POV: wax
Summary
Wax's shotgun blasts on Miles would normally do nothing — until his body kicks the birdshot back out and Wax catches a fleeting Push anchor on the falling metal, hurling Miles into the wall. The Coinshot Pushes himself clear. Wax skids to a stop next to Marasi behind the vault car in the foundry hall in his mistcoat, feeling better than he has any right to — he always does in the mists. Miles bellows across the floor that his men are off to murder the woman Wax came to save and offers him a trade. Wayne reappears behind them in a speed bubble cutting Miles' voice off; his left arm is bandaged where he was shot up above, his healing reserves are nearly gone, his metalminds are dry, and he is *slowing too much*.
They cannot reach Miles until the Coinshot is dead, and Wax has one ceramic-tipped Coinshot round left and no gun that will fire it. He drops the bubble, steps out, tosses the bullet into the air ahead of him, and Pushes it at Push. The Coinshot Pushes the casing back at Wax with casual confidence. The casing flips harmlessly aside; the ceramic tip keeps flying and takes Push in the eye. *Bless you, Ranette.*
Wax launches himself off the coins in a fallen Vanisher's pocket into the unfinished underground railway tunnel beyond the hall. A stair leads up into a wooden hideout the gang built over the tunnel — a barrack of sorts. He kicks open the door, climbs to the upper floor, and tears the place apart from the inside. He Pushes the nails out of the floorboards under armed Vanishers stepping out of their rooms; their footing fails and their aim with it. He fires twin shotguns through doorways. He Pushes himself out a shutter, runs sideways along the building's outside wall on Pushes off lampposts, and crashes feet-first through the next window. He disintegrates an internal wall by Pushing every nail in it into the room beyond, turning nails into a storm of shrapnel. He blasts through a locked door at the top and finds Steris sitting in a rumpled ball gown on a bench and the missing gunsmith Nouxil cowering in the corner. None of the other kidnapped women are with them; the gang had sent them elsewhere.
He pitches Nouxil out a hole in the back wall toward the canal on a Pushed shotgun, grabs Steris, Pushes them up through the ceiling on a shotgun-blast hole, then in the air drains every last charge of his iron metalmind in one moment — hundreds of stored hours of weight focused on one downward Push. The frame's every nail rips into the floor at once. The whole wooden building crushes itself down into the tunnel below in a single thunder. Smashed lumber rains around him. He fires the last shell in his shotgun across three Vanishers who happen to still be standing in the tunnel mouth, looking up at him in disbelief. Steris clings to him with parted lips and flushed cheeks; she does not look terrified. She looks aroused. *You are a bizarre woman, Steris.*
He hands her the spent shotgun and Pushes her up out of the wreckage on it toward the constabulary at Fifteenth and Ruman — if she meets trouble she is to fire it and he will hear the shot. She runs off into the mist. Wax creeps deeper into the tunnel toward the firelight at the other end. He sees Miles standing back with a figure holding Marasi at the gun-point. Then he realises it is Tarson holding her, with the Pewterarm careful to keep her between himself and Wax. Wax cannot get a clean shot at the head, and a wound that doesn't kill instantly will leave Tarson enough reflex to fire into Marasi's skull. Wayne is at his shoulder, also out of ideas. The Sterrion in Wax's hand is the same gun that killed Lessie. Miles starts counting.
*Wayne!* The speed bubble snaps up. Wax fires one bullet wide on purpose to one side; outside the bubble it will deflect and slow erratically, as bullets always do passing the boundary. He waits, judging the new trajectory of the deflected round in slow motion. Then he tells Wayne *drop it on my mark*, fires a second bullet, Pushes it hard enough to catch the first in mid-flight, and lets the deflection take it past Marasi's head into Tarson's. The bubble drops. Tarson drops with it, stone dead. *Aw, biscuits*, Wayne mutters; that was his lucky hat.
Miles is half-naked and unarmed and the only one of them still standing. Wax keeps him occupied with revolver fire to the mouth and face — driving out chips of tooth, holding his attention — while Wayne slips away to execute the backup plan. The backup plan rests on one cold premise: every other Vanisher in the place has to be dead first, so no straggler can shoot Wax through a bubble. Miles beats Wax bloody as the rounds run out and the brawl turns hand-to-hand. Wax cannot fight a man who does not flinch when you hit him. Miles kicks him to the muddy floor of the tunnel and lectures him as he goes down: people are murdered every day in Elendel; Wax has come out of retirement only because a would-be aristocratic wolfhound was shot; he is just a sword for whichever lords hold the haft. Wax, against himself, nods. Miles tells him he will not live long enough to start helping properly. He kicks again.
Marasi breaks cover from behind. She kneels at the beaten Wax's side, defies Miles aloud — *the greatest of men can be taken down by the simplest of things*, *I'll bring you down myself* — and drops her own speed bubble around herself and Miles alone. Buying Wayne the minutes he needs.
Outside the bubble, daylight is pouring into the broken pit at the tunnel's other end. The bubble falls onto more than a hundred constables already at the tunnel mouth, Wayne at their head in a borrowed uniform, false moustache, constable's hat. *Get 'im, boys!* Miles tries to flee for the rim of the just-fallen bubble; the constables take him down with clubs by weight of numbers and tie and gag him as he screams *I defy your oppression*. Wax sits up, one eye swelling shut, blood on his lip. He tells Miles quietly that he broke the oldest law in the Roughs — *the more alone you are, the more important it is to have someone you can rely upon.*