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Wax dives off the train after Steris, tearing the cork from Steris's last steel-and-cod-liver-oil vial with his teeth as he goes. The metal hits him three breaths before he hits her — and then he is burning steel again. He catches her in midair, Pushes off the falling shotgun as it strikes the river, and brings them to a halt two feet above the water on a thin blue line of Allomantic anchor running down to the gun on the riverbed. He warns her to hold her breath; she barely manages it before he plunges them under to swap the gun for one of Ranette's hook spheres anchored in the silt, and then bounds them back up off the bridge supports onto the tracks above.

Soaked, Steris climbs onto the rails with her teeth chattering and a wide, idiot grin on her face, eyes alight. Wax cannot help grinning back. He tells her she's not supposed to enjoy this. She answers that someone who cannot carry a tune may still admire a chorus from the audience, and that since this is the second time he has soaked her in short order, she will choose to be gracious about it. He invites her to come along; she says yes; he launches them in a long arc across the gorge toward the front of the train and lands them on the coal tender, where they drop in on a bandit holding a gun to the engineer's head. Wax pumps the shotgun, Pushes the spent shells through the back wall of the cab into her skull, drops Steris beside the startled engineer, and asks where the next town is. *Ironstand*, the engineer says — minutes away. Wax tells him to drive flat-out and wire ahead for surgeons and constables.

Cut to Marasi, halfway through the train and well into her list of grievances against Waxillium Ladrian. She has spent more time than expected calming hysterical passengers and bandaging the wounded. In a deserted forward car she finds the man with the cane standing alone, blocking her path. He calls her *quite capable indeed*, asks her with strange interest whether she is a Metalborn — she has a cadmium dose burning, but her Pulser speed bubble is unhelpfully suited to combat — and abruptly raises his hand at her, clutching something small. The train lurches under Wax's handling and the man crashes to the floor, stumbles back up on his bad leg, and flees out the platform door. He leaves behind on the floor a small carved metal cube which Marasi tucks away to inspect later. She shoulders her rifle and pushes on after Wax and her stupid sister.

Wax back in the engine cab closes his eyes and feels the metal burning — comfortable, familiar, the gun in his hand readable as a lattice of blue lines pointing at its parts. He leaps from the cab, Pushes himself the length of the first cargo car in a tempest, clears the rear-platform bandits with two outward Pushes, lands on the next cargo car's roof and shoots the three guards working at the box of dynamite and clock-trigger they had wired between the tender and the train. He rips off the detonator and Pushes the whole crate into the river.

The brute climbs up at him again. Wax kneels, draws one of Ranette's hook spheres, pays out the cord as the brute reflexively Pushes the sphere — and lassoes the cord around the brute's leg, Pushes the sphere into a stand of trees so the hooks engage, and watches *this is your stop* yank the man clean off the train and into the woods.

He turns on the larger group of bandits on the next car — at least a dozen of them, and he is empty-handed — and finds them, oddly, throwing the man with the cane off the train themselves. He hits the water and is gone. Several others jump after him into the river. Six remaining bandits notice Wax and raise their weapons.

They freeze. Not flinching, not blinking. Wax flicks a cork at them; it sticks in mid-air against an invisible wall. He hops down between the cars and into the one beneath them, where he finds Marasi standing on a stack of suitcases, shoulders jammed against the ceiling so her speed bubble catches the men on the roof and holds them perfectly still.