There was too much caffeine rushing through my veins to sleep, and all that Coffee Drank was pushing on my bladder, so I gave up on napping and headed to the next car back to use the bathroom.

I was opening the door of the little compartment when a cold, serrated green blade hooked over my shoulder and around my throat.

“Reach for the sky, and place your hands flat against the restroom door,” a flat, insectile voice said. “I won’t hesitate, human, so do not test me.”

I stuck my hands on the bathroom door, looking down at my feet. Between them, I could see green insect legs and a swaying abdomen. I was being held up by a gigantic praying mantis.

“Transfer all your credits to my HUD, human, and you will remain in a single piece. Nod if you will comply.”

“I’m broke, man,” I said. “My last twenty credits went to buy my train ticket.”

Slow clicking as he thought this through. “Then you will place all valuables and non-valuables on the floor and kick them behind your back to me. Nod if you will comply.”

I nodded.

“Begin,” he said.

“I have to take my hands off the door,” I said. “Otherwise I can’t empty my pockets.”

“Do so,” the praying mantis said, “but with only one appendage. Leave the other planted.”

In my pocket, I clamped my hand around Hungry Ghost, the little grinning skull stone that stored Death Spirit for me, then sent Miasma into my neck to reinforce my throat. If my practice sessions with Kest were any indication, my reinforcement wasn’t strong enough to keep this guy from sawing my head off, but hopefully my next move would stop him before he could do any major damage.

I reached out with Dead Man’s Hand and found the praying mantis’s amber life point flickering in his thorax like a candle. When I grabbed a hold of that amber flame, the mantis let out a wheezing hiss.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me. There’s no defense against it, and it can move a lot faster than your arm can. So, either get your arm off my throat or get ready to die.”

The scythelike arm unhooked itself and carefully pulled back.

I turned around. The mantis’s eyes were huge and yellow and made of four or five segments each like tectonic plates. With those and the mandibles, the dude looked more alien than even some of the weirdest aliens I’d seen over the past month. There was no indication of emotion or thought in his face, just this weird insectile blankness.

His dirty cowboy hat had tipped a little to the side, and underneath, you could see what looked like a ragged edge to the chitin on the side of his head. Maybe Rali hadn’t been wrong about this dude having a bite out of his brain.

“Get to the farthest train car possible from this one,” I told him, “and get off at the next stop, no matter where you were headed.” Then it occurred to me why this guy probably was one of the last passengers we’d seen. “Wait. How many other people on the train did you stick up before me?”

“Six,” he said, in that flat voice.

“How many of them are still alive?”

“None.”

With that many new corpses, the train should’ve been a swimming pool of Miasma, but I hadn’t noticed any. Even if I had missed it, Hungry Ghost should’ve started sucking it down.

“Where are their bodies?” I asked.

The praying mantis’s head rotated smoothly on its axis, and he pointed an arm at the windows. “Defenestrated.”

“Then before you go, you can drop whatever you stole from them, too,” I said, nodding at the floor between us.

The praying mantis pulled a leather messenger bag from over his shoulder and dropped it to the floor with a clank.

“That is everything,” he said.

“Get lost,” I said.

He swayed as he headed for the door at the back of the train car. I didn’t let go of Dead Man’s Hand until the ginormous bug had disappeared through it.

On my way into the bathroom, I grabbed the bag and hooked it over my shoulder.

When I got back to our seats, I sat the messenger bag on the table next to the last few bags of uninfused AlgaeFrize. Kest and Warcry stared at the leather bag, but Rali opened his eyes and looked up at me, his black eye-lace shifting from wide to thin and back. It seemed like a weirdly accusatory stare.

I didn’t sit down, just stuck my hands in my pockets. “So I kind of stole this from a dude who stole it from a bunch of other passengers he killed before he tried to steal stuff from me.”

“You did, yeah?” Warcry said like he didn’t believe me. “Where’d you stash this cove’s body?”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said.

“Sure you didn’t, Death cultivator,” the ginger sneered. “But here’s his stuff and here’s you, fine as you like.”

I shifted my weight. “I just told him to drop whatever he’d stolen and get lost.”

“I thought I tasted Miasma,” Rali said in a low voice. “Hake, you…didn’t kill him…did you?”

“No!” I threw up my hands and dropped into my seat. “Geez, I wouldn’t kill a dude for his bag.”

Warcry snorted. “What would you do it for, then, grav?”

“He killed like six people before me,” I said. “If I’d let him get away with all this crap, it would’ve been like he wasn’t getting in trouble at all for what he did.”

That didn’t stop Rali from staring at me some more. He was cool, but we didn’t always agree on stuff related to stealing from the dead, so it wasn’t a big surprise that we didn’t agree on stealing from a murderer.

Kest, on the other hand, was already digging through the bag.

“There’s some great stuff in here,” she said. “Some questionable stuff, too, but the valuables are top-tier.”

She laid out a thin business-card-sized rectangle of pale metal, a handful of Spirit stones, some physical credit coins, a silk fan, and a chunk of meteorite in one pile, then a little cheesecloth bag and a stick of bamboo with the character for LUCK carved into it in another. Between them, she sat a glass flask of clear liquid labeled Lost Mirror in another pile.

“I’ve never heard of Lost Mirror elixir,” she said.

“I like the name,” Rali said, tipping the flask back to get a better look. “It’s got all sorts of haunting connotations.”

For a second, it looked like something moved inside the liquid, a flash of purple and white, but when my eyes tried to focus on it, there was nothing there.

