Misty gathered her wobbly legs beneath her and tried to stand. She lost her balance and spilled forward, becoming one with the carpet. Splayed across the floor like an undignified bug on a windshield, she looked offended, insulted even, that her body would dare betray her this way. “What the…”

  “Mister Lynch tried to turn your brain into hot soup, Misty,” Dobson said with a slow shake of her head. The strained muscles in her shoulders and back protested, insisting she stick to necessary movements only for the time being. “Your nerves are shot. Give your system time to reset.”

  If that was even possible.

  Dobson had been lucky. Her lack of mindware meant the disrupter’s electromagnetic pulses only affected her auditory and visual regulators, leaving the rest of her internal hardware intact. The majority of Misty’s augmentation, on the other hand, was housed within her brain. Bradley’s plan had been wickedly simple. Destroy the brain and you destroy the cyborg. While the device may not have killed Misty, she’d been subjected to its harmful effects long enough to make a difference.

  Dobson wasn’t sure that was something you walked away from without lasting effects.

  Her facial expression must have betrayed her concern, because Misty’s mouth curled back in disgust. “Don’t you look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m some poor thing to pity!” Stubbornly, Misty hauled her limp body upright and managed to sit without flopping over. She swayed tentatively for several seconds before finding enough of her balance to keep it. The scowl on her face darkened. “You don’t think I’ve got built-in fail-safes for this sort of thing? I’m just a little bit wobbly, is all. It’ll pass soon enough. You can stop looking at me like you’re planning to bury me.”

  “I would never,” Dobson replied matter-of-factly. And then something odd happened. Without her consent, a grin tugged at the corner of her lips, threatening to break into a smile. “It would be a waste of a hole.”

  “Darn right it would be,” Misty agreed without thinking.

  “And effort,” Dobson added, scoffing. “After all, why work harder than I need to?”

  “Absobloodylutely!”

  “Not to mention the part where I’d have to place you on your back. Your spirit would return to haunt me for that alone.”

  “I…” Misty’s brow furrowed over her eyes as her thoughts caught up to speed. She tilted her head to the side, gazing up at Dobson suspiciously. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  In a strange turn of events, it was Misty who went quiet. She closed her mouth as fresh tears welled up in her eyes.

  Misty’s reaction stung worse than any comeback could have. Dobson looked away, disgusted. “I told you not to read into this.”

  “If I didn’t know any better, Dobsy,” Misty said, tracing the designs on the soiled carpet with her forefinger, “I’d swear you were warming up to me.”

  “Fortunately, you do know better.”

  “In fact, I daresay, I suspect you might even like me.” Misty lifted her hand and gestured between them. “And you certainly like this. What, with the two of us working together as partners? A team. Mano a mano.”

  “That does not mean what you think it means.”

  Misty carried on regardless, allowing terrible things to tumble from her mouth unchecked. “Just think of what we’re going to accomplish together once we’re out of here. The great Dastardly Dobson and Mad Misty dismantling the Gritstone Coalition from the ground up. And why not stop there? Why not take out the other two syndicates while we’re at it? Send lasting ripples throughout the whole universe! Together, you an’ me, Dobsy? We’d be a force most unstoppable.”

  Misty’s mind had most certainly taken a hit, Dobson concluded. She was batshit crazy. More so than before. Which was really saying something.

  Instead of voicing her concerns, Dobson focused on the matter at hand. Her gaze settled on the entrance to the water closet tucked in the corner. Toppling crime syndicates sounded nice and all, but future plans amounted to little more than meaningless small talk while they were still trapped underground on a desolate planetary satellite. In order to reach the surface, they had to deal with the conductor first, and, more importantly, the reinforced door he was currently hiding behind.

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  “I’m going to go fetch the keys to our ride.” Dobson started for the door. Her left knee did not hesitate to remind her of its fading strength with every step. She called over her shoulder to Misty, “You keep plotting our historic rise to fame.”

  “Nah, that was mostly it.” Misty remained seated on the floor, watching Dobson’s movements like a hawk. “I think tackling the big three will be good enough for me. After that, we can retire on a private planet somewhere, away from all the noise.”

  Dobson inspected the water closet door. It was strictly manual, built with neither a hand screen nor a numberpad to grant entry. Like the rest of Bradley’s private train car, the lack of electronic locks meant the room could not be accessed via overriding the security system. The only way to get inside would be to break the door down. Dobson tapped her knuckles against the painted steel and listened. It was thick. Three inches at the very least. Even at full power, she would not have been able to rip it from its hinges.

  Fortunately, she had an alternative option—provided she could get her blasted parts working this time. Her cutter had failed her once before already, in the saloon, but Dobson was determined to redeem herself.

