POV: wax
Summary
Wax rides alone inside the sealed Breaknaught in the dark, fake blood drying on his shoulder, the welded steel cargo box at his back. The fake paunch is gone; he wears utility trousers and a light jacket instead. He has unrolled his webbing of Marasi's fishing nets to the ceiling on industrial-tape hooks and hung a lamp on a corner hook. He spins Vindication's cylinder in his fingers, clicks the chamber-lock lever, and confirms a Coinshot round and a Pewterarm hazekiller round in its reserved chambers; the remaining six are ordinary. Two more of each hazekiller type are in his pocket. Wayne's pressure-detonator dynamite sits beside him.
He has the earring in. He aims a prayer at Harmony that is, he admits to himself, half an accusation — *you wanted me in this, here I am, I'll expect some help* — and concedes the Tekiels really did build a vault. The flaw, he reckons, is that they were thinking about it all wrong. The brakes start to bite. He fishes the pressure detonator into position.
The scene cuts to a hill above Carlo's Bend. Marasi, in a borrowed pair of Ranette's trousers that she feels improperly bare in, crouches beside Wayne with a spyglass against her eye and watches the railway curve below. The mists are forming — not rolling in over the ocean but sprouting in the air, the way frost grows on cold metal. *Wax will be happy*, Wayne mutters. A ghostly headlamp glides down the opposite tracks, far brighter than ordinary lamplight; she identifies the chemical-battery technology she has read about and the wooden engine facade behind it. The phantom is a hand-propelled rail wagon. The Tekiel train slows; guards spring out at the ready. Marasi smiles for a heartbeat. Maybe the heist will not happen after all.
Then the front of the phantom drops. A rotary gun mounted behind it opens up in a rapid pattern, scything down most of the guards in seconds. Marasi unslings her rifle. Wayne gently puts a hand on the barrel and pushes it back down — *you really think you can hit one of them from up here, in the mists?* — and reminds her the rotary will answer any muzzle flash she gives away. She accepts it. She turns the spyglass on the canal.
A great dark shape glides down the water like a leviathan, half-veiled in mist. A stiff leg lifts and clamps to the shore for stabilisation (and Marasi recognises the rectangular impression in the dirt they had found earlier in the Outer Estates). A long arm rises out of the dark mass, swings, hooks the Breaknaught off the rails. A second crane arm on the opposite side holds counter-ballast; the barge tilts in the water but stops, suggesting an extendable section bottoming out on the canal floor. The arm sets the vault car onto the barge and plucks a near-identical replica off, lowering it carefully into place on the tracks while men on the ground guide the couplings. The phantom headlamp has gone dark and the platform is already racing back the way it came. Marasi turns to Wayne in alarm — Wax is in that car — and they scramble down the hill for the horses.
The scene cuts to the front of the Machine. Miles stands with hands clasped behind him as the barge glides back toward the city under tarps that disguise it as a stone-quarry shipment, with a real shipping manifest and dock authorisation prepared for it. Tarson reports the engineers and a few extra Tekiel guards in the rear passenger car put down. Miles answers, with no satisfaction, that the cargo is not yet clean — Wax is inside the Breaknaught. He does not know the method, but he knows the man; staying with the cargo is exactly what a lawkeeper of his stripe would do. He considers sinking the vault car in the canal for the satisfaction of drowning him — the canal here is only fourteen feet deep, however, and another barge's keel would expose the trick before they could recover it. They sail past the great rising lattices of Tekiel Tower and the Ironspine, skirting streetlights in the mist, and dock at the Ironspine's private freight branch. Miles's two Set minders, who introduce themselves as Push the Coinshot and Pull the Lurcher, stand silently at his side.
The dock's stationary crane swings the disguised vault car off the barge and onto a platform. The platform shudders and drops one storey into the foundry hall beneath the building, where the half-built tunnel for Suit's underground railway yawns off into the dark. Miles could wait the twelve hours for the lock to time out, but he intends to be gone in twelve hours and Wax is too close. He orders the Breaknaught chained in place against the wall and its vault door hooked to the electric winch that runs the lift. He pulls two more aluminum revolvers off a rack that holds almost no guns left, distributes the last of the aluminum rounds, and tells his men to fire on anything that twitches the moment the door comes off. Push is annoyed only to learn now what is inside; Miles tells him he is welcome to the chance.
The winch grinds. The vault door buckles in its mountings, bolts springing free — one slices Miles' cheek and the cut closes itself — and finally the door rips clean across the room and skids to a halt between the men. Miles stills his breath and aims into the dark, ready. *Come on, Wax. Play your hand.* Then he sees the thin string trailing from the fallen door back into the dark interior of the car. Tape. Dynamite. *Aw, hell.* Someone hidden behind the cargo box pulls the string tight.