that aluminum to fund his own operations, and is back where he started. Suit sets the night's terms: rob the Tekiel vault freight car, take no hostages, and surrender half the take to operations the Set will not explain. After that go to ground for six months and recruit. They will discuss whether the *Vanishers* theatrics are still necessary on the other side.

To make sure he holds to it — and to make sure Wax does not survive the night — Suit attaches two black-coated minders, a Coinshot and a Lurcher, who answer to the Set and not to him. The captive Steris stays at the lair tonight as bait; they do not want to move her while Wax has her trail. Suit himself is leaving the city on his regular train and will be back when it is safer; Miles notes privately that he has been tracking those trains.

Out on the foundry floor Miles looks over the Machine — part crane, part barge, the contraption that explains the phantom-railcar trick — and what is left of his gang. Most of the original Vanishers are gone; the remaining thirty are loading the last of the aluminum-rifled guns. Tarson and Clamps are still with him; only Tarson is really loyal, the rest of them in it for thrill or pay. He swings off the balcony rail to the floor twenty feet below for the pleasure of feeling one leg pop and immediately re-knit before it can finish breaking. His two minders drop in beside him — the Coinshot flicks a coin and slows on it, the Lurcher Pulls himself softly down off a ceiling crossbeam.

On a whim he burns gold — the Augur's metal he usually ignores in favour of his Feruchemical healing. Beside him a second self forms, the Miles he had been: a hard Roughs lawman in a white duster and tinted spectacles. The Miles he is now wears a city worker's buttons and suspenders, walks with a slouch, and does not remember when that began. He can think both sets of thoughts at once. The lawman loathes the criminal. The criminal hates the lawman for letting other men dictate his rules and for swatting mosquitoes while a city bled out. He cuts the burn short, leaning heavily against the wall. He sends his babysitters off to sweep his men for stray metal.

He digs his old Roughs duster and trousers out of a trunk and changes into them. If he is an outlaw now, he will at least walk the road with his back straight. *Let them see me for what I am.*

The chapter cuts to a side room of Ranette's townhome. Wax has hammered nails directly into her fine woodwork (she gave him a hammer instead of an easel) to hang his planning pad and is reading shipping manifests Wayne pilfered from the railway clerks (he left a borrowed pistol in their place by way of trade, to the puzzlement of whoever finds it). House Tekiel is sending a vault-style freight car of aluminum out toward Doxonar that night, a public response to months of robberies that read very much like a dare. The route bends in tight to a canal at Carlo's Bend. That is where Miles will hit. Wax measures the distance, marks 35.17 on the pad, sketches out the phantom-railcar trick — a false front and headlamp on a moving platform, run on misty nights to keep eyes off whatever the canal is bringing up behind.

Marasi comes back with the fishing nets, reads his notes (and Wayne's doodles of an unflatteringly ugly Wax in the corners), and gently presses him on whether they should hand all this to the constables. He answers that Miles is not an ordinary criminal and a constable flood will scare him off. He is arrogant for thinking he can do this himself; he is also right. The contingency is Ranette mailing his prepared letter to the precinct if he fails. He tells Marasi her part will be the hilltop, not the train car, with Wayne.

They play a quiet game of guessing one another's thoughts. She reads him fluently — that he thinks her young, that he is glad she insists on staying because he will use the resources he has, that he worries her tendency to fluster will be used against him. He answers with a story about Paclo the Dusty, his pre-Wayne deputy, the easiest man to startle he ever met, who once stared down six guns without breaking a sweat. The measure of a person is what they make of what life has shown them. She then asks, very softly, whether he can guess what else she is thinking. He can. He steers them onto the question of a rifle for the night instead, and lets the other thing go unsaid. She withdraws blushing. He admires the work she has done reading him; she admits with some embarrassment that the university psychologist Murnbru — whom Wax had known as a sketchy red-wearing gambling cheat passing through town — had written him a profile she had read.

Alone again, Wax slips his Pathian earring into his ear. He is supposed to wear it when praying or when doing something of great import. Tonight, he reckons, will be both.