  Misty squinted warily up at her. “You’re about to do something reckless, aren’t you?”

  Dobson found the soft spot on the inside of her left elbow and squeezed. Her arm rearranged its pieces, splitting her hand in half and tucking her fingers out of the way to form a crude torch. The stench of burnt rubber permeated the air when the gas switched on. She squeezed the pressure plate in her arm again, activating the igniter. But, as before, nothing happened. Cursing, Dobson shook her arm, wriggling the loose pieces back into place and then squeezed again. A pillar of flame shot from the torch, crackling as it turned from blue to white.

  She drove the flame into the door and sank it deep into the metal. Sparks arced from the iron as she slowly traced the outline of the door, severing the internal mechanisms that held it bolted in place. Burnt, caustic smoke filled her lungs, but Dobson persisted. The sweat-drenched skin on her face was red and singed from the heat by the time she was done. She switched her plasma cutter off and stepped back, pushing the wet, matted hair from her eyes to better admire her handiwork.

  The outline of the smoldering door glowed bright red. Dobson reached for the handle and tugged. The door came away from the wall as a single, solid piece. It struck the floor and bounced, rattling the wooden floorboards hidden beneath the scorched carpet. Dobson stepped around it, batting the residual cloud of smoke and metal shavings from her face, and peered inside.

  The water closet was small, but decently gaudy, housing both a toilet and a standing sink furnished from polished chrome. Anything less would have been an insult to Bradley’s superior taste, naturally. The conductor, Abner, stood in the center of the lavatory, still clutching the drinking glasses, clueless as to what to do with them.

  Out of habit, Dobson blinked, summoning her mech vision. It failed, leaving her to piece the answers together the good old-fashioned way. Abner had the soft body of an engineer, not a Company Man, leading Dobson to conclude that whatever augmentation he possessed would be geared towards operating heavy machinery with his mind, not fighting off thugs. Which, in this case, left him vulnerable.

  It certainly explained the look of sheer terror stretched across his ashen face.

  Dobson held up her hand in what was supposed to be a peaceful gesture. “Easy, friend. We don’t want you dead. We just—”

  “There aren’t any more!” he cried, stumbling over his words.

  “What?”

  “Mister Lynch lied. There isn’t anyone waiting for you outside the train. They’re all already dead, I swear. There’s no one left to stop you. You can just leave.”

  Dobson paused, taking a moment to collect her thoughts. That was certainly a stroke of luck. Much unlike what happened next.

  Abner’s pale face flushed pink without warning. A muffled whimper escaped his lips and his eyes rolled upwards into the back of his head. He shuddered, violently, dropping the empty glasses from his hands. The tumblers struck the polished tile on either side of his shoes and rolled away.

  Dobson reached for him the same moment he fell. Abner collapsed onto the tile, face contorted in agony as his limbs twitched beyond his control.

  “Daggumit!” Dobson winced, realizing she’d forgotten to shift her hand back to its original shape. In hindsight, approaching an unarmed man with a plasma cutter may not have been the best strategy. Her irritation settled back over the conductor’s body. He’d stopped twitching, which would have been good if it were not for the fact that he’d stopped breathing as well.

  Sighing, Dobson squeezed the release mechanism in her arm, shifting her parts back to normal as she considered what to do.

  “Daggumit?” Misty said, struggling to her feet. Unable to stand on her own, she leaned against the far wall, squinting through the smoke, attempting to make out what Dobson was seeing. “Daggumit, what? What’s wrong, Dobsy? What did you do?”

  There was no sense in beating around the bush. “He’s dead.”

  “He’s what?”

  Dobson’s fingers popped back into place one by one until her left hand fully reformed. She clenched and unclenched her fist, confirming she had a full range of motion as she studied the conductor’s fallen body. He’d died before she even got the chance to put a hand on him. That had to be a record of some kind.

  “Dobsy?” Misty’s voice brimmed with fury. “Dobsy, what in the Sam Hill did you do?” Misty staggered over, dragging one leaden foot after the other, too angry to worry about whether or not she was pushing her body beyond its limits.

  “Me?” While it was logical to assume Dobson had helped Abner meet his maker, she still didn’t appreciate being blamed for something she didn’t do. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t touch him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He saw me and then keeled over.”

  Misty joined Dobson in the narrow doorway. “Cripes. Did he die of a heart attack?”

  “Looks that way.” Dobson waited several seconds for the weight of the situation to settle before asking, “Now what?”

  “Well,” Misty said, unconsciously gnawing the corner of her lip. “Do you recall what Owen said about the locomotive cab?”

  Dobson pulled the answer from her memory. “That only the conductor can access the cab via eye scan and hand print?”

  “Exactly. The way I see it, we’ve still got his head and his hands, yeah?”