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Waxillium Ladrian, lawman for hire, dismounts outside a dusty saloon on the edge of the town of Weathering and orders the seventeen-year-old kid trailing him — Wayne — to stay outside with the horses, not tie up the mare Destroyer in case he needs her, and on no account steal anything. The kid solemnly promises not to swipe anything of Wax's. Wax sighs and pushes inside, lightly tapping his metalmind to lift a tenth of his weight. He has been in the Roughs five years now and is still not used to how dirty everything is — fine city suit and lavender cravat and all, he counts on being noticed; this saloon barely looks up.

He asks the barkeep, a chicken-leg-chewing man with some Terris in him, after Granite Joe — the most notorious outlaw in these parts. The barkeep professes complete ignorance, but mentions a friend who might know, and ushers Wax into a small side room to wait. The window rattles. Burning steel, Wax watches a rod slip the latch and a young woman in dark trousers and rifle climb in, an unlit cigar in her teeth. She recognises him as the man who killed Peret the Black; he introduces himself with full pomp. She calls herself Lessie, mocks the cravat, and grudgingly proposes they split Joe's bounty.

He has, of course, asked the barkeep. Lessie informs him with horror that everyone in the saloon belongs to Joe — half the town does — and a peek through the door confirms the barkeep is out in the taproom arming the room against him. A sharpshooter pins the side window. Wax argues for the stairs; he could jump out a back window safely, given his Coinshot Push and his metalminded weight, but neither is something he has advertised. They make the steps, Wax firing three wild shots into the pianoforte on the way and Pushing the thugs' aim wide. Upstairs, a back window opens onto open ground; he whistles for Destroyer, who does not come. He calls down to the kid. Below, Wayne reports the horse is standing in the street, drinking. Lessie flatly refuses to jump into a saddle.

A second sharpshooter, set up in a mill across the road, opens fire on the back window — and missed high, Wax notices. Footsteps on the stairs come up not as ordinary thugs but as men in tight white shirts with pencil mustaches, carrying wood-and-ceramic hand-crossbows, not a speck of metal on them. They have a kill squad ready for a Coinshot. Joe knows what he is. So does Lessie.

Out of options, Wax grabs Lessie, rolls onto his back with her over him, and drops every grain of stored weight at once. The floor cracks and gives, and as they fall he Pushes the hundreds of nails below them to blow through the ground floor and into the basement beneath. They crash through dust and splinters onto Granite Joe's dinner table. Joe sits at the head of it, napkin tucked into his collar, red soup spilled across the cloth, flanked by two duster-wearing bodyguards.

For a moment it is a standoff Wax cannot win — he could shoot Joe and be cut down by the siblings, and reinforcements are already coming down the stairs. Joe lectures him in the meantime that the Roughs don't want his kind, that everyone here has a price. Then Joe draws. Wax Pushes off the wall lamps to lurch sideways, drops the female guard with one shot, knocks the male guard's pistol out of his hand with another Push, and a moment later his own pistol — sent spinning by the same Push — strikes the second bodyguard full in the face. He scrambles for Joe and stops dead. Lessie has a hand-crossbow on him.

*Everyone up here has a price*, Joe says with satisfaction. Lessie has been his all along — planted in the saloon, sent up the stairs to keep Wax running where he was wanted, the only person in the building who knew exactly what to do about a Coinshot. Wax gropes for something, anything, to say. *I still think your legs are pretty.* Lessie meets his eyes, sighs, turns the crossbow on Joe and puts the bolt through his neck.

The thug squad pounds down into the basement to find their boss dead, both bodyguards down, Wax posed melodramatically in the rubble with sunlight pouring through the hole he punched in the ceiling. They look at the corpse, look at him, and back out up the steps like scolded children, the barkeep last. Wax thanks Lessie for not murdering him; she shrugs that she'd been planning to kill Joe eventually anyway, and that as far as she knew she had never shot a man who didn't deserve it — killing Wax would have been killing what he stood for. Above them, Destroyer and Wayne in his oversized bowler peer down through the wreckage. Wax takes Lessie's hand and lifts them both out on a line of blue light.