I wake up to the cathedral doors exploding inward.
On my feet, gun out, before the sound fully registers.
Clementine Locke stumbles through the gap. Her apron is scorched through in two places. Her brass eye is spinning hard, the iris clicking open and shut like it can't decide what to focus on.
There's blood drying along her ear and jaw.
She sees me with the gun and says, "Put that down. It's me."
"I can see it's you." I holster it. "What happened?"
"What happened," she says, dropping into the nearest pew and pressing her palm to her ear, "is that Vexar's forensics team pulled bismuth fragments from the vault walls this morning and matched the composition to my stockroom."
She looks at me. Her one real eye is very steady. "Rooks came through my front door with twelve men. I went out through the smelter vents. That's what happened."
Harrow appears from the back, takes in her ear, goes for his kit without being asked.
"How bad?" I ask.
"The shop's gone. Everything in it." She says it flat, like she's already made peace with it. "But that's repairable. The problem is Rooks put a street bounty out. Two thousand silver on you. A thousand on me. He's locking down the entire Dregs."
The Ledger burns in my arm.
I turn slightly away and check it.
WANTED: Chief Hound Rooks. The Brass Butcher. | Crime: Mass Extortion. Unsanctioned Augmentation. | REWARD: +120 Hours Stability. 500 Blood-Iron.
Five more days if I kill Rooks. I blink it away.
Harrow is cleaning Clementine's ear wound with cotton and something that smells like pure alcohol. She doesn't flinch in pain but her jaw tightens.
"Ow," she says, as though it's a formality.
"Hold still," he says.
"I am holding still. You're just being overzealous with the antiseptic."
"I'm being thorough. There's a difference."
"Feels the same from here, Doc."
"We need to leave the city," I say. "Tonight."
"The entire perimeter is locked down," Clementine says. "The only thing moving out tonight is Vexar's midnight munitions train. Goes straight to the borderlands."
"And Rooks does his security sweep before it departs," Harrow says. He's not asking. He's realized.
"Yeah," I say.
Silence.
"So we're getting on a train," Clementine says slowly, "knowing that Rooks is on the train."
"He's worth a hundred and twenty hours to me," I say.
"Oh," she says. "Right. Okay. That's fine. That's completely normal. We're getting on a train to kill the man hunting us. Great."
Harrow stands up and wipes his hands. He goes to the altar and picks up his sawed-off rifle from behind it.
"I want to be clear," he says, checking the lever action, "that I am a doctor and this is not what doctors do."
"Could've fooled me," Clementine says.
He gives her a look. She gives him one back. It's the first time I've watched them communicate in something other than words and I file it away.
"Midnight," I say. "Rail yard. We drop onto the third car from the walkway above the tracks."
"You've done this before?" Harrow asks.
"No."
He nods like that's exactly what he expected. "Excellent."