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Wax, still on the floor of the private compartment with Steris and the ledgers, hears the train slowing and the chugging behind retreating, and lights up his Allomantic steel. As the gunman's shot comes down the hallway he Pushes it sideways into the wall and drops the earring he had been about to put in, blaming VenDell under his breath. A second Push throws him out of the compartment; he kills the man on the platform with a single shot from Vindication. The platform reveals the trick: their car has been uncoupled from the train and is drifting along the tracks while three riders pace alongside it on horseback. *Horses?* he thinks, almost insulted — nobody really robs trains on horseback anymore. He picks off one rider, the other two break off shouting *Allomancer!*, and he understands that this is a full-blown armed robbery of the whole train, not a hit on him.

He hurries the servants and his sister-in-law into the cramped servants' compartment under Marasi's watch, then drops onto the tracks behind their stalled car, weights himself enormously, and Pushes the car along after the rest of the train in lurching, body-jarring stages until the couplers slam home. Inside again he reloads, takes Ranette's shotgun and two of her hook spheres off his bunk, and warns Marasi of two things that bother him: the bandits wear no masks, and they board a moving train on horseback like a story-magazine cover. Either they are first-timers or someone put them up to it.

Wax launches himself out the window and over the train, lands on the dining car, drops between cars and clears the bandits on the rear platform of the next one — only to find his vials of metal smashed by a punch from a robber. Steris silently passes him three more from her purse — steel flakes suspended, she clarifies, in cod-liver oil, because whiskey is bad for him and *a wife must look out for her husband's health*. He chokes one down, takes the others, and leaps out to scout the rest of the train.

He drops onto the courier car at the front — a payroll shipment for a weapons firm, disguised as ordinary cargo — and finds the bandits already inside, in strange masks, blasting open the safe. He clears most of them out, but an explosion finishes the safe before he can stop it. He pulls a wounded guard out of the carnage and into the next car. A thin man with a cane stands on the rear platform of the courier car directing the bandits, who tell him the safe's metal doors had been ripped off their hinges. So the robbers have a Coinshot of their own.

A bandit nearly seven feet tall lumbers into the second-class car after Wax — and a small metal cube tumbles down the hallway and stops near him. Nothing detonates. The horror is what *doesn't* happen: his steel reserves are simply gone. The cube has stripped his Allomancy without touching him.

Cut to Marasi. She fights her way forward through the train with Wax's cartridge-wheel rifle and a pair of wax earplugs Steris hands her unprompted — passing through cars of shaken second-class passengers, bandaging a young man who'd stood up to a robber and been shot for it, batting away Drewton's increasingly aggrieved discovery that *this sort of thing happens often* in this household. (*Except when the house blew up*, Steris adds; the new valet's question about his predecessor goes unanswered.) She kills a bandit using a passenger as a meat-shield with one shot to the forehead and feels sick about it, hands the rifle to a competent first-class passenger to hold the back of the train, and pushes forward looking for her sister, who has slipped off to follow Wax.

In a car deserted save for bodies, she meets the thin man with the cane herself. He calls her *quite capable indeed*, asks her with strange interest whether she is a Metalborn, and raises his hand at her — clutching something small. She has a cadmium dose burning and her unspectacular Pulser speed bubble ready. The train lurches before he can act. He drops to the floor, fumbles to his feet, and flees, leaving behind the small carved metal cube he had been holding. Marasi pockets the cube and presses forward.

Back to Wax in the second-class car. Caught without metals, he rips free of his gunbelts, dodges the brute's wall-cracking punches, and bails out the window onto the rooftop. The brute, grinning, climbs up after him with Wax's gunbelt and pulls out Ranette's enormous shotgun — but the recoil rips the gun out of his fingers and breaks his thumb, exactly as Ranette had warned. Wax grabs the dropped gunbelt for the lone unbroken vial it still holds, but the brute keeps Pushing on him, dragging him toward the lip of the roof above the wide river gorge below.

Climbing up behind the brute, in the dress she had been wearing all day, with Ranette's shotgun braced into her shoulder — Steris. She sets one knee, blinks the wind out of her eyes, and pulls the trigger. The shot only clips the brute in the arm; the engineered kick of the gun, designed to be used by someone with their weight Allomantically increased, hurls her wildly off the side of the train.