Saint doesn’t slow. Her hand lifts occasionally as she sips the coffee I brought—tiny, cautious tastes, like she’s still debating whether I poisoned it. Eventually, she drops the rest in a trash can.
“So what is this?” she calls, not bothering to face me. “You hovering behind me until I get sentimental?”
“It worked once.”
“It didn’t.”
“A little,” I say.
She reaches the final car, the one that houses the secondary conductor cabin. Dark. Locked. And absolutely not meant for passengers.
Saint inspects the lock as she pulls out that ridiculous pocket knife she refuses to stop carrying. Stainless steel, worn handle, multi-purpose attachment she sharpened herself. I lean against the opposite wall, arms folded.
“You are still using that?” I ask, letting the disbelief coat every syllable. “You know they make real tools now.”
She doesn’t look up as the lock clicks open. “Some of us don’t have to overcompensate with a sniper rifle the length of a small car.”
I step behind her, close enough for my shadow to swallow hers. “You know damn well I don’t overcompensate for anything, Pícarita.”
She gives an eye roll so exaggerated it might qualify as choreography. “Everything with a Y chromosome says that.”
She slips into the conductor cabin. Wind humsfaintly around the sealed window as she starts working the rubber lining free—methodical, efficient, silent. I stay close, because I know she’ll let me talk as long as my words don’t evoke my earlier agreement to having my throat slit.
“We can work together,” I say.
“No,” she says immediately.
“You didn’t even hear the offer.”
“You didn’t give one.”
“Yet.”
She tightens a strap on her pack. Another around her waist. Another across her chest. All silent preparations for a plan she clearly finalized long before I sat across from her with breakfast she didn’t trust.
I try again. “We share an enemy.”
“We share nothing.”
“You’re an exile now,” I say softly. “Just like me.”
She goes still for half a second. Then: “Who set you up?”
Direct. Precise. The same way she kills.
I say nothing, keeping my eyes fixed on hers and the silence becomes heavier around us.
She nods once, resigned. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Her hands flex around the window frame. “Well… time’s up.”
Her heel snaps back like a piston.
Saint’s kick hits the exact pressure point along the frame, and the entire reinforced pane rips free in a single slab. It tears out of the housing with a deafening metallic crack and gets sucked backward into the slipstream.
Wind detonates through the cabin, slamming into me hard enough to steal my breath. The pane hits the tracks behind us—barely visible before it disintegrates under thetrain’s speed, pulverized into sparkling debris the wheels chew to dust.
Sensors scream. The brakes seize in rapid, angry pulses as the system registers the catastrophic breach.
