Wax kept the gun on her. “Walk away. I don’t know you, but I can promise you this: They’ve lied to you. Trell, the Set. They’ve lied. You are somebody. And someone out there misses you.”
She grinned. “They said you’d get into our heads. They said it! But see, I’m smarter than you think. I got into your heads first.”
She came running at him. Wax turned Vindication a fraction of a degree and pulled the trigger — delivering the hazekiller round into her right shoulder. The secondary blast came a moment later.
Ripping her arm clean off.
She lurched to a stop, gaping at the wound. It didn’t heal, as that arm had held the metalmind that stored her healing. She might have another metalmind elsewhere — having several was smart — but if so, he’d forced her to use enough healing to drain it. Because the arm didn’t heal.
The wound was gruesome, but not as bad as one might imagine. Head wounds bled a ton, but if you separated a limb … well, it was awful. Yet there was always less blood than he expected.
She looked to him, almost pleading, but kept running at him. So, with a sigh, he tossed a bullet in the air and delivered it into her head with a surgical Push.
Her body dropped. Wax sighed, feeling wrung out. Now … where had Wayne run off to?
* * *
The Coinshot raised his hand toward Wayne, preparing to do his trick with the super-Push again.
Wayne braced himself, then got pushed back into a heap, barely raising a speed bubble in time. He glanced up and saw a bullet inching through the air about a finger’s width from the edge of the bubble. He rolled aside as it broke through the barrier, deflecting in the process, and went zipping past him.
Right. Okay. He gritted his teeth and launched forward, dropping the speed bubble and charging the fellow. Not-Wax was expecting this, of course. Wayne had pulled this trick multiple times. The guy flung out some bullets, which Wayne dodged.
Resigned, not-Wax raised a hand to begin grappling Wayne.
Who hit him square in the face with a dueling cane instead, smashing his nose. The man cursed and backed up, bloodied.
“Yeah,” Wayne said, “that’s better. Not so pretty anymore.”
The man howled, raising his gun.
Wayne slapped the free side of the handcuffs down on the man’s wrist. The Coinshot, bleeding from both face and arm, gaped at this. Then, after letting out a howl of rage and frustration, he Pushed them into the air with a powerful force. Exactly as Wayne had hoped, though the force of the launch nearly ripped his arm out of its socket.
He dangled off the fellow, then grabbed on and climbed his body, holding his coat as they shot high, high, high into the air. Up through the mists in an incredible Steelpush, going many times the height Wax could have managed with the same metal. That super-metal — duralumin, it had been called? — was really something.
“You know,” Wayne said over the howling wind, “your problem is that you specialized too much!”
The man grabbed Wayne by the throat, no longer bothering with the guns. They continued to rise, then exploded from the top of the mists into a land bathed in starlight.
“You did everything you could to learn to fight Wax,” Wayne said, “but you didn’t train to defeat me. That says you’ve been too single-minded. You should pick up a hobby or somethin’!”
They finally crested the height of the Push and began to drop. As they hit the mists again, the man shoved Wayne free, leaving him to dangle by the handcuff. With his other hand, not-Wax reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
He came out with a yellow handkerchief, a bunny sewn in the corner.
“I suggest,” Wayne called up to him, “taking up pickpocketing. It’s rusting useful!”
And with that, Wayne tossed the man’s aluminum flask full of metals away into the darkness.
The man watched it go, his eyes widening in horror. The wind picked up again as they fell. The man scrambled, searching his body frantically.
“No others?” Wayne shouted. “Too bad!”
Not-Wax reached for Wayne as the two of them plummeted, his eyes bloodshot and enraged. But fallin’, it happened fast. Faster and faster, the more you did it. Wayne had always wondered why that was.
“Hey!” Wayne shouted. “When you meet Death—”
They crashed through the skylight, then slammed to the floor with a crunch.
All went black.
A few minutes later, Wayne blinked open his eyes and groaned. The healing he’d stored had been enough. Barely. He rolled over and looked at the Coinshot’s crumpled, broken body.
“Aw, man,” he muttered. “We dropped too fast. I didn’t get to say my awesome line.”
He found the keys to the handcuffs in the man’s pocket, and unlocked himself. Ruin, his body hurt. He’d have bruises something fierce in the morning. The metalmind had repaired the worst parts first, and saved him from dyin’. But it hadn’t been enough for anything more than an economy-class-type healing, and now he was all tapped out.
“When you see Death,” Wayne said, kicking the corpse in the side, “tell him he owes me fifty clips.”
He wandered over to Wax, who had removed the metalminds from the disembodied arm of the woman who absolutely was not a clone of Wayne. Takin’ those out was smart. There were stories of Compounding Bloodmakers regrowing a whole damn body from a limb that got ripped off.
“We should remove their spikes too,” Wayne said. “Just in case.”
“Let’s stop the bomb first.”
“Your sister is up there,” Wayne warned. “With the rocket thing, ready to shoot off.”
“Right, then,” Wax said. They crossed the room to the skylight.
“Why’d you keep so close to fight?” Wayne asked. “You shoulda stayed up high. Best way to fight someone maybe a little like me, in purely superficial ways.”
“I couldn’t. She would have run out the time. I needed to stay in close, force her to engage me.”
Huh. Well, maybe both of them had wanted things personal this time. They positioned themselves in the center of the room, ready for Wax to grab ahold and launch them both up into the open skylight — toward the mist, which cascaded down like a ghostly waterfall.
But Wax paused.
“Mate?” Wayne asked.
Still staring up, Wax fished in his pocket, then brought out a small earring. Shaped like a bent nail. A religious icon for a Pathian, but to him, so much more.
He rarely put it in, except when he had to. Tonight he hooked it into his ear, and then he whispered something.
66
“I did my part,” Wax whispered. “I became your sword. I want you to do your part now.”
My part, Harmony said in his head, is to put you where you can—
“No,” Wax said, reloading quickly while staring up at the mists. “Not good enough. Not damn near good enough, Sazed. I can kill men. I’m far too good at that. But I can’t kill a god. If Autonomy intervenes, I will need you.”
Autonomy won’t intervene, he said. It’s not our way, as it exposes us. She has Invested your sister, but mostly to let Telsin communicate with her followers and visualize plans in greater complexity than an ordinary human. She will not fight you. You won’t win this next part with bullets.