The pants and top first—skin-hugging material that covers me from my feet all the way up to my jaw. The mask is lighter and thinner and hides everything but my eyes, and automatically I adjust my breathing to account for the fabric over my nose. The boots are next, and the sheaths for my knives, and then the gloves, which are thin on the fingertips to keep them nimble, but lined with metal bars along the knuckles and backs of my hands. My goggles go on last, with their harness of black leather and dull black metal and the layers of colored lenses soldered into place, and then I pull my hood up as the finishing touch.
Trinity’s song hums against the back of my head as I rearrange the lenses and rebalance myself on my toes at the edge of the rooftop, eyes locked on the tracks below me. A second later, the wardens’ prison train swings into view.
It’s not like I haven’t landed in a moving object before. I do it all the time with airships above the skyline. But those are usuallyslow, drifting things. A prison train is more like trying to phase onto a comet. I can’t phase to where it is—I have to phase where it’s going to be.
And even then, there’s no way to match its momentum. But I can deal with that after I land.
The train rockets forward, rolling arcs of too-bright lightning connecting the bottoms of the cars to the tracks below. I leap off the edge of the roof and drop into free fall just as the engine shoots by. Wind rips across my face. I count the cars blurring by, checking for people, for little orange life signs, trying to find a safe place—
There. The last car. There are only two wardens posted there, which isn’t ideal, but it’s the best option I’ve got. The ground rushes toward me, and as soon as I’m close enough, I phase—
—and reappear in the car I’d been aiming for. I have one moment to take a breath before momentum catches up with me, and the back of the car slams into my spine, knocking the wind out of me.
I drop into a crouch, letting my body acclimate to its new acceleration, inhaling and exhaling quickly as my lungs recover. My body aches from the impact, but I can’t afford to feel it because the two wardens have frozen in shock at my sudden, inexplicable appearance and I take full advantage of it, slipping my blades across their throats with two efficient swipes. I catch each one as best I can and lay them out gently on the floor of the car. I don’t need them making any noise if I can help it.
As the sworn holy law keepers of Trinity, wardens are everywhere on this world, and no duster has a lot of love for them. Sometimes the Ministry decides a neighborhood or town has strayed too far from the Heralds’ teachings and unleashes a whole swarm of them to round up “outlaws” and “reform” an area. Isaw it happen in Covenant once, before Kelda was born. They’d flooded the streets. Took Orion’s father away, along with dozens of others. I still remember the wardens’ faces, hard and righteous in the shadows of their white hats.
But even with their golden breastplates, they have plenty of weaknesses. At the neck and shoulders. Along the waist and the backs of the knees. And Reason is thin and sharp enough to slice through them all.
The wind tears at my clothes the second I slip out the compartment door and onto the rickety platform that connects this car to the next one. A sudden stabbing pain hits my stomach as I start to step forward, and the view from my goggles rolls like a bad reel on the dailies.
No… no, it’s not the goggles. It’s me.
My vision splinters, and I dig my fingers into the metal wall at my back to stay on my feet. I’m not on the lightningrail anymore—I’m in our lodgings. Only Kelda and Halle hang from the ceiling like puppets and there’s fire everywhere, licking up my legs—
Squeezing my eyes shut, I curl my fingers and slam my weighted knuckles into my thigh, feeling the jolt travel up my arm and into my shoulder joints. I breathe in deep, smelling copper and sweat, and when I pry open my eyelids, I’m balanced on the back of a speeding train car once more.
Just a hallucination. I’ve heard of that happening with hair of the dog. One of the possible side effects from taking it.
Fantastic. Exactly what I need right now.
I brace myself against the frame, shaking my head clear so I can adjust to the high-pitched roar of wind and metal and crackling tracks. My goggles pick up ten armed figures in the next car, all ofthem with their hands on the hilts of their pistols, ready and waiting. There’s no going up and over them, even with phasing. Prison trains have hundreds of vicious iron spikes covering the tops of the cars as a security measure, to keep anyone from trying to escape by crawling on top and getting picked up by a low-flying airship. But that’s fine. I’m more than happy to work my way through. It’s not like I can let them live once they see what I can do.
Reason sings happily as I slip it into my palm, and I take a deep, slow breath.
Time for them to meet the Butcher.
I step out into open space and disappear—
—then reappear in an instant, just inside the car. The wardens face me down, and I take half a second to better assess where they’re all at, how they’re arranged, my best path through them.
Then I’m gone again, just as they start firing away with their pulse pistols. I come back together, poised in the air just above the warden out in front. As gravity takes me, I twist Toothpick free and drive it down, straight into his eye.
Phase—
—I sweep the legs out from under the next one, slicing Reason across his exposed neck the moment his head snaps backward. Pulse pistol fire sprays all around me—
—phase—
—I’m on the back of the next, jamming Toothpick through the gap in his armor, downward into his lungs and his heart. The warden next to me falls in a hail of friendly fire—
—phase—
—I disarm another, shooting him in the face with his own gun. Pulse blasts explode too late—
—phase—
—I go low and to the side, slipping Toothpick between another weak point, deep into the ribs. I snatch his weapon from him as I vanish—
