The rail yard at midnight is all shadows and heat shimmer from the furnaces, and the three of us are crouched on a rusted overpass above the tracks watching Vexar's munitions transport push through the fog.
It's a rolling fortress. Armored engine, six sealed cargo cars, the whole thing clad in thick steel plating like whoever built it was expecting exactly what's about to happen.
"Third car," Clementine says. Her brass eye zooms. "Ballistics vault. I can melt the lock in under a minute."
Beside me, Harrow is checking his rifle for the fourth time.
"You're going to wear out the mechanism," I say.
"I haven't fired at a living person in eleven years," he says, without looking up. "I'm allowed to check."
"Aim for kneecaps," Clementine says.
Harrow looks at her. "That's your advice? Kneecaps?"
"Graft-Gang enforcers always skip the joint plating. It's a budgeting thing." She shrugs. "Kneecap goes, they stop moving. Simple math."
"Right," Harrow says. "Simple math."
The second car passes under us.
"Now," I say.
* * *
We drop onto the third car roof one by one, and Clementine has the lock melted and the hatch open before I've fully gotten my balance.
Below, the car smells like gun oil and sulfur and Clementine makes a sound like a person who has found their home. Military rifles in wooden crates. Her bismuth ingots and barium caps in an iron lockbox. She has it open in thirty seconds and her hands move through the stock like they're greeting old friends.
"Here." She tosses me six rounds she has crimped freehand on a moving train. "Not pretty. Don't care. They'll fire."
I load them. The cylinder clicks closed and feels right.
The car door at the far end kicks open.
Rooks is every description I was given and worse in person. Half his skeleton is hydraulic iron, joints hissing steam. His right arm is a mechanical claw. He carries a rotary cannon underhand, casual as a man carries a fishing rod, and his optical implants find me immediately across the length of the car.
"There you are," he says. His voice sounds like a transmission failing. "I've been looking for you all night, drifter."
"I saved you the trouble," I say.
He spins the cannon barrels.
"Get down!" I shove Harrow behind a sulfur crate as the rounds tear through the wood above us. I roll into the space behind a steel brace and the shots track left and I count the pattern.
Three-second burst. Half-second reset.
I come around the crate in the reset, level the under-barrel.
"Don't aim for the chest," Clementine shouts from somewhere to my left. "He's iron under there. The shoulder joint, right side, that's the weak point!"
I adjust.
I pull the secondary trigger.
The thermobaric shell hits Rooks and the orange vapor blooms around him and the secondary ignition catches it and the vacuum explosion shakes the entire car, throws me backward into the wall, blows crates into the air. Rooks goes through the side wall and takes some of it with him.
I push myself off the wall. My ears are ringing.
Harrow appears from behind a crate, covered in sawdust. "Is he down?"
"Check him," Clementine says, already moving toward the hole in the wall.
Rooks is in a heap against the car frame, one hydraulic arm gone, his visual implants flickering. Still alive. But gone from the fight.
The spectral coins rise. I sweep my arm through the air. The Ledger pulses.
BOUNTY CLAIMED: Chief Hound Rooks. | REWARD: +120 Hours Stability. 500 Blood-Iron.| LEDGER BALANCE: 176 Hours, 22 Minutes.
Seven days.
"We're leaving the city," I say.
"Finally," Clementine says. "Can someone tell the engineer to go faster?"