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Wayne watches Wax Push the caps off two bottles of Logshine and hand one over, and the two of them lean back against the support of a Bilming billboard whose painted slogan reads *Independence Through Shared Struggle*. Wax has chosen the spot because it points across the main highway at the city's central spire — Independence Tower, nicknamed *the Shaw* — and because Wax is in a mood to be conspicuous. Wayne's head is pounding from a hard day of storing health and the beer tastes like a beer ought to taste. They trade an old joke about how Wayne used to smack the bottles on a table before Wax opened them.

Wax looks over the rim of his bottle and asks why Wayne has been feeling worse than usual lately. It is not only MeLaan. Wayne tries to refuse the conversation, fails, and gives him the truth: he has been thinking about his ma, about how ashamed she would be of the man he became after the death he caused as a boy, and about the slow growing dread that no amount of helping people can ever balance the killing. *Maybe I'll always be worthless.* Wax answers him carefully. He cannot pay it off, that much is true; Durkel will always be dead. *But you don't need forgiveness, Wayne.* The man who shot Durkel is buried in the Roughs and has been for years. The reason Wayne fights now is not penance. It is who he has become.

Wayne resists. He tries the old defences — *maybe I'm corrupt through and through; maybe I do it because I like the fighting; mate, I burned down a building today* — and Wax dismantles each in turn, gently, with that perceptive Roughs steadiness. The building Wayne burned down today he also led the evacuation of, door by door, in person. He still cares when Ranette tells him visiting *the Durkel girl* has been the worst thing he could have done. That care, Wax tells him, is the proof. *You're a good man.* Wayne sits with that for a long moment, and on the billboard ledge over a city full of new lights and old shadows decides — for now — to stop carrying the corpse he has been carrying. He lets the health-store run dry. His head clears. The aches fade.

They turn to the duffels Steris sent them. Wax flips through the captured notebook by the billboard's electric lights and lays out the bomb picture: schematic for a portable but very large warhead, a vicious dead-man's switch designed so no one disarms it cleanly, and a desperate final design for a much bigger rocket — a last chance to make this work, but at the cost of possibly catching Bilming itself in the blast. Wayne finds sandwiches (pastrami — a small thanks to Steris), then turns out a wicker ball with a weight at its centre, a Ranette toy Max must have slipped in. Wax Steelpushes it skyward, higher each time — then freezes mid-catch. Height, he says. You need height first, then you can launch something far. And you need a place no one can poke around in. He looks back at the lit upper floors and floodlights atop Independence Tower — the construction supposedly *adding floors* at the top — and he knows where the bomb is.

Wayne sees it too, and says it differently. It is a mesa, he tells Wax. The lone peak in his ma's story, where the lawman finally caught up to Blatant Barm — and where the villain turned out to *be* the mesa itself. He has never been able to make the ending make sense. Wax takes the story seriously and proposes a reading: the bad guy is the land, the world that grows the bad men in the first place. *Do you think you'd have fallen in with the Plank Boys if your mother hadn't died in that accident?* No. *Nearly every man I've had to shoot had a story like yours.* If you can build a world where fewer boys grow up alone, you have fewer Blatant Barms to face down later. Wayne thinks that sounds right, and decides his ma was saying it all along.

The sun drops below the horizon and the mists curl out of nothing into the streets below. Wayne holds his breath. Wax reaches into the bottom of the ammo duffel and pulls out a stocky wooden case with Ranette's mark on the lid. *Steris packed it,* he breathes, almost reverently. Inside is the Big Gun — a four-inch bore, a wheel of slugs the size of shot glasses, a piece Wax tells Wayne was not built for a lawman. *It was built for a sword.* He shoulders it, slides the last of the Harmony-sent metal vials into his aluminum-lined sheath, and tells Wayne to stay back when it gets bloody — he needs to let Wax do what Harmony has decided he needs to do.

Before they jump, Wax reminds Wayne how this life started: he had given up after Lessie, and it was Wayne who came to Elendel and dragged him back into the work — *you're meant to be helping people, it's what you do.* Wax still knows the line by heart. Wayne cracks up — *damn, Wax, I just say things* — but the line lands. The mists keep climbing the buildings. The two of them stand at the edge of the billboard ledge and face the spire. *You ready for this?* *Let's do it.*