“We should get a distiller to identify that before we try to use it,” I said. I had spent most of the past month as an indentured servant for the OSS’s distiller in Ghost Town, and he’d kept all his poisons interspersed with his real and counterfeit elixirs. Even with Ki-sight, you couldn’t tell which was which. Only another distiller would be able to figure it out.

“Wouldn’t open that on the train, neither.” Warcry tapped the silk fan. “It’s got a Wind Spirit construct on it. Probably something that blasts enemies back.”

Kest picked up the metal business card and turned it over, studying both sides.

“I would’ve thought you’d be more interested in the star iron, Kest,” Rali said.

“Star iron is everywhere.” She squinted at the card. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen platinum in person. It has some sort of information on it, but it’s not a book. It looks like…”

She frowned, then put the card up to her mouth and breathed on it. Thin script appeared etched in the metal surface, then disappeared as the condensation from her breath evaporated.

“What did it say?” I asked, leaning in.

“What I thought—‘Money in the bank,’” she said. “It’s a favor card. Probably from somebody powerful if it’s platinum.”

Rali’s eyebrows jumped up. “That mantis killed somebody with seriously high connections. Maybe they were on their way to retrieve a favor from the owner. Or maybe they got the card in exchange for taking the fall for a higher-up off planet, and they were going to retrieve it once they’d paid the sentence for him.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “What, is that just like an old sword legend you read?”

“No, it’s like the gangster dramas,” he said. “Not as good, but still entertaining.”

“And total nonsense,” Kest said.

Rali chuckled. “Yeah, total nonsense, but it’s still fun to see what the Confederated planets think gangs are like. Personally, I think the Big Five has them written as propaganda to romanticize themselves, sort of like recruiting tools.”

The train lurched. I grabbed the edge of the table to brace myself. The elixir flask slid off the corner of the table and smashed on the floor. A wisp of purple shimmered in the air before evaporating into nothingness.

“Guess we don’t have to worry about what was inside it,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the train’s screaming brakes.

Rali shrugged. “Fate takes care of itself.”

The car filled with heat and noise as we pulled into the second to last station on this line. Nobody was waiting on the platform to board.

The doors on the train slid open, and I watched out the window for the praying mantis to come out. It took so long that I started to think he wasn’t getting off, but finally he swayed off the train and through the rickety screen door into the station. A little tension I hadn’t noticed before drained out of my shoulders and gut knowing he was out of the picture.

Enemies who still live are not gone, only waiting, Hungry Ghost’s voice croaked in my head.

I flinched. Usually, the little grinning skull stone couldn’t talk to me unless I was touching it, but it was still in my pocket.

That guy wasn’t my enemy, I thought back to Hungry Ghost. Just some dick who wanted to rob me.

Death cultivator does not know the definition of ‘enemy.’

Was that a joke?

Hungry Ghost went silent with a feeling like somebody putting a hand in your face and walking off.

“Next stop Bogland,” the conductor’s voice crackled through the speaker system. “Stand clear of the closing doors.”

The train wheezed back to life and crept out of the station, slowly getting back up to speed.

“So, Death cultivator,” Rali said, surprising me by using the same address Hungry Ghost always used, “what would you like to do with your ill-gotten gains?”

I shrugged. “Keep the Spirit stones, sell the rest? I don’t really need any of this stuff.”

“Except the favor card,” Kest said, pushing it across the table in front of me. “That’s worth more than all of us combined. Don’t let it out of your sight until we know who issued it.”

“If I’m hanging onto that, it’s just going in my pocket,” I told her.

She blinked at me, then took the card back. “When you need it, it’ll be in the storage ring.”

“I feel safer already,” I said. “If you guys want any of this stuff, you should take it. You can probably do something with the star iron meteorite, right, Kest?”

“You can always do something with star iron,” she said, putting that in the storage ring, too. “For the rest, I can see whether Naph’s back on Van Diemann yet. He could meet us for a buy.” She looked at Warcry. “He could probably bring new components or even a replacement prosthetic for you.”

“Oi, stumpy, in case you missed it, I ain’t the only one with a missing piece now, am I? You let me worry about getting around on what I got while you figure out the sound of one hand clapping.”

Kest sent him a flat glare, then swiped her HUD screen a couple times and tapped.

Canned applause erupted from the little speaker on the side.

That caught me so off-guard that I forgot to be ticked at Warcry for being a jerk about Kest’s arm and laughed. Surprisingly, Warcry was grinning, too.

Kest raised her chin a little and tried not to look smug about winning that round.

“So, what about the rest of it?” she asked.

Warcry sat forward and scooped up the fan. “If nobody wants it, I’ll hang onto this.”

“It really sets off your eyes,” I said.

“Ah, piss off,” he said. “Anyway, ya never know when a Wind construct’ll come handy, do ya?”

“Rali?” I asked.

The heavy-set guy shook his head, flicking his long hair out of his face.

“You know how I feel about material goods, Hake,” he said. “I’ve got a good walking stick and good friends. What more does a man need?”

“Money for food,” Kest said.

Rali shrugged. “My twin usually pays for that.”

“A safe place to stay?” I suggested.

“Safety’s an illusion.”

“A bleedin’ challenge,” Warcry muttered, glaring down at the silk fan.

Rali smiled. “You speak my language with alarming regularity, Warcry.”

The ginger snorted and stuffed the fan into the cargo pocket of his pants.

“Offer’s open, big man,” he said. “Anytime, any day. Name the terms of the fight, and I’ll be there.”