POV: wayne
Summary
Wayne hobbles through the platform crowd as Abrigain, a frail elderly woman in a patched coat that drops to her ankles, a once-fashionable felt cap, dockworker-thick spectacles. The accent is Margothian District — a part of Elendel that has been swallowed by the industrial quarter and no longer really exists; a dying accent for a dying woman. He hands out candies to small boys to remind himself they are his Abrigain's grandchildren and lets the contagious-sounding cough clear his path to the front of the press of gawkers.
There, Tekiel's new Breaknaught sits open for the public to admire: a freight car built to vault-bank standards, six-inch steel walls, shiny rounded corners, a vault-style door with a rotating wheel lock, and an inner cargo box welded to the floor — also welded shut. The Tekiel guard captain on duty puffs out his chest. The door, he explains, engages a clockwork mechanism the moment it closes that nobody — guard, owner, robber — can open for twelve hours, regardless of the code. Explosives would destroy the contents before they could breach six inches of steel. A Coinshot could not Push hard enough to budge it. And eight guards will be riding inside. Abrigain remarks she once rode a railway car at her grandson's insistence to meet his bride in Covingtar, and is not impressed by progress that locks you up in a box. She asks one too many questions about the guards' guns, and the captain narrows his eyes.
Abrigain remembers her tea, turns, shoves through the crowd. The captain hollers for someone to stop the woman. Wayne stops pretending to be old, fires a blank from his cane (his hand wobbling on the trigger as always, even on blanks), and as the crowd drops to the ground in a wave of panic he hops over them and rounds the corner of the station building.
There he opens a speed bubble and reverses out the gentleman's costume he had built into Abrigain's bust: a black coat, white shirt, red cravat, a collapsible top hat, a Madion Ways aristocratic accent picked up off the richest area of the First Octant where House Tekiel owns the land. The wig goes by the wall. The makeup comes off on a wet rag. He strips off the long Abrigain coat, untargets the cane (the outer layer rips away to reveal black underneath), and steps back around the corner as a furious young Tekiel cousin who has just been *shoved out of the way* by some Vanisher impostor. He berates the captain at full aristocratic volume for abandoning his post chasing the impostor, demands more guards, and sends the captain running back to organise the men.
A pause, a glance about for clear sightlines, a second bubble. Off comes the hat, the fake nose, the gentleman's suit. He reverses the jacket into a brown-and-yellow guard uniform, slips a soldier's triangular cap on instead of the topper (the hat, he reminds himself, does most of the work of a costume), straps on a handgun. He drops out of the bubble and saunters back to the captain as Farnsward Dubs, an officer from the Outer Estates sent over by Lord Evenstrom — a fictional gentleman Wayne invents on the spot complete with a chronically ill backstory and a tendency to send help where none is needed. The captain, frazzled, accepts him without argument.
Cued in, Wax ducks out of the station in a matching guard uniform with a sizable false paunch sewn into the coat to hide the gear he will need on the journey. He plays the role of *Bren*, Farnsward's dull-minded subordinate whose father left him the position. A volley of rifle cracks comes from a nearby rooftop and Wax drops to the platform clutching his shoulder, fake blood spraying. From a rooftop opposite Marasi is firing carefully wide — wide enough to ricochet off the girder near Wayne, who notes irritably that every woman he meets seems to want to shoot at him a little. Wayne drags the *wounded* guard into the open door of the Breaknaught, shoves him over the threshold, kicks the counterbalance, and slams the great vault door shut on top of him before anyone thinks to stop him. The clockwork engages with a settling click.
The firing on the rooftops stops. The other guards, who have all lost friends in skirmishes, accept that you get the wounded under cover and you do not stop to ask where. The captain runs over horrified — *there were supposed to be soldiers inside!* — and Wayne convinces him the soldiers had been trying to get in *as the gang was attacking* and that closing the door was the only thing that stopped them. The captain, knowing he will be the one blamed if it turns out otherwise, repeats Wayne's words verbatim to the noblemen storming over to him.
Guards comb the area and find scattered rifle casings on a dozen rooftops — most of them blank casings, planted earlier by beggar boys Wayne had paid in advance, along with planted stories of men jumping into carriages and riding off. Inside an hour, House Tekiel has convinced itself it has just driven off a major Vanisher raid and sends the Breaknaught on its way toward Doxonar after all. There is even talk of a commendation for Wayne; he deflects the glory toward the captain and slips out of the station before anyone can ask which lord retains him.